main targets of demolitions in 2005 were backyard shacks, most of those rendered homeless were tenants, while plot-owners and homeowners were left untouched (although they lost a significant income stream from forfeited rents).
While each element of ‘standards’ can be debated and possibly adapted to local circumstances, this can miss the point that the costs of a legal, formal, urban home that is located so that it is realistically possible for its inhabitants to be part of the city’s economic and social fabric are an assemblage of many market-set prices for different elements. In the end, once it is accepted that standards are necessary to keep people alive or healthy, it makes more sense to start with the issue of affordability and the profiles of disposable incomes (i.e. after tax and other deductions, and after basic needs such as food, water and clothes are taken into account) that are typical for the society in question. These can be used to create the housing affordability curves discussed in Chapter 2, which provide an indication of how many urban citizens cannot ‘afford’ formal-sector, market-priced housing. Where, as is common, there are significant differences in such profiles and housing costs between cities in any one country, with the capital city often far more expensive but also with very significant proportions of very poor people living alongside the country’s wealthiest, then separate affordability curves are needed. If these, for example, show that 50% of households in any one city cannot afford to pay the upfront and recurring costs of the cheapest, legal urban home, then it becomes apparent that reducing the costs of wall materials, or whatever, may help only a small proportion of these people and that the scale of the problem requires a different approach.
The bemoaning of inappropriate standards in housing in relation to the GS also has to be treated with some caution, as, although there are historical links to European standards, there have also been sensible adaptations in many countries. Furthermore, as noted earlier, implementation regimes, rather than laws themselves, are really more important. The vast majority of homes that do not meet standards across the GS – and also many in the GN – are not under threat. Knocking down unplanned extensions, as happened in Zimbabwe, is usually a GN issue. A bigger threat often arises over tenure – where homes are built on land under arrangements that are not seen by city officials as legitimate, particularly where the land occupied has, or has come to have, high value that more powerful interests want to obtain. Legislation about standards in the UK, for example, does not mention this: that is, there is no ‘rule’ in the statutes which says that rented or owned houses must have legal title to the land they occupy. It is largely taken as read, but for housing standards in the GS, it is quite often the ‘big issue’.
So what types of urban housing have been and are being produced in the world’s large cities? How affordable have they been and how affordable are they today? What makes houses more or less affordable for ordinary urban residents? How have all the hundreds of millions of urban households in the lower bands of national income groups managed to house themselves? What forms does their housing take? The answers to these questions involve a complex mix of private- and public-sector actors, trends in political economic ideologies, changes in the share of national income accruing to working people and those too old to work, key historical moments that create space for progressive outcomes previously constrained by powerful vested interests, and the history of past and current modes of production that underpin the ways in which urban land is owned and transacted. These are the topics of the next five chapters.
Private-sector urban housing provision: formal and informal
In the Global North (GN), most urban housing was built by the formal private sector with the aim of making a profit. In the Global South (GS), much, and sometimes most, was built by the informal private sector – if this is understood to include ‘self-help’ housing where homes are, usually gradually, built by their owners. The informal sector also builds plenty of for-profit housing, usually for rent, and many ‘self-builders’ pay small-scale informal enterprises to help build their houses. Many homes are also built by the public sector for renting, or homes for buying are subsidised by governments, not-for-profit actors and donors of various sorts. The focus in this chapter is on private-sector delivery of rental houses and houses for ownership by both formal and informal actors, with an emphasis on what has happened and why and the outcomes for urban populations. Key themes are the similarities and differences between these sectors and the pros and cons of each in terms of affordable housing ‘delivery’.
There are some straightforward similarities between the formal and informal housebuilding sectors in terms of market forces that influence things such as the pace of building, the height of houses or rental units (one storey or more), and relative rents or costs (within the sector). These include the way in which relative demand for the house or room is influenced by its location: the nearer to the inner city or other employment hubs, or to fast transport, the higher the demand and therefore the price and the likelihood that it is profitable to ‘build up’ and add storeys. The usual ‘rules’ of the economic geography of any urban settlement pertain for both sectors. There are also similar influences on the extent to which houses originally built as homes for a family or one household may now also contain lodgers, or have extensions built to house lodgers – swings in income and domestic household cycles among them. The cost of materials such as cement, sand and roofing will feed through to costs in either sector, as will the ways in which any government subsidies or restrictions on, for example, imports affect their availability and price. But factors such as these are rarely at the forefront of comparisons between the sectors.
Much of the housing literature, with its tendency to analyse urban housing in the GS and the GN as distinctive subsets that do not require cross-comparison except to note their differences, tends to be negative towards urban housing in the urban GS. The emphasis is usually on the poor quality of housing and services for many residents, and on institutional ‘problems’ in GS cities which hinder the achievement of the housing norms of the GN. The term ‘slums’ may be used loosely in such discussions, despite decades of efforts by thoughtful housing scholars1 to limit its use to very specific housing types. It is rarer for analyses to consider which characteristics of GS urban housing, especially informal housing, offer anything positive for urban people, or how they might add to understandings of housing issues in the urban GN.
Formal-sector, large-scale, for-profit housing
Many urban settlements in Europe and Asia and in parts of Africa are very old and some of their housing stock reflects the workings of modes of production with class and land ownership systems that pre-dated capitalism. Much has been knocked down and replaced, of course, sometimes facilitated in large industrial cities by the bombings during World War Two. Smaller towns in Europe, such as Bury St Edmunds in the UK, Verona in Italy or Carcassonne in France, often have better-preserved sections of still inhabited housing built in a pre-capitalist era. Much has been fully incorporated into the capitalist land and housing markets since the institutions of capitalism came to dominate. Although the building types and materials do not comply with modern regulations, this is understood to be inevitable and only gradual modernisation occurs as houses are maintained over time. GS cities such as Beijing, Mumbai, Kano, Kochi, Timbuktu, Addis Ababa, Istanbul and a host of others all require an understanding of pre-capitalist land and property systems and regulations about the built environment if some of their housing, and their more general built environment, are to be interpreted. In many, more than two modes of production are still evident – Addis Ababa, for example, started afresh (and very late by world standards) as a feudal city in the late nineteenth century. Then, without much change,
