School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society

A Review of “Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking sustainable solutions”, Edited by Jan Bredenoord, Paul van Lindert and Peer Smets

Harry Smith

School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society

Heriot-Watt University

UK

As stated in the concluding chapter by its editors, who are based at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam, this book ‘provides a collection of thematic state of the art reviews on affordable housing and well-informed accounts of housing policies and practices in Asia, Latin America and Africa’ (p. 26). The book is structured into four parts, the first containing seven thematic chapters respectively on urban land markets, housing finance, assisted self-help housing, resilience in self-built housing, housing rental, housing cooperatives and community-led affordable shelter. The remaining three parts focus consecutively on the three worlds regions referred to above, each containing five or six country-specific chapters by country experts.

As such, the book contains a wealth of information which, as noted in Aucioly’s ‘Foreword’, helps fill the gap in knowledge about different housing experiences across these world regions among local practitioners and policy makers, particularly as a resource and source of reference. Indeed, the book collects in one place a range of recent experience which hitherto could only be assembled by extensive searching and reading across different academic journals – a remote possibility for practitioners and policy makers due to the inaccessibility of peer reviewed academic papers to the wider public (now diminishing with the advance of open access publishing) – or through use of the limited number of UN-Habitat housing profiles (e.g. UN-Habitat, 2011a). It also provides much more in-depth detail and critical analysis of individual national experiences than those found in the UN-Habitat Adequate Housing Series (e.g. UN-Habitat, 2011b).

Unusually, this edited volume is not the result of a conference but of a specific initiative to develop a book building on the editors’ successful experience as guest editors of a Habitat International special issue on ‘Equal Access to Shelter’, which focused on the role of self-help housing across various countries and the potential for supporting this (Bredenoord et al, 2010). The challenge faced by the editors, as usual in this kind of edited volume, is to transcend the logistics of getting such a large team of contributors to deliver their chapters (a feat in itself!) and produce a book that is more than the sum of its parts. The editors address this, as well as the multidimensionality of housing, by setting out and discussing three broad themes – governance, sustainability and affordability of low-income housing – in their introductory chapter; by providing brief characterisations of each region in the introductions to the respective sections on Asia, Latin America and Africa; and in a concluding chapter which is not structured using the book’s three broad themes, but instead offers a summary of key trends in Latin America, Asia and Africa (heavily weighted towards the former), a discussion that sets out key findings and a section suggesting further research directions.

The key findings (or ‘messages’, as they are referred to in the book) contain a mixture of novelty and deja-vu for academics in the field, and as such will perhaps be more enlightening for practitioners and policy makers. These are namely that: (1) informal settlements have mushroomed, due to self-help housing being in most cases the only way for low-income households to secure an affordable house; (2) some countries which have massive public housing provision paradoxically also have huge housing deficits for the urban poor, due to the unsuitability of the public housing; (3) a ‘new’ model of housing finance in Latin America (the ABC model – which has actually been around for a couple of decades) provides interesting opportunities for both purchase of finished houses and in situ expansion/improvement, but still tend to be beyond the reach of the lowest income groups; (4) many housing policy packages aim to expand home ownership and stimulate national economic production, but serious consideration should be given to rental housing as an affordable solution; (5) the Asian experience provides promising examples of innovative approaches, particularly around ‘community-driven development’; (6) blueprint or blanket approaches to solve the urban housing crisis are unsustainable, and the development of solutions that are relevant to context requires in particular the development of local government capacity; and (7) a diversity of physical solutions to affordable housing is required to achieve sustainability.

It is when the final section on ‘research directions’ is reached that the limitations of the book in terms of its contribution to theoretical debate are acknowledged. For example, this section calls for an unpacking of the concepts of affordability and sustainability beyond the initial exploration set out by the editors in the first chapter. It also recommends research on the governance of housing supply for the urban poor; in-depth empirical research on innovative practices of stakeholder arrangements (a more nuanced and evidence-based best practice approach perhaps?); redefinition of incremental building solutions to include adaptation of existing empty buildings; and better understanding of urban housing markets (including themes such as housing vacancy and rental). The question emerges as to why some of these issues (such as those set out as central to the book in its first chapter) do not get analysed more in depth in the concluding chapter based on the discussion set out at the beginning of the book and drawing on the wealth of material presented by the contributing authors. Other aspects which would have strengthened the book further would have been e.g. further development of the political economy analysis – this is set out as a useful perspective in the editors’ introduction to Part 1 of the book, and is then used explicitly by the authors of the first two chapters in this part, on land management and affordable housing respectively, but this line of analysis then peters out. Another point is that the book is clearly focused on housing policy and on practices related to its implementation, but not so much on the practices of the low-income households per se (with a few exceptions) – this would seem an essential element in learning from self-help practices in order to develop policies that further assist these, as two of the editors advocated prior to the production of this book (see Bredenoord and van Lindert, 2010). An additional recommendation for further research, which would support such learning, would be ethnographic- and cultural studies-led research on the housing provision practices of low-income households.

In summary, this book provides an excellent resource of empirical material documenting current affordable housing policy (and related practice) in the three key major regions of the Global South, as well as useful thematic chapters which help understand the country case studies. It will be of use to practitioners, policy-makers and students as a reference, and a source of inspiration for scholars wishing to take forward the issues raised in the book and to reignite the level of debate which has been achieved in the past (Ward, 1982; Mathey, 1992) but to a large extent abandoned since (in relation to self-help housing), as Bredenoord and van Lindert (2010) themselves point out.

Word count: 1,141

References

Bredenoord J. & van Lindert P. (2010) ‘Pro-poor housing policies: Rethinking the potential of assisted self-help housing’, Habitat International, 34, 278-287.

Bredenoord J., van Lindert P. & Smets P. (2010) ‘Editorial: Equal access to shelter: Coping with the urban crisis by supporting self-help housing’, Habitat International, 34, 274-277.

Mathéy, K. (1992) Beyond self-help housing. London: Mansell.

UN-Habitat (2011a) Ghana: HousingProfile. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.UN-Habitat (2011b) Affordable Land and Housing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

Ward, P. (Ed. (1982) Self-help housing: A critique. London: Mansell.