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Urban housing

'Legal Empowerment of the Poor' versus 'Right to the City' : Implications for access to housing in urban Africa

Upphovsperson: Vogiazides, Louisa
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Urban Dynamics | Uppsala, Sweden
År: 2012
Ämnesord: Towns, Urban areas, Urbanization, Urban housing, poverty, Low income groups, Property rights, Empowerment Legislation, Research methods, comparative analysis, Africa, SOCIAL SCIENCES, SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP
The challenge of urban deprivation and exclusion in the urban South has given rise to varied and shifting policies and ideas. Two sets of ideas have gained great currency in recent years in international policy and academic circles. The Legal Empowerment of the Poor approach, rooted in neoliberal thinking, focuses on the legal rights of the urban poor as the means to secure access to basic services and needs. The Right to the City perspective, on the other hand, stresses issues of citizenship and the appropriation and uses of urban space. This Policy Dialogue analyses the different ideological and normative foundations of the two perspectives and discusses how they lead to different policy formulations. It then takes a closer look at how the two perspectives find expression in contemporary discussions on and approaches to access to housing in urban Africa. To this end, it compares what each approach identifies as the source of the problem and recommends as the policy solution.

Reconsidering informality : perspectives from urban Africa

Upphovspersoner: Hansen, Karen Tranberg | Vaa, Mariken
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2004
Ämnesord: Informal sector, Hidden economy, Employment, Land use, Livelihood, Urban areas, Urban planning, Urban housing, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Social anthropology, Socialantropologi
This book brings together two bodies of research on urban Africa that have tended to be separate: Studies of urban land use and housing, and studies of work and livelihoods. Africa’s future will be to an increasing extent urban. Nevertheless, the inherited legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate. The recent decades of neo-liberal political and economic reforms have increased social inequality across urban space. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious for most urban residents. Extra-legal housing and unregistered economic activities proliferate. Basic urban services are increasingly provided informally. The result is the phenomenal growth of the informal city and extra-legal activities. How do urban residents see these activities? What do they accomplish through them? How can these “informal” cities be governed? The case studies are drawn from a diverse set of cities on the African continent. A central theme is how practices that from an official standpoint are illegal or extra-legal do not only work but are considered legitimate by the actors concerned. Another is how the informal city is not exclusively the domain of the poor, but also provides shelter and livelihoods for better-off segments of the urban population.  

Multi-habitation : urban housing and everyday life in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe

Upphovsperson: Schlyter, Ann
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2003
Ämnesord: Urban housing, Home ownership, Living conditions, Zimbabwe, SOCIAL SCIENCES, SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP
This is a study of everyday life and the quality of living in a poor neighbourhood of Chitungwiza, an independent Zimbabwean town about thirty kilometres south of Harare city centre. In the official view, this is a home-ownership neighbourhood. However, there are usually many families living in multi-habitation on each property, and lodgers outnumber owners. Within a restricted area people have to negotiate over, and adapt their use of space. Their ability to do so differs, depending on whether they are owners, tenants or lodgers, women or men, children, adults or elderly, and whether they are gainfully employed or not. The outcome of these negotiations and adaptations decisively affects their feeling of being at home in the house and the neighbourhood. The histories told by the people who are given voice in this report point to housing as highly significant in their coping with poverty, and to multi-habitation as affecting their agency as urban citizens.