The arguments made in this book have also been influenced by long-standing research based in urban Africa, as explained in the Foreword. Three particular aspects of studying and teaching on housing in regions such as Africa have helped shape the perspectives underpinning this book. First, GS urban housing studies (and indeed research on many other aspects of societies in the GS) tend to focus on, or incorporate, poverty as a key factor in any analysis. Indeed, it can be hard to obtain funding for research that is not, at least ostensibly, pro-poor. This is often, and understandably, seen as a barrier between any insights and theorising based on such work being drawn on by the more powerful and established theoretical scholarship of the GN. After all, far fewer people in the cities of the GN are that poor, as, for the reasons discussed above, their societies are generally wealthier. Yet the focus on poverty can have its advantages. Much work in the cities of the GS starts from the position of understanding patterns of livelihoods and incomes in such cities. This provides a different perspective because it often demonstrates that the key to interpreting urban housing problems is affordability. People’s incomes determine what sort of housing they live in. For many – sometimes most – urban families, this means that formally built housing, of adequate size and construction type, in safe locations with reliable services is completely unaffordable. So they do not live in it, no matter what the conditions of supply.
These sorts of conditions are quite typical of much of urban sub-Saharan Africa. Also, as the shape and scale of very large urban settlements and their economies shifted in Africa and the world entered the phase of being mainly urban, it became increasingly clear that the most pertinent insight about housing problems in African cities was not about how they differed from those elsewhere, including in wealthier societies, but about recognising the similarities. A particular issue in Africa has been the profound lack of legal, planned housing (‘formal’ housing in development-speak) that both meets some basic requirements to allow healthy living, including adequate space, and is affordable for very significant proportions of the urban population. This brings us to the second way in which working in African cities forged insights that have wider application. This is the role of what is called ‘informal housing’, which, for the moment, can be taken to mean housing that is not legal or planned according to the laws and plans of the city authorities (even if it is widely perceived to be legitimate by local societies and on such a scale that it is unlikely to be demolished). Yet again, the presence of widespread ‘informality’ in the cities of the GS is usually felt to hinder comparisons with planned and regulated cities elsewhere. In the GN, it is assumed, slums and squatter settlements are things of the past and of little relevance to contemporary urban understandings. But the point is that they did indeed exist in the past. Classroom discussions about such housing types in Africa soon lead to discussions about why slums occurred in London or New York, or squatter settlements were found around Paris, or shack settlements around Chicago. The reasons were the same – the costs of decent and/or legal housing were beyond large sections of the population: their incomes were just too low. At the time, the laws and regulations that can be used today to label contemporary urban housing ‘informal’ may either not have existed or not been enforced, but the underlying mechanisms leading to people being housed in these ways were essentially the same as they are in the cities of the contemporary GS. Thus comparing across time rather than just across space puts the role of ‘informality’ in housing outcomes into clearer perspective.
Once it is recalled how badly most of the working classes used to be housed in the GN, the next logical step is to think about why and how these housing types are no longer prevalent. The answers involve a combination of changes that emerged over a period of time. The actions of the state and of private philanthropists (many of whom had made their fortunes from workers in the rural GS and the urban GN who were housed in very poor conditions) were crucial. Official slum clearances had complex rationales and were hardly pro-poor, but the development of model, subsidised inner-city housing estates by actors such as the Peabody Trust in London clearly were. GN societies also became wealthier, the share of the population who were extremely poor shrank and the size of the middle classes whose housing needs could be addressed by a modernising private sector expanded apace. In addition, the state provided more income support of various types such as pensions, child support, unemployment benefits, free education and eventually state-supported healthcare for varying proportions of the population. As poverty levels reduced, the share of the urban population who could manage rental costs for ‘decent’ housing (compared with nineteenth-century norms, at least) increased.
Nonetheless, significant proportions of urban people in the GN in, say, the 1960s and 1970s were housed in social housing, many in the private rental sector could manage only because of state interventions such as rent controls or housing support payments, and house purchases for some lower-income groups, particularly in the USA, were also only possible through state support. This brings us to the third and final comparative point that emerges from considering urban low-income housing characteristics in the GN from the perspective of urban housing situations in the GS. This is that it is only the availability of a segment of non-market-priced housing in GN cities that prevents mass recourse (again) to the sort of insecure and inadequate housing that is now sometimes assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the GS. In other words, the underlying conditions that can lead to urban people living in such housing are universal. And the problem lies in the workings of another set of market forces, this time in labour markets. Thus, in nearly all urban societies today, in both the GN and the GS, most people’s incomes are determined by the forces of supply and demand and for very many types of work in all cities the price for their labour is simply too low to cover the cost of formal-sector, ‘decent’, secure housing. What they can afford is informal-sector housing, but it is this sector’s very insecurity and frequent lack of properly functioning services, space and privacy that makes it cheap and affordable.
Mismatches between incomes and housing costs: a global condition
In 2016, UN-Habitat, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, produced its first global review of the world’s urban settlements: the World Cities Report 2016.1 Housing was identified, rightly, as being key to the future of cities. It was reported that, in 2010, 980 million people did not have decent housing and 600 million were expected to be added to that total by 2030. Between 2000 and 2014, the population living in slums, as defined by the UN,2 had increased to 881 million. While there had been improvements over the preceding 20 years in access to piped water and electricity in most countries of the Global South (GS) (although less progress with sewerage) and the share of the world’s urban population in slum conditions had fallen from 39% to 30%, these improvements have been geographically very uneven. Sub-Saharan African countries generally still have very inadequate urban infrastructure for the majority of their urban populations while many South American countries have achieved water, sewerage and electricity connections for most of theirs. The physical inadequacies of much urban housing across the poorer parts of the world are widely acknowledged and reported, so, in a sense, these aspects of the report were unremarkable. Most data in the report’s statistical annex relate to housing quality (exclusively in the cities of the GS) and economic indices such as inequality and poverty (again, only for cities in the GS, apart from data on some eastern European countries), urban gross domestic product (GDP), employment