Reimagining (informal) housing futures in uncertain times

Abstract

In an incisive piece in this Journal, Michele Lancione argues that the only way to envision new housing futures is to pay attention to places where housing precarity is lived and felt. We respond to such a discursive call by drawing on a wide-range of particular empirics—from our pedagogical engagement with housing informality in Melbourne to in-situ ethnographic empirical work in Manila and Dhaka—to elaborate three aspects of reimagining informal housing practices: a) informal housing as a site for grounding teaching and learning pedagogy; b) informal housing as a space for reflexive research; and c) informal housing as a mode of futuring. Our reflective insights, which put three cities with vastly different socio-political histories in conversation, also answer a growing call from critical urban scholars to abandon the usual comparison of similar cities and to overcome the division between global North and global South cities, offering ideas that stress mutual learning across this divide.

KEYWORDS :

• Informal housing
• housing futures
• global South
• global North
• research justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, livelihood refers to people’s initiatives to earn a living, including practices that produce income in cash and kind, enhance social institutions (kin, family, community), gender relations, and property rights needed to support and sustain a living standard (Duyne-Barenstein, 2013; Ellis, 2000).

2 Perhaps a word could be said here about the particular role NGOs continue to play in maintaining a certain vision of futures, that often align with their own agenda. As a concrete example, one could question the recent increase in housing upgrade in Karail that has been facilitated by the loans provided by BRAC, the largest NGO in the world. The access to financial capital can be lauded, but a closer examination shows how this one mode of futuring by the NGO has shut the door for a more potential radical housing politics within the settlement. A more detailed account of such entanglements of power in Karail has been published recently as well (Shafique, 2021).