Informal housing practices in the global north: digital technologies, methods, and ethics

Abstract

In this editorial for Part II of the special issue on ‘informal housing practices’, we build upon the work done in Part I that charted informality from the global South to the global North. In Part II we shift our lens to focus more explicitly on understanding the interplay between traditional and ‘digital’ methodologies and the ethical challenges encountered while researching informal housing practices through a series of papers that demonstrate a wide range of methodological richness via empirical cases from Australia, the US and the UK. Some contributions to this special issue peer through the window created by online real estate platforms to better understand informal housing practices and in so doing explore new research methodologies. Others show that the value of traditional qualitative methods remains high. All raise new ethical questions for researchers and policymakers who must tread carefully when engaging with residents and owners of informal homes. As a whole, the papers in the second part of this special issue continue to explore the diverse forms of informal housing within Global North contexts, while drawing on the rich theory and practice on informality from the Global South.

Introduction

Part I of this Special Issue (Shrestha et al., 2021) set the foundations for informality as a research agenda within housing scholarship and explored it through a global, postcolonial lens from Kampungs in Indonesia to Ghanaian migrants in New York to ‘beds in sheds’ in London. The issue outlined some of the key challenges in researching informal housing practices more specifically in the context of the Global North where these practices often seem less visible than in the Global South. As a continuation of our first issue and as an attempt to address this methodological challenge, in this second special issue on ‘informal housing practices’ we engage with papers that employ a wide range of traditional and digital research methods to understand these practices which are not limited to urban settings within the Global North. In this issue, we also examine how the rise of digital platforms and trends intersect with other drivers of demand and unmet need to enable and often exploit what are often ‘under the radar’ or ‘hidden’ forms of housing. As Nasreen and Ruming (2021) emphasised in Part 1 of this Special Issue, digital platforms have become central to particular forms of informality, such as share housing, and for particular groups, such as international students. With digital platforms – from Zillow and Craigslist to Flatmates.com – for those offering and seeking housing, new markets and practices, the ‘fine-grained and temporal’ dimension of the housing market can be uploaded and made visible. Although traditional methods such as in-depth interviews and focus group discussions are also used in researching informal housing practices, there is emerging interest in investigating these practices using ‘digital’ platforms and techniques.

However, it would be incorrect to imply that all forms of informality are mediated by the digital – the collection of papers in this special issue also emphasise the role of traditional community networks in facilitating informal rental arrangements; and challenge assumptions about those who produce or reside in informal homes. From the new ‘generation share’ (Maalsen, 2020) priced out of home ownership or unable to afford renting on their own, to owner occupiers who seek additional sources of income and or undertake unauthorised modifications to their homes, or landlords who offer substandard rental housing, the papers in Part II of this special issue shed light on the range of actors involved in informal housing practices and the wider pervasiveness of informality within cities and regions of the Global North. Several point to the interrelationships between formal planning systems and informal development and practices which arise and operate despite, and sometimes in response to these regulatory frameworks. Other papers help understand how digital platforms provide cover for irregular and unauthorised housing practices, particularly within the informal rental market, while opening new methods and data sources for research and analysis.

With these methods and data come new ethical questions for researchers who must be careful not to expose those at risk of punitive regulatory action while also committing to bringing about positive change. Taken together, the papers raise the ethics of not only how research on informality should be conducted, but what should be done. Is the answer increased digital and data surveillance to detect informal housing practices and enforce regulatory codes; are the regulations themselves the problem; or are more fundamental responses to housing crises and inequality required? As a whole, the papers in the second part of this special issue continue to explore the diverse forms of informal housing within Global North contexts, while drawing on the rich theory and practice on informality from the Global South.

The sharing economy, platform capitalism, and researching informality

Despite early promise, the so called ‘sharing economy’ (Slee, 2017) and the rise of platform capitalism have coincided with growing housing inequality in cities across the world. With the rise of PropTech or ‘Platform Real Estate’ (Shaw, 2020), people are increasingly connected with properties and flatmates through for-profit, peer-to-peer platforms from residential real estate (Zillow, Realestate.com) through to sharing accommodation websites (Craigslist, Flatmates.com, Gumtree.com). Digital platforms both exploit housing demand and enable new market practices across the income spectrum. Operating at the intersection of the neoliberalised housing system and the ‘digital turn’ these forms of platform capitalism (Papadimitropoulos, 2021) are facilitating a ‘digital informalisation’ (Ferreri & Sanyal, 2021). Not only are these platforms facilitating new housing practices and markets, they are also providing new potential insights for researchers and policy makers. The pioneering analysis of Craigslist advertisements for rental accommodation in the United States Boeing and Waddell (2017, p. 1) showed the potential for such platforms to ‘reveal fine-grained and temporal patterns’ within housing markets. Since this time housing platforms have become important sources of quantitative and qualitative data due to the increasing role they play in mediating access to accommodation, including within the informal sector.

However, the data also has the potential to reveal practices which have been deliberately concealed because exposure may attract regulatory enforcement action. As Durst and Wegmann (2017, p. 295) note, ‘Participants in the informal market are often as hidden from each other as they are from the arms of government enforcement’ (Durst & Wegmann, 2017, p. 295). This hidden nature of informal housing practices foregrounds the ethical issues inherent in doing research in the area – researchers must be careful not to expose those for whom bringing to light informal housing practices may cause harm. Mindful of these ethical challenges, the papers in Part II of this special issue show the myriad of ways informal housing is understood, accessed and researched in the Global North. While digital technologies and platforms are increasingly used to access informal housing, as the papers in this collection highlight, informal accommodation is still accessed via community networks and/or produced in ways that bypass the digital highway altogether, allowing occupants to live ‘off grid’ beyond housing markets and regulation. Thus, the papers here illustrate the opportunities and limitations that emerge across the traditional to digital spectrum.

Outline of the special issue

Combining digital and more traditional methods in the first paper in this issue, Gurran et al. (2020) show how grounding online real estate advertisements and property photographs alongside interviews and a focus group with local government informants can reveal the scale, typology and drivers of informality in Sydney, Australia. They systematically examine online rental advertisements (realestate.com.au), housing supply and affordability data to highlight the important, often overlooked role played by the informal housing sector in accommodating lower income groups, through informal and unauthorised secondary dwellings, boarding houses, subdivided and share apartments, and other non-standard rental arrangements. They also explore the contradictory co-dependency of the formal planning sector and informal practices, illustrated by the NSW state policy efforts to legitimise and encourage secondary dwelling construction as a form of low-cost rental accommodation. Their research finds that a consequent boom in secondary dwelling construction has neither alleviated illegal, sometimes dangerous secondary dwellings nor demonstrably improved the supply of low cost rental homes. This tension between lower cost rents and exposure to serious risk from unsafe accommodation is a dilemma faced by residents of informal housing and regulatory enforcement officers. The answer, suggest these authors, is not to embark on hard-line regulatory enforcement but rather to continue to progress the possibility of informal or de-commodified housing types while working actively to increase social housing supply and support for low-income renters. Moreover, in terms of methodological limitations, the paper also shows the limits of automated data extraction, which one would associate as a benefit of online analysis. The auto-categorisation approach was not able to reveal the rich textual, geospatial and visual material contained in the ads, with the authors electing to manually analyse the advertisement material.

The nature of informal housing production is also examined in Conrad et al.’s (2021) paper which investigates unpermitted additions to the housing stock in Austin, Texas. Through a longitudinal study between 2008 and 2018, their data suggests a form of ‘diffuse informality’ in the built fabric of Austin, with around one in two hundred single-family residential parcels having received an ‘informalised addition’ over the study period. With informality typically associated with poor and vulnerable communities, this paper highlights the relative advantage of those undertaking informal additions to their single-family homes while also suggesting that the ‘informalisation’ occurring at a diffuse scale in Austin may intensify if housing affordability pressures worsen. Conrad et al.’s paper shows how quantitative analysis of tax assessment and building permit datasets can give a sense of the scale of informal housing. They introduce a novel technique, Informal Housing Addition at the Parcel Scale (IHAPS) which match parcel- level data on building structures and building permits to quantify the floor area of housing added to single-family residential parcels via informal means. This method is possible because of the granularity of administrative tax assessment and building permit data sets available, something that is not so readily accessible in the South. This forms part of what Conrad et al. (2021) identify as the ‘quantitative turn to the North’ in research on housing informality. With the digital era comes a greater opportunity to understand the scale and types of informality than before but also a type of geographic surveillance that troubles the authors who ask: ‘in an era of growing surveillance of private life—made possible by advances in digital technologies—should researchers develop methods that could expose vulnerable populations to government oversight?’ The authors conclude by opening new avenues of quantitative research methods to document overall trends and extent of informal housing practices in the context of United States, while raising ethical and privacy considerations and cautioning that such data should not be used in enforcement action.

Acknowledging the ethical implications of subjecting residents to building inspection and law enforcement scrutiny, Conrad et al. (2021) self-impose practices, commonly used for restrictive data, when publishing their work. This includes not making their data set freely available, and only reporting aggregated results that reveal generalised trends and overall patterns of informal housing while concealing any identifying features and avoiding any violation of privacy. This dilemma is also present in Gurran et al.’s work, as one faced by those in local government who are responsible for enforcing compliance but are aware of the fact that occupants of informal housing don’t have anywhere else to go. Compliance officers were caught between their duties to enforce planning and building regulations important for health and safety risk management, and the housing needs and limited options of vulnerable tenants. Informality exists at the edges of visibility for a reason, and researchers and indeed policy makers, should ask themselves serious questions on the implications rendering informality visible has for those who live there. It is not that this work cannot be done, but it must be done in ways that do not make more precarious situations for those living in informal housing.

Next, Alam et al. (2021) provide insights into informal shared housing practices among Bangladeshi migrants in the suburbs of Greater Sydney. Alam et al. (2021) use in-depth interviews as the primary method of investigation. However, when possible, the authors also drew upon analysing text from participants’ Gumtree advertisements to contextualise the interview with additional background data. Informal networks are enabled by online sites, and this paper hints at the value of the digitally derived data for broadening our understanding of informality, as further highlighted by Gurran et al. (2020) and Conrad et al.’s (2021) contributions. Interviews were loosely structured to allow participants to reflect freely on their experiences. Particular attention was paid to the motivations to share, challenges encountered, and the reorganisation of time and space inside the home to accommodate tenants. Again, focusing on the actions of (relatively) advantaged owner-occupiers, in this paper the informal practices centre around sharing a home with tenants. By investigating the experience of owner-occupiers, who are renting out rooms to those from similar ethic and social groups, ostensibly as a financial strategy, the authors show that shared housing practices and associated risk evaluations are underpinned by more than the perceived economic rationality of rent-and-return. Here, participants reflected on the need to balance social pressures, religious expectations and personal preferences with having a live-in tenant within their own homes – practices that were managed by negotiating presence and absence in the house, as well as length of tenure. Community networks were important for recruiting renters, as were online platforms like Gumtree.com, both of which could help those renting their houses avoid neighbourly attention and the institutional eye, demonstrating how both digital and social networks were central to navigating the cultural expectations surrounding housing.

As highlighted earlier however, despite the rise of digital technologies and methods to facilitate access to informal housing in the Global North, community networks and traditional method are still important to enabling and understanding informality. The final two papers show how informality is produced and engaged with, beyond the platform. Griffin et al.’s (2021) paper examines people living ‘off-grid’ in rural England, and their campaigns for alternatives to formal and planned forms of development. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with people living ‘informally’ and also with those advocating for informal housing alternatives. Interviews were anonymised and names of communities removed to protect the privacy of key informants. Through their research the authors draw out a complex relationship between regulatory planning systems and the desire for alternative approaches to housing and settlement not accommodated within prescriptive planning frameworks. In presenting these informal developments as innovative responses to the shortage of affordable housing, the authors suggest that they may become ‘part of wider conversations about solutions to land and property-based inequalities’.

A final paper in this issue, by Redento Recio¹ and Tanzil Shafique provides a reflective meditation on the positionality of researchers and the pedagogy of engaging with informal housing in the classroom and the field. They seek to move beyond the extraction and production of knowledge about informality to a more active and future-focused practice that improves living conditions in both global north and southern contexts.

Informality as risk or alternatives?

In sum, the papers in this special issue contribute new insights into the various forms of informality emerging within cities of the Global North. Often arising in a context of housing unaffordability, informal options offer vulnerable or low income groups accommodation and a level of agency that might otherwise be limited, as highlighted by Gurran et al. in their study of informal rental housing in Sydney, and Griffin et al. in relation to ‘off the grid’ forms of informality in rural England. However, these informal alternatives are often associated with significant risk for residents. When regulations designed to protect occupants are evaded or not enforced, serious health and safety issues arise, particularly in the face of climatic extremes, fire hazard or substandard construction.

There may also be increased risk of social conflict and distress when households share their homes in informal rental arrangements. Alam et al.’s paper for example, shows the tensions that can arise when renting rooms to strangers in an existing household. In their research with Bangladeshi home owners who were letting out rooms to help pay the mortgage, Alam et al. revealed the delicate dance of sharing a house in this way. Tenants had little agency over the use of space yet at the same time, owners felt their privacy and agency was diminished. This led some owner-occupiers to feel as though they were ‘risking’ the value and the peace entailed in owning a home. While informal practices and forms of home sharing are often idealised within the broader rhetoric of the sharing economy, Alam et al.’s research shows that the reality may be far from ideal, bringing social challenges and personal risks for owners and their tenants alike.

Of course, these risks and compromises are often judged acceptable trade-offs for access to lower cost accommodation. However, perhaps counter-intuitively, the research presented in this special issue shows that informal options are not necessarily affordable for lower income earners. For instance, despite the state’s intention to increase the supply of low cost rental housing by deregulating residential zoning controls to permit secondary dwellings in lower density areas, Gurran et al.’s piece finds no clear rise in affordable rental supply. As highlighted by Conrad et al., the home owners undertaking unauthorised additions to their properties are not necessarily unable to afford compliance with local regulatory codes. Similarly, as Griffin et al. point out, the residents of ‘off the grid’ housing in their study of informal practices in rural England are exercising agency even within a framework of economically constrained options.

As Recio and Shafique emphasise, those undertaking research or teaching on informality must consider their obligations to do more than produce or disseminate knowledge, given the disadvantages often experienced by those dependent on informal housing. Fundamental, structural disadvantages that give rise to unmet housing need must be identified and addressed before progressing regulatory and enforcement interventions. At the same time, we read in this collection of papers the potential for alternative, culturally appropriate and de-commodified forms of housing production and access to emerge through informal practices, opening new possibilities for making and accessing home.

Conclusion: digital informality

Drawing on our observations from editing this special issue, in understanding informal housing practices and markets we see a need to pay attention to the increasing role of digital platforms in mediating access to housing. While research on informal housing has traditionally been qualitative and ethnographic, these platforms and the data they contain offers the opportunity to combine more qualitative insights with quantitative, digital and automated methods. Many residents seek accommodation in the informal sector because they face barriers in formal rental markets. These barriers are not only financial, they may also lack rental or credit history or references. The increasing digital facilitation of informality, however, is enabling greater recording and surveillance opportunities of this activity. This poses an important ethical question for researchers. Similarly, the emergence of new digital data sources such as satellite imagery, and methodological advances in urban data present new opportunities to detect and understand changes to the housing stock which might otherwise occur unnoticed. Should we use digitally collected data on informal housing practices, and if so, how should we treat it to ensure that we do not negatively impact those who are living in informal accommodation? The answer lies in the insights produced by the traditional, rich, qualitative methods exhibited in this collection of papers which help understand not only the ways in which informal housing manifests in the built environment but also how, and why it is produced and accessed and by whom. Advancing knowledge about the nature and extent of informality in global North contexts through quantitative and digitally informed approaches is essential if this critical sector of the housing system is to be recognised but the qualitative perspectives of residents and frontline policy makers are needed to inform what is to be done.

This special issue as a continuation of our first special issue on ‘informal housing practices’ makes a significant and critical contribution to the emerging understanding informality in the so-called global North context. Within cities and regions of the global north, highly regulated urban/regional structures are intersecting with harsh, deregulated ‘free market’ environments often further enabled by platforms which rise to new forms of informal housing practices. Each of the papers within this special issue presents a nuanced understanding of informal housing practices through rigorous and ethical methodological choices. These range from traditional, deeply qualitative interviews to quantitative analysis of digitally extracted sources of data. The intersection of informality, neoliberalism and digital technologies, therefore, offers both opportunities and unique challenges to understanding informal housing practices. It is at this intersection that we see heterogeneity of informality in the global North. Informal housing represents a critique of the social, economic and environmental sustainability of formal housing practices, yet also is full of tensions, contradictions and threats to ontological security and physical safety that also exist in the informal. Methodologically, digital technologies and platforms open new conduits to revealing informal housing practices, but this work of revealing must be approached ethically as it is in the uncovering that tenants are potentially put at risk. The papers in this special issue navigate these challenges and opportunities to provide what we believe are original insights into informal housing practices and exemplars in what is a rapidly growing field. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Notes

1 The University of Melbourne, Informal Urbanism Research Hub - Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.