Understanding Processes of Informal Housing: Appropriate Methodological Tools for a Sensitive Research Area

This paper is concerned with the methodological difficulties of collecting and validating research data in the field of low-income group housing. The problem is conceptualized by applying a methodology— sensitive research method— which is novel to this field. The paper explores the potentialities for developing appropriate field-work skills and methods for collecting interview data using this approach. Used for ethnographic field work on housing land tenure security among low-income groups in Recife Brazil, the sensitive nature of such research, and thus the wider applicability of the approach, is examined from two perspectives. First, the utility of the method is demonstrated, through the enhanced understanding it yielded of the extremely vulnerable and threatening conditions for households in informal housing settlements; its success in encouraging households to reveal the 'illegal' initiatives they use to house themselves, the nature of their poverty, their intimate feelings and family matters to an outsider, i.e. the researcher, is also demonstrated. Second, the sensitivity lies in reinforcing for the researcherthe recognition that data on the processes by which households gain access to housing resources, such as land, building materials and credit, must be gathered and understood from the respondents' perspectives.Means of ensuring the validity and reliability of data which is not value-free, are also discussed.     

Troubled lands: sovereignty and livelihoods in the Marquesas Islands

In the course of their daily subsistence activities, Marquesan Islanders exercise a form of sovereignty that defies the cumbersome land regulations established by the state (France) and the territory (French Polynesia). A complex network of land owners, workers and caretakers shapes the way islanders use the land, perpetuating customary patterns of tenure and resisting imposed structures of power. Fruit trees apparently planted for financial gain are in fact a pointed political statement about islanders’ struggle for influence and the continuing power of their past.     

Housing supply in Ghana: a study of Accra, Kumasi and Berekum

This is a study of housing supply in three urban areas in Ghana: Accra the capital city, Kumasi, the most important provincial city, and Berekum, a small town. The sample of over 1600 households is divided into renters, recent owners, and longer established owners. The last group is divided into those who have and those who have not extended their home in the previous 6 years. The data provides an insight into who is supplying houses (and extensions), what sort of housing they are building, their reasons for building and the problems encountered in achieving ownership. The study shows that house ownership is available to much lower income households than expected, especially when traditional compounds are built; that owners are relatively old, have large households and occupy considerably more rooms than renters, and build houses larger than they need and let the remainder to tenants or relatives. There is a great need for housing finance because land is currently inappropriate for collateral against a building loan. Research is needed to develop a means by which land could be used as collateral for a loan without unravelling the customary non-marketability of land.     

Community land trusts: releasing possible selves through stable affordable housing

Housing affordability – a long-standing issue for low-income households – is crucial for the flourishing of both households and communities. When housing is unaffordable, households struggle to attain and maintain housing, which negatively effects household well-being. Since the foreclosure crisis, community land trusts (CLTs) have emerged as a viable housing policy. Relying on quantitative and qualitative data collected by a Minneapolis-based CLT, this study examines the experiences of 91 CLT homeowners. Our analysis illustrates how the CLT’s institutional framework alters the political, economic, social and material relations that characterize the lives of these households to facilitate the provision of previously unavailable resources. Beyond indefinitely stabilizing households, this new arrangement of relations creates a foundation for the cultivation of ontological security and contributes to the opening up of possibilities and the unfolding of life in ways not previously possible.     

Advertising and city formation with local public goods

This paper intends to integrate imperfect information into the Tiebout-type model so as to examine the role of information in city formation with local public goods. To do so, the author focuses on a specific land market in which land developers try to form cities by providing some quantity of local public goods as club goods. They advertise the location, rent, and service level of the public goods of the city, and homogeneous households have no alternative sources of information. A structure of information transmission following Butters (1977) is adopted which assumes a random process in the allocation of advertisements. Based on the model presented here, the following results are obtained: (1) All combinations of advertised rent and service level are on a curve which coincides with the income expansion path. This implies that the effect of the imperfectness of information may be mixed only with the variation caused by income heterogeneity. (2) Moreover, the equilibrium number of advertisements is socially optimal. (3) These results imply that, given the structure of information transmission, a free land market or city formation with imperfect information could still be justifiable.The author wishes to thank Haruo Imai, Makoto Tawada, Fumiko Seo, Tony Smith, Masahisa Fujita, Ronald Miller, Dong Ju Kim, Penny Totsui, Yuji Kubo and Christopher Morrone for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. He also thanks the editor of this journal and anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors.     

Amenities and urban residential structure: An amenity-embedded model of residential choice

The basic model of residential choice, which has been established by generalizing Von Thünen's concept to an urban context, states that the equilibrium structure of residential land use is determined by the trade-off between accessibility and space. The willingness to sacrifice space for accessibility differs between households and depends on household income. The equilibrium land use is the outcome of the interplay between the income elasticity of space consumption and the income elasticity of commuting outlays. The primary purpose of this article is to extend the basic model by incorporating a location-dependent quality of the environment. The proposed model examines the locational consequences of household choice as influenced by a complicated interplay among three factors: the income elasticity of housing demand, the income elasticity of commuting costs, and the location-dependent amenity schedule. The equilibrium land use is contrasted for two types of cities: the case 1 city in which the level of amenities increases toward the urban fringe, and the case 2 city in which the level of amenities is assumed to decrease as one moves toward the urban fringe. Received: 2 August 1999 / Accepted: 18 September 2000     

Gendered Access to and Utilization of Land by Food Producers in Urban Kenya

This paper explores gendered patterns of access to and utilization of land by urban farmers in Eldoret (Kenya). It shows that the urban farmers established entitlement over farming spaces mainly through purchase, social connections, and informal use of land around their dwellings. Owing partly to social norms and cultural practices, and partly to their better economic status, it was mostly the men who had greater entitlement to farming spaces in male-headed households; but female household heads also accessed land in their own right, although they accessed land to a limited extent and their holdings were generally smaller than men’s. However, despite high incidences of non-ownership of land among them, married women seemed to enjoy considerable access and use rights over household land for urban farming, but such rights were more limited for other land uses such as housing. Female household heads enjoyed greater control (compared to married women) over the use of household land holdings for whatever uses.     

Land tenure insecurity and rural‐urban migration in rural China

This paper examines the impact of land tenure security perceptions on rural‐urban migration decisions of rural households, using data collected in Minle County in Northwest China. We find that tenure security perceptions play a significant role in household migration decisions in villages without well‐functioning land rental markets but not in villages where the land rental markets are more developed. In villages with underdeveloped land rental markets, households that expect that no land reallocations will occur within their village in the near future are less involved in migration, while households that attach a greater importance to land certificates in protecting land use rights are more involved in migration.     

Do Strict Land Use Regulations Make Metropolitan Areas More Segregated by Income?

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Income segregation has risen in each of the last four decades in U.S. metropolitan areas, which can have lifelong impacts on the health, economic productivity, and behaviors of residents. Although it is widely assumed that local land use regulations—such as minimum lot sizes and growth controls—exclude low-income households from wealthier neighborhoods, the empirical research is surprisingly limited. We examine the relationship between land use regulation and segregation by income using new measures for the 95 biggest cities in the United States. We find that density restrictions are associated with the segregation of the wealthy and middle income, but not the poor. We also find that more local pressure to regulate land use is linked to higher rates of income segregation, but that more state control is connected to lower-income segregation.

Takeaway for practice: Density restrictions do drive urban income segregation of the rich, not the poor, but should be addressed because rich enclaves create significant metropolitan problems. Planners at the local level need assistance from regional and state efforts to ameliorate income segregation. Inclusionary housing requirements have a greater potential to reduce income segregation than bringing higher-income households into lower-income parts of the city. Finally, comprehensive and consistent data on the impacts of local land use regulations should be collected to inform future research and planning practice.     

Dynamics of wide sense migrational systems: A choice theoretic setting

The study of migration of various kinds of populations, a common subject in regional science, is given a broader scope of applicability by the provision of a very general choice theoretic setting of migrational dynamics. A dynamized Alonso type location and land use model, comprising dispersed land prices, is chosen to illustrate wide sense migration of landowners, on the one hand, between different price levels at which they may offer land, and of households and firms, on the other hand, that may choose between different prices and zones.     

Residential relocation and sustainable urban form: Statistical analyses of owner-occupiers' preferences

This paper reports on analyses of the residential preferences of a sample of owner-occupier households moving house in the Cardiff region of Wales. These analyses were designed to examine the acceptability to relocating households of more sustainable residential alternatives, involving higher density living in mixed land use areas particularly in redeveloped dockland, inner urban and city-centre locations. The findings offer little comfort to those advocating urban intensification or compaction policies. City-centre services are a substitute for land for only a few. The dominant preferences remain, as they have been historically, for semi-detached and detached properties with their own private gardens in suburban areas. These preferences are further reinforced if households have young children or comprise persons of retirement age. The conclusion addresses the scope for achieving more sustainable suburbs.     

从土地利用角度谈生态旅游规划

针对我国目前普遍以旅游策划和旅游管理为主体特征的生态旅游规划,并不能有效解决旅游地现存的土地利用失调、基础设施不完善、产业结构不合理、社区活力衰退、生态退化及环境污染等问题,提出了从土地利用的角度进行生态旅游规划的新思路,并对一相关案例进行了介绍。     

The housing careers of black middle-class residents in a South African metropolitan area

Under apartheid, black African households could not own land or homes in most major urban centres in South Africa. This limited residential mobility and locked many households into state rental accommodation in townships. Homeownership for all South Africans was restored in the mid-1980 s and the Group Areas Act was repealed in 1991. Democracy opened up economic opportunities previously unavailable to black people. This paper investigates the effect on black middle-class South African households’ residential mobility and housing careers. A retrospective cross-sectional survey of 244 such homeowners in the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality determined their last five housing states. Changes in housing state indicated a steady improvement in housing quality, but tenure changes were not necessarily unidirectional—some had reverted to rental. More than 85% of the study participants had used mortgages to finance their housing career. Very few had financed their housing using own savings, an inheritance, or sale of a previous house, and not many had used the government subsidy. We found that housing careers are bridging the historical spatial racial divide in this municipality.     

An integrated model of formal and informal housing sectors

Many cities in developing countries are characterized by a striking juxtaposition of formal and informal housing, where these sectors coexist in close proximity. This paper develops a model of urban land markets where both the formal and informal sectors are endogenously and mutually determined. More specifically, the informal market arises as a kind of residual effect of decisions made in the formal sector. The model posits a fixed number of rich and of poor households, all of whom are competing in the marketplace for a place to live. Rich households enact formal land use regulations in the form of minimum lot size requirements that directly reflect their preferences. The impacts of these regulations on the informal sector depend upon relative incomes and populations of poor and rich households, as well as on housing preferences. In order to assess these impacts empirically, the paper formulates a set of stylized case studies. The model results illustrate that the formal and informal sectors do not exist independently from one another, but are instead dual aspects of a single market phenomenon. In particular, an insufficient absorptive capacity of the formal sector results directly in informality.     

Strategic intervention for the economically active? Exploring the role of selected English local authorities in the development of new market rental housing with pension fund investment

Drawing on qualitative data the paper explores a shift in the focus of the English local authority enabling/strategic function towards innovative models to stimulate new supply of market rented homes, with local authority pension funds as institutional investors. It is argued that these initiatives are significant in illustrating the role of local, rather than national authorities, as initiators and trailblazers of policy towards the private rented sector. The importance of policy discourses that prioritise the needs of economically active households in justifying the use of publicly owned land for the development of privately-owned rented housing is explored in the context of debates around modes of local economic development in the global context. It is suggested that although the identification of local government pension funds as institutional investors may create an impression of social accountability and an ethical dimension to these innovations, they nevertheless represent a form of marketization of socially-held assets. This raises questions about the changing nature of the enabling/strategic function within English local authorities and the extent to which the previous focus on affordable housing delivery is being diminished in the dedication of local authority resources such as land to a profit-driven form of housing supply.     

A Stock/Flow Model Of Defining Racially Integrated Neighborhoods

ABSTRACT: This article discusses the appropriate measurement of neighborhood racial integration and proposes a new operational definition. A neighborhood is integrated if currently (1) its stock of households may be classified as “mixed” (no single group comprises more than 75% of the neighborhood's population), and (2) the flow of households into and out of this stock is such that it will be so classified for a decade in the future. The article mathematically develops stability boundaries that researchers and policy makers can use to assess the degree to which contemporaneous flows of households into and out of mixed neighborhoods will render them integrated in the future.     

Toward a land zoning negotiation support platform: “Tips and tricks” for participatory land use planning in Laos

Managing complex landscape mosaics in areas dominated by poverty often requires addressing conflicting objectives and managing trade-offs, such as that between maintaining/enhancing ecological functions and improving livelihoods. Laos, like many other developing countries dependent on agriculture and natural resources for the subsistence of a mostly rural population, has used land use planning (LUP) as a core policy instrument to achieve sustainable development. However, previous reviews of LUP implementation showed large discrepancies between policies and practices and between the intended goals and actual outcomes. There is a need for increased participation, improved integration of scales, harmonization of superimposed plans, and enhanced coordination between implementing agencies and other stakeholders. Consequently, former normative approaches to LUP have been gradually replaced (at least on paper) by a new paradigm. Participatory land use planning (PLUP) has recently become a central element of donor-supported programs in developing countries. However, despite the good intentions of PLUP principles, implementation remains entangled with confused practical issues that compromise effective participation. As an alternative to complex, technologically sophisticated LUP models that local stakeholders cannot use or replicate, a communication platform supporting negotiations among multiple stakeholder groups was tested in a village cluster in Luang Prabang Province in northern Laos. This innovative approach, based on a combination of role-playing games, participatory 3D modeling, GIS, and socioeconomic and environmental impact assessment, allows stakeholders to collectively explore the consequences of land use decisions and choose between alternative future landscapes.     

Multifunctional landscapes in a rural,developing country context: conflicts and synergies in Tshidzivhe,South Africa

Available examples of multifunctional landscapes are derived from developed countries, and do not typically shed light on the spatial clashes and synergies between traditional subsistence and commercially intensive production activities in developing countries. This paper explores the relationships between multiple land uses in a rural South African landscape, and in particular, the interactions between a community involved in subsistence agriculture and mixed livelihoods, and adjacent commercial forestry. Using both field and desktop methods, the paper aims to enhance understanding of landscape conflicts and synergies in this developing country context. The findings reveal a landscape polarised between highly productive monofunctional commercial forestry and tribal authority lands comprising a continuum of human settlement and indigenous vegetation. Conflicts and synergies centre around the natural resources required for these uses. Proposed policy solutions for landscape management include the need for better understanding of dual economy landscapes; maximising land use synergies; and providing direct community benefits and livelihood opportunities.     

Shelter,Location, and Livelihoods: Exploring the Linkages in Mexico City

For many low-income households in cities of the developing world, ‘self-help’ or informal housing provides not only their shelter, but also functions as a vital productive asset. The land accessible to the urban poor for informal housing, however, is often remotely located in the urban periphery. While providing access to shelter, such peripheral locations may undermine the potential of shelter to serve as a productive asset, especially for women whose mobility is constrained by their dual roles as care-givers and wage-earners. This research explores how location influences the potential of housing to serve as a productive asset in two informally settled communities in different parts of Mexico City. The paper argues that the ‘right to shelter’ associated with informal housing needs to be ‘scaled-up’ to include the ‘right to the city’ through closer consideration of the linkages among shelter, location, and livelihoods. Such a policy focus necessarily situates housing in a broader socio-spatial context and would serve to complement the prevailing emphasis on community or place-specific upgrading activities in informal or low-income settlements. Finally, the paper raises questions about the role of planning in improving the livelihood opportunities of lower-income households.