Informal Housing in Developing Countries
Homelessness and insecurity of tenure are issues faced by populations around the world. However there are particularly pernicious circumstances in developing countries that lead to a large proportion of the population resorting to informal housing. According to Saskia Sassen, in the race to become a ‘global city’ (wiki ref) with the requisite state-of-the-art economic and regulatory platforms for handling the operations of international firms and markets’, radical physical interventions in the existing fabric of the city are often called for, displacing ‘modest, low-profit firms and households’.
If these households lack the economic resilience to repurchase within the same area, or relocate to a place that offers similar economic opportunity, they are prime candidates for informal housing options. For example, in Mumbai, India, this fast-paced economic growth, coupled with inadequate infrastructure, endemic corruption and the legacy of the restrictive tenancy laws have left the city unable to house the estimated 54% who now live informally.
Many cities in the developing world are currently experiencing a rapid increase in informal housing, driven by mass migration to cities in search of employment, or fleeing from war or environmental disaster. According to Robert Neuwirth, already there are over 1 billion, or one in six squatters worldwide. If current trends continue, this will increase to 2 billion by 2030 (one in four), and 3 billion by 2050 (one in three). Informal housing, and the often informal livelihoods that accompany them, are set to be defining features of the cities of the future.
Read more about this topic: Informal Economy
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