Building, Owning & Belonging From Assisting Owner-driven Housing Reconstruction to Co-production in Sri Lanka, India and Beyond

Abstract

According to UN-Habitat, around 1.2 billion people in the developing countries lived in inadequate housing in 2014. In the last few years, a great deal of effort has been put in by governments and international donors to change that. And yet, as per the present trends, the number of people living in inadequate housing in the slums and deprived villages of poor countries will increase to probably 2 billion in the next 25 years. The state-led efforts to alleviate the housing problem confront two major obstacles. First, the resources mobilised by governments and made available to implementing agencies meet a tiny fraction of the needs. Resources required for housing include not just funds but also suitable land for construction, diverse and secure forms of tenure, socially purposeful tax incentives, inclusive transportation networks, transparent governance, etc. Second, most affordable housing interventions do not capitalise upon the huge latent resources that the so-called ‘poor’ can contribute. Both the magnitude of needs and the wide range of benefits of participation have been extensively documented for the last four decades. As a practitioner on this field throughout this time, I have witnessed how when providing flexibility for the end users to participate in the planning and building process, or better still, if they ‘own’ the process, interventions respond more effectively to their needs, to their time scales and often lead to the leveraging of unexpected human and financial inputs. Yet, government’s appeal for centralised forms of delivery continues to produce generic standard rubberstamp units: houses as ‘products’, which are often detached from people’s aspirations. These, time after time, come at the expense of developmental opportunities that can be fostered through participatory housing processes such as the owner-driven approach. Clearly, there is a need to explore new strategies to meet basic housing needs. But along with innovation, there is also a need to better capitalise on lessons already learnt. This book acknowledges these needs and builds on four decades of owner-driven reconstruction experiences. The essays, by authors of very diverse backgrounds, account for several strategies and initiatives with varying levels of community engagement and of partnership with donors and governments. Authors evaluate alternative paradigms of participatory housing and local technologies, some found to be successful and some failing to sustain over time and scale. It is precisely the question of the long term that makes this book distinct. Articles being based on actual experiences makes the accounts all the more relevant. This book will be an invaluable guide to the academics, planners and practitioners to charter new paths or to replicate aspects that have already worked.