Aided self-help: the Million Houses Programme - revisiting the issues

The self-help approach to housing aims at creating an enabling environment. An environment in which occupants of a piece of land, especially the poor, build their affordable houses fulfilling their current needs and progressively expand and/or improve the house to meet their changing needs. The Million Houses Programme in Sri Lanka ‘aided’ self-help incorporated participation in decisionmaking, support for planning, design, construction, and financing. The project further expanded to enhance skills of settlement residents for taking-up community contracts for construction of community assets. Currently when relocation of slum dwellers in built-housing is becoming the preferred option, this article very briefly revisited the lessons learnt and the lessons that could still be learned from the experience of the Million Houses Programme and of the ‘People’s Process’. It argues that an ‘enabling environment’ for increasing access to housing involves multi-pronged support through facilitators. The experience of the Million Houses Programme offer insights, even now, into effective strategies for aided self-help housing

Housing futures: housing for the poor in Sri-Lanka

Since the mid-1950s, Governments in countries of South Asia have attempted to meet the housing demand of the poor, and introduced housing policies often backed by public finance to support public, subsidised and incremental/ self-help housing. With rapid urbanization, rising real estate-prices, transition to market-driven housing finance systems and focus on slum-free cities, Governments are implementing redevelopment projects for central districts of cities. Recently, new housing stock is being created under reconstruction and resettlement projects in areas affected by environmental disasters and civil unrest..

Affordable housing in Ahmedabad

In 2012, the estimated housing shortage in India was 18.78 million units. 88% of this shortage pertains to households with annual incomes of about Rs100,000 (USD 1,724) and another 11% for those with annual incomes of less than Rs200,000 (USD 3,450). Government of India has played a supporting role to house the poor through special programmes, targeted subsidy, and creation of an enabling environment for private sector initiatives. Post 1990, several reforms were introduced, and there was a gradual shift in the role of the Government from a ‘provider’ to a ‘facilitator’. The facilitating approach aims at fostering public-private partnerships through incentives for the private sector, promotion of housing finance institutions, use of alternative and environment-friendly building materials and technologies, and support to NGOs, CBOs and cooperatives. In this context, Ahmedabad - the fifth largest city in India with a population of 5,570,585 and seventh largest urban agglomeration with a population of 6,352,254 (Census 2011), offers an interesting perspective on affordable housing. Private developers implementing housing schemes for low income groups have learnt from experience that although initially there is a higher demand for two-room units, a majority of potential customers’ can afford only one-room units. Further, housing finance institutions have come-up with new products and have identified alternative means for assessing incomes and affordability of people in the informal sector. The strategies, processes and tools that private developers have introduced in Ahmedabad are contributing to increasing the stock of affordable housing

Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world

Challenges in Up-scaling Good Practices

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