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E-book Housing the Poor : The Right to the City and Policy Arrangements in Urban Indonesia

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Penilaian

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What is so interesting about housing policies? I have been asked this question many times over the last years, ever since I became interested in the topic of housing. I used to respond in a simple way, disregarding the complexity of the topic: ‘We cannot allow the existence of one billion people living in slums!’, ‘We live in the 21st century; there must be a way to improve the living conditions of the poorest’, or ‘We need a right to adequate and affordable housing for all!’. Such were my direct answers and they satis-fied most people. Usually, they agreed, and recognised the importance of studying this topic. At the same time, however, they did not understand slogans such as ‘the right to the city’ or immediately judged them to be ideologically charged, and regarded the whole issue of housing the poor to be something from the past, an issue already over-come in advanced societies.It was not until the financial crisis in 2008, when discussions on housing reappeared in the so-called ‘developed countries’1 that slowly, people began to become aware of the fact that housing is not a given right in a capitalist world. In the precise moment when the employees of Lehman Brothers were leaving their offices carrying boxes with their belongings, the importance of housing markets as part of the circuits of cap-ital accumulation with its inherent tendency to produce recurring crises (Harvey 1978) became evident. Loan defaults in the housing sector had induced a severe crisis in the financial sector, resulting not only in the near bankruptcy of whole countries but more concretely in the expulsion of thousands of families in North America and many coun-tries of the European Union (Crump et al. 2008; Alexandri & Janoschka 2017). The crisis had shown quite plainly that a right to adequate housing does not exist, at least not everywhere and for everyone.In most countries of the Global South the housing question has never left the table. While some industrialised countries only recently and only intermittently experienced serious housing backlogs, the housing challenge faced by developing countries is much more serious. Here, rapid urbanisation processes, never before seen in their severity, result in fast-growing urban agglomerations and extensive urban landscapes. Usually, these urbanisation processes take place uncontrolled and produce an increasing hous-ing shortage. Despite considerable economic growth, a significant part of society– the underprivileged– remain excluded and, due to the inherent logic of capitalism, for-mal markets have proven unable to provide sufficient amounts of adequate housing for the poor. Consequently, informal settlements in various stages of consolidation are sprawling in the cities of the Global South and informality as a way of life has long since become one of their characteristics (Roy & AlSayyad 2004).The housing question is closely linked to two other debates: the discussions on the urban age and planetary urbanisation. The idea of the so-called urban age was born in 2007, when the United Nations, based on their demographic records, proclaimed that for the first time in human history more people lived in urban than in rural areas (UN-DESA 2014). In this perspective, cities are seen as the home to the majority of the population, as the places where the future of humanity will be decided.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

361.1 OBE h

Penerbit

London : Franz Steiner Verlag., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

508 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783515133494

Klasifikasi

361.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Social Problems

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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