The scarcity and inaccessibility of land in urban areas has become a major obstacle in the provision of housing to low-income groups in developing countries. This thesis studies the land policies and practices in Metropolitan Kano, Nigeria, and investigates the issues and problems hindering the adequate supply of residential land to low-income groups. / The thesis commences with a general study of urban land policies and low-income housing in developing countries. It examines the nature of housing problems in developing countries, the role of land in the housing problems, issues addressed by land policies, and policy measures and strategies used. The general study is followed by a specific study of the land policies and practices in the study area. The policy and institutional management frameworks are identified and examined. The roles of the major institutions are explained. The last section identifies and examines the main issues and problems with the existing policies. / The thesis concludes that actions are necessary to address the identified issues and problems with the policies in order to avoid chaos. Suggestions for policy reform are made.

It is believed that by knowing user characteristics during the pre-design stage, the architect can better satisfy the economic requirements and spatial preferences of the user. The author's goal in this study is to demonstrate the validity of four variables in providing information about prospective home buyers in a particular site in order to define their housing needs during the programming stage. / Past studies suggested four variables from which basic design guidelines could eventually be extracted: socio-demographic characteristics, type of household/life cycle stage, economic characteristics and mobility. The validity of these variables were tested by the author in four case studies which included several low-cost housing projects in metropolitan Montreal. Information from indirect sources (i.e. literature survey and evaluation of existing projects), was compared to direct sources (i.e. target projects in which the information was readily available). The results established the relevance of some of the variables, and indicated that reliable information could be obtained by architects and housing researchers from indirect sources, thereby, optimizing time and resources.

The government has through many legislations initiated programs to provide housing for those who cannot afford housing in the private market. From 1945, the government has continuously tried to fulfill those housing needs and to improve living conditions. This thesis is an overview of the policies, programs and livability of low rental housing in Canada. / This study is divided into three parts. In the first part, there is a factual description of the circumstances and policies that have influenced the development of low rental housing since 1945. The second part assesses the demand and tenant characteristics for such housing. Three types of low income housing: public housing, low rental housing and cooperatives, are compared to measure their merits. The third part analyses the design criteria for such housing with reference to projects built in Montreal, Quebec. Tenants' opinions on what is satisfactory in housing projects are discussed and appropriate management policies are suggested. In the conclusion, government policies of the past, and some recent developments are summarized, and future strategies suggested.

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Despite the attention given to the role of the housing market in the constitution and duration of low-income minority neighborhoods in American cities, little is known about the inner-workings of the housing market within these neighborhoods. The kind of housing professionals that populate this local economic world, the strategies they develop, both orthodox and unorthodox, especially towards tenants, are deemed of little interest by the dominant perspectives in the field, Human Ecology and Political Economy. The shared intellectual movement behind these two widely different theoretical perspectives is to understand how the city is mapped, how people and activities come to be distributed in space across the city. In this agenda, low-income minority areas are seen as a residual geographical entity, something whose existence is the effect of external forces: real estate brokers who steer households according to race, white ethnic immigrants who flee to the suburbs, white middle-class youths who gentrify the inner-city, downtown elites who disinvest from low-income minority neighborhoods. To focus on local actors of the housing market who operate within low-income minority neighborhoods requires a shift away from the traditional question of spatial distribution. Instead of framing the housing market as a spatial mechanism, this research looks at the housing market as a set of varied economic circuits that plug into a local social life with the goal of extracting money out of a local population's housing needs. In this view, the empirical questions are the variety of economic circuits in which the poor and near-poor minorities are embedded; the economic roles that define these various circuits; the strategies that are adequate, both for housing actors and for the local population; the opportunities for upward mobility and the risks of downward mobility they offer; the experience of hardship that emerges from these circuits. In brief, the key issue is how the different modes of organization of a local housing field (a term more open to variations than "market") participate to the local process of economic differentiation in low-income minority neighborhoods. The process under study can be conceived as the mutual shaping between two linked ecologies (Abbott 2005). On one hand, there are small and independent local housing professionals. For these actors, the issue is: how can they meet the specific challenges and seize the specific profits that stem from the economic project of making money out of the housing needs of poor and near-poor minorities? On the other hand, there is the ecology of the local population living in these neighborhoods. This population is internally differentiated by class and by a myriad of support networks, which may include formal organizations, such as lawyers, community based organizations, religious organizations, or legal aid societies. For this population, the key question is: how to benefit best from the housing field they face with the variety of resources at their hands? The interactions of these two ecologies with the larger regulatory framework shape the economic circuits that make up the housing field in low-income minority neighborhoods. The outcome of such interactive process can be approached from the inside - i.e. the inner-workings of the economic circuits as seen by those who derive money from them. It can also be seen from the outside - i.e. the economic structures that people living in these communities face. For almost three years (2009-2012), I was embedded into an informal group of housing actors operating in central Brooklyn and central Harlem, NY. This group is made of small landlords, larger real estate investors, independent real estate brokers, several housing lawyers and a criminal lawyer, construction workers and handymen, local community leaders, and, more marginally, New York City agents and bureaucrats and tenants. My research is an ethnographic study of this group, which I call "Larry's clique". It yielded three main results. First, the local housing field in low-income minority neighborhoods is segmented between the "housing market" and the "housing game". In the "housing market" economic dynamics fall within the boundary of institutional regulations. Roles and strategies are encapsulated in common terms like "tenant", "landlord", "housing lawyer", "real estate broker" etc. Next to this institutionalized housing market, exists a predatory segment, which, following the people I have observed, I call the "housing game". In this second segment, institutionally-proscribed modes of making money are common, formal economic roles are transformed and new categories emerge such as "the professional tenant", "the foolish landlord", "the predatory machine", "the tenant who plays the game right"; new boundaries between fair and unfair business practices are drawn; and the texture of ordinary economic transactions is not one of middle-class doux-commerce, but one of incivility and verbal violence. Second, the housing game sheds a new light on the local economic life in which poor and near-poor minorities are embedded. I have observed the formation of patrons-clients ties between local housing actors of the "game" and the local population. Patron-clients ties are a classic structure in the social scientific literature. However, it is a vocabulary that has disappeared from the scholarship on the contemporary forms of American poverty and near-poverty. My research brings back this vocabulary. Associated to this form of relation is a particular experience of hardship. The poor and near-poor who come in contact with the housing game experience the world as full of concealed riches that can be unlocked through personal yet distrustful relations of dependency. In this worldview, people shift quickly from being friend to being foe, double-agents are constant worries, simple questions as who works for whom receive unstable answers, and hubristic anger and joy accompany expectations of high rewards, of rainfalls of money, and feelings of being robbed. In this deeply personalistic worldview, something key is obliterated from the eyes of the people: it is the marginality of most of the actors I have observed from larger formal organizations and bureaucracies that chiefly affect the distribution of economic rewards in the housing market. Third, the housing game is not a well-ordered underworld in the tradition of the Chicago School. It is not a sub economic system with its own parallel culture and practices. The real mode of existence of this economic world has much less substance. Economic actors in the housing game are haunted by feelings of inefficacy and amateurism. Beyond the scams, the predatory attempts, the shouts and the insults in Housing Court, beyond the moralizing discourses about who "abuses the system" and who deserves to be "fucked", beyond all this gesticulation, people of the game have the nagging feeling of being stalled. The economic life of the housing game fights by all means necessary the actors' creeping experience of passivity, helplessness, and low self-efficacy - but it is not always successful. The vocabulary of the "game" indicates not only the distance with the institutionalized housing market, but also the dramaturgy of this economic world, the layers of meaning and symbolic practices that cover up, but only in part, the fact that the game does not fully work, does not bring the expected rewards. The concealed riches of the world remain out of reach. The intellectual posture behind this research is the reconstruction of economic categories through intimate ethnographic observations. Such reconstruction requires an epoch (i.e. a suspension) of the common modes of description of economic life inherited from both economics and legal studies and from the regulatory framework that supervises the "market". This research is the occasion, then, to interrogate the place of rich narratives and close descriptions in the study of economic life.

As enshrined in the post-apartheid South African constitution, access to basic services like potable water, sanitation and formal housing has become a basic right for all South Africans. The delivery of low-cost housing through the national and provincial Departments of Human Settlement is one of the major focuses of the post-apartheid South African Government. South Africa today (2010) still has massive shortages of low-cost housing for the poor, despite funding being made available to address this need. Millions of poor families live in shacks in informal settlements and in overcrowded townships where small (250 to 300 square metre) erven with one bedroom dwellings and rudimentary extensions and backyard shacks erected on them often house more than one family while they await access to housing subsidies. The Eastern Cape Province is one of the poorest provinces in South Africa, with a significantly poor rural community and dense urban settlements which have sprouted all over as a result of urban migration and population growth. According to the Provincial Human Settlement Department, the Eastern Cape has a backlog of approximately 370,000 low-cost houses. Several low cost housing projects have been initiated in the province. The projects are implemented using different partnership strategies and they produce different outcomes, which are in no way near the desired outcomes of meeting the demand of supplying quality houses in the shortest possible time (E Cape Government Department of Human Settlement). In terms of the project management norms, standards and processes of the building industry, it takes two builders, one plumber and five labourers five days to build a fifty square metre low-cost housing unit. Yet some projects, as small as 200 housing units, have taken more than 10 years to complete for one reason or the other. Often when the houses are perceived to be complete it becomes evident that their quality is of an unacceptable standard, and some unmet desired objectives. Some project sites in rural towns of the former Transkei have been abandoned due to failures in implementation. Furthermore, some project sites which start off as green fields have been invaded by poor communities who build rudimentary shack dwellings on the sites in a sign of desperation, impatience and frustration at the pace of delivery (among other reasons) with a huge unfavourable financial impact on the implementation of the planned projects. The problems impacting on low-cost housing delivery are a combination of hard systems (processes, procedures, costing, programming and so on) and soft systems (the human element). The problems and risks described as being associated with housing projects are many and varied, depending who is talking, and in some instances it is difficult to describe the problems in words (unstructured and complex problems). This study concentrates on the human element associated with the implementation processes by critically examining the roles of the multitude of stakeholders who are identified as partners in the projects. Such partnerships are a huge contributing factor to the success or failure of a programme. This study looks at minimising project implementation risks through the establishment of effective cross-sector partnership frameworks. The positive and negative impacts of partners in low-cost housing project management and implementation are critically examined using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) with a view to improving service delivery. Keywords Systems Thinking, Complexity, Soft Systems, Cross-sector Partnerships, Project Management, Low-cost Housing Projects / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.

The urban poor of the third world cities living in slums and squatter settlements often have to support themselves or augment their meagre and uncertain incomes with small-scale business enterprises. This deceptively marginal sector of the urban economy in reality plays a vital role as a major percentage of the urban population are poor. These enterprises are, more often than not, home-based due to their lack of resources. The squalid and congested living conditions in these settlements are thus further compromised by setting up these commercial endeavour, but it is essential for their livelihood as employment opportunities occupy a primary position in their list of priorities. / This thesis studies the phenomenon of people in low-income housing settlements using their own homes for income generating activities and the compromise between the various uses of the same space. A field study was undertaken in a typical bustee in Calcutta, India to help illustrate this phenomenon. Sample surveys of a number of households where small-scale economic activity takes place were taken and studied in detail. How the integration of such activities in their daily living environment shapes, changes and influences their living patterns forms the main focus of the study.

Most developing countries have based their housing strategies on ownership. Approaches they have adopted, such as sites and services or upgrading schemes, rely basically on ownership through self-help. Yet, most of these efforts have proved inadequate to cope with the increasing demand for urban housing. In this context, informal settlements seem to provide the cheapest and more 'affordable' ownership options for the poor. Nevertheless, home ownership, even in its squatter form, demands time, investment, and long term commitment; a luxury that some households simply cannot afford. / Based on qualitative research conducted in three low income barrios of informal origin, this study looks at the kind of non-ownership-oriented solutions available for the poor in Resistencia a provincial capital in Northeast Argentina. On the demand side, findings suggest that for some households rental or shared housing is the only choice. For others, on the contrary, it seems to be a matter of preference, a way to avoid the chores of ownership. On the supply side, the study unveils a fairly wide spectrum of choices, with options ranging from a bed in a house to rooming houses of up to 15 rooms. While some of the landlords are relatively wealthy, others are just as poor, or poorer than their tenants. / Rental and shared alternatives are far from being 'ideal' housing solutions. Under certain conditions, however, they result in reasonable short-term options that, apart from generating extra income for small landlords, contribute to diversify the supply of cheap accommodation for poor households.