Reimagining incremental housing: city-making within and beyond the state

Abigail Friendly, Femke van Noorloos and Griet Steel

International Journal of Housing Policy, 2025, vol. 25, issue 4, 557-570

Abstract: In this special issue, we aim to reconceptualise incremental housing, acknowledging its embeddedness within industries, markets, institutions and practices of city-making, based on a diversity of cases from around the world, with varying degrees of state, citizen, market and civil society involvement. In this introduction, we first shed light on the dilemmas and paradoxes involved in the complex forms and manifestations of state involvement in relation to bottom-up practices and ‘self-organizing logics’ that are often considered informal. We also discuss three key themes related to ongoing debates and agendas on incremental housing: temporality, relationality, and urban systems, suggesting the need to reimagine the role of incremental housing within broader debates on city-making. Putting temporality centre stage in the debate means paying more attention to longitudinal development; speculation and waiting time; issues of maintenance and repair; and the possibility of upward but also downward mobility. Relational, feminist and intersectional approaches to incremental housing bring important new angles of care, plurality and heterogeneity of actors and needs. Connecting such relational approaches to urban systems thinking further allows us to consider precarious (paid/unpaid) labour, income generation and power. Thinking through citywide issues of land scarcity, labour, financial markets, and building materials involves many complex networks of actors, and in particular, highly complicates the formal-informal divide. Therefore, as we suggest in this special issue introduction, taking forward debates on incremental housing must pay attention to the critical role of temporality, relationality and broader urban systems.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19491247.2025.2548048 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:intjhp:v:25:y:2025:i:4:p:557-570

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REUJ20

DOI: 10.1080/19491247.2025.2548048

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Housing Policy is currently edited by Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Gerard van Bortel and Richard Ronald

More articles in International Journal of Housing Policy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().