Housing policies and governance in global south

For many cities in global south, the future of housing is now. The region is facing grand challenges such as rapid urbanization, massive population growth, widespread poverty and widening inequality in housing provision between the rich and the poor. In the past few decades, private sector involvement in housing delivery has been considered a panacea in line with World Bank and UN-Habitat’s enabling housing policies to address the endemic mismatch in housing supply and demand. Whilst private housing supply, public-private partnerships and stronger governance with corporate ethos and ambitions have been able to address partly the housing demand of the top percentile of the population, housing condition of the urban poor has not changed much. Majority of the urban poor continue to live in slums and squatter settlements, and rely on self-help strategies for housing and basic infrastructural facilities. This prompts us to question how far the enabling housing market principles have been able to address the housing needs of the bottom half of the population in the region. How do various interventions of previous decades over housing have fared and what explains the particular shape they take? More importantly how can the current housing challenges push the planners, policy makers and governments to go beyond their economic focus and re-imagine a new housing paradigm that could help to turn the ‘housing for all’ rhetoric to reality?