Sufficient, well-maintained housing infrastructure can support healthy living practices for hygiene, safety and nutrition. This chapter focuses on the relationship between housing and health through a case study in the remote Barkly region in the Northern Territory, Australia. A research partnership between Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation and academic researchers employed a mixed methodological approach, involving interviews with residents, clinical and outreach staff, and clinical database analysis. The results revealed much higher levels of crowding in remote communities and in Tennant Creek than officially recorded, with up to 22 residents in surveyed households. Interviews with clinicians and public health staff highlighted the impact of crowding on infection transmission, poor sleep and reduced personal safety, and damage to health hardware. The database analysis detailed the types of preventable, hygiene-related infectious diseases that dominated, with over half of the total infectious disease diagnoses being skin, respiratory and ear, nose and throat infections. Repeated infection likely contributes to increased rates of chronic kidney and rheumatic heart diseases. The combined overall findings highlight the parallel conditions of the prevalence of hygiene-related infectious diseases, crowding and environmental health issues (including health hardware). No objective evidence of direct causal relationships was obtained due to the small scale and methodological limitations of the study. More complex future research is outlined in order to understand how to further investigate the burden of disease that the affects morbidity and mortality of Aboriginal Australians, and underlies the urgency for housing policy reform and funding to upgrade housing.

The current literature on migrantsʼ housing experience in Australia and internationally often uses spatial and economic conditions of disadvantage and adverse personal circumstances to frame the description of migrantsʼ resettlement. Even when using positive frameworks, such as inclusion and integration, the focus is on the lack of resources and support. This chapter uses the conceptual lens of resilience as an alternative framework for describing migrantsʼ resettlement experience. Using the case study of the Sudanese refugees living in the metropolitan area of Perth, Western Australia, this chapter describes the settlement process from the migrantsʼ perspective, discussing the link between settlement processes and the housing choices of migrants with a refugee background, using the concept of resilience. In particular, the chapter focuses on the external triggers that ignite, support and strengthen the different components of the migrantsʼ resilience. These triggers are defined as ‘attributes of resilienceʼ. The study identified four attributes of social resilience applicable and relevant to the housing choices and settlement patterns of the Sudanese refugee migrants settled in Perth. These are: knowledge, skills and learning; community networks; people–place connections; and community infrastructures. The chapter illustrates how the attributes assisted these migrants in developing tools and mechanisms to build new opportunities and negotiate and access suitable housing opportunities. The findings presented in this chapter stress the need, within the resettlement experience, to consider housing issues outside the simple provision of affordable and appropriate dwellings, including recognising the relationship between social and spatial domains.

Paying guest accommodations are an informal, yet organically organised, segment of the rental housing market in India. Offering inexpensive housing, paying guest accommodations mainly cater to young adults who migrate to cities, primarily for education or employment. However, this affordability and viability often comes at the cost of decent living conditions. The COVID-19-induced lockdown has exacerbated the precariousness of such accommodation at a time when adequate housing can play a pivotal role in mitigating the spread of infection. Based on qualitative research conducted in Bengaluru, India, this chapter examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tenant well-being and the shifting relationship between tenants and operators in paying guest accommodations. The analysis of narratives collected from the tenants and operators of paying guest accommodations reveals the following: first, in addition to the closures of paying guest accommodations and evictions of tenants, the lockdown led to a deterioration in the overall living conditions in these accommodations; second, in many cases, tenants had to compromise on adequacy and safety for affordability and viability, which exacerbated the negative effects on their well-being; third, the operators of paying guest accommodations faced severe economic and psychological stress during the lockdown, partly as a result of being invisible to policy; and, fourth, the relationships between the tenants operators of paying guest accommodations – a key factor shaping the overall experience of living in a paying guest accommodation – took a largely negative turn during the pandemic. This chapter brings to light an under-studied but important form of affordable rental housing, and serves as a much-needed starting point for future research.

Focusing on the architecture of three co-ops in Montreal established to support women in the 1978–88 period, this chapter examines the relationship between empowerment and design in the context of gender-conscious cooperative housing. Deindustrialisation from the 1960s was coupled with downtown renewal, which effectively meant many low-income, working-class neighbourhoods were wholesale cleared for new projects. The housing cooperative emerged as a viable model to protect access to housing. Against this backdrop, women in various government and non-profit positions helped each other and other women in precarious housing situations to establish housing co-ops for women. Feminist proponents of permanent and affordable women’s housing argued that housing was central to women’s emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘non-sexist’ cities. The chapter treats the built environment of the co-ops as evidence to study if and how residents transformed their surroundings, and complements this with qualitative interviews with former and current residents to understand how the physical environment has, in turn, shaped their lives. While the co-op movement characterises itself as a type of solidarity network with open membership, the quality of architecture, or the deficiency thereof, in a social environment with already scarce resources can lead to tensions among member-residents. However, the historical housing co-ops, as well as ongoing initiatives to establish new women’s co-ops, demonstrate the need and desire to pursue intersectional housing justice via the cooperative model, and the chapter’s findings point to the need for increased attention to and investment in architectural design.

In the Global South, urban space is appropriated through diverse informal housing arrangements, with characteristic inherent and relational temporalities. While these forms of housing often consolidate through incremental growth, change in materials and perceived security, they also exist precariously through changing circumstances. While some urban scholars have discussed the characteristic in-betweenness of informality, others have noted the conceptual tension that policy holds in addressing this temporality. This chapter builds on these discussions to argue that the temporality within and across diverse informal housing arrangements matters not due to the ways in which it manifests, but due to what happens within it as a space of transformation, that is, of socio-economic and political mobility. It draws from literature across disciplines on mobilities, poverty and capabilities to posit that a conceptual frame of choice and agency is key to policy engagement with housing temporalities. The chapter locates this discussion in the city of Delhi, where cycles of evictions have broken large ‘slum’ clusters, or bastis, into further spatial and temporal configurations. The chapter uses two distinct housing models to illustrate narratives of the state across two sites: Savda Ghevra, a case of peripheral resettlement; and Kathputli Colony, a case of in-situ redevelopment. It reveals how the state not only does not recognise the temporality of self-made housing practices, but also sets into motion temporalities that, through the absence of choice and agency, create conditions for precarity, highlighting the need to keep choice and agency central to discourses on housing and well-being.

Informal housing has been assessed to have a negative impact on its residents’ well-being. However, this chapter demonstrates that residents also perceive and experience some positive effects within their precarious housing condition. Both the Global South and the Global North are home to informal housing, yet there are very few studies that compare these contexts. In response, this chapter discusses the differences and similarities between how informality and precarious housing emerges and is experienced by its residents in both contexts. Qualitative content analysis was applied to interpret the data collected in two separate studies developed in Caracas and Sydney. The perspectives of two different populations deemed vulnerable, low-income groups are discussed: slum dwellers and international students. Aligning with Roy’s (Roy, 2005) proposition in the literature about the need to include actors such as residents in the discussion on informality, this research approach was applied to delve into the accounts of the participants to understand their meanings and experiences in the production of, access to and their everyday lives in their housing environments. Four themes arose from the interpretation of the participants’ accounts: (1) the production of informal housing; (2) permanency versus temporality; (3) networks and relationships; and (4) the overall impact on residents’ everyday lives and well-being. These emerged as significant themes for understanding the perceived well-being of informal housing residents. Residents’ experiences in the Global North and South are indeed different. However, despite the oppressing external conditions and their vulnerability, people in both areas implement psychosocial and physical strategies to improve their housing conditions and well-being. By acknowledging and understanding people’s experiences of informal housing – including those of a positive nature – we gain a deeper comprehension of the processes influencing residents’ well-being.

The criticality of housing for human health and well-being have been noted for decades. The United Nations (UN) Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948), states that: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of him[them]self and of his [their] family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his [their] control’ (United Nations, 1948: Article 25, edits and emphasis ours). Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, and shaped by that monumental event, it is a vision for a better world. In the current global moment, post-COVID-19, with ongoing conflicts, an increasing climate crisis and a stuttering global economy, a severe housing crisis remains. Across the globe we see how this ageing promise to provide a minimum standard of housing for every global citizen has not been kept. Today new forms of housing precarity including housing that is highly crowded, marginally safe housing, increasingly informal, and inaccessible to young and even fully employed people to afford housing in many countries.

In their chapter examining comparative experiences of informal housing residents in Caracas and Sydney, Quintana Vigiola (2022) makes three key propositions: first, despite the often discussed/highlighted negative impacts, informal housing can very well have positive impacts on residents’ well-being; second, informal housing residents make use of various psychosocial and physical strategies to improve their housing experience, which, in turn, leads to improvement of their perception of overall well-being; and, third, meaningful commonalities can be identified in terms of informal housing residents’ perceptions of housing and well-being across cities in the Global South and North. In this reply to Quintana Vigiola (2022), I will engage with these three propositions, drawing on my own research in informal housing settlements in a Southern context. I begin with Quintana Vigiola’s (2022) first proposition on the positive impacts of informal housing on residents’ well-being. Indeed, the literature on informal housing often tends to focus on the negative effects of such housing arrangements and the precarity associated with them. In comparison, there have been many fewer studies and much less written on how particular modes of informal dwellings can also have positive effects on residents’ well-being. I would like to expand on this by reflecting on my research in two informal settlements in Dhaka, one being Korail – a very large slum – and the other being Town Hall Camp – a former refugee camp – where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork. I found that not all people in these settlements lived there because of an inability to move out due to a lack of economic means.

Ruchika Lall’s (2022) chapter, ‘Housing temporalities: state narratives and precarity in the Global South’, provides important insights into various elements of housing precariousness in Delhi. The empirical evidence is based contextually in the Indian capital city, but the analytical arguments have wide-ranging implications for framing housing problems in other Global South metropolises. The chapter’s notion of ‘housing temporalities’ draws attention to the varied factors that deepen the housing precariousness of marginalised populations in Delhi. While being attentive to the role of the state in creating new forms of vulnerability of the urban poor, it also invites readers to recognise how different housing practices (and arrangements) shape the agency and choice of the affected groups. This framing has two key implications. First, it prompts state officials, urban planners and grass-roots leaders to revisit how the short-term strategies and long-term urban agenda inform processes of generating viable policy to improve the housing, health and well-being of specific sectors. It is particularly crucial to turn a critical gaze on the processes of these strategies, as well as the impacts (intended or not) on the everyday living conditions and strategic aspirations of housing ‘beneficiaries’. Second, Lall’s framework underscores the socio-temporal dimensions of housing precariousness in many unequal metropolises like Delhi, drawing attention to the structural violence embedded within the processes of (un)housing. Indeed, unpacking the elements of violence that occur slowly over time reminds us to be mindful of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called ‘spatial amnesia’, where (unseen) communities are imaginatively erased and uncoupled from the dominant national/urban future and memory.