Housing without Debt
It is now more or less universally accepted that there is something fundamentally wrong with our housing economy. Not just the centralised industrial production models we use to produce housing: our dependence on a few large development companies to buy the land, beat their way through local community resistance, and build rows of poor quality, unsustainable mass-housing that fewer and fewer of us can afford. The Big Short is not about those industrial housing models. It’s about the economy behind them.
How can we transcend slum urbanism in Africa? – Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town – UN-Habitat
In this lecture, Edgar Pieterse, professor at the University of Cape Town and the founding director of the African Centre for Cities, puts forward the concept of the underlying logic of slum urbanism. This logic in turn manifests in an overall urban form that can be characterised as ‘extreme splintered urbanism’—a pattern of urban development that manifests in sharp urban divides, the privatisation of key urban services and infrastructure linked to large-scale slum neglect over long periods of time.