The citizenship promise (un)fulfilled: The right to housing in informal settings

Abstract

Informal settlements (often called ‘slums’) seem to defy the realisation of social rights. The UN Special Rapporteurs, in their reports, present informal dwellers mostly as the victims of human rights violations. Informal dwellers are not merely victims, however; they also produce non‐state welfare through economic and social practices on the margins. Considering the human right to housing (as promise of social citizenship) and informal settlements, we discuss the ‘everyday social contract of informality’ that frames the production of non‐state welfare in densely populated urban areas in the global South. Planning theorists, by introducing ‘insurgent citizenship’, examine the potential of bottom‐up initiatives that claim the ‘right to the city’. Insurgent citizenship focuses on the enjoyment dimension of human rights. In this vein, we suggest that human rights cannot be implemented in informal settings without full consideration to the spatiality and sociality of non‐state welfare.

Property and Social Citizenship: Social Policy beyond the North

“…right to employment) could be related to the housing question. Davy and Pellissery (2013) reviewed the housing conditions in slums across the world using the parameters of adequate housing as specified by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 20 It was found that claiming formal property rights is not merely difficult in informal contexts, but undesirable since sentimentality and enjoyment dimensions of the realisation of rights are constitutive elements of social Property and Social Citizenship: Social Policy beyond the North citizenship in non-state welfare institutions.…”

An endogenous theory of property rights: opening the black box of institutions

“…Such situations could occur in highly industrialized and urbanized settings with a minimal proportion of rural labor to the total population, when land no longer caters for social welfare, but as a vehicle for trade and investment. 31 In fact, in highly industrialized and urbanized settings, it is not so much the access to land but the access to housing that determines social welfare (Davy and Pellissery 2013). Under these conditions, formalization of informal land tenure is not likely to result in social cleavage and marginalization and could, in fact, be used as a measure against the concentration of land into the hands of an elite few.…”

The Sixth Giant? Environmental Policy and the Labour Government, 1945–51

“…Weiler, 2013: 390-1, 406-08 Davy and Pellissery (2013) argue that the issue of land ownership is leading to a form of 'insurgent citizenship' in developing countries. If so, then it may yet be that 'developed countries' have much to learn from the Global South (Davy & Pellissery, 2011: 109).…”