Housing rehab for consolidated settlements: A new policy agenda for 2016 UN-Habitat III

pSince the first Habitat Conference in 1976 the primary focus for housing policy has been upgrading and regularization (tenure and services) directed towards informal settlements and are largely a conventional wisdom today. However, settlements that formed 20-40 years at the then periphery and which developed through self-building have been overtaken by subsequent decades of suburban growth and are today located in the intermediate ring of cities (i.e. the old periphery or the contemporary ldquo;innerburbsrdquo;). Now fully serviced and integrated into the urban fabric they are no longer considered a policy priority, yet they, too, need to be brought back into the policy focus for UN-Habitat 2016. Self-built, intensively used, high density, multi- and mixed-tenure and now containing second and third generations of residents who were raised in these settlements, there is an urgent need to shape creative policies for these second generation households, many of whom are inheriting the homes from their parents.br /
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This invited editorial paper presents findings from a path breaking comparative research in nine Latin American countries (eleven cities) where a common methodology has been applied to gather household, settlement and municipal data about consolidated settlements and the housing rehab needs and policies that can be applied to attend to the needs of these now often dilapidated housing as well as for renewal of the often now heavily deteriorated infrastructure of these neighborhoods (a href="http://www.lahn.utexas.org" title="www.lahn.utexas.org"www.lahn.utexas.org/a). It offers a spectrum of policies for housing and community rehab and retrofitting of the low income housing stock. Drawing upon tools and policy approaches of housing rehab and urban regeneration in the USA and Europe it proposes a new agenda of physical development, financing, legal regulation, and social mobilization policies to target housing and neighborhood rehab of the old established working class self-built neighborhoods of cities./p