Public housing and beneficiary responses to it

Low income housing interventions that respond to people living in poor conditions in countries of the South have received considerable scrutiny.  Amongst state housing programmes that share similar characteristics such as those of Chile, Colombia and South Africa, are those which broadly centre on the construction of new housing stock to be owned by qualifying beneficiaries.  These can be large-scale and significant in impact on the landscape and form of cities: South Africa’s programme for example has delivered over 3 million newly built detached houses for ownership since the transition to democracy in 1994. A key strand of criticism of these housing approaches has centered on their regularizing, ordering and standardizing properties - loosely, their modernist characteristics.  These, it is argued, are uncomfortably juxtaposed against household structures, activities, and ways of generating income that are more informal, complex or fluid than these buildings and settlements allow for.  Nevertheless, there are indications that many recipients and potential beneficiaries from diverse contexts appreciate, cherish or aspire to such accommodation: research from Cairo for example describes peoples’ transformation of the housing they are relocated to but also their attachment to it. In Mumbai in-situ ‘SRA’ apartment housing evokes aspirations and desires from informal settlement dwellers.   These indications, diverse as they are, resonate with empirical findings from state funded ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa, where gratitude to the state and pride in the housing surfaces.  The various criticisms directed to such housing programmes might anticipate more resistance, rejection or conflict from recipients than this suggests. Instead, what conceptual and theoretical tools help explain this more ambiguous interface between these government sponsored programmes and the lives of resident users?