Concepts and Methods

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

A People-Centred Social Totality

in the Developing World

*E. Babatunde Jaiyeoba and Abimbola O. Asojo*

Approach to Low-Income Housing

In a significant part of the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, public housing policies and implementation have depended on a top-to-bottom approach in an attempt to ensure housing supply. However, public authorities sometimes backed by international agencies preferring to operate through the housing market have failed to meet the housing need, especially for low-income people. Even when the users are involved like in the slum dwellers association, the organisation of the process is majorly controlled by the public authorities. While government and public institutions attained minimal success in housing provision for the lowest classes in the society, the people have been more successful in housing production. This chapter situates the housing problem and policy responses in the context of the developing world characterised by limited capacity to control and manage the largely more successful informal people-controlled housing production structure. A cyclic peoplecentred strategy framework for low-income housing is proposed based on town-gown collaboration in studying low-income people, their activated housing process and the houses produced to guide present strategies and synthesise future strategies and policy. This framework emanates from Henri Lefebvre's social totality explanation to understand how low-income people negotiate housing from the social context.

**Keywords:** low income, housing strategy, developing world, social totality

Housing policy is naturally a top-down process since government should be seen or at least perceived as taking care of all the people in any country. The mode of carrying out this laudable ideal of ensuring housing provision for all citizens irrespective of income varies in different contexts depending on the housing policysuccess-failure history, objectives set, the desires and mode of government in place. This chapter examines housing strategies in the developing world, especially for low-income people in sub-Saharan Africa. It x-rays the housing problem in the developing world and policy prescriptions vis-a-vis the housing solutions of low-income people. Whereas public authority approaches have limited success in housing supply, cross sections of low-income people in the developing world have succeeded in housing production in informal ways. It is important to understand how these lowincome people succeed to device housing strategies that work for the poor. The social totality concept derivable from Lefebvre's theory of space provides an explanation
