**8. Conclusion**

*Sustainability Concept in Developing Countries*

alternative strategies [52].

of the country.

and families that need housing and their social profile in relation to actions already initiated to actualise housing desire. In the interim, it will be beneficial to do a comprehensive survey of rapidly growing and developing outskirts and suburb of cities. This means working backwards from the field to devising strategies and policies to aid the self-producers of housing and master plan these newly developing areas in ways of reintegrating them to city, regional or national comprehensive plans. In places where the people are building houses on cheap land on the outskirts, government should acquire land for public housing and map out future light industrial areas and other uses like educational, commercial, health and recreational spaces since housing problem is solved individually in these contexts. The resources to execute sites-and-services schemes is rarely available and, if executed, results in over valuing of land beyond the reach of the low income. In practice, cheaper land beyond the sites-and-services scheme is usually the next target of the poor resulting in rapid expansion of low-density cities. Also, the rural and urban areas in these cities are socially interconnected—economically, financially, politically, culturally and technologically. The housing environment on the outskirts has houses belonging to different income groups in an indistinctive way but predominantly to low-income people. Therefore, housing solution should not be seen in isolation of other aspects of development to ensure urban sustainability. Academics and researchers are in a position to bring to the fore negative effects of neoliberal housing processes on the society and policies with class interest through people's perspectives and collaborate with community groups to negotiate better

As shown in **Figure 1**, researchers and public administrators will collaborate in collecting data about family size and composition, occupation, income, education level, residential history and other socio-economic characteristics of the lowincome people in rapidly developing outskirts of the city. Data will be collected on the housing process starting from how the land was acquired, the legalisation process, the construction process, who are the actors and participants in the process and how much support they enjoyed from their networks and community. In such informal developments, the houses will be in different stages of completion. The location and environment have to be studied. Data will be collected on the design type of houses, the uses accommodated, the completion and occupying schedule and whether it is occupied by the owner family with or without renters. This list of data needed is not exhaustive depending on the context. These data will be collected simultaneously with information on the history, social, economic, political, cultural and technological situation of the immediate local context and the overall context

These data will be subjected to univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses to synthesise information on motivation for housing production, desired housing typologies and process, stages in life cycle and housing production correlation. Other synthesised information will include sources of credit commonly utilised and corresponding modes of collateral security, the communal support the people enjoy including indigenous organisations, the common home-based enterprises, the indigenous or local knowledge in the process and other unexpected information not

Housing strategies that will emanate from this synthesis will include determination of housing need components, intervention strategies after defining the people that really need housing, what they need, why they need it and their preferred process. Others include finance strategies, urban planning and administration strategies, the meeting and departure points of the informal and formal processes and formalisation strategies that may facilitate equitable housing provision and

envisaged that will be useful in formulating housing strategies.

**14**

overall development.

This chapter has highlighted the crisis level of housing shortfall in the developing world, especially concerning low-income people. It took a panoramic view of housing strategies implemented in these countries, evaluated them and pointed to why there is marginal success of internationally backed national housing strategies compared to people's negotiated self-produced housing. The chapter proposes a people-centred approach and a cyclic people-centred housing strategy framework based on the social totality concept of Lefebvre's theory of space. The implementation of the framework needs town and gown collaboration of researchers and professionals in academics, private and public sectors. The cycle starts from collecting data about the people, the process and the houses produced by people and the social, economic, political, cultural and technological characteristics of the immediate local and larger national context. This information is analysed and synthesised to discover people, housing production, housing process, housing uses and typologies, sources of finance, community support, motivation and life cycle correlates. These correlates are critical to deriving housing strategies in defining who needs housing, for what purpose or purposes and when it is needed. It also helps to arrive at appropriate intervention strategies for the process, finance, urban and infrastructure planning and formalisation in ways that will positively affect housing solutions and overall development.

### **Author details**


\*Address all correspondence to: aasojo@umn.edu

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
