Housing Needs and Policy Approaches: An Overview

Willem van Vliet— and Sylvia Fava

Social research on housing concerns a broad array of policy issues along various dimensions and at various levels, ranging from equity in national subsidy programs to trends in regional dwelling supply to popular participation in local development to individual residential choice. Accordingly, research is conducted in a variety of settings. Researchers may be found in traditionally organized academic departments (e.g., sociology, economics), in multidisciplinary entities, and in research institutes that may be independent, semigovernmental or affiliated with a university. Other researchers come from professional backgrounds such asurban planning and architecture. In addition, many investigations are carried out in ministries of housing or similar bodies. In Third World countries, housing research is often sponsored by the United Nations and large international foundations and agencies.

Considering the great variety of research contexts, it comes as little surprise that the outcomes of research have been scattered, rather than cumulative. Academic housing researchers typically are either the only people with such interests in their department or the only representatives of their discipline in a multidisciplinary unit. Consequently, they seek out diverse audiences and report their findings in many different journals. Furthermore, results from research conducted under government auspices are often presented in documents that receive only limited circulation. In short, the dissemination of findings has been difficult.

The situation sketched above has been problematic because it provides researchers with limited opportunities to compare their findings. Such exchange is extremely valuable, however, because it enables the identification of common trends and facilitates the formulation of policy approaches to specific issues whose underlying more generic factors would not otherwise be manifest. The present volume is prompted by this hiatus in the literature. Unlike other recent housing publications more narrowly concerned with economic issues (McGuire, 1981) or the situation in theUnited States (e.g., Sternlieb et al., 1980; Pynoos et al., 1980; Montgomery and Mandelker, 1979; Fish, 1979; Montgomery andMarshall, 1980; Hartman, 1983), this book contains perspectives from six continents selected to illustrate, generally with original empirical data, dominant themes in social research on policies regarding housing supply and demand worldwide.

Transition

The need for comparative housing research is relatively recent and it has emerged in the transition from unselfconscious form making in housing to self-conscious form making (Alexander, 1964). The following historical sketch describes how this transition added new dimensions to the quantity and quality of housing demands and at the same time increased the need for government involvement in the provision of housing.

In preindustrial times, and even today to some extent in the less-developed countries, the inhabitants of dwellings, the designer, and the builder were one and the same person or members of a small social group. The process of so-called unselfconscious construction was guided by covert procedural rules which produced physical settings integrally linked to their sociocultural context on the one hand, and to physical and technological constraints on the other. The unspoken rules, as well as their products, evolved incrementally over an extended time. The builders were close to their materials and techniques of construction. They usually inhabited the shelters they produced and subsequently altered them, as required by their changing needs. In short, the unselfconscious building process was one of iterative, systematic responses, integrally linked to the requisites of slowly evolving housing needs (Studer and Van Vliet—, in press).

In contrast, the self-conscious building process is characterized by environmental needs which change more frequently and more abruptly and which are increasingly multivariegated. The responses to these needs involve the contemplated and synoptic use of specialized skills and the large-scale adoption of advanced technologies, overcoming physical constraints. Social and administrative distance separates the users of the environment from the producers (Lipman, 1969), as they form organizational entities such as tenant and homeowner associations, architectural firms, development corporations, and building companies.

Clearly, housing is intricately interwoven with sociopolitical, economic, and technological factors constituting the societal context, and the transformation from unselfconscious to self-conscious construction finds its genesis in a radical alteration of what had been an enduring societal configuration. The principal instigating force behind this change was the Industrial Revolution. Mechanization of agricultural production decreased the labor force in the countryside, while the introduction of industrial production created a need for unskilled labor in urban centers. This change in the economic structure resulted in a massive migration from rural to urban areas and a concomitant demand for housing. The newcomers differed in many respects from the old-time urban residents. Migrants were generally...