Summary

Rapidly urbanizing India faces a crisis for affordable housing. Affordable shelter options for the urban poor are often found in dynamic low-income neighborhoods enveloped in the city. Usually known as slums due to lack of tenure rights & poor access to basic services, these informal settlements house a majority of the city’s residents. Some of these neighborhoods have the potential to offer a viable response to the low income-housing crisis- as they have the advantage of proximity to livelihood and economic opportunity, they grow incrementally, respond to bottom-up demands on the community for rentals, home-upgrades, extensions. Home-building activity here is undertaken based on a phenomenon of self-construction supporting the local economy.