HomePrecarious housing in the Global South

Precarious housing in the Global South

Habitats précaires dans les Suds

Hábitats precarios en el Sur global

Public interventions and residents' expériences

Action publique et expériences habitantes

Acción pública y experiencias ciudadanas

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Published on Wednesday, October 08, 2025

Abstract

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This call for abstracts aims to highlight the growth and complexity of precarious housing in a context of increasing urban inequality. Far from being reduced to marginality or poverty, these spaces represent a third of the world's population and play an active role in urban dynamics, combining vulnerability, inventiveness and collective capacities. In the face of often repressive or insufficiently coordinated policies, it calls for recognition of their diversity, their essential function in the urban fabric, and the importance of interdisciplinary reflection based on field surveys, via the following thematic areas: theme 1 - Ambivalent effects of urban public action, theme 2 - Residents' practices, mobilisation and daily resistance, theme 3 - Institutional, symbolic and criminal violence: forms, effects and social responses.

Announcement

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Argument

In a global context marked by exacerbated urban contrasts (increasing fragmentation of space, greater segregation between rich and poor neighbourhoods, accelerated urbanisation coupled with the neglect of certain rural areas), growing socio-spatial inequalities (disparities in living conditions, access to housing, public services and institutional recognition), climate change and the resurgence of authoritarianism and armed conflict (causing large-scale migration), territories – whether central or peripheral, urban or undergoing urbanisation – appear to be spaces where multiple tensions are crystallising. These converging dynamics are producing increasingly contrasting living conditions and accentuating processes of marginalisation, relegation and vulnerability, which are largely concentrated in areas of precarious housing. According to UN-Habitat estimates (2016), these forms of housing have absorbed nearly 40% of urban growth in recent decades and are now home to about one-third of the world's population (Deboulet, 2016). In this context, what place do these spaces occupy around the world, and what roles do they play in contemporary urban dynamics? This thematic issue invites us to examine this question, particularly in the Global South, using a two-pronged approach.

On the one hand, following the proposals of Agnès Deboulet (2016), the choice of the term ‘precarious habitats’ stems from the intention to encompass the multiple local expressions of this phenomenon and to avoid vague and ambiguous categorisations based on a binary (and often simplistic) reading of the world: formal/informal, legal/illegal, order/disorder. Thus, the broad concept of ‘precarious housing’ on which we rely here does not refer only to informal housing that escapes institutional urban management and planning, is illegal and/or self-built. It also refers to spaces subject to specific constraints in terms of building deterioration, inadequate access to urban infrastructure and public services, or the guarantee of fundamental human rights. It therefore covers slums, favelas, barriades or townships, refugee camps (Agier, 2014; Bouagga, 2017), platz (Véniat, 2018), urban villages (Wong et al., 2018; Losavio, 2025), squats (Benarrosh-Orsoni, 2011; Bouillon, 2009) and furnished hotels (Levy-Vroelant, 2000; Dietrich-Ragon, 2011), as well as certain social housing neighbourhoods marked by poor living conditions and discriminatory treatment of residents (Paquette Vassalli & Bustos Peñafiel, 2024).

On the other hand, it is necessary to move beyond the reductive representations that traditionally confine forms of precarious housing to poverty, disorder and violence. Often perceived in political and media discourse as separate spaces – disorderly, amoral, threatening to public order – precarious housing is also associated with health and environmental risks. This perception, inherited from hygienist discourse, resurfaced during the Covid-19 crisis. Their location on vacant land on the outskirts or in geographically atypical areas, combined with poor sanitation infrastructure and a lack of adequate waste and wastewater management, fuels a persistent perception of these spaces as hotbeds of pollution and a threat to the environment or public health. Yet precarious housing should also be seen as laboratories of inventiveness, resilience and collective construction. Not only do they provide a response to the housing crisis for thousands of people, but they also embody a capacity for collective organisation that often compensates for institutional failures by ensuring access to essential resources, asserting rights to housing outside formal frameworks and giving rise to forms of self-managed development. The mobilisation of favela residents in Brazil in the face of the Bolsonaro government's inaction – and even interference – during the Covid-19 epidemic offers an illuminating illustration of this.

These spaces, which are anything but marginal, actually play a full part in the socio-spatial reconfiguration of cities and urban development. Their location, often adjacent to more established neighbourhoods, and their multiple interactions with the rest of the city (daily mobility, regular interventions by public authorities, investments by private actors, and sometimes even tourism development) demonstrate their functional, social and institutional integration into the urban whole. Highlighting the diversity of trajectories, living practices and forms of governance that unfold there provides a better understanding of the role of these precarious forms of living in contemporary urban dynamics. The aim is to recognise their epistemological significance by using these spaces as a privileged prism for analysing current social reconfigurations and modes of exercising power.

Far from recognising the contribution of precarious housing to the production of contemporary urban space, local and national public authorities and urban planning actors have long advocated its demolition. Many countries have implemented, in a more or less coordinated manner, public policies aimed at eradicating precarious housing neighbourhoods and evicting their inhabitants, often violating human rights and creating social tensions.

Although since the 1970s the international debate has shifted from a call for the elimination of precarious housing to a preference for improvement and rehabilitation, the measures implemented by many local and national governments are often limited in resources, fragmented and generally lack continuity (Deboulet, 2016). Sometimes these programmes create new inequalities, as has been the case in China (Huang & Li, 2014; Losavio, 2024), for example, fuelling property speculation and potentially leading to tourism development (Wu, 2016; Sisternas, 2024) – or even ‘slum gentrification’, as is the case in Nairobi, Mumbai and Lagos (Ascenção, 2018). At the same time, eviction policies continue in West Africa, in connection with new urban expansion projects (Blot & Spire, 2014). New forms of eviction are emerging in Morocco, justified by security arguments of population control (El Arabi, 2021) and urban cleaning practices in the run-up to major sporting events (Shin & Li 2013; Comitê Popular da Copa, 2014). 

Over the last few decades, processes of socio-spatial segregation have tended to intensify, driven by the growth of large cities, standardising urban planning and urban policies with ambivalent effects. New forms of exclusion and dynamics that widen urban inequalities have emerged, reinforced by the inaction of public authorities in terms of redistribution and guaranteeing the right to the city. They contribute to the destruction and fragility of already precarious urban spaces, degrade the living conditions of the populations concerned and also cause waves of displacement, both nationally and internationally. These migrations in turn fuel the growth of precarious housing, in a cumulative cycle of social and territorial vulnerability.

It is in light of these transformations that we must examine the growing importance of precarious housing within cities, while striving to understand and restore their fundamental role in the production of urban space.

Following on from the symposium Regards croisés sur les habitats précaires (Aubervilliers, November 2023), which established an initial international and interdisciplinary dialogue on this globalised urban phenomenon, this thematic dossier brings together contributions from a variety of geographical and disciplinary backgrounds to engage in joint reflection and provide a large-scale perspective. The contributions sought will mainly be based on research conducted in the Global South, but may also be part of a comparative approach with other contexts, particularly those of the Global North. Contributions should be based on empirical material from field surveys, the conditions of which should be specified. They should be primarily rooted in an ethnographic approach, understood as a close attention to situations, interactions and experiences in contexts of precarious housing (Cefaï, 2010). This approach may be combined with other qualitative, visual and participatory methods, as well as quantitative tools, in order to enrich the analysis and cross-reference the scales of observation. Semi-structured or biographical interviews, participatory mapping, documentary analysis, photography, drawing, questionnaire surveys or targeted statistical processing may thus be used in a complementary manner. Finally, contributions will fall within one or more of the following thematic areas.

Theme 1 - Ambivalent effects of urban public interventions

Public policies on urban planning, urban renewal and land regularisation have ambivalent and often contrasting effects on precarious neighbourhoods and their inhabitants (Zhao & Webster, 2011; Chien, 2018). While many of these interventions are officially driven by objectives to improve degraded housing and combat urban inequalities, in reality they often contribute to reinforcing forms of social and residential vulnerability. This is particularly the case when the measures involve mass evictions or forced displacement, disregarding the residential trajectories and long-standing roots of the populations concerned. From the violent evictions from the favelas of Rio in the 1960s and 1970s (Soares Gonçalves, 2010) to the forced relocations due to environmental risks in the cities of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam (Jullien & Pulliat, 2020), to the forced displacement of residents from urban villages to the outskirts of Beijing (Wong et al., 2018), these interventions have often exacerbated the forms of exclusion they claimed to resolve.

In several contexts, policies to eliminate precarious neighbourhoods have thus been more about social control, repression and stigmatisation than genuine efforts to recognise and improve housing conditions. Furthermore, despite the rise in rhetoric about citizen participation and local democracy, the participatory mechanisms put in place often remain limited, both in their scope and in their ability to include residents who are furthest removed from institutional channels (Zhou, 2014).

However, alternative experiences do exist. Certain public interventions deserve to be highlighted for the improvements they have brought about in terms of quality of life, urban integration and the reduction of socio-spatial inequalities, taking into account environmental issues and local dynamics (Ferreira et al., 2019) and the involvement of local populations (Leite et al., 2020). 

This theme therefore proposes to examine the multiple, sometimes contradictory, effects of public policies implemented in precarious neighbourhoods. The aim will be to question the logic of domination, exclusion or control that underlies these policies, but also to highlight initiatives that are more respectful of residents, more attentive to local civic practices and sometimes based on forms of self-organisation. Particular attention may be paid to the circulation of experiences and the hybridisation of mechanisms, while testing the hypothesis of the predominance of discriminatory political treatment towards these populations.

Theme 2 - Everyday practices, mobilisation and resistance

Because the existence of precarious neighbourhoods is frequently threatened by public authorities, their inhabitants are often forced to coordinate and act collectively to avoid forced displacement or the demolition of their homes. They engage in daily practices of resistance and solidarity that may be rooted in long-standing neighbourhood relationships or arise during more specific and temporary mobilisations in response to an event or disturbance affecting the neighbourhood and its residents. These practices set in motion (and sometimes create tension between) actors who mobilise different repertoires of action (demonstrations, occupations, media appeals, legal action) to make their voices heard and attempt to influence the situation (Veniat, 2019). They can also be expressed through discreet forms of appropriation of space and urban agency, falling under what Bayat (2013) calls a ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, or even more or less visible and coordinated ‘urban practices’ (Deboulet et al., 2020).

Beyond these moments of collective mobilisation that resort to forms of public denunciation, the very act of occupying land considered unbuildable, abandoned buildings or the interstices of the city are acts that disrupt the usual urban order and its formal organisation and can therefore be perceived as forms of resistance. The collective occupation of an empty building, the construction of shacks on vacant land, or the creation of a discreet living space in the interstices of the city constitute silent opposition to the gentrification of city centres, the relegation of poor populations to the periphery, and policies of forced displacement. Precarious housing can thus be seen, in its existence and persistence, as a daily exercise of the ‘right to the city’ and even the ‘right to centrality’ (Lefebvre, 1968; Aguilera, Bouillon, 2013).

Finally, inhabitants' practices are more broadly reflected in their daily use of space, their habits of movement and occupation. Precarious habitats are thus places of everyday inventiveness (De Certeau & Mayol, 1994), of the development of new forms of urbanity (Berry-Chickaoui & Deboulet, 2002) and of the fabrication of the city (Agier, 1999).

These are all elements that can be grasped through a situational and ethnographic approach, paying particular attention to the density of experiences of communal living, the forms of cooperation and negotiation that develop between residents and between residents and other actors (public, private, associative, etc.), without forgetting the conflictual relationships and forms of resistance that unfold there.

Theme 3 - Institutional, symbolic and criminal violence: forms, effects and social responses

The relationship between public authorities, both state and municipal, and poor urban populations living in precarious housing areas is often marked by multiple forms of violence. Whether through urbanisation programmes – legitimised by modernising, hygienist or environmental discourse (Soares Gonçalves, 2013) – or security measures – policies of “pacification” and “civilisation”, operations against drug trafficking – national and local authorities resort to violence to control and regulate the lives of poor populations. hygienist or environmental (Soares Gonçalves, 2013) or security-related – policies of ‘pacification’ and ‘civilisation’, operations against drug trafficking – national and local authorities resort to practices of control, repression and even political persecution, as well as evictions and forced relocation. This is in addition to the many forms of institutional and symbolic violence, often more discreet and insidious, suffered by residents: discrimination in the labour and housing markets, stigmatising representations, etc. In some cases, these populations are also ‘held hostage’ by the violence of cartels, militias or mafias (Corantin, 2024). In many Latin American countries, clashes between drug traffickers and law enforcement agencies result in an alarming number of homicides, with young people and racialised populations being the main victims (Feltran, 2018). These issues are compounded by domestic, gender-based and sexual violence, which can be particularly difficult to report in precarious neighbourhoods.

This theme aims to highlight these multiple forms of violence in the field of investigation, while paying attention to the forms of resistance implemented by the inhabitants concerned and perhaps emphasising how researchers' working methodologies are having to adapt in increasingly difficult contexts. Several themes or scales of observation may be considered. Through what actions do the state, public institutions and law enforcement agencies perpetrate institutional violence and racial discrimination? How is this violence made visible, denounced and combated by residents and social actors? What forms does it take in the daily life of the affected areas, in the life trajectories of residents and in the relations between these neighbourhoods and the rest of the city? What individual or collective strategies enable the populations concerned to cope with or protect themselves from it? Finally, what about violence perpetrated by criminal or mafia groups, particularly in terms of the appropriation and control of land and buildings?

Participation in Issue

Submitting the proposal 

The authors must submit an abstract in French, English, or Spanish, presenting their proposal in approximately 8,000 characters (with spaces), i.e. about 1,000 words or two pages.  

The Word file for the abstract must be entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-Proposal-263,” and must include: 

  • the title: short and precise, 70 characters maximum (with the possibility of adding a subtitle); 
  • the research question, the theoretical framework, the fieldwork, and the main results;  
  • the bibliographical references (not included in the character count). 

For each author, a second file entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-info” must include their first name and last name, their discipline, status, institutional affiliation, email address, and the name of the corresponding author. 

For the proposals to be examined, it is essential that they follow these guidelines. Their suitability to the call for papers will be determined by the guest editors and the journal’s editorial board. 

Submitting the paper 

The authors whose proposals have been selected will be invited to send a first draft of their article, which must absolutely follow the Guidelines for Authors. The articles will then be submitted to a double-blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic. 

The articles (45,000 characters with spaces, excluding the abstract and references) may be written in French, English, or Spanish. They must be original work. They may however have been presented at a conference (with proceedings), as long as they have been adapted to the format required by the Revue internationale des études du développement, but the author must not submit their paper to another journal simultaneously. 

The references cited must be presented in APA format. 

Publication Calendar 

The authors agree to comply with the calendar. 

The proposals must be submitted by December 1st, 2025 to: 

  • cinzia.losavio@gmail.com
  • joanasisternas@gmail.com
  • celine.veniat@parisnanterre.fr
  • revdev@univ-paris1.fr 

The authors preselected by the editors and the editorial committee will be notified by the editorial team the week of December 15, 2025. 

The first version of the article, following the journal’s guidelines for authors, must be submitted by the authors to the aforementioned email addresses by March 6, 2026. 

The evaluation process will take a few months; each – anonymous – article will be submitted to a double blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic. Requesting a first version of the article does not constitute a commitment from the journal to publish the aforementioned article, which must be approved by the editorial committee, following the different steps in the evaluation process. No 263 2027-1 is expected to be published in March 2027.

Guest editors

  • Cinzia Losavio, Post-doctorante, Projet Chine CoREF, UAR 2999 CNRS-Inalco, UMR 8586 PRODIG
  • Joana Sisternas Tusell, maîtresse de conférences associée, ENSAPVS, membre associée du Centre de Recherche sur l’Habitat (CRH) UMR LAVUE. 7218 CNRS, jeune chercheure du Centre d’Études des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS) UMR 8044 EHESS/CNRS - INSERM U1276
  • Céline Véniat, maîtresse de conférences en sociologie, Université Paris Nanterre - CREF - Institut Convergence Migrations

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Véniat, C. (2018). Se faire un "platz" dans la ville : Décrire les pratiques d’appropriation de familles roumaines vivant en bidonville. Espaces et sociétés, 172–173.

Véniat, C. (2019). Se mobiliser contre l’expulsion d’un bidonville en région parisienne : Émotions, négociations informelles et processus de publicisation. Sociologie et sociétés, 51(1–2), 93–122.

Wong, C., Qiao, M., & Zheng, W. (2018). Dispersing, regulating, and upgrading urban villages in suburban Beijing. Town Planning Review, 89(6), 597–621.

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Zhou, Z. (2014). Towards collaborative approach? Investigating the regeneration of urban village in Guangzhou, China. Habitat International, 44, 297–305.


Date(s)

  • Monday, December 01, 2025

Attached files

Keywords

  • habitat précaire, quartier informel, action publique, politique urbaine, expérience habitante

Information source

  • Marilyne Efstathopouloss
    courriel : revdev [at] univ-paris1 [dot] fr

License

CC-BY-4.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 .

To cite this announcement

Cinzia Losavio, Joana Sisternas Tusell, Céilne Véniat, « Precarious housing in the Global South », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Wednesday, October 08, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/14vln

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