Reimagining incremental housing: city-making within and beyond the state

In this special issue, we aim to reconceptualise incremental housing, acknowledging its embeddedness within industries, markets, institutions and practices of city-making, based on a diversity of cases from around the world, with varying degrees of state, citizen, market and civil society involvement. In this introduction, we first shed light on the dilemmas and paradoxes involved in the complex forms and manifestations of state involvement in relation to bottom-up practices and ‘self-organizing logics’ that are often considered informal. We also discuss three key themes related to ongoing debates and agendas on incremental housing: temporality, relationality, and urban systems, suggesting the need to reimagine the role of incremental housing within broader debates on city-making. Putting temporality centre stage in the debate means paying more attention to longitudinal development; speculation and waiting time; issues of maintenance and repair; and the possibility of upward but also downward mobility. Relational, feminist and intersectional approaches to incremental housing bring important new angles of care, plurality and heterogeneity of actors and needs. Connecting such relational approaches to urban systems thinking further allows us to consider precarious (paid/unpaid) labour, income generation and power. Thinking through citywide issues of land scarcity, labour, financial markets, and building materials involves many complex networks of actors, and in particular, highly complicates the formal-informal divide. Therefore, as we suggest in this special issue introduction, taking forward debates on incremental housing must pay attention to the critical role of temporality, relationality and broader urban systems.