A publication of the Gender Research in Urbanisation, Planning, Housing and Everyday Life (GRUPHEL) Research network, aiming to play an active role, and adopt a capacity building approach to meet the huge challenges of human settlement development, sustainable urban housing, and changes in social structures in Southern Africa. The book brings together contributions from thirteen women and six men from seven Southern African and Scandinavian countries. Contents: housing provision and home-ownership schemes amongst low-income groups; a gendered case study of Bulawayo; exploration into changing gender roles in self-help housing construction in Botswana; women and housing insecurity in Malawi; housing policy and institutional practice in Swaziland; participation and sanitation technology from a gender perspective; housing and survival strategies of Basotho urban women tenants; black women building contractors in South Africa; and the privatisation of public housing and the exclusion of women: a case study in Lusaka, Zambia.

There is little research easily available on how gender relates to urbanisation and housing in Africa. This is a compilation of documentary sources in Southern Africa, and elsewhere, covering subject areas such as gender and housing policy, income and urban settlements, environment, justice and land acquisition. It served as a reference tool for the GRUPHEL (Gender Research on Urbanisation, Planning, Housing and Everyday Life) project. The study provides over a hundred detailed entries, physical locations of documents and full contact details of the information sources. Limaktso Ranko is the Documentalist at the Institute of Southern African Studies, National University of Lesotho, and an expert in information management and research economics.

Be it a house or a makeshift, a shared or rented room, or a home of one's own, a place to live is central in the survival strategies of all urban households. In this volume the above authors explore the gendered experiences of housing and housing rights in African countries. The collection begins with articles on conceptual and methodological problems in gender-aware research. The following articles present cases showing a wide variety in housing experiences, a variety which depends on urban setting, tenure forms, stage in the life cycle or other factors. There are many differences but also many similarities in the pattern of women not having the same access and control over housing as men have. While women are often the main bread-winners, they are also the home-makers, in the literal sense that it is women who put intense efforts into making a place home.

Presents a selection of papers from the programme, which is intended to provide further knowledge through capturing voices of men and women across generations to represent the elderly, adults, boys and girls in different positions within the urban context.

The six essays address urban life, housing and community participation is southern Africa - Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa and Zambia - from gender perspectives. The papers reveal concerns about unequal relations between women and men in relation to access to and control of housing and community affairs. They conclude that men and women have different housing aspirations, and that women are disproportionately affected by inadequate financing.

This is the ninth of the research reports from the GRUPHEL, part of the regional programme on Gender Research on Urbanisation, Planning, Housing and Everyday Life. The report focuses on the realities of severely overcrowded accommodation in family dwellings; the ways in which young women and men adapt of insufficient access to independent housing; strategies to access affordable housing; the gendered and generation specific nature of social networks that facilitate access to housing; the ways in which young women and men respond to housing and household context by redefining their households and expectations of and aspirations for the formation of their own families; and the ways in which overcrowded housing contexts shape relationships between young women and men, and their positioning within households, the neighbourhood, and the city more generally. Sophie Oldfield is a senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town. Joanne Boulton is a graduate student in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town.

This book’s point of departure rests on the premises that dimensions of the mainstream inclusive city discourse fail to capture in detail vulnerable clusters of society (being women, children, and the aging), the minority clusters (i.e., the blind, the disabled), and migrants. In addition, it fails to recognize the increase of spatial inequality driven by racial and class differences—a factor that has seen an increase in community violence and protests. The focus on spatial inequality has, for a long time, blind-folded urban authorities to ignore exclusion arising out of the same environments created with a notion of creating inclusivity. Hence this book “collapses spatial walls” as it seeks to uncover the true perspectives of inclusivity in cities beyond spatial dimensions but within social realms. The depth of this book’s enquiry rests on its critical investigation of Southern African cities’ through historical epochs of apartheid and colonialism in the region.