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.

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.

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.

Beyond Inequalities is a series of publications which profile the status of women in Southern Africa, and the initiatives being made to mainstreamgender in development processes in the region. The series presents the situation of women and men in the Southern African Development Community(SADC) as a region, and in each member country; and reviews the roles and responsibilities, access to and control over resources, decision-making powers, needs and constraints of women vis-a-vis men. The series is forward looking, based on an assessment that inequalities are now generally acknowledged as an impediment to development and economic growth in most countries and regions of the world. The twelve country profiles document and analyse information along themes drawn from theCritical Areas of Concern identified in the Beijing Platform for Actionand derived from what the countries of the region consider to bepriorities. Each profile is in three parts: Situation Analysis, Policiesand Programmes, and the Way Forward, and each has references, bibliography, appendices, and illustrative tables, figures and boxes.

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.

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.