Policy Alternatives to Informal Housing

Policy Alternatives to Informal Housing offers a new way of seeing the informal city. More than a billion people live in informal settlements, and billions more in informal or precarious housing, yet policy too often treats informality as a pathology to be cleared rather than a signal of how formal housing systems fail. Drawing on urban economics, planning, and public finance, Goytia and Heikkila reframe informal housing as an equilibrium outcome shaped by the elasticity of land and housing supply, and adopt a diagnostic rather than prescriptive approach: the binding constraint on housing access differs from city to city. A dual typology built from a global dataset of 169 cities anchors six in-depth case studies, Kanpur, Santiago, Jinan, Cleveland, Accra, and Cirebon, each read through its cluster context. The book moves from diagnosis to a forward agenda of land and urban management: knowing and servicing land, capturing the value urbanization creates, and finding alternatives to informality rather than only curing it. Written for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in development banks, city governments, and international agencies, it provides both a rigorous analytical framework and concrete, comparative guidance for building more inclusive and affordable cities.