ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Sustainable Development Agenda and the New Urban Agenda to unpack the challenges and opportunities that urbanisation presents. Both agendas aspire for inclusive and sustainable growth within cities where people can get jobs, build houses and enjoy decent infrastructure. But for many who are disadvantaged, their quotidian experience is characterised by placelessness, landlessness, homelessness, waterlessness and other “lessnesses” linked to informal settlements and slums. Without decent housing, the potential and capacity, ingenuity and talent of citizens are not fully harnessed. This chapter is based on a review of extant literature on housing and development studies. The secondary sources comprised mainly academic journal articles and books. This chapter posits four types of spaces within the context of a theory of desperation, namely, spaces of comfort (dignity) and discomfort (flooding and storms); spaces of oppression characterised by domination; spaces of restricted choices and constrained opportunities (noxious laws and regulations); and spaces of participatory exclusion undergirded by multi-layered governance systems which constrain initiative by creating fewer spaces in which poor people can cooperate and collaborate. Such circumstances reproduce existing relations of exclusion, which in turn further marginalise the agency of poor people. The chapter posits that the state is key in the realisation of both agendas.
