ABSTRACT
The growth of slums and squatter settlements in cities of the Third World, according to market approach analysis, is a result of rapidly increasing population growths to which governments are unable to provide basic infrastructure, housing and services. The competing theoretical perspective of political economy places issues of poverty and housing within a larger world political economy framework. Self-help individual utility maximisation and empirical market analysis have been brought together in the institutional context of self-help housing. The dynamic potential within self-help housing improvement to John F.C. Turner is the petty-commodity mode of production. Burgess is critical of this as being Turner's main means of meeting housing needs. Rod Burgess is also critical of Turner's ideas in terms of the possibility of expansion of self-help programs. Through the 1970s and 1980s economic development policies in the Third World encouraged basic needs and redistribution with growth, which resulted in the international sponsorship of self-help housing projects.
