Work

Pathways to assisted self-help housing: the evolution of Mexico’s housing governability system

Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ Assisted self-help housing is a process whereby people are actively involved in the decision-making of their homes’ consolidation, receiving tools to better manage resources in building them. While such support is embedded within urban and regional systems, evolving forms of state intervention have received little attention in the literature. In this article, we focus on federal assisted self-help housing programmes in Mexico, where this approach became formalised by the early 2000s. Recent governments positioned assisted self-help housing – at least on paper – as key for Mexico’s housing agenda. What we term Mexico’s housing governability system has continuously evolved, yet its capacity to address housing needs is challenged. We show that policy and institutional change in Mexico reflect a continuing pathway over several decades to include assisted self-help policies in the housing governability system. We highlight the nonlinear nature of policy development and the paradoxes of formalising flexible selfhelp approaches.
Institution: Utrecht University
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4385954928
FWCI: 1.745
Cites: 37
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10