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This chapter is based on fieldwork carried out in Jeramana, a village that was once in the Ghouta and now forms part of Greater Damascus. It studies the architectural development of two streets located on agricultural land. Middle-class households have no choice but to build their own homes, using the flexibility of concrete blocks, cement, and reinforced concrete pillars for adapting housing to income and family size. The author thus shows that construction techniques allow for the use of better materials as incomes rise.

Comparing the housing situation of European city-regions is complicated by the large differences between social-economic and institutional conditions. In the first part of the chapter, a global indication is given of the different tenures, the differences of accessibility, and the recent tendencies of housing conditions. Social and private rent appear to be the most common arrangements for low- and middle-income groups; these are provided by different public and private sector agencies. The second part of the chapter discusses recent experiences of articulating the commissioning role of tenants vis à vis the public sector, the market and the established developers in a number of significant cases.

This chapter analyses an urban self-management project developed by the partnership between a social housing movement — Movimento Nacional de Luta pela Moradia/MNLM (National Movement of Struggle for Housing) and a public university — Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro/UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) in a land occupation in the metropolitan periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Solano Trindade occupation, located in the peripheral city "Duque de Caxias", has as its main innovation the social movement-university partnership in the collective construction of ways to associate housing and emancipated work through technical and political training. The article presents activities developed in the context of this partnership during the collective production of housing, urban services and agroecological products with alternative technologies, highlighting the interactions between the agents and the tension between scientific and popular knowledge.

This chapter examines changing housing regimes in Istanbul. It analyses two forms of self-building that emerged as solutions improvised by people in response to the pressing housing need and became predominant modes of housing production since the 1950s, namely “gecekondu,” and “yap-sat” or “build-and-sell.” Although stimulated by governments for some decades, both of these self-regulated housing forms came to a point of expulsion under the new regime of capital accumulation based on aggressive real-estate development that has been adopted as part of neoliberal urban policies in Turkey since the 2000s. The frenzy for urban transformation accompanied by financialization of housing led to further commodification of housing and urban space, undermining the right to decent and affordable housing and quality urban space for every citizen, which gave rise to considerable dissent that culminated in the emergence of new urban movements in defence of housing rights and ‘right to the city.’

This chapter explores how the different arrangements of low- and middle-income housing at the micro-level relate to processes of city building at the level of the city-region. We study how the social and economic contestation on the uses of urban land translate into new spatial patterns of urban and regional development. This is concretely done through a comparative case study of a Brazilian and an European city-region. This comparative perspective will sensitize the empirical investigation to the effect of the (changes of) institutional context and regimes on housing arrangements and spatial patterns of city building. A specific focus will be on self-building arrangements as practices that challenge existing formal systems of city building in both cases.