The Case of the Wendy House
Jean Comaroff
Housing is the social issue of the twenty-first, claimed Jon Henley in The Guardian in May 2024.i European governments, he added, have failed abysmally to ensure affordable accommodation in the face of soaring property prices, fueling right-wing anger and a rising resentment of immigrants. The report featured a picture of two men in a massive street protest in Spain, carrying a large, cardboard doll’s house (Figure 1). In Britain, in the same year, the leader of the Labor party and soon to be prime-minister, Sir Keith Starmer, promised to restore the dream of having “a place of one’s own,” vowing to” deliver the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation.”ii
Until recently, urban “slums” have been largely associated with the Global South (Davis 2006), although the problem of homelessness in Europe is hardly new; vide the workhouses, Salvation Army Hostels, and depots de mendicite in early industrializing cities like London and Paris.iii. These days, the presence of squatter populations in affluent northern cities has become impossible to ignore. From Boston to Berlin, Paris to Prague, make-shift shelters pop in public spaces, offering jarring comment on the pretentions of urban modernism to order, functionality, security. The normalization of these Euro-American favelas also calls into question the would-be hegemony of state and capital over the planning, provenance, and governance of so-called ‘global cities’ (Sasson 1991; Pithouse 2014:135).
That cardboard house carried through the Spanish street, as if in a ritual procession, makes several home truths plain. For one, the private home is an ever more elusive icon of
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human dignity, civility, and social reproduction in an inhospitable world. In 1948, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized access to viable shelter as an essential precondition of an adequate standard of living. This was subsequently endorsed by a range of international legal instruments and some national constitutions — South Africa, where my story unfolds, being one of them. But in the Western liberal tradition, the “home” has two faces, often irreconcilable, sometimes in contradiction with each other. One is the house as place of residence, the “fixed abode” of the civil subject and the interior domain of domestic life, of family beyond public scrutiny and the transactions of politics and the market. The other is the house as the fons et origo of the family estate, its capital. Scholars have noted that, in African societies, the “house” often referred simultaneously to the atom of kinship and the elemental unit of society. In capitalist society, however, it sits ambiguously between the domains of kinship and commodification, the private and the public, being treated both as a place of mutuality without price and as the quintessential form of property. This tension is evident in the dual sense of the “private,” both as a haven beyond the market, legal scrutiny, or government intrusion, and as an object of proprietary ownership, an asset to be freely mortgaged, bought, or sold, a means of securing debt or wealth. Taken together, these two faces of the house make it at once the sine qua non of civil personhood and the point of articulation between the citizen and the economy; in Starmer’s words, “the bedrock of security and aspiration.”iv
Ensuring access of citizens to affordable “social housing” by one or another means has been a commitment recognized by most European liberal democracies, an undertaking that peaked in the decades after World War ll. But with the planetary ascent of neoliberalism, states everywhere have cut public spending and slowed investment in urban accommodation. At the same time, the price of private homes has soared, fueled by low-interst loans and mounting
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demand. In the upshot, real estate emerged as a prime object of financial speculation. Not coincidentally, housing played a key role in the first major crisis of the “new” global economy, the Great Recession of 2007-2008, which led to millions of bankruptcies, jobs lost, and homes foreclosed.v The crisis, most immediately triggered by the collapse of the so-called housing bubble in the US, was stoked by the rise in high-risk, sub-prime mortgages in the real estate industry and the dramatic increase in minimally regulated housing debt. “As safe as houses” had become, literally, a cosmic irony.
But the disruptions that accompanied this crisis and the operations of global capital that underlay it were symptomatic of something more widespread. In 2003, the UN Habitat report, Challenge of the Slums, drew attention to the alarming rise of the planetary population living in impoverished urban settlements, inadequately housed and without access to viable income and services — the bulk of them (43 per cent) in the developing world. In stark contrast to the language of neoliberal orthodoxy, the report associated these developments with the impact of structural adjustment programs in the Global South that urged privatization and market growth over investment in urban infrastructure, welfare, and social housing (UN Habitat 2003:6). The poverty and inequality abetted by these policies heightened rural flight to already stressed cites. The report’s most immediate response was to make virtue of necessity. It invoked the inventiveness and resilience of Southern urbanism, noting that informal settlements had long been entry points to the city, their portal to wider urban society (2003:vi). Most immediately, it advocated participatory slum upgrading programs that built on “the logic of the innovative solutions developed by the poor themselves” (2003:xxvii) should be supported wherever possible, and interested parties, like informal sector landlords, landowners be consulted.
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Here, I examine the unexpected history of one such innovative solution, the Wendy house – and its role in popular urbanism in South Africa. I explore the uses and limits of informality in this built form, its lack of fixity and productive ambiguity, and its legal uncertainty and floating existence in time. I focus on how it plays into the contradictory qualities attached to the house in our late modern world, inflected by the colonial history, continuing economic inequality, and dynamic sociality of a specific Southern city.
Like most megacities in Africa, Cape Town is built on imperial foundations, shaped over three centuries of Dutch and British rule around the intricate interdependence of radically unequal populations in the service of extraction, commerce, and governance (Demissie 2007). The site first of agrarian then industrial production, its population was a mélange of Khoi, San, and other African peoples, East Asian slaves and other indentured workers, and Dutch, British, and other European peoples. While the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 deemed urban South Africa “white,” requiring all black African men in conurbations to carry “passes,” Cape Town retained several mixed-race communities at its core – at least until the high apartheid removals of the 1960’s. But the dominant national model was established by the cities to the north that had sprung up during the country’s mineral revolution and industrialization. It was shaped by the country’s distinctive form of racial capitalism, vested in the tightly regulated migration of African labor to the workplace from what came to be designated as “tribal homelands.”
The city proper had little place for “idle” blacks or worker’s families. Hostels and backyard rooms were the main form of housing provided (cf. K’Akumu 2018:191), other than a restricted number of closely monitored townships on urban peripheries. But defiant forms of African urbanism thrived at its edges, as they did in postcolonial cities elsewhere on the
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continent (White 1990; Myers 2003; Freund 2007), giving rise to new residential arrangements, popular economies, and cultures of ethnicity, class, and political identity (Hellman 1948). In the wake of liberalization, deregulation, and the collapse of minority rule in the late twentieth century, South African cities became reception points for growing numbers of refugees from countries to the north. As a result, they began to look more like their postcolonial counterparts elsewhere on the continent, their material, social, and commercial practices displaying ever more informal characteristics (Rakodi 1997). While some would associate these features with the “urbanization of poverty” (Piel 1997), others saw them as constitutive of new urban worlds, with “open‐ended social and institutional dynamics” and opportunistic kinds of politics (Pieterse 2009:5; Simone and Pieterse 2017). In the wake of decolonization, wrote Achille Mbembe (2001:59-60), African cities had concatenated “the most formal and modern with the most informal.” While this posed certain obstacles, it could also “prefigure the power of a new impulse – a new intensity.”.
The Genealogy of the Wendy House
Many would argue that, in South Africa, housing remains one such obstacle. “Housing crisis tops the list of key priorities for voters,” proclaimed a news headline on the eve of the national election in June 2024,vi Another accused the ruling regime of having failed utterly to redress the spatial segregation entrenched by apartheid.vii To be sure, when the ANC took power in 1994, it inherited one of the most unequal societies on earth. Undoing this separatist geography was a foundational commitment to ensuring a better future for all, a promise embodied in the provision of dignified housing for the formerly dispossessed. Over the past thirty years, the regime has built almost five million homes.viii But its initially ambitious
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Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) soon fell afoul of liberalizing orthodoxies locally and abroad; its leaders were persuaded to adopt more resolutely free market policies, encouraging privatization, and reducing government spending (Hirsch 2005). Growth remained uneven, however, and the economy was plagued by job losses, corruption, and inequality. As thousands flocked to cities in search of work, they were joined by many more from impoverished, strife-torn nations to the north.
Meanwhile, the pace of state-sponsored house building slackened, then slowed to a trickle. In 2013, a report in The Architectural Review declared that Mandela’s “wildly ambitious” dream of a proper house for all remained unfulfilled.ix South African cities still exhibit a starkly neocolonial topography, with core white enclaves, most of them securely middle-class, fostering world-class amenities, brisk enterprise, and relative safety, and peripheries populated largely by poor people of color, living in the crowded townships and informal settlements that burgeoned in the late apartheid years (Gilbert et al 1996). A daunting array of barriers – the high cost of accommodation among them — restrict marginalized residents from real participation, except as labor, in the centers of wealth creation and opportunity. “What they’re doing with us now is the same as under apartheid, it’s just called by the fancy name – ‘gentrification,”’ said Faghmeeda Ling, a housing activist living in an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Cape Town.x As the city’s managers have courted the global tourist dollar, the price of real estate has skyrocketed. Campaigns to provide affordable urban housing have struggled to gain traction. On the impoverished outskirts, people live in a range of habitations, from private and state-built (RDP) houses to repurposed urban detritus, from giant emergency tents to shacks made of wood, cardboard, plastic, and metal sheeting. Many homes lack water, sanitation, and electricity, and are chronically prone to fire, floods, and crime. Local
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municipalities, with the help of international agencies like Global Action Plan on Slums and Informal Settlements, undertake periodic upgrades of informal settlements to provide reliable plumbing, toilets, and social services. But their efforts fall woefully short of the ever-swelling demand.
A growing proportion of the population are “backyard dwellers,” living at the rear of houses on the outskirts of South African cities, either in townships or former lower-class white suburbs. Often those backyards contain a honeycomb of one- or two-room structures that cover all available ground, interlaced by tangled strings of make-shift electricity cables and ablution facilities. A range of intricate tenurial arrangements link their occupants to each other and to their landlords; to wit, an ever more complex economy of informal real estate transactions has developed in the secondary domain of backyard accommodation. That domain is secondary in two senses: first, in the abstract sense, in which property is made to give birth to further property, each drawing on the alibi of a house with registered services and an established address; and second, in the physical sense of occupying a space behind an anchoring structure. There is a brisk secondary trade, too, in the sale, subdivision, and letting of RDP houses, despite its illegality.xi Under such conditions of “subsistence capitalism” (Appadurai 2024), even shacks in informal settlements have become assets, the subject of burgeoning credit and rental markets — and anchors for further commodification “out back.” Already in 2007, Bank (2007:206) claimed that “a quarter to a third” of South Africa’s township populations were backyarders. The proportion has increased exponentially since then, although the unauthorized nature of informal accommodation makes it hard to compute either here or in cities elsewhere in the global South (Scheba and Turok 2020).
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It is at this point that the unlikely history of the Wendy House – a structure strangely resembling the cardboard doll’s house carried through the streets by those Spanish activists (above, p.0) — becomes instructive. The original Wendy House first appeared in a children’s stage play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1904), dreamed up by the Scottish author J.M. Barrie. A small abode, it was built in Neverland for the protection of one of the main characters, Wendy Darling,xii herself in search of shelter in a foreign locale. Having to be erected onstage, Wendy’s make-believe house was designed in prefabricated form. But it was soon became the fashion in middle class British families to construct a Wendy house for children to play in – and sometimes, for storage or entertainment in the domestic gardens, both in the UK and the colonies. Though they were usually large enough for one or more children to enter, they varied in size, from prefabricated kits to child-sized replicas of a real house.xiii
The “Wendy,” as it is called in South Africa, is one of the most prevalent forms of backyard housing in the country. Its genealogy as “unreal,” make-shift accommodation for not fully adult beings prefigures its nature as “unreal” estate;xiv that is, of unfixed, not fully realized property that piggybacks off the status and services of real estate structures on private ground. As a species of built form, it is a square wooden edifice,xv usually a single room with a floor, roof, door, and window. Crucially, though, it has no actual foundation in the ground. Technically, Wendys are portable, and do not necessarily imply the ownership or the lease of land on which they are constructed. Prefabricated, or rapidly assembled on a simple frame, they are most frequently erected on the grounds of an existing property, either by the owner or by a tenant or some other informal investor. Their legal status is productively ambiguous: they rest on the fact (maintained by many vendors, builders, owners, and inhabitants) that, because it lacks foundation and is ostensibly temporary, it does not require planning permission,
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compliance with municipal building standards, or registration as residential property.xvi The law dictates otherwise. But is largely ignored, since these dwellings typically exist in the invisible “private” space to the rear of an owner/occupier’s formal home. Their provisional quality, moreover, makes it difficult to subject them to formal regulation. As a result, Wendys have become big business, playing an ever-larger role in the desperate quest for accommodation in the country’s crowded cities.
In South Africa, where Wendy Houses were common in affluent white suburbs, they began to take on the added connotation of low-cost accommodation for live-in domestic workers built in the backyard of the employer’s property; this at a time when most white homes were permitted a servant’s back room or two, with a toilet and shower stall alongside other service buildings (Ginsburg 2000 87). Like the more commonly brick-built back rooms, these houses were about eight by ten feet. They lacked ceilings or (often) electricity and had a single door with a lock and a key, with copies held both by the worker and by the employer. Landscaping tended partially to obscure the structure, yielding a modicum of privacy and sociality. But these accommodations were also notoriously subject to the intrusive paternal oversight of employers and, under apartheid, by police tasked with enforcing the exacting laws of Influx Control that excluded undocumented rural Africans (Ginsburg 2000:96),
A Precarious Foothold
A common set of qualities links the make-believe children’s shelter to the makeshift, accommodation of workers who, at least until 1994 in South Africa, were deemed impermanent in the “white” city,’; less subjects than unworthy of full (adult, independent) citizenship. It is precisely this impermanent, “unreal” quality, lacking foundation, erected or removed with minimal expertise that enabled the Wendy house to elude formal regulation. And rendered a
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relatively affordable, unmoored shelter for those in need. As Ivan Vladislavic (2024:84) writes of a similarly makeshift vending shack in a Johannesburg street, “any attempt at making improvements might threaten [its] livelihood. It is likely that the precariousness of [its] foothold in the economy guarantees its survival.” What is more, in the case of the Wendy, size matters. Their scale likens them to the other so-called “tiny houses” currently the focus of a world-wide movement sparked by socially-minded US architects in the 1970’s, who championed contemporary compact living (Kahn and Easton 1973). These houses, it was argued, offered low-cost, eco-friendly accommodation for the homeless; in the wake of the Recession of 2008, settlements of tiny houses were built in several US cities. But their wider adoption has been hampered in the Globa North by the cost of securing building sites, and by restrictive NIMBY zoning, aimed at limiting the impact of stigmatized dwellings on the value of neighboring real estate.xvii
By comparison, the norms of urban informality in South Africa are more hospitable. Where the erection of weightier structures requires access to land, and to larger investments of capital, expertise, and labor, Wendy houses have proliferated widely; not only in backyards, but also on public land and space subcontracted by others. There is a spiraling market in prefabricated Wendys, dominated by a couple of large corporations. Their current cost varies from an entry level, single-roomed structure for R12,000 ($652) to a three-bedroomed wooden bungalow at R90,000 ($4,888).xviii But there is also a significant informal trade in their construction; often they are built by occupants, their kin and neighbors. Thus, a report in The Sowetan:xix
A 62-year-old woman who ran out of patience after waiting for an RDP house for over 20 years has built herself a Wendy house. Gloria Matebe is a grandmother of two young girls. She spent six months building her home from discarded pieces of timber that she collected from a nearby dumpsite in GG Camp informal settlement, Oudtshoorn.
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The pensioner said she had been on a waiting list since 1998 but had lost hope of having a postal address of her own.
Built with the assistance of two local youths, the house had been varnished on the outside “to make it look more attractive.” Mrs. Matebe added that she had erected the house out of frustration: she “couldn’t stand living in a shack any longer.” She could now “lock her front door,” she said, and the door to her own room. A Wendy, note, is a house, not a shack. A shack-dweller in Khayelitsha, on the fringes of Cape Town, described the transformative effects on her existence when a local retailer built her a Wendy as part of a community donation during Mandela Month.xx “God has his way of doing things,” said the unemployed mother of three.xxi
For many, the Wendy provides a means of taking direct action in the face of the exclusion and abjection of urban existence, caught between rapacious real estate markets and state austerity. As a makeshift dwelling, it embodies Mbembe’s “concatenation” (above, p.0) of old and new, formal and informal, being a provisional structure secure enough to serve as human shelter yet unfixed enough to leave its ownership and longer-term status sufficiently equivocal to elude regulation. The Wendy house affords an entry-point for modest investors in unofficial credit and rental markets. While its formal vendors offer a range of terms of credit for first-time buyers or speculators, much of the finance for these and other backyard structures is provided by informal landlords and financiers. This, in turn, gives rise to hybrid patterns of proprietorship and tenancy, and to contracts backed by diverse relations of patronage and reciprocity—arrangements that enable a flexibility of pricing and credit.
Take the ethnographic fragment:
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Leonard is a single man in his early 50’s who migrated to Cape Town some 20 years ago from rural KwaZulu-Natal in search of training and a livelihood. Disabled from birth and disowned by his kin, he has never been able to secure a steady job and subsists largely on a monthly disability allowance. For eight years he shared a shack in an informal settlement without access to basic services, affordable transport, or protection from flooding and theft. Leonard is a member of a racially diverse, mainline Protestant church. Three years ago, its housing committee built a Wendy for him in the yard of a house in Kuilsriver, a former white working class suburb north of Cape Town where West African immigrants with regular income are buying property. The owner of the house came to South Africa from Cameroon some years ago. She resides elsewhere in the neighborhood: her tenant, who shares her migrant ethnic identity, subcontracted the backyard site for Leonard’s house, an arrangement that was facilitated by yet another person of Cameroonian origin who is an elder in Leonard’s church. The housing committee in this congregation provides aid for indigent congregants. It advanced funds for Leonard’s entry-level, prefabricated Wendy, helped erect it, and offered some meagre furnishings. Almost all of Leonard’s disability grant goes toward paying his monthly rent of R1,400 to the tenant in the main house. It includes water and toilet facilities, the last shared with another family, living in a further small brick structure alongside his own. Both units have electric cables connected to the main house for which they pay an additional R200 per month. For a couple of years, Leonard has been on the municipal list for the installation of his own electricity meter. His main household effects consist of a bed, a refrigerator (that he plugs in when he has fresh food), and a disconnected TV. Every mobile phone he has acquired has been stolen almost immediately; he lives under the watchful eye of neighbors (about a dozen people live on site, of whom only two have any regular work). Yet his home offers more than a modicum of self-possession: on election day, he set off on crutches to cast his vote, noting the satisfaction it gave him to be able to lock his own door. While he has no formal residential address, he draws his disability grant from the local post office and carries his money in his shoes.
Leonard’s dwelling highlights how the Wendy – its makeshift, mobile quality, the modesty of its material and labor costs — play into the flexible, opportunistic nature of an informal sphere of real estate commerce that piggybacks on a limited foothold in the regular institutions of government and market. Here we see how social capital in the form of ethnic or religious ties operates — especially among people who are more or less on the move – to mediate transactions and embed them within webs of interdependence that facilitate trust and credit. In a context in which formal instruments of security and protection are absent, these webs of sociality serve as a backstop for innovation and risk, opening new possibilities of trade and investment in the face of scarcity.
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But moral economies of this sort are unevenly distributed. They ride on access to patronage amidst shifting fortunes beyond local control, like recession or pandemic. Leonard’s tenure of his home has no guarantees. His dwelling as a mode of life rests on the unwritten assent of persons and voluntary associations; specifically, on their ability to extend credit and empathy. The death of one of his church’s major benefactors has meant that, for a couple of months, Leonard has had trouble paying his rent. In the upshot, the benevolent elder who helped fund his home has negotiated credit and advanced him small personal loans. While the church technically owns his house, his onsite landlady could evict him with little comeback. In several cases where tenants like him have been evicted, or moved on, the church has failed to repossess the houses they had built. In the meantime, Leonard remains vulnerable to being overcharged for services like electricity and must weather the jealous gaze cast by jobless neighbors on his paltry assets. The yard is both a transient commons and a space of enforced intimacy and Hobbesian survival. Yet, provisional as they may be, the comforts of his home delight him, as does the satisfaction of holding the keys to his own door.
A second case highlights the supply side of the Wendy house and similar accommodation as speculative assets in informal real estate economies like that of South Africa.
In another part of Kuilsriver stands a three-bedroomed house, originally built in the 1970’s as a family home. It has been divided into three “flatlets,” and now accommodates ten tenants, a mix of South Africans and immigrants who speak six different mother tongues. The house is owned by a South African woman, who lives in a similarly subdivided residence a few blocks away. She is an informal market trader from Johannesburg, who bought property finance advanced by a distant kinsman, himself raised in West Africa. This kinsman, the only person involved with the property who has formal sector employment, was permitted, as part of his share, to erect a Wendy in the backyard — in the space next to the servants’ quarters, now converted into a further rental unit. The Wendy was inhabited by an undocumented Malawian man, who helped build it, his wife and baby. Although he had been in South Africa for some years, he had never been able to procure more than irregular garden work. In lieu of rent, he
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maintains the grounds of the whole property and “keeps a general eye on things” for his benefactor. The latter holds an academic position in a college in the city and owns a large family home in another formerly white suburb, for which he secured a mortgage. In assisting his kinswoman and fellow migrant with the financing of this second house he further consolidated his status as a respected citizen at the intersection of professional, ethnic, and religious networks. Apart from providing occasional home loans, he deploys his cultural capital more generally by serving as signatory on contracts – like lease agreements — on behalf individuals who lack legal standing. A genial patron, he has become the “go-to” person in his neighborhood, serving as surrogate for senior kin in rituals in young immigrant families. He now owns several Wendy houses in the yards of clients, who monitor his loans and investments. The interest on such loans is often rendered in small services, referrals, and other favors. Meanwhile, his property portfolio has expanded, and he continues to invest in various kinds of communal sponsorship with a view to securing the material and educational futures of his children.
In these ways, the backyard economy – in which the Wendy is a staple component – offers modes opportunistic modes of accommodation, of riding on the coattails of formal contracts in the shadow of a formal civil frontage. Until relatively recently, policymakers and statesmen have viewed the informal sector — that part of any economy that is neither taxed nor monitored by government — as a source and corollary of underdevelopment, restricting growth and exacerbating poverty. Transition to formality was held to be the cure, enabling linkages with
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established enterprise and encouraging state control over untaxed, unregulated business. Not anymore. For one thing, formal economic growth does not necessarily put an end to xxiii
informality. For another, neoliberal deregulation and intensified competitiveness on an ever wider global scale have ensured the expansion of shadow enterprise, not only in the South but across the world at large. This has been abetted by the financialization of ever more domains of everyday life, not least by way of the “sharing economy” that encourages the treatment of personal property, like cars and homes, as rent-yielding assets, negotiated ever more directly (person-to-person, P2P) with willing users. Ironically, putting sharable assets to work has long been the default strategy of the poor, something from which corporations have sought to profit
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via platforming (as in the advent of Uber or Airbnb; Comaroff and Comaroff 2020). But now bodies like the ILO and the World Economic Forum declare the informal to be the new normal’xxiv vide the UN Habitat’s recommendation that policy be based on the creative innovation of the urban poor, encouraging job creation born of informality, its income generating potential and it’s as capacity to meet the needs of the dispossessed.xxv
One cannot but wonder about the newfound respect for vernacular urban solutions on the part of agencies that, for so long, have been invested in trying to transform and “develop” nonwestern economies in their own image. After all, the ostensible hazards of informal enterprise long stressed by these agencies — like the risk of doing business without the safeguard of titles and contracts, or of working without the protections of organized labor – remain. The new pragmatism comes at a time when the era of Western humanitarian aid is giving way to one of neoliberal “responsibilization,” “self-care,” and the subjection of life to
cost-benefit calculation.
xxvi But what remains consequential is something that global
development institutions and initiatives have been less ready to acknowledge: that legal instruments tend to favor the rich and powerful, especially where urgent, immediate action is called for and where there is a great deal of money to be made. As Mathew Desmond (2016) shows of “slum landlords” in the US inner city, the profitable exploitation of the poor and homeless is largely pursued in compliance with the law and the ordinary workings of the market. At a time when global anxiety focuses on the explosive implications of a “planet of slums” (Davis 2006) and drastically rising inequality, close attention is increasingly being paid to who is profiting from accommodating the precariat; as activists have learned all too well, moreover, the services of professional experts can be a mixed blessing. The “bottom-up”
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strategies championed by the likes of Slum Dwellers International stress the need for the
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unhoused to have a say in the expenditure of resources that affects them. It also stresses that architects, planners, and corporate contractors often spurn their knowledge, and profit at their expense. Even well-meaning efforts by the likes of UN Habitat to work with informal housing stakeholders — in securing and upgrading shacks, for instance – run the risk of gentrification that raises rents to the detriment of the poorest of the poor.
Conclusion
The essential right to a home – to shelter from the ravages of commerce both legal and criminal, and/or from the unwanted attentions of an intrusive state – has become increasingly vulnerable to the threat posed by the other face of the domestic dwelling: as private property, as potential capital, as a bedrock of market enterprise. At a time when financialization shapes ever larger domains of life, threatening profoundly the prospect of making a home in the world, the unlikely story of the Wendy House offers a slender shoot of evidence of the opportunistic impulse sparked by the friction between brute necessity and an endless appetite for life. At the very least, it prompts us to take seriously the virtues of the makeshift and provisional, of the kind of trust born of shared insecurity, and of investments in “unreal” estate as a basis of human co-existence in the face of daunting obstacles.
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i “Fix Europe’s Housing Crisis or Risk Fuelling the Far-right, UN Expert Warns,” Jon Henley, The Guardian, 6 May 2024; https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/may/06/fix-europe-housing-crisis-risk-fuelling-far right-un-expert-warns, accessed 8 JuneS 2024.
ii “Sir Keir Starmer: My Vision for Housing,” Keir Starmer, Inside Housing, 26 June 2024; https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/sir-keir-starmer-my-vision-for-housing-87096, accessed 28 June 2024.
iii “Homelessness in Victorian London: Exhibition Charts Life on the Streets.” Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, 2 January 2015; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/02/homelessness-victorian-london-exhibition geffrye-museum, accessed 17 May 2024.
iv “Sir Keir Starmer: My Vision for Housing.”
v “A Short History of the Great Recession,” Wayne Duggan. Forbes Advisor, 21 January 2023; https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/great-recession/, accessed 21 June 2024.
vi “2024 Elections: Housing Crisis Tops the List of Key Priorities for Voters,” Kamogelo Moichela, IOL, 24 July 2024; https://www.iol.co.za/news/2024-elections-housing-crisis-tops-the-list-of-key-priorities-for-voters-9de5bf3c 66ba-4d86-9201-465484ac0435, 21 April 21 2024;
vii “’People Have Died on the Waiting Lists’: South Africa’s Housing Crisis Casts a Shadow over Election,” Julie Boudin, The Guardian, 27 May 2024; https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/27/south africa-housing-crisis-waiting-lists-election, accessed 27 May 2024.
viii “’People Have Died on the Waiting Lists.’”
ix “Mandela’s Built Legacy and a New Dawn for African Architecture,” Lesley Lokko, The Architectural Review, 18 December 2012; https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/mandelas-built-legacy-and-a-new-dawn-for african-architecture, accessed 31 May 2024.
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x “‘People have Died on the Waiting Lists.’”
xi “2024 Elections: Housing Crisis Tops the List of Key Priorities for Voters.”
xii Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1903). The house was constructed so as to be assembled and disassembled on stage. The character Wendy sings a song which begin:” I wish I had a darling house, The littlest ever seen…” See “Wendy House,” Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_house, accessed 2 June 2024.
xiii “Wendy House,” Wikipedia.
xiv See Joshua Comaroff (2009: 360ff) for a significant use of the term, if in a somewhat different context; also Herscher 2012.
xv Wendy Houses can also be made from Nutec, or fiber cement board, ia man-made material used for cladding timber framed structures to render them more durable.
xvi Industry watchdogs often issue stern warnings to buyers about the National Buildings Regulations and Building Standards Act of 1977 that requires plans to be submitted for approval to local authorities for all structures, temporary or permanent. “[W]e practice conveyancing outside Neverland,” notes one. See “Wendy Houses and Plans – Watch out,” Marion Taylor Properties, 6 September 2013; https://www.marion-taylor.com/news/wendy houses-and-plans-watch-out/, accessed 6 June 2024.
xvii “Small Houses Challenge our Notions of Need as Well as Minimum-size Standards,” Carol Lloyd, SF Gate, 27 April 2007; https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Small-houses-challenge-our notions-of-need-as-2599159.php#photo-2088333, accessed 28 June, 2024. Some trace these homes back to the “shotgun houses” of the old South and the Depression; see “Tiny House Movement,” Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny-house_movement, accessed 30 June 2024.
xviii “Price List for Nutec and Traditional Wendy Houses;” https://www.wendyhouseshop.co.za/price-list, accessed 6 June 2024. R1= 0.053 US.
xix “Fed-up After 20 Years on a Waiting List, Gogo Builds her Own House,” Mpumi Kiva, Groundup, 17 January 2020; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny-house_movement, accessed 15 June 2024.
xx In 2013, the South African government declared July, the month in which Nelson Mandela was born, a period for celebrating his life and recognizing every person’s capacity to change the world around them for the better. xxi “Life Will Never be the Same for Khayelitsha Family After Receiving New Wendy House,” Unathi Obose, City Vision, 27 July 2023; https://www.news24.com/news24/community-newspaper/city-vision/needy-family-thrilled-by new-wendy-house-20230726, accessed 6 June 2024.
xxii “What is the Informal Economy?” Corinne Deléchat and Leandro Medina, Finance and Development Magazine, ILO, December 2020; https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2020/12/what-is-the-informal economy-basics, accessed 16 June 2024.
xxiii “Why We Need to Rethink the Informal Economy,” Michael Keen, World Economic Forum, 8 June 2015; https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/why-we-need-to-rethink-the-informal-economy/, accessed 15 June 2024.
xxiv “The Informal is the New Normal,” World Economic Forum; https://www.weforum.org/videos/informal-is the-new-normal/, accessed 13 June 2024; “New normal? Better normal!” Guy Ryder, ILO, 1 May 2020; https://www.ilo.org/resource/article/new-normal-better-normal, accessed 13 June 2024.
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xxv “The Informal Economy: Fact Finding Study,” Kristina Flodman Becker, Swedish Department for Infrastructure and Economic Cooperation, 12 March 2012; https://www.rrojasdatabank.info/sida.pdf, accessed 13 June 2024.
xxvi “Declining Aid, Rising Debt Thwarting World’s Ability to Fund Sustainable Development, Speakers Warn at General Assembly High-Level Dialogue,” United Nations, 26 September 2019;
https://press.un.org/en/2019/ga12191.doc.htm#:~:text=Aid%20plays%20a%20critical%20role,can%20hurt%20prog ress%20already%20made, accessed 16 June 2024.
xxvii “Breakthrough and Struggle: Land, Housing and Backyarders in Tiryville, Eastern Cape, “SDI, 15 February, 2016; https://sdinet.org/category/housing/, accessed 14 June 2024.
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