We started in our previous lecture by making the move from houses to housing to thinking about how moving away from an imagination of just the unit of the house to housing allows us to understand that talking about housing means engaging with its legal, material, economic, political, social, and spatial forms. This was critical for us because in order to ask the question of housing justice, we need to hold that question as it plays out in all these different layers, dimensions, and forms of housing. Very often debating housing justice does not take its political and social structure into account, becomes a deeply economistic debate about money and rent and affordability. Equally, a debate about discrimination and segregation that does not take very different material landscapes of different forms of housing becomes something that is dematerialized too far. So our challenge is to think about the question of housing justice within this broad multiple entry points into housing. This is a hard thing to do. Questions about justice, questions about right, questions about good are questions that are as old as human society itself. In this lecture, we are not going to resolve or come to a singular notion of housing justice. Our task is somewhat different. Our task is to begin from where we are both in the cities we are in, in this historical conjuncture that we are in and with the political and belief systems, our biographies and other influences in our life that brought us too and to say, how can we begin to operationalize and ask a certain set of questions about housing from a perspective of housing justice. Our task therefore is to generate operational frames of thinking about justice rather than finding a single normative, political or ethical vision of housing justice that we can all agree upon. To do this, we want to think a little bit about two different debates that typically come from political philosophy about what it means to talk about justice. The first emphasizes the equality of opportunity. It basically says that justice and equity sit in everyone having the same shot at something. You want to start a race with everyone on the same starting line. Questions of opportunity are fundamentally questions that come from theories of justice that believe that difference is a part of human society. But differences should not be structured in a hierarchical inequalities. The other notion of housing, justice or justice more philosophically, is the question of equality of outcome. Now when we asked us just from the perspective of outcomes, what we're saying is that there are certain outcomes that are inherently unjust. Think about when we define housing as a capability good, or a basic need for human life. In this framework, the absence of minimal outcomes of housing, at the very least are unacceptable in a framework of housing justice. Equality of outcomes are concerned with the real existing empirical distribution of access to housing and the form of housing and the quality of housing and its character. Putting these two together, a distribution of the most equitable understanding of opportunity along with its actual meaningful and substantive realization into outcomes, this tension, this terrain, is the terrain of housing justice we're thinking about. Now how do we take this from its philosophical dimensions into the practice of housing in actually existing city regions. Here is where this course wants to offer you a framework. Now I repeat again, it is one framework, one way of unpacking the complexities of questions of housing justice, but we believe it is a useful one. There are four key components of this framework. The first is to say that when we think about housing justice, we have to ask questions of affordability. Now this is recognizable to us from our first lecture on questions of the economic form of housing. In particular, affordability reminds us that housing is centrally a question. Also of wage, of income, of savings. That our ability to enter any form of housing market formal or informal is dependent on what an economist would call our effective demand, not just the house we wish to demand, but the house we're actually able to back with purchasing power, with the ability to enter that market. Now it is quite evident that in a housing market where say, a working carpenter cannot, even if he takes seven times his annual income, five times his annual income, all of his savings cannot enter the formal housing market because the entry point is too high, that is manifestly an unjust market where the opportunity of entry of effective demand is denied. When we think about affordability in this way, we also have to turn around and ask the question of, what if this opportunity was there? What if the carpenter was able to enter into this housing market but the house that she could afford was materially inadequate, was materially not the right size for her growing family, was located in the periphery of the city far from the employment where they worked? In this case, the inequality in affordability is manifested through an outcome we consider unjust when an opportunity is not meaningful enough to give us the correct combination when we want to think about questions of justice. Our first question of affordability matches what in your interactive dashboard is called an exercise on the affordability spectrum, which helps you ask the question, in the city/region where you are listening to me today from, what is the distribution of wealth and income that tells you the map of actual demand for housing in your city today? What can people afford? It also allows us to ask the second question, does that housing stock exist at those price points for them to be able to meaningfully translate their opportunity into an outcome? The second part of affordability that's key, is not just the starting point of wealth, income and savings, but increasingly, particularly in contemporary forms of urbanism and capitalism, the ability to bridge the gap between what you have and what you need through viable financing. Therefore, access to reasonable finance is a key second part of thinking about affordability. The second part of our framework is adequacy. Now this will emphasize, from my first lecture, the material form of the housing question. Adequacy is very often thought about as thinking about the quality of the housing stock. There's two clear components for us. One is the adequacy of the built unit. Here we are again closest to thinking of houses as well as housing; the size of the unit, its ability to expand as families grow, the material and quality of it's built material structure, its safety. All of these questions are critical when we start thinking about, can there be housing justice if people live in deeply material inadequate housing structures? But materiality of the structure is only one part of adequacy. Its other two components are equally important. The second, like we talked about last time again, is that a house can become housing only if that material unit lives and is embedded within the dignified infrastructures of everyday life. Very core in urban systems, here we're talking about sanitation systems, water systems, public transport systems, accessibility to light, to roads, to thoughts that make a house into viable housing through its connection to settlement in neighborhood-level Infrastructure. The last part of adequacy, which is often forgotten, particularly in policy making circles, but which is a fundamental characteristic of the urbanism of cities of the south is that even if a house is materially adequate, even if a house has access to the correct environmental services and basic public infrastructure, if it remains insecure in its tenure, these are important words for us to hold onto, insecure in its tenure, which means it does not have what UN-Habitat would call a reasonable expectation of protection from forced eviction, then the materiality of the house cannot offset what this tenure insecurity does to housing justice. Tenure and security is a particularly important part of housing, particularly in cities of the south, where much of the housing stock is built in some tension with the formal logics of law, plan, and property. We'll talk a lot more about this in Module 2, when we take on the question of informality and housing quite directly. When we begin to think about affordability and adequacy together, you begin to see the complexity of trade-offs even halfway through the framework. Very often, the minute a house becomes more adequate, it also begins to become more unaffordable. A leading policy-maker in India once used one frame to talk about the housing question in India that has stayed with me for many years. What he said was that in India, the housing question is this, affordable housing is inadequate and adequate housing is unaffordable. Therefore, the framework is a set of tensions and trade-offs where the more we protect affordability, it can come at the cost of adequacy. But the more we improve adequacy, we have to begin to protect affordability. This is a reminder to us that our framework is talking about a dynamic housing market, where the questions of justice and their configurations are constantly shifting. But we're not done with the framework yet. Because in addition to affordability and adequacy, there is a third and fourth component. The third is accessibility. In the third aspect of affordability, we're talking about the ways in which outside questions of market demand and supply of material adequacy. There are still social and political structures that fracture opportunity from becoming outcome. I'll give you two examples. The first is the example of identity-based discrimination and rental markets. In every city that you know, that you have experienced or have heard about, we know the ways in which effective demand, according to the economist, does not turn into meaningful housing. Fractured precisely by structures of identity-based exclusion. Whether it is racial discrimination, whether it is caspase discrimination, whether it is fractures in terms of ethnicity, language, citizenship, region, sexuality, gender identity, or a host of other identity axes that manifest themselves in different ways. The second example I want to give you is precisely the example which the economist Amartya Sen used in talking about capability goods that we talked about last time. Which is the example of saying that if affordable and adequate housing is designed assuming a certain formation of physical ability, then people with disability are automatically dealt an unjust housing outcome despite being able to both demand and have stock that is adequate but not adequate in the ways that describes the needs they have. Accessibility is about ways in which non-material, non-economic exclusions can occur. Because of the way all housing is always, remember, equally, socially, and politically constructed. Our last point in the framework then returns us to what we call viability. Viability becomes a way to think about housing that takes us to the spatial and economic forms of our framework from last week. When we think about viability, it reminds us that an adequate and affordable house in the periphery of the city region, disconnected from public transport far from sites of work and livelihood is likely to be one that same carpenter we talked about is not going to take. When we think about why someone would choose an inadequate house in a viable location because of proximity to employment, we are once again reminded that when we talk about housing and not houses, we are equally talking about wage and infrastructure and ability to make trade-offs between what makes housing viable through access, say to transport and proximity to work, as opposed to simply the adequacy of the material unit. Therefore, our framework is not a set of points that can be listed in order. It is actually a nested set of what we would call an end framework. Housing justice is only possible if housing at multiple scales from an individual decision-maker to the city region is affordable and adequate and accessible and viable. The end condition is what makes systemic changes to housing justice so complicated. Because like we saw in our example, very often, moving towards incremental improvements or more just outcomes in one of these aspects often comes at the cost of the other. The challenge is to think about what it means to create housing justice outcomes and opportunities that hold all four of these frameworks together. In the next four modules, you are going to see how this framework underlies both housing policy, social mobilization, individual housing decisions as multiple actors seek to try and move from a structure of systemic exclusion to more just structures, either incrementally or radically. We will keep repeating these words, coming back to these diagnostic categories. There are ways for us to think through how to unpack and ask the question of housing justice. But just to remind you again of how these visions are always rooted in normative, political, and ethical belief systems about justice, here is now an opportunity for you to hear from faculty, even in this course, about how differently we think about what housing justice is. I look forward to seeing you in Module 2 when we take this framework and operationalize it down and start asking questions particularly of informality and housing, and thinking about what is often called in southern urban discussions, the slum question. Thank you for paying attention.
