The Self-Build Experience: Institutionalisation, Place-Making and City Building

Using a broad international comparative perspective spanning multiple countries across South America, Europe and Africa, contributors explore resident-led self-building for low- and middle-income groups in urban areas. Although social, economic and urban prosperity differs across these contexts, there exists a recurring, cross-continental, tension between formal governance and self-regulation.

Contributors examine the multifaceted regulation dilemmas of self-building under the conditions of modernisation and consider alternative methods of institutionalisation, place-making and urban design, reconceptualising the moral and managerial ownership of the city. Innovative in scope, this book provides an array of globalised solutions for navigating regulatory tensions in order to optimise sustainable development for the future.

Willem Salet is professor emeritus Urban and Regional Planning, at the department of Planning, Geography and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. He chaired Urban Planning from 1998 to 2017. He was the Scientific Director of the Amsterdam study center for the Metropolitan Environment AME (2008-2013). He was the President of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) 2008-2010 and was awarded AESOP Honorary Membership in 2016. As a sociologist and urban planner, Willem Salet specializes in the institutional aspects of metropolitan development. Institutions are conceived in sociological sense as the patterning of public norms. He investigates the cultural, legal and political dimensions of public norms in the making of sustainable metropolitan spaces.

Camila L. D’Ottaviano is an architect, urban planner and faculty member in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo.

Stan Majoor is Professor of Urban Management at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Daniël Bossuyt is a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam.