Provincializing Housing Resilience: Urban Political Ecology, Informality, and the Right to Dwell
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Abstract
Housing resilience has become a central concern of urban climate governance, yet its dominant framing remains technocratic, focusing on upgrading structures, optimizing infrastructure, and engineering adaptive capacity. This paper argues that such framings systematically depoliticize resilience by obscuring the property relations, exclusionary planning, and uneven infrastructures that determine who can secure safe dwelling. Through a critical narrative review spanning urban political ecology (UPE), housing studies, infrastructure studies, and climate justice scholarship, the paper develops a provincialized UPE framework that re-centers analysis on the Global South, where informality is constitutive of urbanization rather than a deviation from it. The framework advances three interconnected analytics, “CEE”. Capture traces how resilience is financialized and commodified, transforming safety into an investable frontier that deepens housing inequality. Enclosure diagnoses how resilience planning produces fortified enclaves for elites alongside sacrifice zones of normalized risk. Endurance foregrounds the everyday repair, improvisation, and insurgent dwelling through which marginalized communities assemble habitability where formal systems fail. These analytics converge on a political horizon of radical housing resilience, demanding redistribution, recognition, and the right to dwell. Abuja, Nigeria, a master-planned capital where formal order and informal life collide, serves as one illustrative thread among several Southern cities. The paper’s contribution lies less in the now-established claim that informality is constitutive of urbanization than in integrating these dispersed critical strands into a single diagnostic framework calibrated to housing resilience, reframing it as a political struggle over dwelling rather than a technical property of buildings.
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