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The organised self-help approach successfully enhances urban low-income earners' (LIE) homeownership in some developing countries. The technique can enhance urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership. There is a paucity of studies concerning sustainable homeownership for Nigeria's urban LIE through a self-help approach. The study investigated the housing needs of the urban LIE via organised self-help mechanisms and how the same can enhance urban resilience for sustainable homeownership in the Ancient City of Benin, Nigeria.

Given the unexplored nature of the issue, 20 face-to-face interviews were conducted with experts and analysed through a thematic approach.

Findings identified eleven main barriers faced by the urban LIE. This includes the absence of government housing policy, funding frameworks, urban land scarcity, high property development costs, naira devaluation, high-interest rates, inflation, bribery and corruption, lax mortgage sub-sector, high cost of infrastructure, and government bureaucracy.

This study will contribute to pioneering the role of organised self-help mechanisms in urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership in developing cities via a qualitative approach. Also, findings would significantly contribute to developing countries' sustainable housing and urban resilience literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the adequacy of incrementally constructed government assisted self‐help housing in addressing the needs of residents of the Workers’ Housing Estate, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria.

A quantitative method and the survey research approach were used. Data were collected from randomly selected 156 household heads in this housing estate with structured questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive and factor analyses.

About 50 percent of the respondents felt that housing environment in the estate was adequate in meeting their needs. Adequacy of housing unit characteristics was higher than that of housing services, social infrastructure and management of the housing estate.

Incremental housing construction strategy can provide adequate housing for low and middle‐income public sector workers in the developing countries; and this can be enhanced through measures that ensure rapid upgrading of housing units and access to housing services and basic infrastructure by the residents.

The adoption of government assisted incremental construction strategy has great potentials in facilitating access to housing by low‐income urban residents in the developing countries.

A pioneer study on the adequacy of housing provided using the incremental construction strategy in Ogun State Nigeria. Findings may not be generalised, but they have implications for social housing in the developing countries.

Faced with a dearth of affordable housing opportunities, even after the end of Apartheid, residents from Motherwell, South Africa, turned to CHF International for help. CHF provided residents with the technical assistance, organisational support and bridging finance they needed to build their own high-quality homes, through a method that allowed the use of relatively unskilled labour. After helping residents form the Sakhezethu NgoManyano Housing Association and establishing the Assisted Self-Help Model, community members built a total of 395 safe and affordable houses to which they have full title. This model has been transferred throughout South Africa, with thousands of houses built using the concepts for the development of housing and community that it established.

Housing transformation is not part of the Ethiopian urban housing policy, but it is a reality for city dwellers. The objective of this study was to find out what, why, and how aided self-help residents transformed their core house in Bahir Dar city. The focus was specifically on the transformations that resulted in changes to the floor area.

The case study research design is ideal for empirically examining socio-physical dynamics. The study employed three aided self-help housing cooperatives as case studies in Bahir Dar city. Information was gathered from cooperative members, committees, relevant government bodies, and the physical environment through field observations, interviews, photographic surveys, and questionnaires.

The findings showed three types of housing transformations that resulted in a change in floor area and are influenced by the building features of the original core house, motivation, and participation of residents. As a result of the housing transformation, residents became housing producers and suppliers, and their neighbourhood changed into a more socially and functionally diversified settlement.

The findings of this study have practical implications for policy makers to institute mechanisms that help planners and architects in preparing plots of land for residential use and in designing housing typologies. The findings will have an impact on the housing policy of Ethiopia.

The findings of this study will impact planners and architects when it comes to preparing plots for residential land use and designing housing typologies. In addition, the finding will have an impact on housing policy of Ethiopia.

The study of the resident’s housing transformation that brought floor area change provides further insights on the consideration of housing transformation as a housing production and supply strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role played by small-size non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in slum upgrading, building and incremental housing processes in Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, focusing, in particular, on actions to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance community resilience.

The research method relied on literature review and fieldwork. It included surveys, activities with the communities, interviews and questionnaires. The data collected were subject to cross-disciplinary and comparative analysis.

The paper analyses the innovative methods and solutions used by NGOs in informal settlement upgrading and housing improvement works related to disaster risk reduction, namely, community mapping and design, and show how they end up building community resilience.

Grasping the impacts of NGOs’ work whether in slums of Brazil or Africa requires staying with communities for a significant amount of time. However, those stays raise many practical problems regarding security, health and related costs.

The existing literature misses to address from a comparative perspective, the methods used by social workers and designers teams in slums. This paper aims at filling this gap in slum studies. Its originality and value rely on the particular experience of the authors, who were personally involved in the NGOs actions and could deepen the connections between vulnerabilities, risk and successful aid-self-help practices.

Customization is a paradox in architecture, providing necessary modernization for buildings but potentially damaging their architectural integrity. In this paper, the authors introduce the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach for avoiding this paradox; this approach lets inhabitants design the customization from options created by architects that safeguard architectural rules. As a first implementation of the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach, the MyChanges tool is presented. The authors assess whether the approach avoids the customization paradox by a qualitative stakeholder evaluation of the MyChanges tool and by a comparison of the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach with existing approaches to housing customization.

MyChanges is a shape grammar-based design tool developed to enable inhabitants of the Álvaro Siza Vieira Malagueira housing complex to customize their houses in accordance with the architectural language of the complex. In this study, the authors qualitatively evaluated MyChanges with architects and other professional stakeholders. MyChanges is used in this paper to assess if the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach avoids the paradox of customization. The initial reception of MyChanges produced diverging outcomes, suggesting that Inhabitant-Driven Customization is also unable to avoid the customization paradox. For analyzing this possibility further, this paper describes the main existing approaches to housing customization, including the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach, formulates nine conditions for these approaches, and provides a qualitative comparative assessment of the approaches.

The customization paradox is demonstrated in the outcomes of the interviews with professional stakeholders on the MyChanges customization tool for the Malagueira housing complex. An argument is given that makes plausible that the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach avoids the customization paradox by creating a co-design process in which inhabitants and architects alternately shape customization.

The originality of this paper lies in the introduction and discussion of the paradox of customization in housing. The paper identifies the conditions advanced in architecture for assessing housing customization approaches. Additionally, the authors propose a new customization approach and a design tool that to a large extent fulfills those conditions and avoids the customization paradox.