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Inadequate housing is a crisis that affects all areas of the world. The severity and magnitude of this crisis has been augmented by the exponential growth in the global population. Expounding upon this problem, particularly in the South, is the migration of rural peoples into urban cores, fostering the creation of mega-cities of illegally developed, inadequate housing. These developments lack basic necessities including access to water, proper sanitation, and safe areas to prepare food.

Urban agriculture has presented itself as a key design component in the mission to alleviate the aforementioned crisis. The incorporation of agriculture as a permanent and edible design feature bolsters the design methodology of sustainable urban fabrics by presenting opportunities of cohesion between built and cultural landscapes. Research on one of the largest slum developments, known as Kibera, in Kenya provides a design study in which the addition of edible landscapes contributes to the neighborhood “njia” infrastructure. The term njia refers to the street paths and alleyways that bind the developments. When applied to the model of njia, the potential benefits of the incorporation of urban agriculture into the contextual vocabulary become clear. Designing edible landscapes as a feature of permanence in urban design situations provides the potential to address critical issues concerning development of housing, city planning, and food security.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough assessment of the current statistical sources in Spain, as well as new indicators that extend and improve the European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS) to better address every housing exclusion situation.

The main categories of the ETHOS typology are reviewed: definition, subcategories and the availability of data and statistical sources in Spain. The assessment of the information available is carried out by considering objective and subjective indicators. Additionally, the inclusion of new subcategories is proposed.

The strengths and weaknesses of the ETHOS model when applied in the study of housing exclusion are highlighted, and the need to have an appropriate set of indicators for measuring housing exclusion is stressed. The ETHOS typology may be the reference conceptual framework to elaborate a system of housing exclusion indicators. However, it would be necessary to extent this model in order to cover some situations of exclusion risk owing to insecure housing for economic reasons and environmental degradation, and including the subjective assessment of the people affected by these processes.

This study implements the ETHOS methodology checking the statistical information available distinguishing between objective and subjective indicators. Further, this paper shows an integrated overview of the four main ETHOS categories (rooflessness, houselessness, insecure and inadequate housing) with the four types of housing restrictions (accessibility, stability, adequacy and habitability).

Living on the Boundaries: Urban Marginality in National and International Contexts is a volume long overdue. With the impact of the Great Recession of 2009 and its resultant impacts on a global scale, we are witnessing crises and institutional collapse on a major scale. Systemic problems go well beyond institutional crises brought on by collapsed economies and corporate excesses, but involve and make worse issues of inequality, racism, sexism, inadequate housing and health care, un/employment, poverty, underachievement, inadequate schooling and crime and justice. Periodically, our social science research and public policies have tended to assume that our social problems and social ills could be resolved. However with growing income inequality, there is notable tension developing between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. During periods of tight economies, contemporary thinking is reminiscent of Social Darwinism, that social ills and social problems can be traced to laziness, lack of ambition and deficiencies among the lower social classes. The shifting nature of work, global economic competition and technological advance has and will continue to have marked influence on jobs, income and social mobility in both developed and developing countries. The purpose of Living on the Boundaries: Urban Marginality in National and International Contexts is to raise questions and provide its readers with well-rounded and expansive frames of analysis to question, to view and to improve upon the societies in which they live. Our purpose will be accomplished if this volume helps its readers to begin their own process of questioning and addressing the substantive issues involved.

Purpose – Academic campuses in India in recent years have witnessed an increase in the proportion of older people due to the rise in the age of superannuation of faculty and their cohabitation with older parents. However, such campuses continue to have a skewed program which favor the needs of the younger population. For the present study, a residential academic campus equipped with a health care facility was selected to understand the challenges of the family caregivers of older people residing in it.

Methodology/Approach – Exploratory in-depth interviews were conducted with 154 family caregivers. Secondary data were obtained from the campus hospital records.

Findings – Data revealed that family caregivers experienced various challenges in providing older care in the campus due to unavailability of paid supportive caregivers, lack of community support, and inadequate housing. Though the academic campus has a health care facility, the entitlement rights to it varies among the older people in campus. While the campus health facility was not congenial for family caregiving, it was utilized as a space for providing long-term care. This chapter suggests the need to extend a public heath model of family caregiving in campus.

Research limitations/implications – The study has implication for modifying similar academic campuses in India for facilitating family caregivers of older people.

Originality/Value of Paper – This is the first study of its kind which explored the challenges of family caregiving for older people in academic campuses in India.

The purpose of this study is to investigate barriers to accessing mortgages in Nigeria’s urban housing markets with the main focus on Kaduna State. The objective was to establish the diverse factors that constitute barriers to urban households’ access to mortgages for homeownership from the perceptions of households, mortgage lenders and the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria.

The study used cross-sectional survey with triangulation of results. To enable the triangulation, three new samples were developed from 450 surveys with households and 10 completed by lenders, both in Kaduna State and one survey undertaken by the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria. Data were collected with questionnaires designed on five-point Likert model. Data analysis utilized descriptive statistics and one-sample t-test. Triangulation enabled cross-validation of the results.

The barriers include low incomes and savings which constrain households’ ability to pay mortgage instalments and deposits, respectively, high interest rates, poor access to land, inability of potential borrowers to provide certificates of occupancy on their land, inadequate loanable funds and inadequate number of mortgage lending institutions.

The study has the potential to provide a basis for mortgage market reforms. Mortgage market reforms should be encompassing because it requires action in some other sectors.

The social implication of the study is the possibility of motivating actions to deal with the diverse barriers to accessing mortgages which have constituted deterrents to households from realizing their homeownership aspirations and enjoying the benefits of homeownership and consequently contributing to inadequate housing and poor living conditions.

The study provides distinctive insight into Nigeria’s mortgage market by integrating the views of various stakeholders on a subject of social and economic significance. It contributes to the evidence-base around mortgage market reforms in Nigeria.

HIV/AIDS has now become part of everyday life in urban settlements in the developing world, and presents the world with one of the most serious and disastrous urban challenges it has ever had to face. Since HIV first emerged in the early 1980s, more than 25 million people (adults and children) have lost their lives to AIDS worldwide. The UNAIDS 2007 figures estimate that 33.2 million people are currently living with the virus. Over 95 percent of these people live in developing countries, with Sub-Saharan Africa - particularly Eastern and Southern Africa - most affected. Slum conditions, in which up to 72% of the urban poor in Sub-Saharan African live, are marked by inadequate housing and settlements, which place their inhabitants in a position of heightened vulnerability to HIV infection.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe experiences of recovery among people with co-occurring mental health and substance use conditions (co-occurring conditions) in a rural community in Norway.

In-depth individual interviews with eight persons with co-occurring conditions were conducted, audiotaped, transcribed and analysed using a phenomenological approach. This study is part of a research project investigating recovery orientation of services in a Norwegian district.

The analysis yielded four dimensions of recovery: feeling useful and accepted; coming to love oneself; mastering life; and emerging as a person. Insecure and inadequate housing and limited solutions to financial problems were described as major obstacles to recovery.

Further research into the facilitation of recovery as defined by persons with concurrent disorders is needed, particularly regarding the facilitation of community participation.

This study supports an increased focus on societal and community factors in promoting recovery for persons with co-occurring conditions, as well as service designs that allow for an integration of social services and health care, and for collaboration among services.

The results suggest that the community can aid recovery by accepting persons with co-occurring conditions as fellow citizens and welcoming their contributions.

The paper provides an enhanced understanding of how persons with co-occurring conditions may experience recovery.

As host to over one million Syrian refugees, Lebanon continues to experience challenges addressing the needs of refugee families. This research examined the experiences of Syrian families with the refugee support system in Lebanon. The purpose of this study was to better understand the strengths and gaps in existing mechanisms of support for these Syrian families, including informal support from family, neighbors and community and more formalized support provided through entities such as nongovernmental organizations and United Nations agencies.

Data were collected from 46 families displaced by the war and living in Lebanon (N = 351 individuals within 46 families). Collaborative family interviews were conducted with parents, children and often extended family.

The data identified both strengths and gaps in the refugee support system in Lebanon. Gaps in the refugee support system included inadequate housing, a lack of financial and economic support, challenges with a lack of psychosocial support for pregnant women and support for disabled youth. Despite these challenges, families and community workers reported informal community support as a strong mediator of the challenges in Lebanon. Furthermore, the data find that organizations working with Syrian families are utilizing informal community support through capacity building, to create more effective and sustainable support services.

This study provides an overview of strengths and gaps in supports identified by refugees themselves. The research will inform the development and improvement of better support systems in Lebanon and in other refugee–hosting contexts.

This study builds on existing research to explore how transgender and non-binary people navigate complex terrain when it comes to strained and ambiguous relationships with families of origin. This chapter draws on 23 in-depth interviews with trans and non-binary adults (ages 19–41) to examine the ways that respondents navigated ambiguous and complex family relationships marked by mixed messages and contradictory behaviors from parents regarding their sexual and gender identities. I find that respondents engage in a range of strategies – correcting, conforming, and concealing – to bargain for belonging within families of origin through their work to preserve family ties. Beyond experiencing the emotional costs of ambiguous parental support, I find that some respondents also experience financial strain and inadequate housing, stemming from unstable, distressing relationships with their parents. This chapter demonstrates that ambiguous support from family and complex familial relationships may contribute to a cycle of precarity for trans and non-binary adults. Finally, I show that for respondents, connections to local queer and trans communities and supportive partnerships buffered the negative impacts of familial ambiguity. However, not all respondents had access to community support, intensifying their experiences of marginalization. This chapter contributes to the literature working to destabilize the support versus rejection binary used to characterize LGBTQ experiences and has implications for better understanding the pathways into poverty that trans and non-binary people experience.