We have so far understood the contours to the question of housing justice in the previous modules. We have covered the idea of housing, its various facets, the concept of housing justice, a special module on the role of tenure systems other than ownership in providing housing justice and collective modes of action. I hope you've been able to see and understand the import of the examples and cases presented in the previous modules as this module on modes of action, will try and bring together approaches to the delivery of housing justice at different scales. In this, we will focus on the role of the public sector and how it can partner with other stakeholders in order to deliver housing justice. Let me introduce you to the module. When we speak of modes of action, the idea of scale becomes central. This is because different problems require different approaches and the scale of action or intervention becomes a key determinant in firstly defining what we want to achieve and secondly, how we plan to achieve it. In this module, we will outline and illustrate three scales of actions. Law, policy and programs, and projects. While projects are highly embedded in their local contexts, policies and programs allow for thinking through potential translations or transferability and are therefore more suited to learning about wider approaches across different contexts. Thus, we will be spending more time at these scales of action in this module. Let us now go through how law can support housing justice. Legal systems and jurisprudence vary significantly across nations. While some countries follow codes in which Justice is seen through a clear cut filter of written word, other countries follow a system of common law where in the law is interpreted in courts in order to create jurisprudence. With this in mind, I'm going to lay out three forms of law, often delivered through legislative acts that support housing justice. These three forms are, as mentioned earlier, fairly varied, and record different levels of achievement of housing justice. The simplest and foremost approach to achieving housing justice is through a right to housing enshrined in a constitutional frame. We will not cover this too much here as the right to housing has been covered in a previous module. However, it is pertinent to state here that such legislation may happen at the level of the federal government or at the provincial or local government. In India, for example, land and housing are subjects of state legislation. Rent control. Carrying on from the third module on rental housing, we will cover one particular approach to housing justice through controlling of rents to keep them affordable for income poor households. Rent control is a fairly widely prevalent legislation across the world. The premise of rent control was that poor families that constituted the majority of the workforce in industrial and industrializing economies would not be able to afford rents in cities that were seeing a concurrent appreciation in the land and housing markets. Thus, rent was essentially kept at prevalent fingers by law. Further, landlords were also severely restricted in the matter of evictions. While this is a form of justice for poor households, we must not forget that it was also to support industrialization, especially in the periods around the two World Wars. In a sense, these workers were critical to the war effort. Most scholars and practitioners argue that rent laws were highly unfavorable to landlords and investors in the rental housing market. Over time, this led to a stagnation and even choking off investment in rental housing. In India, some scholars have track the decline of rental housing in growing cities such as Mumbai, due to rent control law. Many countries and also states and provinces have thereafter reformed or even repealed the rent control law. In India, the federal government, for example, has promulgated a so-called Model Tenancy Act that some states such as Tamil Nadu have taken inspiration from in reforming their rent control. These reforms essentially aim for a better balance of interests between landlords and tenants. This is important because as discussed in the previous module on rental housing, landlords are often poor and vulnerable themselves, and were falling short of receiving justice under the older laws. Land rights legislation. The last mode of delivering housing justice through law that we will cover is that of providing land rights. It is a known fact that in many countries and their cities, the income poor are in fact residing on land that is not owned by them. Often slums and squatter settlements come up on government land. In India, for example, about 40 percent of slums are actually on land that belong to the urban local body in some way. Many other settlements are on provincial or federal government land. It is further accepted by policymakers and scholars that these settlements are often decades, if not centuries old and thus have gained a model right to be where they are. There are several interventions that act upon this premise. They grant a form of right to these households to continue to stay on the land. Often this takes the form of a long lease of land that in India is often called a Patta. Sometimes landowning authorities move to regularize such occupation by giving land rights certificates or even no eviction guarantees as you've learned in an earlier module. These forms of land rights allow poor households to first inheritance of the house and land right, leveraging the land in order to raise money when required, and thirdly invest in their own housing condition since they're now in a more secure location. Short of a full fledged right to housing, that most developing countries do not probably have the resources to actually provide the right to occupy certain lands is a low-cost and effective method to deliver housing justice for millions of income poor households that reside in the city.
