Housing Policies for the Urban Poor: The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Approach. A View from São Tomé

Abstract

Housing policies for the urban poor face extensive challenges, specially in territories with extremely high incidence of poverty and low capacity to find the means to tackle it, as in most cities of the Global South. Nevertheless, besides the constraints in available resources for intervention, they are often also limited by inadequacy or mistargeting, resulting in a lower impact than might have been achieved. The territories that were colonized present a specially critical challenge, not only because they have undergone radical changes throughout occupation, decolonization and restructuring—which has often contributed to consequences such as a high incidence of vulnerabilities and disparities—but also as they often suffer from misevaluations and generic solutions that repeatedly fail their specific needs and priorities. Understanding these inheritances and mismatches demands an interdisciplinary analysis of the built environment, the multi-scale influence factors, as well as the perceptions built upon them and the existing policies for intervention. This research focuses on the city of São Tomé—the capital of the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe—an example of an intense changeover from colonial administration to developing territory, perpetuating inequality throughout different political and socioeconomic backgrounds. For a comprehensive overview of this process, this research tries to understand the built environment from different perspectives: their inhabitants, builders, organizations and planning officials. It will thus discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, as well as its potential for reducing misconceptions and limitations of policies for poverty reduction, namely within the improvement of dwellings and informal urban areas.