Governing the right to build: The institutional dynamics of self-build housing in Brazil and the Netherlands

This dissertation investigates self-build housing, understood as a wide array of activities in which people commission the production of housing for their own use. While urban city-regions of the global south are acknowledged for their long history of self-building by low- and middle-incomes, this remains under acknowledged in the context of the global north. Still, in both contexts there is growing attention to active resident involvement in housing provision. This dissertation sets out to explore the activation of residents in housing provision through self-building. It specifically attends to the relationship between spatial governance and self-building, scrutinizing the central conditioning dimension of property. It engages with calls for urban comparativism by bringing together housing experiences from contexts considered vastly different: the Netherlands and Brazil. It aims to reject the incommensurability of urban self-building experiences in different locales, unsettling the dominant frame of self-building as an isolated, informal phenomenon. The research draws upon a comparative case-study of self-build housing governance in the metropolitan areas of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and São Paolo in Brazil. In the Netherlands it engages with the Homeruskwartier, the largest state-assisted self-building scheme in Europe. In Brazil it engages with the experience of Minha Casa Minha-Vida Entidades, a federal housing programme that reconciles resident self-management with housing provision. This programme has enabled the self-managed consolidation of two buildings into low-income housing in central São Paulo. The dissertation formulates the central question of ‘how self-build housing for low- and middle-incomes interacts with the institutional dynamics of spatial governance in the Netherlands and Brazil’. This central question is answered through three sub-questions pertaining to the interaction between state actors and self-building as a mode of housing provision; the experiences of actors in self-building; and the conceptualization and effects of property relations