Introduction

Self-building, and the partly informal city that is created by this practice, is a common characteristic in Brazilian city-regions. The urban fabric is a complex cohabitation of more formal and informal – affordable – city quarters, realised in a situation of extensive urban growth over the last decades. In Europe, the impact of low-and middle-income housing on the social and spatial shape of city-regions differs highly among states and regions with different forms of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kemeny, 1995). Such as outlined in Chapter 3, there are huge differences between the economically advanced city-regions of North-Western Europe, characterised by historic trajectories of professional and affluent social housing, and Southern Europe, where there has often been no extensive social housing sector established and low-and middle-income residents largely depend on access to densely occupied, private sector family homes. In Eastern Europe, the transition of state estates to individual homeownership has created new needs to develop some sort of social housing. Generally speaking, the self-build constructions that are so pivotal for housing production in Latin America are not common in Europe. Almost everywhere historic traces of self-build and cooperative processes exist, and on a modest scale, some new initiatives in European cities appear, but there is no evidence of similarity with the current experiences in Latin American.

Yet, it makes sense to compare the underlying conditions of contested urban regimes in both cases. Characteristic for an urban regime perspective is that it shows how local government occupies two often contrasting positions. It has to generate income from economic growth and the prosperity of its residents (the institutional condition of financial accountability), and it has to be responsive to the political electorate (the institutional condition of electoral accountability). Urban regime theory investigates how these conditions are interrelated in urban practices (Elkin, 1987). In empirical practices, this tender relationship is almost never in balance. In the US, cities tend to be one-sidedly dependent on economic growth within their territory, which may explain their straight market orientation and their competitive attitude to other municipalities.