From Grassroots to Rooftops: Agency and the Right to Housing in Ugandan Housing Cooperatives
(2025) MRSM15 20251Human Rights Studies
- Abstract
- Amid a global housing crisis that leaves more than 1.6 billion people inadequately housed, dominant legal and policy frameworks still define “adequate housing” largely in terms of fixed outcomes such as tenure security, affordability, and habitability. This thesis argues that these lists overlook a critical dimension: people’s housing agency, the real freedom to shape their housing situation. Grounded in three months of fieldwork (August–November 2024) with two emerging and one completed housing cooperative on the urban fringe of Kampala, Uganda, the study combines participatory design workshops, interviews with sector professionals, and observations. Using an adaptation of the Capability Approach, the analysis surfaces four capabilities... (More)
- Amid a global housing crisis that leaves more than 1.6 billion people inadequately housed, dominant legal and policy frameworks still define “adequate housing” largely in terms of fixed outcomes such as tenure security, affordability, and habitability. This thesis argues that these lists overlook a critical dimension: people’s housing agency, the real freedom to shape their housing situation. Grounded in three months of fieldwork (August–November 2024) with two emerging and one completed housing cooperative on the urban fringe of Kampala, Uganda, the study combines participatory design workshops, interviews with sector professionals, and observations. Using an adaptation of the Capability Approach, the analysis surfaces four capabilities that members themselves prioritise: (1) securing land amid speculative markets and complex tenure; (2) achieving privacy, safety and community beyond overcrowded informal settlements; (3) sustaining livelihoods while financing construction, often through home-based work that blurs care and business; and (4) building in culturally and environmentally meaningful ways, balancing tradition with “green” technologies. The cooperative model widens these capabilities by pooling resources, lowering costs and strengthening women’s land rights, yet it can also narrow them when donor agendas, standardised plans or distant locations override decisions. Agency thus emerges as a negotiated, relational practice continually shaped by forces far beyond the household. By showing how Ugandan cooperative members mobilise housing rights in everyday choices, the study extends collaborative- housing scholarship to a limitedly examined Global-South context and argues that agency must be recognised as a core dimension of the right to adequate housing. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9204429
- author
- Verbiesen, Evelien Lucia Johanna LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- MRSM15 20251
- year
- 2025
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- The Right to Adequate Housing, Capability Approach, Cooperative Housing, Uganda, Participatory Design, Agency, Human Rights
- language
- English
- id
- 9204429
- date added to LUP
- 2025-06-24 13:46:16
- date last changed
- 2025-06-24 13:46:16
@misc{9204429,
abstract = {{Amid a global housing crisis that leaves more than 1.6 billion people inadequately housed, dominant legal and policy frameworks still define “adequate housing” largely in terms of fixed outcomes such as tenure security, affordability, and habitability. This thesis argues that these lists overlook a critical dimension: people’s housing agency, the real freedom to shape their housing situation. Grounded in three months of fieldwork (August–November 2024) with two emerging and one completed housing cooperative on the urban fringe of Kampala, Uganda, the study combines participatory design workshops, interviews with sector professionals, and observations. Using an adaptation of the Capability Approach, the analysis surfaces four capabilities that members themselves prioritise: (1) securing land amid speculative markets and complex tenure; (2) achieving privacy, safety and community beyond overcrowded informal settlements; (3) sustaining livelihoods while financing construction, often through home-based work that blurs care and business; and (4) building in culturally and environmentally meaningful ways, balancing tradition with “green” technologies. The cooperative model widens these capabilities by pooling resources, lowering costs and strengthening women’s land rights, yet it can also narrow them when donor agendas, standardised plans or distant locations override decisions. Agency thus emerges as a negotiated, relational practice continually shaped by forces far beyond the household. By showing how Ugandan cooperative members mobilise housing rights in everyday choices, the study extends collaborative- housing scholarship to a limitedly examined Global-South context and argues that agency must be recognised as a core dimension of the right to adequate housing.}},
author = {{Verbiesen, Evelien Lucia Johanna}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{From Grassroots to Rooftops: Agency and the Right to Housing in Ugandan Housing Cooperatives}},
year = {{2025}},
}