Introduction

Located within a world of moving capital, forms of informal housing emerge in the Global South as a means of appropriating urban space (YUVA, 2019). These housing arrangements have particular inherent and relational temporalities, that is, these practices hold a spatial, material and experiential relationship with time – often, to consolidate, through incremental growth, change in material and perceived security. However, these housing temporalities may be non-linear, revealing a life of precarious circumstances – floods, fire, evictions and changing individual and political circumstances (Bhan, 2017). This chapter argues that this temporality matters: it is a space of transformation, that is, of socio-economic and political mobility, and should be of key interest to discourses on housing. Literature across disciplines on mobility, poverty and capabilities, and choice and agency suggest that the temporality of these housing practices is not just symptomatic of a quantitative movement of people or finance across space, but also implies a qualitative shift in well-being (Sen, 1999; 2000; Dani and Moser, 2008; Narayan and Kapoor, 2008; Cresswell, 2010; Griffiths et al, 2013). However, state narratives that hold a limited reading of the temporality of informal housing practices further set into motion conditions for precarity.

This chapter locates itself within the city of Delhi, India, to illustrate state narratives of housing temporalities through two cases. In Delhi, cycles of evictions have broken large ‘slum’ clusters, or bastis, ‘unsettling the city’ (Bhan, 2017) into further spatial configurations of ‘moving slums’ with particular ‘precarious temporalities’ (Kalyan, 2014): waiting during resettlement, resultant cycles of homelessness from forced eviction and peripheral resettlement.

The criticality of housing and its impacts on human health and well-being have been noted for decades. Indeed, the United Nations (UN) Declaration of Universal Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, states unequivocally that:

Written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, this declaration was shaped by that monumental global event and the fragility of everyday people within it. It is a vision for a better world. Yet, in the current global setting, as economies recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and face new challenges, including ongoing instability from the Israel-Gaza conflict and war in Ukraine, the effects of increasing climate crisis-induced severe weather events and the stuttering global economic situation, a severe housing crisis remains. Indeed, across both the Global North and South, and irrespective of national economic status, we see how this promise to provide a minimum standard of housing for every global citizen has not been kept.

Introduction

Housing and sociocultural practices are critical influences on human health globally. Yet, the World Health Organization's Housing and Health Guidelines (WHO, 2018) have identified that low-income groups, including Indigenous peoples, are more likely to live in housing that is unsuitable. In turn, this raises their exposure to health impacts from housing and crowding, such as mental stress and infectious disease transmission (WHO, 2018).

For Australian Indigenous communities experiencing relatively high levels of socio-economic vulnerabilities, sufficient, well-maintained housing infrastructure can support healthy living practices (Healthabitat, 2019). However, if there is insufficient housing stock to meet community need, as is the case in much of Aboriginal Australia, crowded social housing can adversely impact occupants’ health through recurring transmission of infectious diseases between residents in regular close bodily contact (Lowell et al, 2018). This can manifest as high-frequency of upper respiratory tract (URT) and otitis media (OM) infections. These infections are problematic on their own but can be lethal because key organisms involved in these diseases, such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, may cause meningitis and pneumonia (Subramanian et al, 2019). Moreover, the risks of infection with Streptococcus pneumoniae are greater in individuals who are immune-compromised, elderly or young (Subramanian et al, 2019). There is also a relationship between recurrent infections and chronic diseases. Damaged skin after scabies and pyoderma disorders can attract infections by group A Streptococcal (GAS) infections. Recurrent infections by this bacterium can lead to acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis (PSGN). These associations are significant, as PSGN can lead to chronic kidney disease (CKD) (White et al, 2010; Garcia-Garcia et al, 2017) and ARF to rheumatic heart disease (RHD) (Kerdemelidis et al, 2010).

In their chapter examining comparative experiences of informal housing residents in Caracas and Sydney, Quintana Vigiola (2022) makes three key propositions: first, despite the often discussed/highlighted negative impacts, informal housing can very well have positive impacts on residents’ well-being; second, informal housing residents make use of various psychosocial and physical strategies to improve their housing experience, which, in turn, leads to improvement of their perception of overall well-being; and, third, meaningful commonalities can be identified in terms of informal housing residents’ perceptions of housing and well-being across cities in the Global South and North. In this reply to Quintana Vigiola (2022), I will engage with these three propositions, drawing on my own research in informal housing settlements in a Southern context.

I begin with Quintana Vigiola's (2022) first proposition on the positive impacts of informal housing on residents’ well-being. Indeed, the literature on informal housing often tends to focus on the negative effects of such housing arrangements and the precarity associated with them. In comparison, there have been many fewer studies and much less written on how particular modes of informal dwellings can also have positive effects on residents’ well-being. I would like to expand on this by reflecting on my research in two informal settlements in Dhaka, one being Korail – a very large slum – and the other being Town Hall Camp – a former refugee camp – where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork. I found that not all people in these settlements lived there because of an inability to move out due to a lack of economic means.

Chapter 2 overviews local methods for inpainting, also referred to as geometric methods, starting in 1993. These approaches are typically based on the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) arising from the minimisation of certain mathematical energies. Geometrical methods have proven to be powerful for the removal of scratches, long tiny lines or small damages such as craquelures in art-related images.

Chapter 4 describes the rise of deep learning inpainting methods in the past ten years. These methods learn an end-to-end mapping from a corrupted input to its estimated restoration. In contrast with traditional methods from the previous chapters, which use model-based or hand-crafted features, learning-based algorithms are able to infer the missing content by training on a large-scale dataset and can capture local or non-local dependencies inside the image and over the full dataset and exploit high-level information inherent in the image itself. In this chapter we present the seminal deep learning inpainting methods up to 2020 together with dedicated datasets designed for the inpainting problem.

The appendix gives contextual details about the dataset from the Fitzwilliam Museum manuscript collection, digitally restored through the various inpainting imaging techniques described and analysed in the book. The content of each manuscript and the particular restoration challenge is briefly described.

Chapter 3 provides a historical view of non-local inpainting methods, also called examplar-based or patch-based methods. These approaches rely on the self-similarity principle, i.e. on the idea that the missing information in the inpainting domain can be copied from somewhere else within the intact part of the image. Over the years. many improvements and algorithms have been proposed, enabling us to offer visually plausible solutions to the inpainting problem, especially for large damages and areas with texture.

Chapter 5 focuses on specific strategies to addess inpainting in real-life cultural heritage restoration cases, such as the colour restoration of old paintings, the inpainting of ancient frescoes, and the virtual restoration of damaged illuminated manuscripts.

Chapter 1 presents a brief overview of the book and the basics on inpainting, visual perception and Gestalt laws, together with a presentation of the Fitzwilliam Museum dataset of illuminated manuscripts, selected to represent different types of damage and consequent restoration challenges, which will be used throughout the book.

Chapter 6 offers a a retrospective view of inpainting methods described in the book and it summarizes key findings with some take home messages.