Energy justice is a rapidly growing social science construct that allows policymakers, academics and practitioners to unpack how energy interfaces with modern society. There could be no better time to consider these links than now, as climate change is rapidly pushing governments around the world to permanently shift their systems of energy production and consumption.

In the last half a decade, energy justice has become a popular research agenda (Jenkins et al, 2016) and a robust conceptual, analytical and decision-making framework (Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015) to explore ‘injustices in the energy system related to aspects such as class, race, ethnicity, age, gender or spatial and economic inequalities’ (Hanke et al, 2021). A significant proportion of the contexts where this framework has been applied, however, have been situated in the Global North, mostly in Europe and the US. As Jones (2022) points out, the specific socio-economic, political and gender sensitivities that dominate the Global South are plainly absent in the North. As such, currently knowledge of experiences of energy justice or injustice is not robust enough to draw on and inform policymaking in the Global South, where the overwhelming share of the world's energy poor live.

Jones’ chapter makes a novel contribution by bringing to the academic discourse on energy justice a critical assessment of ‘lived’ experiences of energy injustice and long-term implications for human rights from the Global South. Collecting first-hand information from one of the world's most poor, densely packed urban slum regions, the chapter provides a ‘grounded’ assessment of what energy injustice means and how it manifests locally at an individual and household level.

Introduction

In Australia, low-income migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, also referred to as ‘culturally and linguistically diverseʼ (CaLD) migrants, are one of the groups suffering from the housing crisis. They have trouble navigating the housing market and achieving a sustainable housing outcome (Wood et al, 2015). This study focuses on the resettlement experience of a specific CaLD migrant group: Sudanese-and South Sudanese-born migrants settled within the Perth, Western Australia (WA), metropolitan area.1 Between 2001 and 2011, almost 27,000 Sudanese permanently resettled in Australia (DSS, 2017) to escape the countryʼs ongoing civil war. According to the 2011 census data, WA recorded the highest density of Sudanese people, 1.43 per 1,000 (Robinson, 2013). Between 2001 and 2006, Perth welcomed 11 per cent of the Sudanese entrants, the third most after Melbourne (33 per cent) and Sydney (21 per cent) (DIAC, 2007). Furthermore, in 2006, Perth was home to almost 99 per cent of the Sudanese population in WA. The 2016 census data show that nearly the entire native Sudanese population in WA was still settled in Perth (at 98 per cent). The research presented in this chapter focuses on the resettlement experience of this population.

The literature presents the resettlement experience as a road paved with many difficulties (Lejukole, 2008; 2013; Atem, 2011; Abur, 2012; Robinson, 2013). According to Neumann et al (2014: 12), Australian literature studying refugees ‘has tended to be about refugeesʼ problematic baggage such as their traumatic experiences or lack of skillsʼ.

This is a reply to Memmott et al's (2022) chapter on ‘Aboriginal social housing in remote Australia: crowded, unrepaired and raising the risk of infectious diseases’. It is not hard to see that the physical environment of the home is likely to have a significant impact on health. Problems such as leaking toilets, uneven stairs, mouldy walls and crowding clearly create health-and-safety risks. This relationship is recognised in World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) housing and health guidelines, with crowding identified as increasing risks to mental and physical health. These problems disproportionately affect low-income renters, who have limited capacity to remedy such issues (Robinson and Adams, 2008). This relationship between housing and mental and physical well-being significantly contributes to intergenerational poverty (McKnight and Cowell, 2014).

The central role of housing for individual and community well-being has been known for centuries. After all, it is housing's impact on health that has historically been the primary justification for slum-clearance programmes, and this remains the case in many countries. Yet, policy has been slow to address this connection, even though health services bear most of the cost of poor-quality housing. This is the case for Indigenous housing, where poverty, housing exclusion, underfunding of the social and affordable housing sector, and government neglect more generally result in high rates of crowding and deteriorated dwellings in countries including the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (Habibis et al, 2018; Lea, 2020). Despite this, there is a surprising dearth of research on the processes and mechanisms that make many Indigenous homes sites of illness and injury. Memmott et al's (2022) chapter is therefore a welcome contribution in its effort to add to the evidence base on housing and infectious disease among Indigenous peoples in Australia.

Introduction

This is a reply to ‘COVID-19 and precarious housing: paying guest accommodation in a metropolitan Indian city’ by Sairama Raju Marella, Krishna Priya and Pooja Vincia D’Souza (2022). Based on empirical research, the chapter provides an evidence-based understanding of how tenants and operators in paying guest accommodation respond to COVID-19 pandemic impacts on their housing situation and management in Bengaluru, India. The chapter is clear in explaining the inadequacy of the paying guest accommodation sector in protecting the health and safety and tenancy rights of occupants, while highlighting the failure of this sector to accommodate its actors (tenants and operators), both physically and financially, as regards their pandemic-induced needs. Nonetheless, the research is limited in articulating detail on how tenants experience living in overcrowded and unhygienic housing situations, and the impact on their physical and mental health.

The COVID-19 pandemic and marginalised households

Tenants living in marginal housing forms, such as paying guest accommodation, are a particularly vulnerable demographic and one of the hardest hit of the COVID-19 pandemic due to their limited employment prospects, low savings and housing precariousness. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the vulnerability of these population groups due to widening social and economic inequalities, putting them at risk of displacement, homelessness and unemployment, both in the Global South and in the Global North. Such unprecedented shocks have prompted urban researchers and thinkers to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affects tenants in rental housing, including marginal housing forms, and what the implications are for their future housing choices (Baker et al, 2020; Manville et al, 2020; Soaita, 2021).

I agree with the arguments and position taken by Ruchika Lall (2022) in this chapter: that the temporalities of informal settlements are not considered in state narratives that seek to provide alternate formal housing solutions; and that formal housing solutions can lead to precarity, with their own temporalities. Rather than critiquing the chapter, I place the author's arguments in a wider frame of the aspiring global city and its planning modalities. This lens emerges naturally from my involvement in the intense debates that are currently taking place on the draft proposals of the Delhi Master Plan 2041 (Delhi Development Authority, 2021), which is likely to reinforce the exclusionary nature of the present plan (the Delhi Master Plan 2021 [Delhi Development Authority, 2007]) and further enhance the housing precarities of the poor.

Contrary to the incremental processes of building and consolidating housing, livelihoods and lives that are inherent in informal settlements, the temporalities of urban planning are based on altruistic visions for the future, articulated for citizens by their political representatives or rulers, and translated by city planners into master plans (Banerjee, forthcoming). The vision for the current Delhi Master Plan 2021 is ‘to make Delhi a global metropolis and a world-class city’ (Delhi Development Authority, 2007: 2). According to Ghertner (2015: 10): ‘Like other utopian projects, world-class city making is oriented toward not progressive improvement, but an already known conclusion. It thereby sketches the interim as but a medium for reaching the anticipated future.’ This is very different from the jagged everyday trajectories of informal building, brick by brick, which is intensely aspirational but determined by the temporalities of the here and now rather than a futuristic temporality of metropolitan scale.

Introduction

With increasing rural-to-urban migration, the growing demand for housing and the severe dearth (Zia et al, 2019) in supply are not surprising. Migrant populations largely rely on rental accommodations to meet their housing needs. In India, thousands of young adults aged between 18 and 30, from relatively income-poor segments, migrate to urban centres each year for education or employment, seeking inexpensive accommodation for the duration of their stay (Government of India, 2017). In cities with high economic growth and employment opportunities, this demand for affordable housing is being addressed by the mushrooming of a particular typology of informal rental housing, colloquially known as ‘paying guest accommodations’ (PGs). Informal housing of this type is generally single sex in nature, cash based and rented out for either short-term or long-term durations.

PGs usually involve three main stakeholders: tenants, landowners and operators – third-party actors who manage the facilities. These shared accommodations, while being affordable and viable, often fall short in terms of adequacy. Adequacy in the context of rental housing refers to the quality of the housing in terms of ventilation, lighting, hygiene and so on. Affordability, here, refers to the financial capacity of an individual to rent a house, and viability refers to factors such as proximity to places of work and access to transport and social and physical infrastructure (Deb, 2016).

Introduction

By discussing the perspectives and experiences of residents living in informal housing in Caracas, Venezuela, and Sydney, Australia, this chapter responds to this special issue's call regarding precarious housing and well-being, focusing on vulnerable, low-income populations, such as slum dwellers and international students. This chapter unpacks the common elements found in the two rather different case studies regarding how informal housing is produced, accessed and experienced, and the perceived impacts on its residents’ well-being.

Pendall et al (2012) argue that substandard quality, unaffordability, overcrowding and the failure to meet people's needs are the main characteristics of precarious housing. Closely related to this concept, and with a strong focus on the Global South, informal housing has traditionally been defined as that ‘built by artisans and small, local builders with or for the users and usually without official authorization’ (Turner, 1976: 1143). On a similar note, but focusing on the Global North, Gurran et al (2019: 9) define informal housing as ‘housing that contravenes existing planning, building, or tenancy rules, or which offers residents few protections within these rules’. Informality often involves precariousness, but, at the same time, it encompasses broader discussions on production of the space, economy, employment, activities and housing (Porter et al, 2011; Roy, 2005; 2009); hence, ‘informality’ is the term adopted in this chapter.

There is a well-established focus on informal housing and its corresponding challenges and opportunities in the Global South (encompassing developing countries).

It is my pleasure to respond to and reflect on Francesca Francesca Perugia's (2022) chapter about the attributes of social resilience in refugees’ settlement patterns and housing choices. First, it is refreshing to see a discussion of housing, as it is an often-forgotten aspect of the refugee settlement journey. Despite its importance, not much has been written on housing as part of the refugee settlement process. As Fozdar and Hartley (2014) demonstrate, safe, appropriate and secure housing is crucial for the integration and settlement of humanitarian entrants, as establishing a home is a vital part of the regaining of ontological security (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). However, as they and others clarify (Fozdar and Hartley, 2014; Ziersch et al, 2017), recently arrived humanitarian entrants and asylum seekers in Australia experience barriers in securing housing and often need to go through multiple housing moves in their first few years in the country. This has been the result of years of minimal government investment in social housing across the country and an ongoing fiscal housing policy that has led to a national housing affordability crisis. It has also been a result of ongoing inadequate income support for refugees settling in Australia.

Housing is crucial for developing the feeling of belonging and a sense of home in the community (Levin, 2016). Yet, for refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in Australia without any social or cultural capital, finding secure housing is almost impossible; what used to be migrant gateway suburbs are no longer affordable for newly arrived communities (Easthope et al, 2017), and refugees and asylum seekers (as well as other ethnic and migrant groups)

Introduction

Access to energy is widely acknowledged to be a fundamental determinant of human well-being (Bridge et al, 2018). Restricted access to energy limits at least three pathways out of poverty: improved health, extended education and greater livelihood opportunities (Ouedraogo, 2013: 29). The importance of energy in society is encapsulated in the frequently quoted statement by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) in 2012: ‘Energy is the golden thread that connects economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability’. Energy is implicated in our every practical endeavours.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) signify an important global agreement on human development objectives by 2030. The first target of SDG7 – ‘By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services’ – represents a hugely ambitious mission given that the figure for those without electricity is estimated at close to 1 billion and the number of those dependent upon solid cooking fuels is about 3 billion people globally (International Energy Agency, 2019: 98, 87). Solid-fuel cooking is known to cause health problems (see Figure 5.1). A great many of these people are the urban poor of the Global South. For people living in informal settlements or urban slums in the Global South, the energy experience is particularly challenging. Most characterisations of slums concur with the path-breaking UN Challenge of Slums (UN Habitat, 2003: 12), which defines a slum as a settlement that combines to some degree: inadequate access to safe water, sanitation and other infrastructure; overcrowding; poor-quality housing; and insecure residential status.

Ruchika Lall's (2022) chapter, ‘Housing temporalities: state narratives and precarity in the Global South’, provides important insights into various elements of housing precariousness in Delhi. The empirical evidence is based contextually in the Indian capital city, but the analytical arguments have wide-ranging implications for framing housing problems in other Global South metropolises. The chapter's notion of ‘housing temporalities’ draws attention to the varied factors that deepen the housing precariousness of marginalised populations in Delhi. While being attentive to the role of the state in creating new forms of vulnerability of the urban poor, it also invites readers to recognise how different housing practices (and arrangements) shape the agency and choice of the affected groups.

This framing has two key implications. First, it prompts state officials, urban planners and grass-roots leaders to revisit how the short-term strategies and long-term urban agenda inform processes of generating viable policy to improve the housing, health and well-being of specific sectors. It is particularly crucial to turn a critical gaze on the processes of these strategies, as well as the impacts (intended or not) on the everyday living conditions and strategic aspirations of housing ‘beneficiaries’. Second, Lall's framework underscores the socio-temporal dimensions of housing precariousness in many unequal metropolises like Delhi, drawing attention to the structural violence embedded within the processes of (un) housing. Indeed, unpacking the elements of violence that occur slowly over time reminds us to be mindful of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called ‘spatial amnesia’, where (unseen) communities are imaginatively erased and uncoupled from the dominant national/urban future and memory.