Amanuel Alemu Desta
Architecture, Dilla University, Ethiopia
“Visualizing Housing Practices as Common Knowledge: Countering Data Neglect through Participatory Architectural Documentation of Kebele and Kuteba Houses in Dilla, Ethiopia”
Urban housing data in Ethiopia’s secondary cities remains largely invisible, limiting transparency
and constraining evidence-based planning. This study addresses this challenge by transforming
neglected housing information into accessible urban knowledge. The project focuses on two
dominant modalities of state-owned public rental housing: Kebele houses, nationalized under
the Derg regime, and Kuteba houses, purpose-built for low- and middle-income groups. Despite
their prevalence, both typologies exist in a state of “spatial anonymity,” with little measured
data, mapping, or documentation available to residents or municipal authorities.
With mixed-method participatory approach employed, combining field surveys, parcel
measurements, condition assessments, and photographic inventories with resident interviews, and collaborative storytelling. Visualization techniques such as measured drawings, GIS-based mapping, and photogrammetry were used to represent spatial organization and transformations. Over four years, student groups from Dilla University’s Department of Architecture contributed to the documentation of three Kebele sites and two Kuteba sites, producing maps, typological analyses, activity diagrams, and materials used. These outputs reveal structural weaknesses, informal modifications, and socio-economic shifts in material use, and occupancy practices that challenge official governance.
By replicating these findings within Ethiopia’s broader housing history, the study highlights how data neglect perpetuates epistemic injustice, denying residents access to basic information
about their living environments. Documenting and visualizing these units becomes an act of
social justice, turning hidden state assets into common. The project contributes directly to
Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 16 (Peace,
Justice, and Strong Institutions), while also seeding the possibility of a dynamic, participatory urban database. Ultimately, the research demonstrates how participatory architectural visualization can counter data opacity, democratize urban governance, and advance equitable housing futures in Ethiopia’s secondary cities.
Sarah Flinspach
Urban & Regional Planning, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
“Planning to End Homelessness:
Classification of Homeless Response System Data for Urban Planners in Washington, DC”Homelessness has become an intractable issue in American cities. Counter to stereotypes, researchers have found that the root cause can be attributed to high costs of rent resulting from housing shortages. While both city planning departments and homeless response systems create plans to address housing shortages and homelessness respectively, they rarely collaborate despite the connection between these issues. Few plans mention the other system, let alone draw a connection between housing stock, land use, and homelessness. Furthermore, planning departments frequently do not include
populations experiencing homelessness when creating population projections and housing
production targets because the underlying data source they use, the American Community
Survey (ACS), fails to adequately count and report this demographic. This is true nationally
and in Washington, DC specifically. This project seeks to begin to address this issue by classifying data reports generated by the homeless services Continuum of Care (CoC). It starts by explaining both the history of housing planning and the framework for homeless response in Washington, DC. Then, it performs an environmental scan to identify all the data reports that describe the population experiencing homelessness in Washington, DC. Finally, it classifies the reports by context and content. This project finds integrating information about people experiencing homelessness into housing planning and production targets is not an unrealistic goal. The DC CoC prepares this information regularly and can provide accounts of current and historical trends. These two data
classification methods are appropriate for organizing reports related to the homeless response system. With a better understanding of each data set, the DC OVice of Planning will be more equipped to develop a projection of people experiencing homelessness, shelter needs, and how an increase of aVordable housing may reduce the rate of homelessness over time. This project represents the beginning of a series of steps to improve collaboration between planning departments and homeless response systems, particularly in Washington, DC.
Lauren Harper
The Rent Brigade, Los Angeles, USA
“Data During Disasters: Tenants Producing Knowledge in Los Angeles”
Who creates housing knowledge? In Los Angeles, the organized real estate interests use profits
extracted from renters to fund research and lobbying to promote their vision of a speculative,
deregulated housing market. The tenant movement requires the same investment in knowledge production and narrative change to advance our vision of dignified, decommodified housing that protects the rights of tenants. A series of acute crises in Los Angeles in 2025 provided an opening for a new grassroots tenant group to produce their own research and take control of the narrative around tenant rights. The Rent Brigade was born out of the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, which destroyed over 10,000 homes and displaced tens of thousands of
Angelenos. The group began with a crowd-sourced spreadsheet tracking rent gouging, then
quickly brought together organizers, researchers, web developers, and tenant organizers to
scrape data, produce research, and hold rent gougers accountable. When federal agents began
immigration raids across Los Angeles County in June 2025, the Rent Brigade turned their
energy to an eviction protection campaign to protect immigrant tenants from displacement and deportation. In this paper, I show how the Rent Brigade created new datasets, produced knowledge, and advocated for tenant rights in response to the Los Angeles wildfires and federal immigration raids. The Rent Brigade’s efforts resulted in near-term policy wins for tenants, while exposing the need for more robust tenant protections during disasters. In the longer term, the Rent Brigade brought new people and skills into the tenant movement, increasing the movement’s capacity for knowledge production and narrative change to expand tenant rights and build power toward social housing in Los Angeles.
Dagnachew Amberbir Ketema
Urban Studies, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa
“The Epistemic Erasure of the Informal: Counter-Mapping Data Justice and
Redevelopment in Addis Ababa”Addis Ababa is currently navigating a rapid and profoundly disruptive spatial metamorphosis
driven by state-led smart-city initiatives and modernist planning. The new corridor redevelopment serves as the ideological epicenter of this shift. Within the emerging paradigm
of data justice, this structural transformation exposes a critical blind spot: vernacular and
informal urbanism is frequently excluded as actionable data within municipal planning systems like the Addis Ababa Cadastral Information System (AA-CADIS). Relying on Automatic Feature Extraction (AFE) software programmed with rigid geometric constraints, available evidence indicates the state often underrepresents informal settlements in official cadastres. This paper refines the concept of Algorithmic Redlining—defined here as the systematic production of unequal spatial recognition through computational classification systems that disproportionately exclude informal urban forms from official planning datasets, thereby influencing institutional decision-making. By prioritizing Euclidean spatial metrics, planning algorithms generate representations that classify vibrant neighborhoods as “vacant land,” representations which planning institutions then rely upon to authorize unrecorded displacement. Methodologically, the research operationalizes critical cartography and spatial ethnography to reconstruct the spatialities removed by the redevelopment, revealing the dismantling of essential social and economic vernacular infrastructures. The findings suggest that the groundwork for housing injustice is frequently laid within databases long before it materializes in physical clearance. Ultimately, the paper proposes a Vernacular Data Justice Framework, arguing that representation within housing data is a fundamental prerequisite for spatial survival.
Joseph Kwasnik
Urban Studies, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Germany
“Manifesting the Market: Data Practice and Asymmetric Legibility in
the Short-Term Rental Market”Short-term rental regulation is often framed as a problem of missing public data. Yet the same market can appear data-rich to the operators who work within it. This article examines that asymmetry through an ethnographic study of intermediary hosts in Warsaw: small-scale operators who manage or lease dwellings owned by others through co-hosting, property-management and rent-to-rent arrangements. Existing research has shown how data infrastructures have enabled the expansion of
corporate landlords and institutional investors, while studies of STR professionalisation have largely identified commercial activity through listings, portfolio size and revenue performance. Less is known about how smaller actors acquire practical control over housing by interpreting uncertain information and carrying it into owner relationships. Drawing on four semi-structured interviews, whole-day shadowing and digital ethnography, the article follows how three operators learned to recognise viable properties, decided when forecasts were persuasive enough to justify commitment, and used operational information to maintain access once a dwelling entered short-term rental use. Their advantage did not arise from complete or consistently accurate knowledge. Market estimates, pricing recommendations and alerts became consequential because they arrived through tools and relationships already connected to decisions about property use. I develop the concept of asymmetric legibility to describe this unequal capacity to move from representation to intervention. Public authorities and civic projects often reconstruct STR activity from listings, complaints and registration records that still require verification and institutional authorisation. Operators can act on provisional information while prices, agreements and future uses remain unsettled. Manifesting with data describes how forecasts, peer advice and entrepreneurial conviction make speculative housing futures credible enough to organise present work. These practices show how professionalised forms of data-driven housing control can be assembled without property ownership. The politics of STR data lies in the unequal routes through which knowledge reaches housing decisions, allowing some actors to intervene while the future use of a dwelling
remains open, while others must reconstruct the change after it has occurred.
Rohit Lahoti
Independent Researcher and Urban Development Practitioner, Mumbai, India
“Data Justice through Multi-dimensional Housing Literacy Platform (CIHab): Democratizing Informal Housing Data in Mumbai”
Informal settlements across urban India persist not only because of resource scarcity, but because the legal, technical, procedural, and financial data governing their redevelopment futures remains locked behind opaque, technocratic systems — inaccessible to the very residents whose lives it shapes. This paper conceptualises this condition as a problem of data justice: informal housing data is technically public, yet practically unusable by the communities it governs, denying them visibility within, and equal terms of engagement with, the data systems that determine their housing futures. Drawing on Linnet Taylor’s (2017) data justice framework and Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, the paper introduces housing literacy — and, more specifically, multi-dimensional housing literacy — as a missing conceptual
bridge between data justice theory and housing scholarship. Situating this within Mumbai and
Maharashtra’s acute affordable housing deficit and its flagship Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS), the paper examines the Centre for Inclusive Habitat (CIHab), a practice-based housing literacy platform cofounded by the author1, as an empirical case of an institutional model that attempts to democratise informal housing data. It traces how CIHab’s four-pillar literacy framework — legal, technical, procedural, and financial — together with its Resources archive, operationalises the data justice pillars
of visibility, engagement, and anti discrimination, and situates this model within theories of informational capability, epistemic justice, and planning co-production. It then critically examines the institutional limitations facing such data justice interventions more broadly — gaps in offline dissemination, data currency, monitoring and evaluation, funding sustainability, and digital access — before considering pathways for scaling beyond CIHab’s pilot. The paper’s central theoretical contribution is that housing literacy, understood as a multi-dimensional capability rather than a single
act of disclosure, is a necessary condition for data justice in informal housing contexts, and a necessary — though not sufficient — condition for strengthening community agency in participatory, communityled urban development.
Bruno Lana
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, Chile
“Making Informality Visible: A Measurement Architecture for Informal Settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean”
The share of the urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing in Latin America and the Caribbean fell from 31.9% in 2000 to 17.0% in 2016, but has since remained virtually unchanged at 16.9% in 2022. This stagnation in the main indicator of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 increases the need for timely and spatially precise information on where precarious settlements are located, how they change and which deprivations affect their residents. Yet, measurement remains fragmented across censuses, household surveys, registries, administrative systems, civil-society cadasters and emerging geospatial models. Moreover, most of those sources were not designed to register informal settlements. This paper compares official territorial measurement in Brazil, governmental and civil-society field registries in Chile and Argentina, and AI-assisted mapping initiatives applied in Colombia and Honduras. Based on them, it proposes a four layer regional architecture that could guide the development of a regional monitoring database
of informal settlements, to be incorporated into the Housing and Urban Intelligence platform, an IDB-ECLAC initiative. The paper argues that artificial intelligence is useful for identifying candidate areas, updating boundaries and prioritizing fieldwork, but has inherent limitations in key adequate housing dimensions, such as tenure, regulatory status, affordability or service conditions. A credible regional system must therefore integrate geospatial evidence with census, surveys, administrative and community validated data, while clearly distinguishing predicted, validated and official information.
Aki Lee
Social Design, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
“Artistic Practice in Negotiating Urban
Authorities: An Urban Ethnobotanical
Archive as Counterdata“Quantitative data has long served as an instrument of urban governance in China, where statistics such as population and land revenue are the indices through which cities are planned, approved, and audited. This paper asks what other kinds of data can enter that process. It begins in Lianjiang Community in Qingyuan, Guangdong Province, southern China, a settlement built as the city’s new administrative core and laid out in the work-unit form typical of the period: enclosed compounds. Taking the government-led street renewal project of “opening up the walls” as a case study, the paper draws on the reflexive documentation of the author, who worked on the project as the artist, across two phases. The first phase concerns method, specifically how an artist navigates public authority. Working within a dual artand-architecture framework, the artist mediated among public-sector actors, construction workers, and residents. This third-sector position opened new methodological pathways for artistic participation. Hundreds of plants found throughout the community were collected and consolidated into an archive through a collective writing process. The data was gathered not through questionnaires or structured interviews but through a mobile, rolling structure deployed on the street to generate encounters, followed by community roadshows, botany and gardening workshops, and a co-writing summer camp.
The resulting dataset is not a botanical record. It is a form of non-statistical, informal data embedded with memory, botanical information, and other community-based ecological knowledge connected with plants. Read relationally, the archive unfolds the entanglement of plants, place, and people. Each entry traces a migration trajectory that makes residents’ ties to their rural homelands visible, while the everyday, informal use of plants reveals a gradual, tacit reclaiming of space that has
shaped the community’s urban life since the compounds were built. Reintroduced into the planning process, this bottom-up knowledge informed the co-design and handson workshops that reshaped the community gardens, and
later returned to residents as a set of flashcards used in seasonal events at the new community center. The second phase, currently ongoing, concerns transmission, specifically how situated knowledge travels beyond its origin. Departing from the community as a situated source, it asks how such knowledge moves and how it opens further dialogue. The work involves designing a data structure, applying data visualization as a
set of technical steps, and reconfiguring the collected knowledge so that its layers and relational entanglements remain legible. Digitizing the archive on an online platform will make visible the transformations and couplings these plants carry, connecting the community’s situated knowledge to emerging discourse on urban-ecological futures.
Iago Martínez Durán
Housing Studies and Urban Governance, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Instituto de Estudos e Desenvolvemento de Galicia (IDEGA), Spain
“What governance cannot count: data politics and housing evidence
in contemporary Spain”
Samaneh M. Sharmeh
Land Management and Geospatial Science, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany
“Algorithmic Suitability or Spatial Exclusion? A Critical Geospatial Analysis of Data-Driven Social Housing Site Selection in Munich’s Zone 22”
In 1920s Vienna, Otto Neurath’s Isotype method turned housing data into a public resource. A century later, site selection for social housing increasingly relies on algorithmic tools that
operate as black boxes. I examine whether these tools impose a market logic that conflicts with the redistributive mission of social housing. Drawing on data justice, I treat suitability weights as normative choices rather than technical parameters. Using Munich’s Zone 22, I
constructed three scenarios (Market Efficiency, Ecological Precaution, and Social Housing Mission), each using Fuzzy AHP weights on a set of fuzzified spatial criteria combined through weighted linear combination. The Social Housing Mission weights prioritized access to public transport and services over land cost. Data include scraped property listings (ImmoScout24) as a proxy for official land values, OpenStreetMap features, Landsat 8 thermal imagery, and Bavarian flood hazard maps. Equity outcomes were measured with weighted Gini coefficients, Pareto frontiers, and Bivariate Local Moran’s I. The cost-driven scenario produces higher inequality in transit access (Gini 0.702) and proximity to schools and healthcare (0.401); the Social Housing Mission scenario reduces these to 0.627 and 0.312, drops of 10.7% and 22.2%. The Gini for land price increases slightly under equity (0.258 vs. 0.225), reflecting the lower weight given to cost. Flood risk inequality is negligible, and thermal inequality remains around 0.19 across all scenarios. The economic–
equity Pareto frontier contains only four hexagons, which indicates a sharp trade-off; the
economic–ecological frontier has eight, with ecological suitability above 0.76 for the most
cost-efficient sites. No algorithmic redlining clusters (High-High) appear, yet the equityweighted model increased the number of suitable-and-connected hexagons by 31. These
findings show that site-suitability algorithms are not neutral: their outputs reflect the values encoded in their weights. Social housing agencies must therefore align data-driven planning tools with redistributive goals, not borrow them uncritically from market contexts.
Astrid Pedersen
Consultant (The Good Economy), London, United Kingdom
” Resident participation in impact
measurement for social housing”Institutional capital now funds around 70% of new social housing supply in the UK, and impact
advisory firms occupy a distinctive position within this arrangement. Commissioned by fund
managers, they translate resident experience into the indicators, benchmarks and narratives that
inform investment decisions, portfolio comparison, and public claims about impact performance. This study examines how current impact measurement and reporting practices in social housing investment shape what counts as good housing, and what alternative methods could better integrate resident perspectives while remaining decision-useful for institutional investors. It focuses on reporting practice at an impact advisory firm, drawing on literature on account of upward and downward accountability, epistemic injustice, accounts of housing financialisation, co-production framework, and
account of rendering technical and trusteeship.
The research combines a coded document and visual analysis of eleven published impact reports, semi-structured interviews with four TGE practitioners and two fund managers, two documentary process-traces following resident testimony from transcript to published indicator or graphic, and reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with twelve residents across three housing funds. A prototype Neurath-style isotype panel, built from indicator categories already used in the corpus, tests an alternative representational form. I find a consistent asymmetry in how resident voice is rendered across the corpus. Positive resident experience is generally presented as individualised, attributed narrative, while negative experience is more often generalised or absorbed into an aggregated risk category, a pattern visible in two documentary process-traces and confirmed at scale in corpus-wide coding of testimonial function. In TGE-authored, investor-facing reports, resident quotes function mainly to legitimate claims established elsewhere in the text, a function markedly less common in the corpus’s two tenant-facing reports, which also place resident voice earlier and include named resident co-authorship. Security of tenure, named as central to good housing by residents and practitioners alike, is not coded as a measured indicator in any of the eleven reports. Resident interviews surfaced themes absent from the report corpus altogether, including home as emotional sanctuary and belonging expressed through named staff relationships rather than programme spend. Both fund managers interviewed described engaging with reports mainly through executive summaries and annual presentations, treating case studies as illustrative of a portfolio rather than as evidence in their own right, which helps explain why resident sampling has not been prioritised for representativeness.
These patterns sit within an unresolved tension. TGE’s own account of its intermediary role, and at least one fund manager’s account of their own practice, describe an active effort to widen what
investors treat as material to a fund’s performance. This effort operates within a structural constraint: TGE is commissioned and paid by the funds whose practice its reports assess, which bounds its capacity to hold clients accountable regardless of individual staff intent. The consistent absence of a documented, resident-facing feedback loop is best understood against this constraint, alongside evidence of an informal channel through which some resident concerns are already raised privately with funds, with real effect but no public trace. The findings suggest that impact reporting in social housing investment is built predominantly for upward accountability to capital providers, with resident concerns visible mainly where they coincide
with what an investor audience can verify, compare, and act on. Measuring security of tenure explicitly, sampling residents against existing survey data rather than through volunteer self-selection or property-manager referral, establishing a resident-facing account of how feedback has been acted on, and piloting isotype-style visualisations for discrete, countable metrics would address specific
gaps identified in this study.
Roberto Ponce-Lopez
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education
“The Housing Socioscope
An instrument to observe affordable housing as an innovation system”The world faces a housing affordability crisis, and the possible solutions are well documented at the policy level. What is scarce is the next step: turning that menu of policies into public innovation. In Mexico, the national model of housing production shows clear signs of exhaustion, while local governments, developers, and communities produce innovations all the time. Nobody documents these experiences, and nobody compares them, so they cannot travel and they cannot scale. This paper presents the research design of the Housing Socioscope, an instrument to observe affordable housing
as an innovation system. Its unit of analysis is the transactional dyad: the exchange between two
actors — what each one gives, what each one receives, and how each side sees the deal. Because every transaction has the same form, dyads can be compared across cases, cities, and countries. The instrument focuses on the supply side: cases where the supply of affordable housing is created, increased, or enabled. The pilot will study 12 to 15 cases in Mexico, selected from 20 candidates, and will follow them in a panel of three waves, so that failure can be observed when it happens. The paper
presents no results. It brings three open decisions to the Summer School: the interview question guide, the list of currencies of exchange, and the definition of observable failure. The documented cases will be published on a public, open-access platform. The goal of this research is to scale up innovation that increases the supply of affordable housing in Mexico.
Aditi Pradhan
Independent Researcher
“Draw by Draw: Data-driven Social Housing and the Reproduction of Communal Segregation in Ahmedabad”
In recent years, social housing in Ahmedabad has been allocated through computerised lotteries conducted by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the Ahmedabad
Urban Development Authority (AUDA), with most housing projects implemented under the
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–Urban (PMAY-U). Despite the growing digitisation of this process through Aadhaar-linked applications and centralised beneficiary databases, little is known about its communal outcomes. This paper analyses forty-two scheme-level allotment lists generated through seven computerised housing draws conducted between January 2017 and January 2026, reading them alongside the spatial location of the housing schemes they allocated. Religion is inferred from allottee names for 10,447 of the 13,500 published allotment records, allowing the communal distribution of allotments to be examined. Muslim allottees constitute just 3.34 per cent of the classified allotments, compared to Muslims’ 13.51 per cent share of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s
population in the 2011 Census. This underrepresentation is also geographically uneven. Two schemes in Makarba, located along the edge of Ahmedabad’s largest Muslim settlement, account for nearly two-thirds of all Muslim allottees in the mapped schemes, while the predominantly northern and western growth corridors, where most new social housing has
been constructed, record Muslim allotments of less than one per cent. Since any eligible household in the city may apply, and the published addresses show applicants travelling from across it, the composition of a given scheme has little to do with who lives nearby. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork on housing discrimination in Ahmedabad, the paper argues that this pattern reflects the constraints shaping where Muslim households can realistically seek and secure housing. The data-driven allocation system records only those attributes necessary for administering eligibility and allocation, even though religion remains the defining dimension of Ahmedabad’s residential geography. In a communally divided city, this allows religious inequalities to be reproduced without becoming visible within the system itself.
Najem Eddine Romdhane
Environmental Design, Performing Arts, Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts of Gabes, Institute of Arts and Crafts, Gabès, Tunisia
“Data Justice and the Visualisation of Troglodyte Housing Landscapes
in Southern Tunisia“Housing governance and knowledge production are increasingly informed by digital data, statistical classifications, and related tools of management and planning. Yet, the very same
instruments are at times blind to the diversity of dwelling worlds, as they are grounded in a limited set of categories fit to analyze a restricted number of housing forms. How to think about the plurality of housing landscapes, and in particular those which are not readily incorporated in standard categories? This question is addressed in this paper through an investigation into the specific case of troglodytic housing areas in Matmata (southern Tunisia), a region characterized by excavated dwellings grouped around subterranean courts. Overall, the paper asks how troglodyte dwelling units fit in housing governance knowledge systems, and more generally what alternative ways of documenting and representing housing there are. It combines analyses of architecture, spatial organization, and representations to think through mapping and diagramming as part of the process of generating alternative understandings of housing. Building upon data justice perspectives and Otto Neurath’s work on visual knowledge, the paper finally discusses possibilities for acknowledging marginal housing forms by going beyond aggregating quantitative data.
Participants of New Social Housing Programme for Doctoral Candidates in 2026: Aristotelis Antoniou (TU Wien), Tatjana Bergmeister (TU Wien), Beatriz Stambuk (TU Wien), Constanza Zeni (TU Wien), Christine Sattler (TU Wien), António Pedro Faria (TU Wien), Kerstin Pluch (TU Wien), Delilah Wallbank (London School of Economics), Benedikt Straňák (London School of Economics), Yichuan Guo (Politecnico di Milano), Antonio Couto Nunes (Universidade de São Paulo)