17 Informality, housing and work The view from Indian cities Gautam Bhan This chapter interrogates whether the conceptual frameworks and approaches developed within urban practice on informal settlements apply equally well to informal livelihoods, and, particularly, how urban planning, engineering and design might better respond to such livelihoods. It does so by focusing on the links between informality, housing and work with evidence and examples drawn from Indian cities. Research, policy and practice within informal housing and informal livelihood have a lot to learn from each other, and conversations that begin that inter-referencing are essential and critical. Housing versus houses: the context and frames Anyone who has spent time in informal settlements knows that the income-poor make at least three kinds of housing choices that are driven by the nature of their work. First, the nature, design and form of the house they self-construct often refect the need to use the house for work, storage and commerce as well as for residential purposes. Second, and more importantly, the location of where they live – whether they do so legally or in tension with law and master plans in the “slum”– is dominantly determined based on proximity and access to employ- ment. Often, therefore, workers will tolerate poor material quality of a house that is well located rather than take a materially and structurally “better” house that makes livelihood unviable. Third, investing in the housing unit itself, especially for those who build and improve houses incrementally over a period of time, is dependent on work and wages/earnings. In other words, not only can you not afford a better house if wages and earnings are unreliable or inadequate, you also cannot improve the house you currently live in. In many ways, at individual, household and city-scales, the housing question is, in many ways, a livelihoods question. To understand this more deeply, we must remember that housing is not houses. Beyond just the dwelling unit or the house, housing is an assemblage of location, services, work and tenure. Elsewhere, my colleagues and I have described a framework that argues that housing has to be three things: adequate, affordable and viable. 1 The frst two are familiar to most, touching upon the material adequacy of a dwelling unit, its size, its affordability and its tenure