Session 7 - Lilongwe

Where does a policy circuit start? The history of the undoing of an experiment in low-income housing: Lilongwe’s Traditional Housing

By Deborah Potts

Related Abstract

In the early years after Lilongwe became Malawi’s capital city (the late 1970s/early 1980s), its planned  low-income residential areas, known as Traditional Housing Areas (THAs) were considered to be  something of a model for such urban housing in terms of the practices and policies of those times. They were site-and-service schemes; they were very low-cost, reflecting in appropriate ways Malawi’s  very limited financial capacity; the building standards and types of infrastructure adopted were simple  and cheap and mainly shaped by public health principles. However, in 1979, Malawi was one of the  first countries in the world to experience the pressures of the neoliberal turn, before this was manifest  in actual policies in much of the so-called Global North. The shift in the values and objectives of its  housing institutions towards more market-oriented schemes meant that housing for higher-income  groups became prioritised and financing for the THAs dried up by 1982, leading to the predictable  outcomes of serious overcrowding and dangerous sanitation problems.  

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