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The key concept of the Global Strategy for Shelter, and its successor the Habitat Agenda, is that of enabling; of governments' stepping back from housing production and measures to control the price of outputs and, instead, working to enable the current and potential suppliers of housing to do what they do best. A major part of the enabling process is to set in place a regulatory context in which urban development can be sustainable and of the scale required for all to be adequately housed. This inevitably means a reduction of standards so that they are realistic. Two groups who are currently supplying housing are “transformers” and home-based enterprise (HBE) operators:UL>Transformers are households who take a dwelling that is designed as a finished item and extend and alter it to fit their needs better. They supply housing goods – rooms, services, improvements to bothHBE operators use housing in ways that differ from the intention of the plan. In doing so, they tend to alter and extend it, they also tend to require and afford more than those without HBEs; they are actors in the housing process.Some HBEs have added to household incomes and their ability to pay for housing while not generating much in the way of negative externalities. In this paper, the authors argue that regulatory frameworks have much to learn from these organisations and that standards should be liberalised to cope with and benefit from them.
