In their chapter examining comparative experiences of informal housing residents in Caracas and Sydney, Quintana Vigiola (2022) makes three key propositions: first, despite the often discussed/highlighted negative impacts, informal housing can very well have positive impacts on residents’ well-being; second, informal housing residents make use of various psychosocial and physical strategies to improve their housing experience, which, in turn, leads to improvement of their perception of overall well-being; and, third, meaningful commonalities can be identified in terms of informal housing residents’ perceptions of housing and well-being across cities in the Global South and North. In this reply to Quintana Vigiola (2022), I will engage with these three propositions, drawing on my own research in informal housing settlements in a Southern context.

I begin with Quintana Vigiola's (2022) first proposition on the positive impacts of informal housing on residents’ well-being. Indeed, the literature on informal housing often tends to focus on the negative effects of such housing arrangements and the precarity associated with them. In comparison, there have been many fewer studies and much less written on how particular modes of informal dwellings can also have positive effects on residents’ well-being. I would like to expand on this by reflecting on my research in two informal settlements in Dhaka, one being Korail – a very large slum – and the other being Town Hall Camp – a former refugee camp – where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork. I found that not all people in these settlements lived there because of an inability to move out due to a lack of economic means.