Conversions: The emerging informalisation of housing in the Global North

Abstract

Housing informality in the Global North is becoming an increasingly important topic amongst planners. In this paper, we build on recent debates on informality and planning to highlight forms of housing informality that emerge at the intersection of affordability crises, and capitalism’s new extractivist frontiers through digital platforms. Using the lens of conversions, we show how the flexible transformation of building uses, from commercial to residential (and vice versa) by landlords create new and emerging forms of informality and subsequent planning challenges. These conversions present three specific characteristics: platform-led rapidity, regulatory grey areas, and professional intermediation. These are being extended through corporate and institutional alignments with for-profit motives of rent extraction, and by rapid real estate investment dynamics. Such conversions do not involve material of physical alterations to the built form and thus remain invisible. They exist flexibly in the grey areas of the law, and as a consequence, the rights of tenants, users and those of the wider community become weaker. We focus on examples of property guardianship and digital platforms-enabled home-sharing in England to illustrate our argument, and propose emphasising conversions as dynamic processes to draw attention to their implications for planning theory and practice.