| Abstract | In 1978, six years after the implementation of the first series of self-help housing projects by the World Bank, a major critique was launched and since then the significance of this new strategy has been debated by academics and policy makers. This study groups them into two schools of thought : the convivialists and radicalists. The convivialists is seen to view the selfhelp housing as a realistic approach to solve the housing problem of low income people in cognizance of the financial situation of the Third World countries. Self-help housing, according to the convivialists, provides affordable and adequate housing for low income urban families. The radicalists, however, see self-help housing as a mean of exploitation. It is viewed as a tool of capitalist mode of production to maintain and expand the reproduction of social labour in the name of dweller control. In this situation the capitalist sector gets a scope for not providing adequate housing to its workforce. Within a framework juxtaposing the convivialists' and radicalists' theoretical debate, a critical assessment is made on the basis of three different types of settlements of three different categories of city of Indonesia: Jakarta (the metropolitan city), Yogyakarta (a second order city), and Jember (an agricultural service based city). The settlements are : 'kampung' (the informal self-help settlements), 'KIP' (the quasi-informal self-help settlements), and 'Perumnas' (the formal self-help housing). The dominant indicators of self-help housing are self-management, self-finance, participation in physical developments, and self-design. In contrast, self-help housing would appear limited by the measure of indicators such as self-labor (non-hired labor), availability of free time, and possession of construction skills. The bigger the city size, greater is the potential of self-help in the Perumnas housing. Analogously, the smaller the dty size, the greater is the potential of self-help in KIP and kampung housing. In the economic dimension, indebtedness of Perumnas residents is not so much caused by capitalist penetration through sale of building materials by large capitalist enterprises, as radicalists believe, as it is due to the speed of construction that calls for quick cash forcing the residents to borrow. Regarding the issue of commoditization, it appears that the incidence of selling of houses from their original owners to others is very few in Perumnas (about 9 % ), whereas in KIP and kampung the selling respectively accounts for 17 and 19 per cent. On the social dimension, the survey shows little evidence for the notion that Perumnas projects would require the residents to live in isolation from one another. Social segregation in Perumnas, due to linear and grid pattern of the settlements, as claimed by radicalists, is not found in the settlement areas of this study. On the physical dimension, the study tracked changes and demolition of a considerable proportion of the Perumnas core houses. About 48 per cent of the houses were reconstructed partly and about 9 per cent totally. The radicalists proposition which states that a very minimal standard of state self-help projects result in inadequate integration with the overall urban stt·ucture does not get much empirical support from this study. On the whole, the role of self-help housing within the Global Strategy for Shelter (GSS) will remain relevant and realistic into the future. Self-help strategy is the only approach to ensure affordable housing for the low income families of cities in countries like Indonesia. A model is developed which shows three major points of departure in the debate of selfhelp housing, 'terminology', 'concept', and 'fact' which are linked forming a triangle. Using this model, convivialists are shown to conceptualize self-help housing as 'dweller control' or 'selfmanagement' or 'self-design', whereas radicalists see its structural relationship with the political and socio-economic system, and view it as 'self-exploitation' through a 'self-built' or 'selfconstruction' process. The self-help housing debate appears rather useless and futile with a view to its practices. The net result is rather adding to the confusion which often leads to justification of non-action by public policy makers in support of self-help housing initiatives. This study proposes that more efforts should be made on the side of ' verification' of concept and fact within the model which will be conducive to improvement of self-help housing practices in the future. This is reinforced through a 'Degrees and Context of Self-Help Housing Concept' model, which shows the interrelationship between the levels of self-help housing, types of settlement, and city category. This model offers guidelines for application of the varied forms of self-help housing. |