South Africa's 'housing programme' transfers a fully-funded serviced site and house to qualifying beneficiaries with aims of progressively addressing poverty through homeownership. Despite delivering close to 3 million houses since 1994, informal housing persists, featuring even in some of these new neighbourhoods. This paper focuses on the intersection between a particular mode of informal housing, backyard dwellings, and state-subsidised low-income housing projects. Backyard dwellings arguably contradict state housing objectives by symbolising informality and disorder; a symptom of inadequacy that the housing programme strives to overcome. We consider first the views and experiences of landlords (owners of state-subsided houses) and tenants (occupiers of privately-provided backyard dwellings) in a section of Alexandra, Johannesburg. We then reflect on the potential of backyard accommodation within postapartheid housing delivery, arguing that despite challenges, the phenomenon of planned, state-led infrastructure generating secondary accommodation represents an opportunity rather than an example of failed modernity. South Africa's backyard dwellings resonate with similar forms of self-funded and managed rental stock across the global South. As a quick, flexible and regenerative housing asset, cumulative acceptance of such rental markets is necessaryalong with viewing the driving actors as astute innovators in shelter and livelihood provision.

Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people's experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries reshape the links between their physical and socio-economic mobility, and how does this impact on their ability to build secure urban futures? Experiences of families moving to five peripheral settlements indicate two linked challenges to the social and economic mobility of the peripheralised urban poor: first, their immediate and individual ability to be mobile within the city and second, the longer-term social mobility of their households. While trajectories towards secure urban citizenship for all remain a policy aspiration, housing policies and practices are placing this on hold or even reversing this, with mobility constraints locking many low-income groups into marginality. Introduction: Peripheral relocation and (Im)mobilityMany cities in middle-income countries are witnessing significant expansions in the production of state-subsidised housing, at a scale that is relocating millions of people. Their promise is to deliver housing, infrastructure and services that meet universal standards of decency and sustainable human settlements and, at the same time, to replace informal tenure arrangements, services, and governance with legible and governable urban environments (Patel, 2016). The danger is that delayed or partial 2021 the Author(s). Published by informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & Francis group.

Recent years have seen a rising interest in peri-urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city-regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in South Africa and Ethiopia, this article draws out the epistemologies of researching African urban peripheries and presents a new conceptual framework. It offers a language for interpreting processes of peripheral development and change, highlighting five distinct but overlapping logics which we term speculative, vanguard, auto-constructed, transitioning and inherited. Rather than describing bounded peripheral spaces, we argue that these logics can co-exist, hybridize and bleed into each other in different ways in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Centring our methodological practices of comparative analysis, and privileging the voices of those living in urban peripheries, the article employs critical readings of urban scholarship before exploring how these five logics illuminate the complex processes of urban peripheral evolution and transformation. Formulating these logics helps to fill a lacuna in urban conceptualization with potential relevance beyond African contexts.

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! 'Rooms' and 'spaces' are two closely linked forms of accommodation where the unit of occupation and exchange is a portion of a larger building or property, within which services and facilities are shared. 'Rooms' and 'spaces' in the inner city represented two of very few typologies research participants were aware of that allowed them access to the livelihood opportunities Johannesburg had to offer. Through participant observation and qualitative interviews this study explores two buildings featuring informal rooms and spaces and one building featuring formal rooms and spaces in Johannesburg's inner city. While formal rooms represented the most stable support to those specific occupants, there were several 'barriers to entry' including the prerequisite of a stable income. There was much to be learnt from the flexibility and diversity of rooms and spaces on the informal market, which enabled occupants to cope with insecure livelihood opportunities. The research demonstrated the incredible resilience of occupants in the face of an extreme shortage of affordable accommodation in Johannesburg's inner city (Tissington, 2013). However, the findings suggested an adverse relationship between accommodation and livelihoods demonstrated by the three 'forms' of rooms and spaces, where the only form available to people with the least secure livelihoods is that which, in turn, subjects them to the greatest insecurity.

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In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women. Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessarily impact on men in terms of their power, resources and employment but in complex ways including positive and negative. The home remains significant for many men's desires for authority and identity. Using the lens of masculinity, this paper considers the ways in which men are experiencing this housing intervention, revealing a complex mix of outcomes in terms of their sense of identity, their relationships and their financial pressures and income generation. It draws on empirical work in South Africa to illuminate the importance of focusing on men in relation to housing and offers key questions for future research.

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