Ann Varley

Women heading households: Some more equal than others?

Abstract This paper explores the validity of the statement that one-third of the worlds households are headed by women. It examines the implications of using economic criteria to define household headship and of recent interest in woman-maintained households and concealed woman-headed households. There is a danger of underplaying the diversity of woman-headed households and of marginalizing older women by identifying woman-headed households with single mothers of dependent children. Ultimately, too narrow a focus on particular household types undermines our ability to further a truly gendered analysis of the household in development research and practice.

The reconquest of the historic centre: urban conservation and gentrification in Puebla, Mexico

This is one of the first studies evaluating the experience of gentrification in a developing country. The conservation of the historic centre of Puebla, Mexico, is analysed with particular attention to the uses to which renovated properties are put and the nature and motivations of the agents involved. Gentrification in Puebla constitutes the symbolic reconquest of a space over which the local middle classes feared they had lost moral authority. The class and ‘race’ symbolism of conservation and gentrification is emphasised.

Exiled to the home: Masculinity and ageing in urban Mexico

This study addresses the relationship between ageing and masculinity in urban Mexico. We examine the meaning of home for older men, asking why some live alone and what life at home is like for men whose working lives were largely spent elsewhere. We argue that the growing literature on men has neglected ageing because later life is associated with a subordinate form of masculinity. Although recent work on masculinity in Mexico has rejected the negative stereotyping of machismo, revealing the importance of the provider role to hegemonic masculinity, this role is gradually lost in later life. We conclude that its loss, together with the legacy of difficulties poorer men face in meeting family responsibilities throughout their life, disadvantages older men.

Intact or in tatters? Family care of older women and men in urban Mexico

This article asks how family relationships affect the living conditions of low-income elderly people in urban Mexico. There is little State provision of accommodation for the elderly, forcing older people to rely on their families for care. Yet many poorer families cannot afford to provide care, and some are unwilling to do so. In addition, families treat elderly men and women differently, with significant consequences for womens and mens housing conditions and wellbeing in later life.

The Mexican Landlord: Rental Housing in Guadalajara and Puebla

In Mexican cities, somewhere between one-third and one-half of all households rent or share accommodation. Over the years, even though rental housing has been in relative decline, the absolute numbers of tenant households have been increasing. Recently, because home ownership has become increasingly expensive, the Mexican state has been anxious to expand the stock of rental housing. However, its policies do not seem to be directed towards the majority of landlords, in part, at least, because the nature of the landlordism is not well understood. This paper examines the main features of landlords and landlordism in two major cities of Mexico, Guadalajara and Puebla. Based on surveys with tenants and landlords, it examines how landlords obtained their property, why they began to rent it, their socio-economic characteristics, their perceptions of the business of renting, and the mechanics of setting rent levels and selecting tenants.

Delivering the Goods: Solidarity, Land Regularisation and Urban Services

The Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL) offers fertile ground for the debate around change versus continuity which Stephen Morris (1993) identifies in interpretations of political reformism in Mexico. From its earliest days PRONASOL was promoted as ‘a new style of social policy’ giving ‘a new dimension to public investment and social expenditure’ (Gonzalez Tiburcio, 1992: 4–5)1 and seeking ‘to create a new relationship between the people and the state’ (Salinas, cited in Moguel, 1994: 167). The theme of a break with the past is stressed in PRONASOL publications such as Solidarity in National Development: New Relations between Society and Government (SEDESOL, 1993b)2 and has been taken up, sometimes uncritically, by commentators in Mexico and overseas. Even the Programme’s critics acknowledge the claim to newness, for example, by calling PRONASOL a ‘neopopulist’ solution to Mexico’s neoliberal problems (Dresser, 1991). The Solidarity Programme thus epitomises ‘the reverential cult of “the new” which now characterizes Mexican politics’ (Cordera Campos, cited in Knight, 1994a: 29).

A New Model of Urban Land Regularisation in Mexico? The Role of Opposition Government

Tenure legalisation is often depicted as the key to upgrading illegal settlements. To date, however, the processes of upgrading and legalisation have mostly operated independently in Mexico. Regularisation has instead served to tie the urban poor into a political system dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. To decry the political uses of illegality is not, however, to argue that legalisation is undesirable. This article discusses recent attempts to construct an alternative, more democratic, model of regularisation in the city of Guadalajara. These are the work of municipal and state governments won in 1995 by the National Action Party. The article assesses the new strategy, showing how it differs from the existing model of regularisation. I attribute the emergence of the new model to the rise of opposition government. The article therefore contributes to the growing literature on opposition government in Mexicos cities.

Property titles and the urban poor: from informality to displacement?

Abstract An extensive literature opposes the provision of property titles for the residents of informal settlements. One concern is that titling leads to commodification and the market-driven displacement of the original inhabitants. Another is that it propagates the ideology of private ownership, undermines collective solidarity and demobilises social movements. This article, based on observations from Mexico City and Guadalajara, finds little evidence of displacement but highlights the importance of location. It supports the view that formalisation undermines resistance, but argues that titling does so by meeting rather than creating the desire of the urban poor for private property and homeownership.

Geography, Law and the Emotions of Property: Property Enactment on Norwegian Smallholdings

Property Enactment on Norwegian Smallholdings. Thesis for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor, Trondheim, December 2009. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Social Sciences and Technology Management, Department of Geography. Doctoral theses at NTNU, 2009:263. NTNU, Trondheim. 140 pp. ISBN 978-82-471-1942-6 (printed ver.), ISBN 978-82-471-1943-3 (electronic ver.), ISSN 1503-8181.

Book Reviews : Practising development: social science perspectives. Edited by J. Pottier. London: Routledge. 1993. ix + 222 pp. £13.99 paper. ISBN 0 415 08910 7

a &dquo;troublemakers unit&dquo; for remedial treatment’. He was punished for failing to acknowledge that peasants must be defined as ignorant in order to make the space for the knowledges and activities of a ’developmental programme’ (SAM). Of the remaining essays in the collection I particularly enjoyed those by Richard Burghart (on water, hygiene, and public health knowledges in the eastern Tarai region of Nepal), Piers Vitebsky (on contexts of knowing and doubting about death in the West and amongst the Sora (’tribal’) community of Orissa, India), and Elisabeth Croll (on the negotiation of knowledge and ignorance in China’s development strategy, c.1949-76). This probably reflects my own regional interests as much