Enabled Agency in Self-Help Housing: A Conceptual Model Linking Housing Provision to Multidimensional Housing Quality

Self-help housing remains an important component of housing provision in rapidly urbanising cities, yet existing scholarship provides limited explanation of how household agency operates within enabling systems and through housing-production processes to shape multidimensional housing quality. This article addresses this conceptual gap through a critical integrative synthesis of scholarship on self-help housing, incremental and assisted self-help housing, enabling systems, and housing-quality assessment. Building on Turner’s dweller-control perspective, the article develops the Enabled-Agency Model, which conceptualises household agency as the driving force of self-help housing operating within four interrelated enabling domains: land access, housing finance, infrastructure provision, and technical and institutional support. The model specifies housing-production processes: land acquisition, construction, incremental expansion, consolidation, and maintenance and adaptation, as the proposed mechanism through which enabling conditions and household agency may become reflected in multidimensional housing-quality outcomes. Housing quality is conceptualised across four dimensions: structural and physical quality, infrastructure and service quality, sanitation and public-health quality, and residential satisfaction and user comfort. The model’s originality lies in specifying the analytical relationship among dweller control, enabling systems, housing-production processes, and multidimensional housing quality within a single process-oriented framework, rather than treating these concerns separately. Five theoretically derived propositions translate the framework into empirically testable expectations and provide a basis for examining direct, indirect, and conditional relationships among its principal constructs. Abuja-FCT is identified as the principal application context for subsequent empirical investigation, rather than as the basis for theoretical generalisation. The article contributes an enabling-systems extension of Turner’s dweller-control perspective and provides a conceptual bridge between self-help housing provision and multidimensional housing-quality research. The model remains a conceptual and empirically testable framework requiring validation, refinement, and comparative assessment across contexts.

Self-help housing, Enabled agency, Enabling systems, Housing-production processes, Housing quality.

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