The battle for affordable housing sends squatters to the skies.

What do Redfern in Sydney, Dharavi in Mumbai, Nickelsville in Seattle and Hong Kong's rooftops have in common? All are long-term sites of informal squatter communities, sometimes without clean running water, power, sewage systems or rubbish collection, built by and for the globally increasing numbers of disenfranchised. Gentrification, privatisation, marginalisation, definitions of legality, financial collapse and mortgage foreclosures have all added to the widening gap between rich and poor, meaning photographs taken this year of tin shacks on urban wastelands or tents pitched under motorway flyovers in California mimic images of the 1930s Great Depression. For many, the cost of urban survival is unaffordable. Not only the unemployed and minimum-wage earner but also the middle class can be at risk.

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Rufina Wu, a Hong-Kong-born Canadian architect, and Stefan Canham, a German photographer and film-maker, met through In the Field, a Chicago-based arts organisation for 'creative engagement with global housing crises'. Wu won AIA Medals for her studies on the Three Gorges Commune (2006) and catacomb living in Beijing Underground (2008). Canham's book, Mobile Squatters (Peperoni Books, 2006), recorded an informal community in Hamburg which was dispersed by riot police.

In a new collaboration, Portraits from Above, Wu and Canham documented five rooftop communities in Hong Kong to produce an exhibition and book (Peperoni Books, 2009). One example, in Tai Kok Tsui, is a 1959 eight-storey block with 35 households in a labyrinth of self-made huts, some three storeys high, on its 1,145[m.sup.2] flat roof (pictured). In 1998, Hong Kong officially counted 9,000 'illegal' communities. By 2006, after demolition of older blocks, it claimed numbers had been reduced to 3,962 people in 1,554 households, but there has been no comprehensive survey. The problem is largely ignored because Asians without legal identities have no social housing rights and, by living illegally, low-paid but essential workers remain within affordable reach of their employment or their children's schools. However, even in these basic shelters, there are fridges, televisions, and mobile phones because in comparison to 'legal' homes, consumer items are cheap.

Canham's photos and Wu's axonometric drawings treat these 'illegal' structures with respect, bringing them into architectural discourse. Portraits from Above won third prize at the 5th International Bauhaus Awards 2008 - though, ironically, it featured in the roof extensions category with luxury lofts. The jury was appreciative, but recognising individual creativity deflects interest in dealing with the complex causes of a crisis.

China's economic slowdown has now left 22 million floating, indigenous migrants homeless. Dubai's foreign workers, already the poorest, have been left unpaid and stranded. These are today's headlines but architects have known for decades about exploited household servants in airless cupboards and building workers in huts with a shared water tap. Only now the problem is nearer home. In Paris in 2007, families living in caravans and cars on wasteland were forcibly cleared away using the same strategies as Olympic committees for Beijing 2008 or Vancouver 2010. For the 2014 World Cup, Brazil wants to wall off 1.5 million people in the Rio favelas.

In 1933, US magazine The Nation wrote of the homeless: 'This is a crowd that won't scatter.' In January 2009, it mapped resistance to housing foreclosures in the US. Little has changed. In Germany, graffiti on a wall on Hamburg's Hafenstrasse, the scene of violent clashes between police and squatters, proclaims: 'No person is illegal.' No informal home should be a slum, either.

ar The growing issue of informal settlements must not be ignored. Architectural discourse can generate serious discussion and solutions

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