‘Build Your Own Home’: state-assisted self-help housing in Canada, 1942–75

Recently, aided self-help housing, whereby governments help families to build homes, has been implemented in the developing world but its potential elsewhere has been neglected. The best-known programme, run by the City of Stockholm (1927–90s), showed that almost any family could erect a decent dwelling, but was inflexible. Operating on municipally owned land, it relied on prefabrication. From 1942 to 1975, a Canadian ‘Build Your Own Home’ …