This is a critical discourse of how urbanization in the Global South is shaping people’s housing needs and their increasing reliance on off-grid systems. The authors propose an alternative research agenda that embeds local specificity into how the challenges of off-grid living are tackled.

Housing is becoming ever more elusive for low-income urban dwellers in developing countries. It is estimated that close to 30% of urban dwellers in the Global South countries live in informal settlements or poor quality housing (UNHabitat, 2016). Housing is central to the relationship between people and their physical and psychosocial environments. It is a key determinant of healthy living and crucial to sustainable urbanization (Winston and Pareja Eastaway, 2008). The sustainability of cities largely depends on how mass urban housing needs are met (Balla et al., 2017). In this discourse, we take housing to represent not just formal and physical structures, but to include informal settlements, temporary living arrangements, and spaces where people live and interact, and through which people access the services of the grid systems.