Informal housing practices in the global north: digital technologies, methods, and ethics

In this editorial for Part II of the special issue on ‘informal housing practices’, we build upon the work done in Part I that charted informality from the global South to the global North. In Part II we shift our lens to focus more explicitly on understanding the interplay between traditional and ‘digital’ methodologies and the ethical challenges encountered while researching informal housing practices through a series of papers that demonstrate a wide range of methodological richness via empirical cases from Australia, the US and the UK. Some contributions to this special issue peer through the window created by online real estate platforms to better understand informal housing practices and in so doing explore new research methodologies. Others show that the value of traditional qualitative methods remains high. All raise new ethical questions for researchers and policymakers who must tread carefully when engaging with residents and owners of informal homes. As a whole, the papers in the second part of this special issue continue to explore the diverse forms of informal housing within Global North contexts, while drawing on the rich theory and practice on informality from the Global South.