THIS EDITED COLLECTION of papers presents the results of a gender-oriented research programme on issues of urbanization, planning, housing and everyday life in Southern Africa. Although the studies represented here address gender issues from the perspective of different disciplines, they share a qualitative approach, using in-depth interviews, case studies, focus groups and participant observation – although some of the researchers have combined these tools with more conventional quantitative methods. The papers, as a whole, describe how vulnerable groups, and women in particular, cope during times of economic difficulty and social crisis. Although the emphasis is on people in poverty, it is made clear that women from different social classes still deal with some common problems, such as access to credit and housing.

The editors summarize the overlapping themes that emerge from this collection under the following headings:
- The public private dichotomy. The tradition of identifying women with the private domestic sphere of life has meant that many of the issues which most concern them remain outside the concerns of democratization and fail to be considered in the planning process.
·Gender neutrality or gender equality. Several of the papers illustrate how, apparently, gender neutral policies fail to address the realities which continue to structure women's lives, and may even contribute to the feminization of poverty.
·The meaning of place and housing. Gendered responses to the meaning of place can result sometimes in unexpected reactions within larger trends of migration and housing investment, and these may have far-reaching implications for policy and planning.
·Poverty and coping strategies. Most of these papers deal in one way or another with the strategies women develop for coping with urban poverty and conflicting demands, and examine the ways in which their relationships with men contribute to or undermine these strategies.
·Challenges to gender separation. A few of the papers look at the implications of women engaging in survival activities which challenge the accepted boundaries.
·Household power structures. The realities of household survival may be difficult to uncover in the face of ideologies that continue to present men as the heads of households. Even when women are the actual breadwinners, they may think of this as a temporary measure and continue to regard men as the family head.