 Hello everyone and welcome to today's event community led housing, a pathway for more caring and just urban futures. I hope you're feeling relaxed and ready for a really exciting conversation today. We have a fantastic panel lined up and I think it's going to be a really interesting discussion. So thank you to you, our audience for joining us in this space today. My name is Juliet. I'm the events officer at IID and I'll just be providing some technical support behind the screens for this session. So today's event is part of the IID debate series and we're both very fortunate and delighted to be co-hosting with LeMond Diplomatic Brazil and the Citizenship School of Police Institutes. We've also been able to host today's event with the support of several partner organizations and we'll be able to hear from some of them about the fantastic work they do later in the event. And with that, I'm absolutely delighted to introduce Bianca Pal, who is the journalist from LeMond Diplomatic Brazil and our moderator for today's session. Bianca, over to you. Thank you, Juliet. So I want to welcome to all, as Juliet said, I'm Bianca Pal. I'm a web editor from LeMond Diplomatic Brazil and I'm going to... And I am responsible for the postcast, Guillotine. It is a pleasure to be here with you in such a relevant subject matter as housing. As Juliet already said, it's being promoted by the IID, the Institute of Police and the School of Citizenship and LeMond Diplomatic Brazil. And this event was inspired in an article that was published in the Special Cities of Tomorrow of LeMond Diplomatics with different experiences of community-led experiences in Thailand, Thailand, Brazil and Sierra Leone. So here we've got, in order to talk about those initiatives on how to strengthen, Alexandre Absan Rediani, that's the principal researcher of the IID, Rodrigo and Yacovini. That's the coordinator of the School of Citizenship of Police Institutes and International Relations Officers of the Global Platform for the Right to the City. He's got a PhD in regional and urban planning by the University of Sao Paulo with a bachelor degree in the law of the Federal University of Sierra. He is a former coordinator of the Brazilian Institute of Urban Law and Legal Advice of the UN Special Reporter on the Right to Adequate Housing. Let us welcome them and we have also here Joseph McCarthy. He is a lecture institute of geography and development studies at the University of Nangala in Sierra Leone. He is also executive director of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Center. Joseph is a well-established scholar in the urban development with background in urban management and climate change adaptation and resistant to disasters risk. He has worked in various different capacities on urban development and planning in Sierra Leone, including projects in the infrastructure plan. Joseph research centers mainly on urban land, housing, vulnerability, resilience, mobility, public health and informal settlements. That's all the issues he's got to talk about. Here we've got also Supriya Wung Pacharapun. She is an assistant professor of the Faculty of Architecture at the University in Kasetstadt in Bangkok, Thailand. She's been involved in the research project to study and investigate the practice of community development network in Bangkok. Her design interests are socially relevant architecture, participatory design, urban and community development. And is part of this panel this morning or afternoon, depending on where you are. Eva Nisa Lopez Rodriguez. She is a member of the House and Social movements in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. She's been working for more than 30 years in the social protection and is an activist of the social movements in Brazil. She's got a master in urbanism. And to finish our list of guests, we've got Bea Varnais. She is project manager of Urbamondi. She is passionate about facilitating peer learning, urban development and organizational processes underlying the community-led housing initiatives. In her capacity as project manager, she supports people-led house initiatives across Europe, Africa and Latin America. Part of her work focuses on the design of financial mechanisms that are sustainable and self-managed, with the aim to enable access to affordable finance for community-led houses initiatives. Bea holds a master degree in international development from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and has worked in France, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and Senegal. She is an active member of the participatory platform of Fund Action and also a center for community land trust innovation. So prior to get started the debate, I would like to ask you that please send them questions, comments and if you want to part of any initiative that's part of the issues that we are talking here, please send us through the chat whatever links or contributions plus questions to the panelists. So in order to start our conversation, we'll invite Alexandre that's going to talk to us about the main arguments of the article that has been published in the series Cities of Tomorrow. So, Julia, Alexandre, please thank you for your introduction. You've got five minutes. Great. Thank you, Bianca. Thank you very much. It's incredible to be here in this panel and to be discussing this topic with all of you. So this article is written together with Taisa Comelli and Taka Nanzeman who are also here coordinating this event and helping us, especially around the questions and answers and putting all of these things together. And it was also a result of an ongoing dialogue between these colleagues and organizations that are present today in this event as well as others that represent other organizations that I think Juliet shared the list of partners that was part of those dialogues, which includes, for example, the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, which is a regional network of grassroots community organizations, NGOs and professionals in the Asian cities and the Center for Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation, an NGO based in Freetown that was also part of those conversations. Through these conversations and the article, we found that it's really important to join forces with other organizations such as World Habitat and Abamond and Social Movements that have been already for a while promoting this concept of community-led housing, which refers to non-speculative and collective processes of producing housing which is centered around people's needs and aspirations rather than monetary exchange. Community-led housing then we often use as an umbrella term that refers to a variety of different housing practices and those include, for example, people centered upgrading, cooperative and collaborative housing, self-builds, self-managements, communal forms of land management such as community land trusts as well as other forms of collective action around housing rights so occupations, demonstrations, savings, enumerations and so forth. We think it's important to promote this concept and we think really the purpose of having those conversations, writing the article to support those other networks because it is a way of standing with social movements and amplifying the message that solutions to the global housing crisis must include those who are excluded from or made vulnerable by current housing systems. In a more pragmatic way, we also think that community-led housing offers a tangible alternative to dominant housing policy and practice which focuses purely on market-based mechanisms and individual home ownership as its main goal and purpose. We think that this dominant housing approach has reduced housing choices. It led various forms of housing discriminations while deepening social and spatial inequalities in cities. Furthermore, this financialization of housing has undermined the protection and the promotion of the right to adequate housing, UN commitment among different nation-states and expanded housing precarity among middle-income households. In the meantime, community-led responses to this housing crisis have helped to build a series of capabilities of communities to respond not only to the housing crisis but also to other crises such as the COVID pandemic. That's an argument that we tried to flesh out in the article in which also is drawing on a publication that Upper Moon has made also talking about similar issues and I think Bea might touch on some of those issues a bit later on. So we have seen that social ties and solidarity and care built through struggles for the right to housing have been fundamental to the spread of solidarity actions to help those most vulnerable at the time of the pandemic. We have also seen that the communication infrastructure and the pedagogical experience of housing movements have been quickly and effectively deployed to spread critical information about COVID that talks to the actual needs of those most vulnerable to the pandemic. At the same time, these infrastructures and pedagogies have been fundamental in facilitating public debates and raising our awareness about the injustices being perpetuated in COVID responses and the inequalities that the pandemic exposed. And finally, we also have seen how the ability to navigate between the needs to act and meet immediate housing needs while also demanding from the state policy and structural change has helped movements to do in this COVID crisis what the states should have been doing but they were not doing but at the same time not letting them off the hook. Therefore, demanding specific policy and structural responses for the issues that have been experienced on the ground. So for us, this article and our dialogues have brought to the forefront the need to advocate for more enabling conditions to advance community-led housing. We feel that there has been a lot of already existing documentation of community-led practices for housing but at the same time we feel we need to touch on the conditions on the things that enable or have constrained the possibility to advance community-led housing. So what has emerged as an initial set of issues for our shared agenda is that for housing policies and programs to support community-led housing there is an urgent need to first establish legal frameworks that recognize the diverse models of community-led housing to create organizational and financial arrangements that respond and build capacities of community-based organizations three, we need to unlock access to well-located lands or properties for community-led housing and four, there is a key need to mainstream participatory methodologies of planning, designing, implementing, management and learning from community-led housing initiatives. So this is an initial set of issues that emerging as an agenda which we hope to advance and also to hear more reflections about them through this conversation today and from the people joining our conversation. So we hope that this IID debate will be an opportunity to share experiences in this field and to discuss these issues in more detail and I'm really looking forward for the contributions of the other panelists and the questions from those participating in the event. Thank you, Bian. Thank you, Alexandra. Now I'm going to give the word to Rodrigo that coordinates the serious cities of tomorrow that he has collaborated with Le Monde Diplomatique Brazil and he's going to talk about the importance of community-led housing for the discussions on the housing crisis mainly in this area of COVID-19. Thank you, Bianca. I am so happy in order to be able to talk in Portuguese in an event with a translation into English, it's not always that this happens so I'm very happy to be able to talk in Portuguese to you and very happy as way that he's doing this event in partnership between IID, the School of Citizens of Polis, Le Monde Diplomatique and the participation of the many different brothers and sisters of the housing discussion that are present here today. So it's going to be a very interesting thing for us to advance in the collective discussion about the issue of housing and I think that this event shows what we actually wanted to achieve with the special cities of tomorrow within Le Monde Diplomatique and also what we have developed in the School of Citizenship of the Polis Institute in many different documents, international documents and many different players that dialogue with us that work around urban subject matters that play to the cities many different features and characteristics of ways or forms that the city should be or develop. What do you mean by this? There are people that state that the city should be resilient in order to be able to survive and face a conflict and social environmental disasters. There are people that or other players that say that cities should be competitive attractive in order to attract businesses and people and investments and there are other players that say that the cities need to be intelligent so that Smart Cities is one of the most trendy issues for us but for us in the Polis Institute and the Global Platform for the Right to the City School of Citizenship the cities need to be solidary, have solidarity not only to be have solidarity with or inhabited with those that are living in cities but also have solidarity among themselves in order to build a new society a new world, a new reality, urban reality we need to be cooperative among these different cities competition, dispute, this lost game game has shown that it's a failure that has been the game for the last couple of years or decades and it's obvious that that model doesn't function but now it proposes a different model it's cooperation and solidarity and that comes from the practice so spaces as cities of tomorrow, spaces of school of citizens are these initiatives that IED is bringing not only this IED debate but all these spaces on thinking housing, community-led housing processes are very important for the change because when we place into discussion different experiences and realities, different points of view of what the city should be because of course each city has a right to have a different visual when you place all those different ways of thinking being and building the city onto the table to discussion then yes we can achieve cities that are more fair that are more democratic in the distribution of the benefits of the urban space that are environmentally balanced and healthy that are socially responsible so the special cities of tomorrow within Le Monde Diplomatique Brazil that I'm very happy of coordinating I would like to thank the trust of Bianca and all the team of the editor of Le Monde in order to host this special it's a space that wants to bring to the Brazilian for the Brazilian public experiences and realities and reflections on cities out of Brazil although we might bring discussions for the Brazilian cities it should be a space that we could learn more on realities of African cities other cities from Latin America from Asia, Europe and North America so in that sense the space cities of tomorrow it's open to receive contributions from the many different cities with different factors for discussion because it's that diversity and collaborations that we are going to promote and now the same the Citizen School of Policy Institute when Bianca discuss about the importance of dialog or with communities based on way in order to face the housing crisis the School of Citizenship has a very important space because we believe that collectively we can build a different future and this is why we have done created discussion spaces on housing ways of actually overcoming this present model based on individual housing based on market and we have worked people that have given classes Gracia Xavier for example if contact with people has Guilherme Bolos from MST Raleil Unique that because we believe that building bridges between movements academic organizations, civil society, public authorities another place then we are going to exit this model that is actually an excluding model so that's a lot of this discussion so a great pleasure to be here today Rodrigo, thank you very much for this series of being making the coordination has been very important for us actually to have your content in our website so prior to give you the word to Joseph I want to thank the amount we've got 140 people in the discussion by Zoom by the audience of YouTube I've got participants from Ireland Indian Kenya, San Carlos in Brazil here in Sao Paulo the people from housing from Sao Paulo thank you very much to all of you feel at ease to include your common questions and talk about the initiatives that you've been participating so continuing with our discussion I'm going to invite Joseph to tell us about his experience initiatives community in Freetown in Sierra Leone and talk about the importance of those initiatives for the more fair cities as we've mentioned here Joseph you've got five minutes to talk to us Thank you and hello to everyone I think I will just have to follow from where Rodrigo stopped of course there has been a lot of ideals floated on planning for cities to become inclusive, fair, socially just as the case may be but essentially when you really look at context like Freetown in Sierra Leone or elsewhere especially in the global south or more especially in southern Africa or possibly Latin America you'll see that some of these ideals are a lot difficult to meet I'm talking about context where we are faced with challenges of rapid urbanization where there is high level of poverty housing deficit we are struggling with slump proliferation where essentially policies especially related to land housing for the low income groups is not working where urban poor families are missed out on investment in housing so essentially community-led housing has come to be seen as a direct response to some of these realities and so in Freetown Sierra Leone a lot has been done especially in terms of promoting community-led housing but more especially in terms of promoting a particular principle that was jointly implemented in Freetown with architecture of some frontier ASF UK and this has been about working to promote what we describe as community area action plan of course planning in Sierra Leone is at different scales and the lowest form of planning is the local the neighborhood planning or more especially in terms of local plans and so it has been very difficult for the city authorities the government as well to really promote this in terms of providing housing for the urban poor and because of this we have to engage with the ASF UK to really work how to promote a kind of principles that can work towards presenting a kind of methodology to follow in terms of really ensuring that we create a model where housing can be provided for the urban poor and this has been action-led methodology that uses a kind of participatory design and planning approach consisting of a series of workshops with the community residents but also based on seminars and the idea was really to attempt to have an understanding of the social social spatial and urban dynamics of these communities it has about ensuring that we provide support to the residents but also ensure that they are able to understand their own situation and therefore play advocacy around it so that we can have a kind of more democratic form of city building and so this particular methodology took place at different scales which involve engagement at the home scale it also involved engagement at the community scale or also at the city scale and the idea there was to really have the residents to have the reflection in terms of what really are the key issues that matter to them what are the aspirations in terms of housing how can they go about to be supported to bring about the kind of change that we want and to also determine what kind of future do they want for themselves so community-led housing using this app approach has been very instrumental especially in terms of promoting change within these communities especially because it has been about how do we make housing accessible to low income group it has been so much about how do we unlock creativity among the low income groups but also help them to build a kind of vision for themselves it is so much about how do we work with poor families to provide housing that meets the needs of their households especially in terms of disability but also in terms of quality and it has been a matter of helping the poor households to really fulfill their dreams and aspirations about housing so it is so much matter of how do we restore the dignity of the families how do we make them have a sense of identity how do we make them have that sense of pride how do we make them have a sense of fulfilling community-led housing especially using the app approach has been so much about helping the low income groups to be able to really identify the kind of houses that they consider to be their convenient for themselves the kind of houses they will cherish for themselves and how do we also link that up with the city authorities to ensure that these dreams are fulfilled Thank you very much Josie thank you very much for respecting the time as well so now I'm going to give the word to Supriya to tell us a little bit about the initiatives in Thailand that she's been working with so Supriya you've got five minutes to give you Hello everyone from the other side of the world and thank you, Bianca and our organizer for inviting me to share experience of the committee-based practice in Thailand here with you today Committee-led housing in Thailand has been widely conducted through the Ba Man Kong program or secure housing initiated by Kodi, Stanford Committee Organizations Development Institute and Public Organization and this program has been widely practiced since 2000 Kodi has supported more than 100,000 households in 370 cities nationwide its process has been emphasized on people as a subject of change in every stage For 20 years of practice it has been proved that this program has empowered the grassroots movement at many levels and let me share with you some image so that you can understand it clearly So at the individual level and committee level there have been transformation of housing and public infrastructure that improve the life of the people as well as the neighborhood and the community member can decide together whether they want to implement additional upgrading of infrastructure projects or the whole community reconstruction or the relocation if necessary and housing construction by the committee also enable the group of community builders to start the community enterprise and create jobs to the youth group Further seven groups found in each community have provided them an opportunity to accumulate wealth individually and create a collective community welfare fund that can be used to support its member especially elders and children and beyond housing this self-organized community organization in ECT our network through the program of Kodi it has been demonstrated that this the mutual care and solidarity among them have been strengthened we have seen the power of this network in supporting each other to demand for the right to the city resists eviction of the informal settlements and especially during the crisis not only the recent COVID-19 but also in previous natural disaster such as blood this active community network start their own immediate assistance to raise the member by using their own collective funds we are waiting for the support from the government there have been various activity initiated by the network in many states around the nation in response to the COVID-19 not only immediate help as providing alcohol or masks but they also start a committee garden and communal kitchen project to ensure their full security during the lockdown these support are not limited to only the network's member but also extend to the other vulnerable groups or homeless people in the city food and product they have produced became a part of their business plan to earn income during the crisis and many communities have run their own organized market or like delivery initiatives while some have connected with other stakeholders to sell the products the network have also initiated their own long-term rehabilitation plans with initial funds from another CODI program called quality of life initiative and I think at the city level what is very important for the committee led housing movement in Thailand is that it has achieved the power and the way how the city operates from a very silo governmental structure and very highly centralized work credit system to a horizontal and integrated platform for city development the conventional system in which hierarchy of power exists while the informal community are unorganized has been a cause of unequal distribution of resources and uneven development the city development platform formulated through the environment committee led housing program has transformed the convenient convention practice and include all the relevant stakeholders especially land owners municipality public authority and civil society to recognize each other and especially the community network and they work together towards a fairer city in the future in this aspect it could be said that the role of CODI as a government institute and the committee organization it were very important as well as the relationship with local government and I think that's all for the Thai committee led housing practice I would like to share with you on this first round thank you Thank you very much Thank you very much, Supriya for being within the time I want to highlight the invitation for you that are here with you to thank all the audience we've got more than 140 people following the discussion we understand that you can put the city and country where you are coming from and send some initiatives and comments for programs of housing that you are part of and put questions and questions and comments to our panelists now I'm going to invite Ivanisha to tell us a little bit about the importance of the community's initiatives in Brazil Ivanisha please you've got five minutes Thank you Bianca it's fantastic to be here with you there's so many people it's important to have these places in order to share our experiences and think together how to build the future I want to share with you one of the experiences in Sao Paulo we've been working with in these last 30 years to self-management housing I'm going to share also some photographs for in order to illustrate our conversation but the idea is that in these processes the community is actually the protagonist of that housing solution is the main actor it's the first prior to anything else it's organized, creates a community that will fight for the land property through an occupation and pressure to the public authority financing funding and then all the phases of productions are controlled by the community with the support of a technical support we are talking about the elaboration of the project permits approvals that's very bureaucratic I suppose that in your country is the same thing the management of construction acquisition of material quality control and mainly the management of the resources are in the hands of the community in order that they can do the best possible that renders the accounts to the government to the group and it's very clear in those processes the quality of the production is far better than when you bring a conventional private initiative of housing building we are much more efficient way of expenditure of the public funding with a much bigger quality of what is standard in the market and there's more than that then the sense of ownership of that person that's going to leave that because who has chosen, decided, given opinion, participated in the process is he or she who will live there, he is the subject of that action of his own house, the other important is community what we call in Brazil multirao that is an indigenous world that is collective work that is one of the important values of creating community, we not only build houses but citizenships, it's not a neighborhood communities that we are building, the first building is strengthening the grassroots organization, they're going to build that but after building the house that place will be organized in order to face other challenges for example go out then they will go after education, health in order to prove their life quality also a way of leveraging the collective capacity of that place, so if there's a company that comes here built and goes away there's nothing left but for the houses but if that community is involved in the building, that community empowers itself and we're going to have more capacity and even to face and do the management and discuss with the public authority for more improvements and bring the values of solidarity corporations that we love so in order to make this feasible it's essential to build public policies that actually contemplate that way of production subsidies subsidies from the side to have these families that are the ones need them all, that are excluded from the market, that don't have access to housing or financing for banking system are not part of the format market, if these families that we want to build public policies inclusive that will actually serve those that need the most and for that the movement makes advocacy with the public authority so we go and struggle for resources, for land finances, programs in order to produce quality houses in the cities, in the best places of the cities, in the neighborhoods in order to fight these real estate speculations so that the property actually accomplishes the social objective of property, we do workshops and we also do pressure in that cities with campaigns in public spaces in the next block I'm going to talk a little bit about the tools that we use for that but I understand that the main concept that I want to defend in this discussion is that the communities that are building collectively they turn themselves unactive strength in this creating a social network strengthening this city, thank you Eva Nisa thank you very much within the time very important the issues that you discussed now in order to finish our first part of the event I'm going to invite the two talkers about Urban Monde and the importance of systematicizing these different initiatives of community housing beer you've got five minutes thanks so much for inviting me and it's always a big honor to speak alongside such inspiring leaders that have been working so hard for so many years on promoting community housing across the world so yeah I would say maybe just to introduce that oftentimes I guess we have the impression that you know community housing is sort of nice isolated experiences scatter around the world but oftentimes we see them a bit as like best practices that cannot put to scale and I think what is interesting just heard from Thailand we also heard from Brazil different experiences of like putting really these community housing experiences at scale and it is is actually possible if we have adequate enabling policy frameworks if we have support at different levels and also if we change mindsets I thought it was very interesting that some of the speakers talked about you know participatory planning practices, training and those issues that are also linked to changing the mindset and building kind of an enabling environment for community housing to spread and this is something that we try to promote through the cohabited network yes generating data and information on community housing is really key to create a shared vision around it to enable peer learning and policy transfer at different levels to strengthen the movement generally and also to make those demands heard you know we heard about demands for the access to land demands for the access to facilitated housing finance affordable housing finance the access to technical assistance and yes maybe another idea would like to share with you is just that we've painfully learned that you know viruses travel but also what is important is that ideas travel and one of the experiences or interesting experiences of disseminating community housing and specifically in this case mutual aid housing cooperatives they have traveled across you know not only Latin America but the world more generally and this is why it's so important also to document these experiences and the policy frameworks that enable them so I will by no means go into the detail of this in this presentation but just to show you know that something that was born in Uruguay is spreading across the continent and also inspiring experiences in different regions of the world and a last thought I would like to share in this image around with you is linking of course to the COVID-19 context and crisis the idea that you know it is also important to create this shared knowledge and data basically on the potential of community housing in different areas you know we've heard from Thailand about communities organizing in the COVID-19 context to really resist this crisis to get organized to create alternatives there's also many many stories that we did through the specific study with the support of VFX on community housing in the context of COVID-19 on you know psychosocial support also solidarity networks that are created within community housing so these are just some of the examples that I wanted to share with you and to say that you know to say that I think this is also a very invaluable initiative creating that shared knowledge basis that allows these different organizations, different countries and regions to advocate for more policy support for more support generally to their initiatives and it's interesting that we come together and do that together this knowledge sharing documentation thank you thank you Bea so now we're going to the second round of our discussion we're going to see the questions and answers sent by you so please I invite you all to send questions comments or tell us about some initiatives that you are part of so the first question that we've got here was sent by Melisa Keturo Navarra to Supriya she's asking it seems that the success of lead housing community lead housing depends on the community housing government has supported the houses that are not that organized taking them so that they could have community lead housing so Supriya so what's a challenge for the communities that are not that well organized actually actually through the program it's around the people to network each other especially the informal settlement developers they meet each other and they conduct like a survey and then it's built like a recognition among the people themselves and they start many activities together in order to mobilize the community organizations such as like saving groups or community survey community mapping or community design as a part of building a stronger community organization it's not like they are very well organized at the beginning it took like more than 10 years for some community to get strengthened and be very self organized this is another question for Joseph do you could you talk a little bit more about the importance of the participation of the communities that issued of the participative processes you mentioned many times I could like Joseph to mention the importance of that participation in the building of the neighborhoods planning in Freetown in Sierra Leone you have already commented I leave that process I would like you to depthen a little bit more regarding the participation of the communities in the plan building thank you very much sorry I I have to show this slide now to more or less demonstrate what I actually meant basically the community action area plan had to go through a process but the process was actually more interactive and more participatory and this also in order to really give the community residents an opportunity to really express themselves to be part of the entire process and to really showcase what exactly it is that they want so I said initially that the CAP methodology went through scales there was the home scale which the photo indicates especially in terms of people at their level as households or as families engaging with the researchers so indicates especially what is it that they think about their community what kind of actions do they want to see especially in terms of change how to engage with that particular change process and how can that possibly connect with the wider community and there was also the engagement at the community level that brought different families and households together to relate with similar questions and then bringing the brother community to see how their community can broadly engage with the city how can you make the community a better place to make its relevant to the city and to also ensure that the city works best for the people living in that particular community and how can these actions and these decisions more or less influence policy and planning to make that particular area a better place and each of these at the home community city and policy level went through stages of diagnosing the problem but also thinking about the best ways of dealing with it and what particular strategic actions would be necessary to be able to do it and how do we prioritize those particular actions so here you realize that we already have the home scale where a lot of actions went into the process itself especially in terms of establishing exactly what is it that matters to the people the kinds of physical space, the kind of layout, the kinds of materials that they think are very very important, the kind of 10 year arrangements that they think matter so much and when you go to the community scale it allowed the residents to also share their understanding of the current conditions of the shared spaces in terms of the physical structure and who accesses them but also to share the ideas for inclusive community spaces that reflect the community's collective values and aspiration and discussions were also held about the challenges and opportunities to change within the community at the city scale which now brought the entire community together with different other actors elsewhere it was also an opportunity for residents to share their understanding as well as their experiences of the current citywide processes and conditions and to share their ideas for citywide actions to make freedom work more for them to make freedom more inclusive to make freedom more fairer and to make freedom socially just so what are the aspirations of the people within these informal settlements that needs to matter to the city authorities and how can they take them forward so there were discussions also on the challenges as well as the opportunities for bringing about more equitable and socially just to make freedom more socially just and more fairer for the people and so all of these the ideas at the different scales the home, the community, the city were all consolidated and this brought about a kind of integrated thinking on the options to take if the city, if the community has to be improved the kinds of housings to choose the kind of organization to to bring about in terms of this passion and development of the place the kinds of infrastructure that has to be built the kinds of services that has to be provided what are the particular principles to follow what particular options that we can also agree on for programming as well as for interventions in this particular place places for by city authorities so all these agreements were part of the CAP process and the CAP process actually allowed the very people who will be affected by the problem to be actively involved in the planning but also it also highlights the creativity of the local residents themselves in bringing about solutions to the problems in their communities so these were the kinds of actions that we are taking and as you can see we have three different layouts that actually portray some of these collective thinking which the committees were a critical part of so I thank you very much Thank you Joseph Thank you Joseph Very interesting to see how much the participation of the people that actually live in the place actually makes a difference in all affecting the quality of the place so I would like to think a comment that we received from Paula Sevillea Nunes she was the discussion it's been wonderful and the examples inspiring I wanted to elaborate more how to manage the oppositional of powerful groups in the cities that could make lobby against the leader support community led housing we are talking about a political aspect that could eventually harm or attack the interest of the community in pro of private interest I don't know whether one of you would like to answer that it was not addressed to anybody special if I need that please Paula Sevillea Nunes Yes absolutely so here in Sao Paulo we are leading that very specific moment with the real estate sector even during the pandemic it's actually increasing there are profits a lot of launches of buildings at very high prices and once they want even more and actually destroy the little amount of tools that we've got for access for land so we've got a non-going tension between the market of the real estate the investors of housing they are they are companies they are real estate fans of the international market that puts pressure so that more pieces of the city are given free of charge to them for their investments explaining the poorer people to even fire from the city so we are struggling in order to find resources but also we are struggling in order to have urban policies that assure these people to still continue living in the city in the best places of the city where there is infrastructure, employment, opportunity and this is a very important struggle as housing because it goes hand by hand those two struggles if you want a more mixed city space for all thank you so we've got one more question that I think that is related to what Supreya told us that is from Jagannatha Venkata Maria sorry if I didn't pronounce your name correctly that's the challenge of doing such an international participants but he Supreya you've made any validation of checking with ecological engineering in order to water management energy and waste and he gives some example biogas in order to handle kitchen waste if there is any model to work in that sense and he asks also if there is any article that you could share a link during the construction process new housing the committee learned that previous condition of informal settlement quite bad in terms of sanitation and waste management so they cooperate with the engineer from Kodi and also other architects from educational institute to install a proper sanitary system and waste management between the construction process so I think right now the new project has been quite well prepared with that system so we've got more questions someone from the Philippines says that she sees that we may not the more active in the organizations regarding these issues of housing and fund access what are the roles of many that situation I think that is an issue open for any of you to answer maybe he also wants to set a couple of works maybe you've done some systematization could you talk a little bit also about the gender in the struggle for housing that question it's interesting I think a basic principle of community-led housing is just to build on what is existent and the way people actually work in their communities the way society functions and the way their communities are organized so one of the basic principles in Asia but also in Africa around community-led housing are often based on savings groups for instance and that's in some countries but not in all a very female activity so something that women would come together and save together that's an activity that women would engage with more in some countries so community-led housing just draws on what is existent and reinforces, strengthens it and puts it maybe to scale whenever that is relevant and possible and I guess one of the reasons as well why women are more present in these examples many times is of course because they are the ones who are usually most concerned about anything that is linked to the household, the care activities within the household and also they are most vulnerable potentially to anything that affects their homes and their very local communities I see Supriya raised her hand so I can maybe yeah I agree with you that women quite very active participant in the process but men also contribute to the construction part like in Thailand as I mentioned earlier that they form like a construction worker and also train the youth group within the community to do the job so I think they also take a big role in that and it's quite very important to monitor the process of construction of the houses by themselves and it's quite safe the cost of the construction when the people participate in the construction process in every stage like order the material monitor the labor or even construct the house by themselves Benedith Barboza from the union of movements of house in Sao Paulo I think that something that's essential in Brazil is a criminalization of the struggles of the leaders that push forward their advocacy and he says he asks how do you face the process of criminalization if that happens in other countries maybe if Anisa could actually start to comment and if any of you that another country have experience of criminalization of social movements in the struggle for housing please so what we comment is something that we have seen in the time that it's been worse in the current government of Brazil extremely authoritarian that wants to qualify as terrorism any action of the pressure of the grassroots of the country so the organization of the movement has prepared in order to face that kind of situation because they actually they undermine the capacity of organization of the movement so for us it's something very important in this moment in Brazil but we would like to know how other countries also face that kind of challenge anybody else would like to comment anything regarding this process of criminalization in other countries because if not we can pass to other questions we are we've got 25 minutes we've got many questions from the public and I would like to thank the participation of all of you so I'm going to continue to another question in the context of your own countries in which ways approaches by community contribute for the sustainability and accessibility in housing solutions that question has already more or less touched upon but that issue of sustainability could be something that we could answer or Joseph or Alexander would like to comment a little bit on that actually I'm going to abuse and go back to the prior issue that opens a good link that we cannot lose that's an issue that's being said regarding criminalization of the housing movements in Brazil and I believe that that's linked to important things the social legitimacy of the struggles pro housing in our societies and then the social legitimacy not only in the struggles when we think specifically in the political process used by the movement but the social legitimacy but or the idea of living of having housing the policies housing policies that many times are seen as a subsidiary or housing policy that is based only for sectors that are not able to get into the market to assure the needs through the market so sees the the policies focus in that population but the issue is how we understand housing as a social issue it's not by chance that the right to housing is a social right is a human right we've got human and cultural rights and the right to housing is a social right but it can also be addressed socially and collectively and for that we need to rebuild the notion of housing as a collective issue so I say this based on our reality in Brazil but I think that also applies to other realities in other countries as well where we've got not only a low income class but this median income class that don't see themselves as subjects or beneficiaries of a policy because they think that paying the installment of the housing is addressing but actually the scheme of financing that something actually drowns the budget of the family is a political decision regarding housing so what I want to tell you with that is that we need to build within the society a notion that all of us regardless of in different economical situations and different situations of vulnerability we are all together to build housing as a collective demand the collective good so we need to build the socialist with that idea and that's why we are sure legitimacy is some more and more policies as the housing late community housing actually grow so fighting economical interest that won't maintain that politics are produced through the market in an individually matter so we need to advance on that and being able to diminish the criminalization of the movements thank you so we've got an issue regarding talking what you have said here the person that sent the question was to congratulate for his work and ask how that initiative has was received by the government and the relevant ministries or developments the projects created by the cities are going to be converted into programs projects and will they have funds from the government yeah I think I responded to the the question but then just for the sake of the generality yes there has been a lot of struggle initially when we presented or we propose the community action area plan and more especially the guiding principles towards ensuring that communities are made better and quite recently as recent as the last years we have received a lot of support because the current mayor seems a lot passionate about it the point is she has the intention to improve these spaces but then how to go about it is the question is the problem because there has been no hardly any plan especially at that level of the community or that level of the neighborhood to really guide the process so she has shown a lot of interest she has been working especially with that as luck but also with a few NGOs and she is working to pilot some of these experiences and especially the plan in a few other communities but also taking on both actions that can address some of the priorities that were highlighted in the community action area plan that was done for two communities we are also helping her to do another for another community but the number of NGOs have also shown a lot of interest to be able to do this the fact remains that the central government is really not too much into those kinds of discussion especially so when they are more at the policy level but what is certain is that the land policy has recently been revised and the community level is going to give a lot of attention there is also the prospect to revise the housing policy which is very old and there is also the impression that a lot of the key principles as well as the priorities that were identified will have to be taken into consideration especially in terms of programming and planning thank you thank you very much Joseph thank you very much Joseph I have a few questions that are trying to group them I think that Evanesia could answer because they relate more with the legal framework so medium is talking here it seems that the cooperativism could be an interesting pathway to strengthen these collective initiatives and Mariangela also asked how do you make effective the right to the land in Brazil we have seen how the grassroots plans are important sorry for the noises in my home so there is an issue it was mentioned that the legal frameworks are very important mainly when we try to implement new models in order to introduce the collective legitimacy of the land how the project have supported the legal advice in order to overcome those obstacles and create presidents that could support community-led housing could you start Evanesia talking about this work that the movement the housing movement has done in order to create a legal framework that is related with these collective opportunities and if someone else wants to implement something else on how that support was formed in order to exceed the current obstacles in other countries so it's very interesting some say that in our society in almost the country the legal framework to transfer funds to the private sectors are always very well down there is no question in terms of being so forth when you talk about the public resources for the community to cover their own needs and the rights that are being denied by the public there is a lot of objections for 30 years we've been trying to answer to the government for the different ministries the judiciary general attorneys why we require that we have that demand to all the land in order to cover a right that has not been complied with so after a lot of criminalization by the authority we are called to be answerable in court many times because although we actually complied with all the norms we understood that it's very important to have a legal framework specific for the practice that already exists but it's not totally restored by legislation because there is also some abridged for us to be questions we are getting our inspiration from countries from Uruguay that has this law where the participation of cooperatives is foreseen the in Argentina we have already done a struggle for the occupation of to have a legal framework and some countries of Central America also we have already been able to approve a legal frameworks like El Salvador with a housing laws with the participation of the community so it needs to regulate that concept that understanding that yes the community ways of relating with the public funds in order to be appropriate by community there are ways of ownership collective ownership that could be implement both in land and also the set of housings and making also in the urban history because also in the land there are collective ways of appropriation of the land that are not acknowledged so we are making an initiative that is building a draft of law to be introduced in the national congress that is foreseen in the law that we can present drafts for law we want to discuss with the Brazilian parliament to create an action that lets clear and gives more answer for those actions that the committee has already done without the public authority that when the public authority decides to support they also have the support without being questioned legally because of that that was a little bit moment that we are building now thank you very much Vanessa I don't know if you want to comment about the different initiatives that you have in urban Monday if you've got something regarding legal support in order to handle the legislation that do not acknowledge the collective actions is there any case to mention yeah I would say there is loads of them so I guess one of the ways of advocating for a change in local or national policies is to kind of showcase what is possible in other countries maybe in similar contexts and one of the ways of doing that the local communities or grassroots organizations have developed among many other things is also to kind of do peer learning but across like public servants or local authorities specifically as an example within the SDI network in Africa so there were a few experiences where one federation would take their local authority to a different country to speak in that specific country and to kind of tell them how to implement something different why it is of interest to a local government and how it can be done and I believe that in some cases it's not necessarily about not wanting to support these kind of initiatives but not knowing how to not having the right tools at hand including legal tools of course there's also situations where there is no no public support or no even a very strong way of position towards these community initiatives so that is of course also a case but sometimes it's really about showcasing not just examples but really legal tools or financial tools and it's proven quite effective to kind of make also national and local authorities talk to each other so that's maybe one of the thoughts about it Thank you Bia very much for bringing those issues so we arrived at the last couple of minutes of the event we've got a couple of questions that we didn't treat maybe you're not going to be able to answer all we apologize but the discussion continues you've got the context of the people, the panelists here so we continue we're going to close with a question I think that was from Carmen how to change the public policy for housing regarding the public policy to embrace sustainable projects in order to favor the environment and families that links with the sustainability issue that was not commented maybe Alexandra could comment a little bit and tell about a couple of examples in different parts of the world Thank you for bringing me in here I wanted to come back to this question on sustainability but also the some extent that we've seen in many examples how community-led housing has also been approached as an interim solution as a means to maybe resolve conflicts in the short term or to deal with issues around mitigation and in a very localized way in terms of climate change and I think in such an approach it has been sometimes even difficult to retain those experiences over time and to be able actually not to let it be absorbed by the ongoing interest to then transform that space into again into a kind of more open market and all the threats of individualizing ownership we have been so many experiences that sometimes more collective processes have become merely a stage an instrument which has then become useful to then over time to bring let's say bring back that space or those properties to the open market again and that has been a huge challenge I think for community-led housing initiatives internationally to try to retain that situation of collectivization and therefore retain that social function of property and land over time and so I think that's a massive threat and I think the way to try to deal with some of those things we have seen some emergence I think Joseph could talk also a bit later if there is a time around the establishment of a city learning platform in Freetown which is the type of city-wide alliances that is able to then sustain the political momentum and social momentum behind some of those ideas continued pressure that is needed to then retain those initiatives to scale up to institutionalize I think that's a link to some of the questions in the Q&A I think Mariangela raised some of those issues what can be done to really try to unlock some of those power symmetries and really that requires a kind of mindset shift for a community like housing being nearly a kind of corporate social responsibility of the housing sector it cannot be just that we do 90% of the business as usual and we do 2-3% of the business as unusual I mean that is going to perpetuate that same structural challenge that I think Rodrigo was touching on earlier on and it's fundamental here to really try to shift the tide in a more significant way Wonderful And I'm going to give the word to you because we are have a little bit delayed but please close our conversation tell us about the next steps in this articulation of organizations that work with community-led housing so that we can know how we'll be the next stages and who is actually following us continue to follow us Thank you, it's amazing to still have more than 100 people still with us here after this engagement shows that there's a lot of demand and interest to continue those conversations and that is amazing so I think this is part of an ongoing conversation and a series of engagements that we hope to continue promoting in this area I think just to share a bit of my personal history I joined now the human settlements group in September and since then I've been working with colleagues to convene and promote research knowledge exchange and policy kind of advisory and advocacy work around the agenda of housing justice and we are strategizing this area of work, designing, implementing those activities collaboratively we have social movements, we have our partners here in this but others as well such as Islamic Shack Dwellers International Habitat International Coalition I saw that Adrian Allen is here with us today as well ACHR the Global Platform for the Rights of the City that Rodrigo has been also very active in that space, the cohabitat network so we're trying to advance that agenda collaboratively so that we can design our common and shared goals and to promote this I think this effort also talks to ongoing efforts that we've been talking about also previous work in IID that has been really important in this field, I think if you are interested there has been recently two special issues on housing of environment and urbanization which is a journal that is dedicated to publish the work of activists and scholars in the Global South so it's an incredible resource so please have a look in those documents also David Sattuite has submitted a really incredible submission to the United Cities and Local Government Gold Report, the Gold 5 where he there was a report focusing on rethinking housing policies that I think is really a great contribution to this field another resource that I think is really useful that the group has done in the past so I think our job now in the context of community-led housing which is one of the agendas that we're trying to promote we need further work in this area, we need to go a bit deeper as the conversation was going in systematizing those actual institutional conditions that are enabling or disabling community-led housing Bea was talking precisely about some of those factors many interventions and we need to to really get the evidence of the blockages and also the possibilities and tactics used to address them and I think this is really the agenda that we are putting together on the table we're trying to promote and we hope to carry out further work in this field and involve all of you that have joined us today in this event to continue sharing experiences and hopefully acting together to try to promote and to make community-led housing a reality that is more meaningful and can bring the type of cities that are more caring and more just for all of us so I think that's really the overarching kind of agenda that we're trying to promote from here and I pass that back to you so you'll be welcome Thank you Alexander so we are arriving to the final minutes of the event I would like to thank who has been with us until now we had a very good audience showing that the subject matter is very relevant we've got people from different continents in this conversation so once again I want to highlight the invitation for all of you to hear to be with us within diplomatic.com.br there are texts that are in English and Spanish if you don't understand Portuguese thank our panelists that have been with us and shared your experiences and exchanges and knowledge and highlight this final that we are living these difficult moments mainly here in Brazil and have an event like that that shows the possibilities to build pathways respect to the collectivity that emphasis in collectiveness gives us a little hope and I hope that this message has arrived touched you all thank you very much and we continue in touch and we hope that the network continues to communicate and exchange experiences thank you very much