ISHF 2023 event – Housing policies from below: local co-production strategies for housing justice

How is housing policy shaped by local actors inside and outside public institutions? How do these practices respond to the housing emergency with short and long-term actions? How do they vary across the globe? What alliances are driving them, particularly between local governments and civil society?

Information and Registration

In order to address these and other questions, we invite you to join the activity “Housing policies from below: local co-production strategies for housing justice”, to be held in the context of the 2023, International Social Housing Festival, taking place in Barcelona, from the 7th to the 9th of June. The event will take place on Thursday 8th of June, between 15:30h and 18:20h at Comissions Obreres de Catalunya (CCOO) (see map here).

Please register here by clicking on the event. Participants must be registered to the festival in order to join the activity. Registration is free and can be done here until May 29th. The event will count with interpretation in English and Spanish.

Background

In a scenario in which local action is increasingly becoming a driving force in contributing to responses to the current housing emergency, this workshop seeks to deliver an in-depth participatory discussion on the diversity and complexity of housing policies, particularly those emerging from alliances at the local level. Through the exchange of experiences and concrete strategies, the event will seek to explore mechanisms through which local governments and civil society groups from different regions are re-imagining and expanding housing policies from below, to drive housing justice at the local level.

Organizers

The event is promoted collectively by CIDEU, the Global Platform for the Right to the City, Habitat International Coalition, the International Institute for Environment and Development, Observatory DESC, UCL’s Bartlett Development Planning Unit and United Cities and Local Governments and its committee on Social Inclusion, Participative Democracy and Human Rights. It is introduced as a continuation to a series of efforts by these actors to advance the discussion around strategies and practices to protect and realize the right to adequate housing from the local sphere. 

Objectives

Thus, the workshop will seek to advance and contribute to these efforts, supporting processes of international solidarity and cooperation between actors working to advance housing rights at the local level. For such, the event will foster linkages and alliances between a variety of actors from different sectors and across regions to compose a collective mapping of strategies shaping housing policy from below. 

Going beyond a shared diagnosis, the workshop will span diverse modalities that compose housing policy, based on three pillars for advancing the right to adequate housing:

• Recognizing the housing entitlements of those systematically discriminated from their rights, as well as acknowledging housing processes that take place beyond the realm of formal planning;

• Protecting housing rights by providing adequate regulations, frameworks, and incentives, including market regulation, protection to  different forms of land tenure and regulations against forced evictions and discrimination,

• Fulfilling housing rights through the direct provision of housing units, by building new houses to keep and manage them as rental public units or to give in private ownership; or by recovering existing building stock, including enabling different forms of community-led and co-produced housing

Agenda

The workshop will start with a short introduction by organizers and then move to an opening panel seeking to inspire and provoke debate through interventions by local government representatives, civil society organizations and international organizations. Then, participatory discussion tables will follow, with the event ending with a joint plenary to identify shared conclusions and follow-up steps.