Declaration of World Assembly of Inhabitants

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We, the participants of the World Assembly of Inhabitants , gathered in Tunis from 24 to 28 March 2015, have met for many activities grouped under seven themes during the World Social Forum to continue the processes of convergence as in many previous gatherings including WAI 2013 (Tunis) and the People’s Alternative Social Urban Social Forum (Medellin, 2014).

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First of all, we stand in solidarity with the people of Tunis against fundamentalism and terrorism.

We, the under-signed women and men, organisations, networks and movements of inhabitants of slums, neighbourhoods, settlements, cooperatives, tenants and mortgaged homeowners, squatters, homeless, workers including the informal ones, in urban and rural settings, therefore make the following Declaration:

  • We re-affirm our responsibility and commitment to the struggle for and direct implementation of the principles of human rights, both collective and individual, solidarity, peace, respect and dignity including social justice and equity through the redistribution of wealth and the respect for the environment.
  • We accuse the real estate and land speculation and re-affirm the urgency to replace the neo-liberal capitalist system with one based upon collective ownership and alternative forms of communal management that respects all forms of life, and the recognition of the commons, the social production of habitat including the alternative one, the social function of property, land and cities to establish a more just, humane and sustainable habitat.
  • We are committed to the inclusion of the inhabitants organisations and the whole civil society in planning processes and in putting in place alternative policies and practices that give inhabitants the social function of cities and land where towns and villages respond to the needs of their people, without discrimination, where all live and works in security, dignity and in harmony with nature and the environment. We are also committed with the rights of peasants and farmers to land, water, food production and food sovereignty.
  • We demand the implementation of the values and principles expressed in the right to the city that also respects the well-being of people living in rural areas. We fight together with indigenous peoples in rural and urban struggles against water and land grabbing, privatisations, dispossessions, exploitation and oppression.
  • We are committed to struggle and insist upon respect for, and enforcement of international instruments prohibiting forced evictions, and support those norms affirming human rights related to habitat and corresponding obligations of all organs of the state public authorities and private actors. To this purpose, in particular, we call for cases to be submitted to the International Tribunal of Evictions.
  • We call on all national and local governments to establish constitutional rights to habitat and to adequate housing, including affordable water and sanitation, and to respect and guarantee such rights as enforceable, whether constitutional or otherwise.
  • We support the construction of a pan-African network of inhabitants’ organisations to counter oppression and exploitation by local elites and neo-colonialism.
  • We stand in solidarity with all the struggles and against the criminalisation of activists for the right to housing, to land and to the city.
  • We resolve to continue to strengthen local struggles with international solidarity and mobilisation.

This Declaration also seeks to promote dialogue with other Convergence Assemblies in the WSF and all over the world to build global convergence across all issues for another possible but better world. To further these goals, we resolve to strengthen the convergence of inhabitants’ organisations via the exchange of experiences, sharing of strategies, tools and a common agenda 2015-2017, and through the participation in and outside the gatherings of the global elite.

To this purpose we are committed and call all the inhabitants organisations and networks to organise the World Urban Social Forum (Quito, October 2016), in order to debate and deliberate the implementation of policies for a clear alternative to the neoliberal and technocratic approach of the UN Summit Habitat III, preparing it together from the local, national, regional and international level.

Raising our concerns regarding the UN Summit Habitat III preparatory process, its contents and resolutions, we are committed to bring also there the Civil society and social movements voice and demands.

The Joint Open Calendar of Activities

To promote the convergence of struggles of networks and organisations

2015

  •  20-23 JUNE, European Coalition Right to Housing and to the City, Athens, Greece
  •  OCTOBER, Regional Forum of Civil Society to Prepare for HABITAT III, Lima, Peru
  •  OCTOBER, Anti-MIPIM, London, UK
  •  OCTOBER, World Days for Zero Evictions – Right to Habitat

2016

Other meetings to note:

See Open Calendar  for a comprehensive list

2016