World Habitat at House Party 2015

World Habitat Programme Managers Jenny, Line and Tom recently spoke at House Party 2015 in Manchester, with each of them exploring different aspects of Community-Led Housing. The presentations are available to download at the bottom of this page.

Jenny Line: Scaling Up Community-led Housing – The Art of Herding Cats.
A very short overview of the World Habitat community-led housing project being funded by the Nationwide Foundation. Challenges in communicating about community-led housing and activities to make people think ‘outside the bubble’.

Jenny’s reflections
‘There are lots of people thinking about Community-Led Housing who just want to know more. Everybody faces the same issues with naysayers and a shared resource which provides advice about how to deal with them could be really useful (for community-led projects, and beyond).’

Line Algoed: Community-Led Housing: A Global Perspective
I spoke about how ‘Community-led housing’ is the majority housing practice in the world with cities growing at unprecedented rates and formal house builders (Governments and developers) not responding to the demand. Richard Lang, with whom I shared the session spoke about (new) community-led housing fields in Austria and Germany.

Line’s reflections
‘It’s useful to get a global perspective on these issues as community-led housing, although still quite marginal in the UK (less than 1%), is happening at a much wider scale in other places (eg 80% in Sweden) and especially, as I argued, in cities in the developing world, where in many cases a majority of people arriving to cities are forced to find solutions to their housing needs.’

Tom Archer: Fuelling the Growth in Community Land Trusts and Housing Collectives
I focused on two things related to ‘Fuelling a growth in CLTs and other housing collectives’ – 1) applying lessons from ‘social movement’ literature to the growth of the CLT/ wider CLH movement and 2) learning from ‘heroic successes’ and ‘valiant failures’ of other CLTs, particularly in terms of how they were advised and supported.

Tom’s reflections
‘Members of the audience seemed to concur with the suggestion that powers are needed to ensure local authorities fully support Community-Led Housing (CLH) schemes, and that asset managers don’t ride rough-shod over them. Attendees also agreed that technical advisors in this field need to understand the distinctiveness of such projects; that they are largely run by volunteers and that they do not operate with the same logic as housing associations. We need a network of professionals who understand this and adapt their approach accordingly.’