Housing & Urban Development Imperatives: Towards HABITAT III 2016

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

UN HABITAT Congresses occur every 20 years (Vancouver 1976, Istanbul 1996) and the next meeting is scheduled be held in Quito, in October 2016. The Vancouver Habitat I conference was a tipping point in shifting policies towards positive integration of informality through upgrading, regularization, sites and services, etc. Habitat II (Istanbul) began to embrace social movements & collective action, NGO mobilization, and participation in the recently emerged democratic environments and brought rights-to-the-city type approaches to the foreground. In both cases research and practice in Latin America was at the forefront of these paradigm shifts. Since 1992 the World Urban Forum has provided more frequent (biennial) opportunities for housing and urban research and policy to be evaluated. So, we ask, “Whither UN-Habitat III?” These two linked panel sessions will examine some of the housing and urban development challenges against the contemporary neoliberal paradigm backdrop. The panelists, all members and participants of the Latin American Housing Network (www.lahn.utexas.org), since 2007 have been working collaboratively on a major comparative research project across nine Latin American countries. The unit of analysis for the LAHN has been the informally produced, now-consolidated low-income settlements of Latin American cities that began 25-40 years ago. Located in the intermediate ring and sections of the city (rather than the periphery), these self-built “first suburbs” or “innerburbs” comprise working class mixed-tenure fully serviced poor neighborhoods. Densely populated, these self-built homes continue to provide homes and patrimony for the original owners and, increasingly, for second and third generations raised in the neighborhood. One of the many challenges today is to undertake housing and neighborhood rehabilitation (rehab) without displacement. However such policies of housing rehab of the existing housing stock is rarely on the agenda of national and international government policy makers and planners. Thus each paper will advocate for new policies that break out of ONE of the primary research findings of the LAHN in their particular city/country of analysis and explore how the research and policy briefs may best be inserted into the Habitat agenda and into post conference implementation.

Sub Track

• Cities and Urban Studies

Session Organizer

• Peter M Ward, University of Texas/Austin

Chairs

• Peter M Ward, University of Texas/Austin

• Edith R Jimenez Huerta, Universidad de Guadalajara

Individual Presentations

• La gestión de suelo para vivienda social en Bogotá: 15 años políticas públicas urbanas - Yency Contreras Ortiz, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

• La importancia de la vivienda de alquiler para las personas de escasos recursos: Hacia ONU-Hábitat III. - Edith R Jimenez Huerta, Universidad de Guadalajara

• Future Policies to Avoid the “Clouding” of Decades of Property Title Regularization Programs: Towards UN-Habitat III - Peter M Ward, University of Texas/Austin

• Housing rehabilitation for cross-generational use value: insights from multi-household dwelling culture in Lima and Guayaquil - Olga Peek, KU Leuven / Universidad de Guayaquil