Radically democratic forms of housing production

Fairville is an international and collaborative research project funded that uses participatory action research and the co-production of knowledge as strategies of spatial justice to address urban inequalities affecting cities, mainly in Europe but also in Africa. It has produced a pan-European manifesto for just and democratic housing in European cities. 

From 2024 to 2025, urbaMonde, together with nine grassroots organisations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, collaborated to systematise nine community-led financial mechanisms. The outcome is a comprehensive publication that highlights the history and functioning of these mechanisms, the main challenges they face, and the best practices that enabled their establishment and growth.

This new publication from Hub partners World Habitat and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) examines the enablers and barriers of community-led housing (CLH), advocating for supportive policies, financial access and partnerships to scale CLH as a viable housing solution.

It is based on over 100 sources and case studies from Brazil, Nepal, Malawi and Zambia.

This online session will explore community-led approaches to inclusive and climate-sensitive urban development, hosted by Cities Alliance, GIZ, IIED, and Slum Dwellers International (SDI). This event will celebrate many of the achievements of those living in informality, and serve as a platform for open discussions on how to build on these successes.

A report assessesing how local and regional governments are advancing the right to adequate housing to meet the UN’s housing-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets, describing the importance of local knowledge, and the power of grassroots organisations and local governments to translate the objective of adequate housing into positive action towards that goal.

What pedagogic practices enable social movements, ordinary citizens, activists & urban practitioners to become agents of change towards socially and environmentally just cities? The film explores this question through the experiences of grassroots schools of popular urbanism working under the umbrella of HIC in Latin America.

The overall goal of the HIC co-learning space on social production of habitat was to build a common understanding among HIC members, friends, and allies cross-regionally about concepts and practices of social production of habitat to raise a collective and global voice for political action and joint advocacy strategies.

A collaboration between IIED and World Habitat, working with local partners from Brazil (Catalytic Communities), Malawi (Center for Community Organisation and Development), Zambia (Civic Forum on Housing and Habitat), Nepal (Lumanti Support Group for Shelter), Switzerland (urbaMonde), and Slovenia (Zadrugator), promoting community-led housing as a feasible and effective solution to advance housing justice and to provide housing that delivers the social and environmental outcomes for our cities and the planet to thrive.

This Resource Guide is the outcome of a Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice convened by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy as part of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network. The Resource Guide foregrounds innovative methods that are being used by researchers across academia and activism and explicitly situates such methods in an orientation towards housing justice.