This small report describes a visit Somsook made to Myanmar in March 2009. This was just 11 months after Cyclone Nargis had swept across its ferociously destructive path across the country, and just a few months after the country had opened up to outside aid and visitors at all. The visit was a kind of reconnaissance to see who was doing what after the cyclone, what projects showed promise and how ACHR might help.

In this November 2011 report, part of ACHR's project on "The poor in heritage cities", Chawanad Luansang and Suphana Sophonpanich (two community architects from Thailand) make an assessment of how Bhaktapur's poor and original inhabitants have fared since the city was declared to be part of the Kathmandu Valley's World Heritage site. The monuments and ancient architects are in great danger from development and earthquakes, but what about the people who live there?

In a time when the Covid virus has put so many cities in Asia under lockdown, or at least in very bad straights economically, informal street vending has continued to be a lifeline for the urban poor who have lost jobs and earning opportunities and can't feed their families.  Yet perversely, the authorities in many cities have used the crisis as an excuse to evict informal street vendors.  Karachi is a case in point.  This article by Arif Hasan is about the difficult situation street vendors in his city have been facing.  The article is the product of four years of research, in which many people were involved. This research - and the advocacy that has come out of it - has been crucial in arresting the demolition of small businesses and hawkers in Karachi and in laying the groundwork for the development of an appropriate and easily-implementable process of regularization.  Arif and his team are now working to turn this research into a book-length report and to develop easily-readable advocacy material. 

Informal hawkers continue to be evicted in cities like Karachi, Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta. The pictures in this folder were put together in January 2019 by Arif Hasan and Bushra Sarwar to show the agencies involved in making planning decisions in Karachi that hawkers need not be evicted, but can be resettled in a manner that is aesthetic and does not create congestion or hindrance to vehicular or pedestrian movement. In fact cities around the world are embracing street markets at the time Asia is eliminating them.