This historic housing project was one of the ten pilot housing projects to be built in the first year of the Baan Mankong Program.  These pilot projects became a kind of university for other poor communities to visit and learn from, at a time when community-led, collective housing was still new in Thailand.  In this project, the people formed a cooperative, negotiated to buy the land they had been renting for half a century, and then reblocked their community, with full infrastructure and new houses.

This project, in which 112 families from three squatter areas in the southern Thai city of Pattani came together, formed a housing cooperative, found land to buy nearby and designed and built a new community for themselves, with support from CODI's Baan Mankong program and a team of young community architects.

This case study describes the collective housing project designed and built by 94 landless fisher folk families on Koh Mook Island, after the 2004 Asian tsunami destroyed many of their houses.

This case study describes a seminal upgrading project planned and carried out by an old but vulnerable Muslim fishing community on the Bang Nara River in Narathiwat, in southern Thailand, during a very difficult time of civil conflict in the area.

By 2008, nearly half of the poor communities in Nakhon Sawan had upgraded their land tenure, housing and infrastructure in the same place, with support from the community network, the municipal government and CODI’s Baan Mankong program. But many could not upgrade in the same place and were still squatting in squalid and insecure circumstances around the city.  This is the first project to bring a group of these scattered squatters and renters together, to make their own brand new community, on a plot of leased public land.