Jumlong Wit is an old community in the heart of Nakhon Sawan, where generations of “Likay” folk theater performers have lived and practiced their art.  When a fire burned their houses to the ground in 2007, they used the crisis to transform their run-down and insecure living conditions into something better and more permanent.  After forming a cooperative, they negotiated to lease the public land they had been squatting on and completely rebuilt their community in a new form. This project was the first of many in a citywide process of securing permanent, decent housing for all of the city's poor citizens.

The community network in the small Northeastern city of Chum Phae has found ways to make their cooperative housing projects do double duty as vegetable farms and fruit orchards.  They have also put their resources together to collectively purchase a big piece of land on the outskirts of the city, where they have developed a collective rice farm and vegetable garden, which provides cheap, good, organic rice and produce to community members and also serves as a land bank for future housing needs.

This on-site reblocking and reconstruction of a small community at Block 6A, in Vinh City's Cua Nam Ward, showed everyone in Vietnam a new way to revitalize the country's big stock of run-down collective housing, without evicting anyone.

Vietnam’s cities still have a lot of old, broken-down collective housing projects that were built to provide minimal housing for the workers in state-run factories.  The factories are long gone, but the people are still there, and most of them are prevented from improving or rebuilding their houses by building regulations, because their houses and lanes fall below the government’s minimum allowable standards. This is one of several projects that challenged those unrealistic standards and showed that it was possible for people themselves to build great big, decent, airy houses even on extremely tiny plots.

It’s not easy to find an example of a collective, community-driven housing project in Vietnam, despite the country’s socialist ideology of everything being done by “the people”.  But here is an authentic one that was built by a community of very poor riverside squatters, in the provincial city of Tan An, in southern Vietnam. The city authorities had been wanting for years to address the people’s miserable housing conditions, but had no budget for relocating them.  So instead, they let the people design and build their own houses and played the role of project facilitator, and the results showed everyone a new way.