This milestone land-sharing project was the first of its kind in Cambodia. A large inner-city squatter settlement within a former government sport housing complex negotiated to move onto a small portion of the same site, where the company redeveloping another part of the site built and paid for blocks of new apartments for the residents, with permanent tenure. With facilitation from the municipal and national governments, the construction costs were subsidized by a portion of the profits generated by the commercial redevelopment, and the apartments were given to the residents free of charge.

The on-site upgrading of the Pro Lay Toek, a canal-side squatter settlement, was the first chance for the provincial city of Neak Loeung to see what a collaborative, community-managed housing project looks like.

India has some really big slum redevelopment programs, but most of them are designed to be planned and built by contractors and allotted to families individually, with zero or little participation in anything. This pioneering project in the small city of Bhuj has shown how government subsidies can be used in a very different way.  In these three projects, the new housing was planned and built by community members themselves, with some sensitive design support, and it enhanced existing social structures and made use of the people’s wisdom about how to live together sociably and sustainably in a hot place. 

India has some enormous housing programs for the millions living in slums.  But thee subsidies those programs offer mostly go to developers, who build dystopian housing complexes that are badly designed, poorly built, far from everything and unaffordable to most of the people they are supposed to benefit.  This project, in the city of Ahmednagar, is using government subsidies in a very different way, to show how when communities form cooperatives and are assisted to collectively design and rebuild their housing in-situ, the results can be fine-tuned to people’s real needs and will be more likely to enhance the social support systems that already exist within communities than to destroy them. 

This case study describes a citywide land readjustment housing project in which 22 slum communities moved to 7 existing slum communities (all within 3-4 kms of the old settlements) and redeveloped their housing in 4-story walk-up flats, with the public land being leased by the cooperative housing societies set up in each building.