When a powerful earthquake hit Balochistan Province in 2013, hundreds of remote villages in the mountainous Awaran District, which was closest to the epicenter, were reduced to rubble.  Because this was a conflict zone, the government wouldn’t allow international aid agencies to go in.  But the Karachi-based Urban Resource Centre did go, and worked with the villagers to develop an unconventional project that capitalized on the local building wisdom and social strength in these resourceful communities to rebuild their houses, bringing in to the process only those elements the people couldn’t manage themselves.

Kabalaka was one of the first community associations in the Homeless People’s Federation Philippines to use their own collective savings to successfully acquire a piece of land for housing urban poor squatters under threat of eviction, so this is a historic project.  A few years later, the community was able to tap an experimental finance program and build the first batch of 21 houses, in a pilot project that became a learning opportunity for the whole city.  The community members designed several house models, to accommodate different budgets, and then collectively managed the construction, from start to finish.

Two groups of very poor families came together to make this collective housing project, which was the first of its kind in the city of Digos, on the south-eastern coast of Mindanao.  One group had been squatting on a strip of privately-owned farmland in make-shift shacks, and one group was being evicted to make way for a road-widening project nearby.  With help from the Homeless People’s Federation Philippines, they came together, registered themselves as an association, negotiated to buy the farmland cheaply and then planned and built new houses for themselves, using a variety of cost saving techniques.

When the city of Iloilo began planning a much-needed major flood control project, a lot of informal communities living along the city’s rivers and waterways had to be  resettled, and the city provided land for them that was fairly close to their old settlements.  The Homeless People’s Federation was given one large part of that resettlement site to develop a project for housing some of the displaced families. It was the Federation’s largest-yet project in Iloilo and it tested and scaled up ideas of collective and community-led house design, settlement planning, materials production and house construction.

This housing project was born in the midst of a tense eviction stand-off, when the mayor offered free land for resettlement to two communities facing eviction from the land they had occupied for decades, in the middle of the city.  After many delays and many twists and turns, 46 poor families from slums and danger zones all over Davao were able to move into small but secure houses in a government resettlement site, where they can gradually upgrade them, as their means allow.