This collectively planned and managed housing project in Metro Manila was a breakthrough on several fronts.  The 212 families, whose houses in informal riverside settlements had been swept away by floods, came together, formed a new association and found and bought land for resettlement themselves, right there in the same barangay (sub-district) where they had been living. Then, because the land was much too small for individual plots, they worked with a new government program that was promoting and financing higher-density - but still affordable - housing, so all 212 families could get secure housing on the land.

The Ati people are an indigenous tribe thought to be the first inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago. Decades of development pressures and environmental destruction have driven them from their ancestral highland settlements and into cities, where many live in terrible poverty and isolation.  In this project, a forward-looking Christian pastor, who is an Ati himself, raised enough funds and won over enough allies and supporters to be able to buy a small piece of land on the outskirts of Iloilo, where he and a growing group of poor Ati families collectively developed a new and self-sustaining community. 

The Homeless People’s Federation in Mandaue has a long history of good collaboration with the local government and with a citywide urban poor alliance. This partnership’s first big achievement was a large, on-site upgrading project, in which 9.2 hectares of public land in the heart of the city was donated to the 1,600 families who were squatting on it, and who later developed some extraordinary collective housing projects there. This case study describes one of those projects, at LTHAI, where the people completely rebuilt their community after it was destroyed by a fire, using ICEB blocks they made themselves. 

This is the story of an extraordinary housing project that was imagined and made real by some of Metro Manila’s poorest citizens - the women, men and children who earn their living by collecting, sorting and selling recyclable waste. They were living in squatter settlements around the mountainous Payatas garbage dump, where they faced the constant threat of eviction. Against great odds, they saved together, formed a homeowners association, bought a piece of inexpensive, undeveloped land in a neighboring city and are gradually developing it and building new houses and new lives for themselves there.

This little project may look a bit  cramped and grubby, but if collective housing projects had their own museum, this one would be the star exhibit.  Forty years ago, these 67 poor families, who had survived fires and evictions, negotiated to buy a small portion of the land they used to rent, and rebuilt their community on that postage-stamp-sized land, with help from some creative-thinking friends at the National Housing Authority.  At the end of that extraordinary struggle, they made Thailand’s first land sharing project and its first community-driven formal housing project, which would inspire so many others.