In Bangladesh, eviction is often seen as the only solution when a city’s development plans clash with the poor’s need for land and housing.  Here is a case where an eviction in the city of Gopalganj, to make way for a cricket stadium, turned into an opportunity to demonstrate a community-driven resettlement housing process which showed a new, more community-driven and more collaborative way of making sure that the urban poor displaced by development can be at the center of planning the solution, with the support of the government, development agencies, community architects and their fellow citizens.  

Bangladesh has gigantic housing problems, but almost no examples of community-driven solutions to those problems.  That’s why this little housing project in the provincial city of Jhenaidah is so important.  It shows how much even very poor, marginalized community people - and especially women - can do to design and build solid, comfortable, low-cost houses for themselves, when they have a little sensitive support from community architects and are allowed to control the money and the project themselves.  This much-visited project is helping to show many in Bangladesh that people-driven housing works.  

Here is another small housing project in the provincial city of Jhenaidah, which shows how much even very poor, marginalized community people - and particularly women - can do to design and build solid, comfortable, low-cost houses for themselves, when they are supported by sensitive community architects and are allowed to control the money and the project themselves.  This much-visited project - and it’s sister project in Mohisha-kundu Shordarpara - are helping to show many in Bangladesh that people-driven housing works and can do a great deal to help solve the country’s very big housing problems.

This roadside squatter community planned and built their own resettlement housing project, and showed a war-torn Cambodia how housing problems can be solved better by partnership, not by eviction.

After surveying all the slums in the provincial city of Serey Sophoan, in the northwest corner of Cambodia, this little riverside squatter settlement, which had long faced floods and eviction threats, was prioritized by the community network as having the most urgent housing problems.  After long negotiations, the city agreed to provide free government land and basic infrastructure, just 1.5 kilometers away, for resettlement, where the people worked with the UPDF, municipal officials and a team of community architects to design and build their own new community, with collective land rights.