In the past few years, community networks in cities around Thailand have been finding innovative ways to grow vegetables and produce healthy food on leftover bits of land inside the communities and on borrowed land outside. These community gardens may not solve all the problems of hunger and food insecurity, but they have improved nutrition, lowered food expenses and built greater food self-sufficiency for some of the country's most vulnerable citizens. Since the Covid-19 crisis hit, and so many people have lost jobs, lost income opportunities and lost their ability to buy food and feed their families, community gardens have become even more of a lifeline for the poor.  So much so that it’s become a movement now in Thailand’s urban poor communities.   This report takes you on a guided tour through four of these community gardens (in Bangkok, Chum Phae, Surin and Chiang Mai) - each one very different.

Jockin Arputham, who died in October 2018, was a slum dweller, community organizer and solution-maker of the greatest sort. He was a friend and partner and teacher and rabble-rouser to so many of us in the ACHR and SDI diaspora - and in the global development community. Here is a book that brings together stories and tributes from forty people who worked with him and learned from him over the years and around the world. It was put together with tenderness and affection by the far-flung team of Sheela Patel, Joel Bolnick, David Satterthwaite, Indu Agarwal and Holly Ashley.

These are Tom's rough notes from a 3-day regional meeting on collective housing that was held in Bangkok, Thailand, in October 2019. The meeting gave us a chance to reflect together on the collective housing that groups in the region have already built, and to launch a new ACHR-urbaMonde collaborative project to promote collective and community-driven housing - in all its many varieties - in the Asia region.

This report presents a slightly edited transcript of a workshop on the subject of “Why do we need collective housing in Asia?”, which was held on October 15, 2019, during the seventh Asia Pacific Urban Forum (APUF-7), in Penang, Malaysia. The workshop was organized by ACHR, in collaboration with the Swiss-based NGO urbaMonde.

This report presents a slightly edited transcript of a workshop on the subject of “Grassroots community resilience and disasters”, which was held on October 14, 2019, during the seventh Asia Pacific Urban Forum (APUF-7), in Penang, Malaysia. The workshop was organized by ACHR, in collaboration with three other grassroots networks: the Huairou Commission, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI).