Collective housing:  an international conference and a new ACHR newsletter on the subject of collective and community-driven housing in Asian cities, in all its richness and variety.

Friends and colleagues in the ACHR network drew together again in early July 2024 for a big 4-day international conference on collective and community-driven housing:  housing which people plan, build, finance, own and live in together, in many different ways, across Asia.  Collective housing is especially important for the urban poor, who have long been left behind by the more individual and market-driven forms of housing, and for whom the collective development potential of communities can be lifelines which allow them to survive and thrive in ways they cannot on their own. 
 
We now have a rich stock of examples of how collective housing can be developed, in different contexts, by organized poor communities and their professional and government supporters.  Our task now is to bring these scattered projects together and to use them to inspire a much larger and more unified collective housing movement in the Asia region.  At the core of the conference were discussions about how to do that and about what elements are needed to scale up Asia's collective housing, in all its variety.       
 
The conference was organized by ACHR and hosted by the Thai Government’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security and the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI), in collaboration with ten partner organizations from Thailand and around the world - including our friends at urbaMonde in Switzerland.  The conference brought together some 200 people from some 19 countries (15 in Asia and 2 in Africa) - community leaders and their professional supporters, government officials, architects and friends from academia and international development organizations. 
 
We're always very thrifty when it comes to these big ACHR jamborees, and use the occasion of so many friends gathering in one place to pack in several other meetings and programs.  This meeting was  no exception.  In the days before the conference, there was also a meeting of the Community Architects Network (CAN) and an ACHR regional meeting which allowed us to catch up on what everyone's doing, to discuss the projects ACHR currently has on the bubble and to set some plans for the future.  There were also field visits to see some of the collective housing projects being supported by CODI in Bangkok:  canal-side housing redevelopment, district-wide collective housing, railway slum housing redevelopment and collective housing projects planned and managed by the Homeless Network. 
 
A new issue of the ACHR newsletter was also launched during the conference - an issue which spotlights some of the many collective housing projects we already have in the region and the efforts on various fronts to support the implementation of many more. 
 
To download the new ACHR newsletter, please click here.