New asian case studies documented by ACHR

Mandartola collective housing in Bangladesh

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 communitydriven 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.

• Size: 172 households
• Finished: 201
• Type: Nearby resettlement of some members of an inner-city slum, after it was demolished, to free land provided by the city.

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River View Homeowners Association, a wonderful case study of a large community-driven housing project in the Philippines

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.

• Size: 138 households
• Finished: 2013
• Type: Community-managed nearby resettlement housing project for typhoonaffected and flood control projectaffected families, on land provided by the city government

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Salyani housing project in Nepal

This is the first-ever community-led upgrading project in Bharatpur (Chitwan District, Nepal), and the city’s first case of an informal community being given secure tenure rights to the public land they occupy.

The project was a learning opportunity for the whole city. With help from a team of community architects, the people developed low-cost plans to rebuild their mud and thatch houses, upgrade the infrastructure and negotiate with the Forestry Department, which owns the land, to get subsidized timber, which many used to construct their new houses.

• Size: 31 households
• Finished: 2011
• Type: On-site upgrading of an informal community on Forest Department Land, with secure land use rights.

The project is much visited and has inspired similar projects in several other cities.

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