Winners of 2023 World Habitat Awards announced!
UpdatedThe Awards, which are organised by World Habitat in partnership with UN-Habitat, are the world’s leading housing awards, with winners receiving £10,000 and the opportunity for international development opportunities.
An organisation which re-develops and provides good quality affordable housing to people on low incomes in Scotland and a Senegal-based project which has helped 20,000 people settle in safe homes are the Gold winners of the prestigious World Habitat Awards.
One of the Gold winners is UrbaSEN and the Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants, based in Senegal, West Africa. UrbaSEN is a local NGO which supports the Housing and Living Environment Improvement Programme for Vulnerable People in Precarious Neighbourhoods. The programme works to improve quality of life and build resilience to climate change in informal settlements in Senegal, where severe flooding has become a recuring problem, damaging homes and creating unsanitary living conditions. It is led by the community, organised into the Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants – a federation of women’s saving groups. More than 20,000 people have directly benefited from the project so far.
One partner of the CoHabitat Network, Sostre Cívic, won Silver. Sostre Cívic is an umbrella organisation that supports cooperative groups to purchase and/or develop buildings, usually on municipal land, and advocates for the sector in Catalonia and throughout Spain. Its ambition is to diversify the tenure options in Catalonia’s housing market, so that in 20 to 30 years 10% of the region’s homes are cooperatives.
Under the right to use model, the cooperative retains collective ownership of the property and its members are granted the right to use the dwellings indefinitely. Residents pay an initial contribution, which is returned to them if they leave, and a monthly fee similar to rent. These fees are directly related to the costs of the project and are not linked to the real estate market. The organisation currently has 1,000 members and 17 ongoing projects in Catalonia, comprising 236 homes.