Kirtipur Collective Housing, Kampung Pisangis, Rama 4 Land Sharing & Bhuj case studies are up!

Kirtipur Collective Housing

This housing project made history in many ways. It was Nepal’s first-ever community-planned and communitymanaged resettlement project for squatters who were evicted to make way for a public infrastructure project. It was also the first time that substantial municipal funds were invested in a jointly-managed fund that would finance this first project, and then revolve to finance other initiatives by poor communities in Kathmandu. The project showed how collaboration, flexible finance and the development force of communities themselves can solve a city’s housing problems in fast, simple and inexpensive ways.

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Kampung Pisang

Here is the story of a small informal community in Makassar that twice faced eviction by the same private landowner and twice negotiated to redevelop their housing on a smaller piece of the land they already occupied. In the first project, they moved their houses and rebuilt their community to a small portion of the land they used to occupy, and gave the rest back to the landowner to develop commercially. When the landowner broke the agreement and sold the whole land, the people moved again, to an even smaller piece of adjacent land, where they completely rebuilt their houses and community a second time.

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314 Houses in Bhuj Collective

India has some really big slum redevelopment programs, but most of them are designed to be planned and built by contractors and allotted to families individually, with zero or little participation in anything. This pioneering project in the small city of Bhuj has shown how government subsidies can be used in a very different way. In these three projects, the new housing was planned and built by community members themselves, with some sensitive design support, and it enhanced existing social structures and made use of the people’s wisdom about how to live together sociably and sustainably in a hot place.

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Rama 4 Land Sharing

Thep Prathan was a thriving, welldeveloped and fully legal land-rental community in the heart of Bangkok, on the Rama IV Road. After a series of suspicious fires burned down much of the community, an equally suspicious attempt to evict the people and grab their valuable inner-city land ensued. In the course of negotiating a way to stay in the same place, the people invented the land sharing strategy. This project became Thailand’s first successful land sharing project, even though it took so long to negotiate and build that several other projects that it inspired were planned and built in the mean time.

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