Resumen de Grassroot, community and collaborative housing.
Coming from an organisation which was originally established as a self-build grassroots movement in the US, I feel very much at home sharing my experience and introducing the chapter on community-led housing best practice. My first encounter with community-led housing goes back almost 15 years when I was engaged in developing programmes for Roma communities in Hungary. A young British architect organised a participatory planning workshop for a small Roma community in the outskirts of Debrecen in which they spent 2 days of dreaming and designing together what kind of housing they would really need to meet their family needs. Years later, I started to study the problem of privately owned multi-apartment buildings in former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Western Balkans. These buildings are owned by a community of homeowners and they have to make common decisions about maintenance and about refurbishment or retrofitting. The key to success in these projects is how the community can be mobilised and engaged so that they can operate in an effective way. Engaging the community in housing initiatives is a given in the Global South: incremental informal settlement upgrading projects start with empowering the community members to do community enumeration, facilitate dialogue between the community and the local government and to engage the community in custom-made participatory action planning and help the community to establish a structure for their self-representation. Recently I came across a very inspiring initiative in Central Europe: the MOBA Housing Network is a regional cooperation between brave new cooperative housing initiatives from Prague to Budapest to Zagreb in a region where the word cooperative still has bad connotations from the Communist past. At policy level, the Warsaw Revitalisation Programme for 2014-2020 recently dedicated 4% of the total project budget to ensure over 7 years the participation of civil society in the design and implementation of the programme. This is a best practice of how you can make community-led housing financially sustainable.All of the above examples highlight that community-led housing is characteristic of local action, often small-scale, that it’s about affordability, is not for profit and involves a lot of voluntary effort. The 5 projects featured in this chapter represent a wide variety of forms of community-led housing from community land trusts to community self-builds to cohousing. I hope you will find the same inspiration by reading about these projects as I did.
