We have to look at everybody as human beings. People who live in the slums have equal abilities and ways of thinking – the same as other people in the city. If we have that understanding then we can solve the housing problem properly by the people in the city together. We should bring the decision down to the community and the city as much as possible.
Somsook Boonyabancha
General Secretary,
Asian Coalition for Housing Rights |
We can be prognosticators and think about what’s going to happen, but I suspect that the private sector is going to be clever and is going to figure out a way to utilise the capital to build homes where there is demand. We certainly are. Our company isn’t married to a particular product. We’re not Coca-Cola where we’ve got a product that fits in a certain size container. We’ll adapt to the market.
Gary R Garrabrant
CEO Equity International,
private sector housing developer |
The issue is not building houses. The issue is building appropriate urbanised areas. We take the problem as if it’s a problem of mathematics, of producing houses, as if a house is like a refrigerator. You promote mass production and then everybody can get one if they have proper credit. Houses are not like that...they are part of the city.
Raquel Rolnik
Professor of Urban Planning,
University of São Paulo |
Governments everywhere try to design rational development strategies. The problem is the tide of humanity is much faster than the rational development strategies. Every year the world creates roughly four Mumbai’s - a city of
20 million people. Every year the world has
80 million more people and nearly all of them live in cities. If we don’t do anything about this, cities drown in poor people.
David A Smith
Founder,
The Affordable Housing Institute |
We should not make an assumption that all the urban poor own the shacks in which they live because that is not the case. In Africa, for example, in Nairobi, 80 percent of the slum dwellers are renters. And that’s why slum upgrading becomes a political activity: there is vested interest. The owners are private people but they are - to call a spade a spade - exploiting the poor.
Anna Tibajuka
Executive Director,
UN-Habitat |
Somsook Boonyabancha is Secretary General of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. Based in Bangkok, Thailand, she spearheads the ongoing campaign for slum dwellers’ rights through land-sharing schemes and microfinance. She is director of CODI, the Community Organizations Development Institute entrusted with
60 million dollars of Thai government money to create cities without slums. Somsook has helped 80,000 families into better housing in 240 cities in Asia. |
Gary Garrabrant is CEO and co-founder of Equity International, a US-based property development company working as far afield as Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, China, Africa, India and Vietnam. It focuses on building affordable homes for the newly emerging middle classes and builds on a large scale – sometimes up to 20,000 houses at a time. Gary was formerly Managing Director in the real estate investment banking division of Chemical Bank. |
Raquel Rolnik is an architect and urban planner. She was National Secretary for Urban Programs in the Brazilian government (2003-2007) and ran the planning department for the city of São Paulo for four years. In May 2008 she became United Nations Special Rapporteur tasked with investigating obstacles to adequate housing around the world. She is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo and has her own weekday radio show, ‘Our Town’, on Band News FM. |
David A Smith is an expert on housing finance, who has advised policy makers in Africa, the Middle East and Europe through his work at the Affordable Housing Institute. David is co-founder of AHI, a non-profit organisation, which offers research and consultation on housing issues. He is also CEO of CAS Financial Advisory Services, a company that aims to make underperforming real estate profitable. |
Anna Tibaijuka is Executive Director of UN-Habitat, the UN’s shelter agency and Under-Secretary General of the UN – the first African woman to be elected to this position. She has served as a member of the Commission for Africa which resulted in the cancellation of multilateral debt for several African countries by the G8 Summit in 2005. She was Professor of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam for five years. |
