Why Habitat for Humanity is Needed

Habitat.org. The world is experiencing a global housing crisis.

About 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing and 100 million are homeless.(1)

Each week, more than 1 million people are born in, or move to, cities in the developing world.(2)

One billion people (32 percent of the global urban population) live in urban slums.

If no serious action were taken, the number of slum dwellers worldwide would increase over the next 30 years to nearly 2 billion.(3)

In the United States alone, 95 million people have housing problems. 
Including payments too large a percentage of their income, overcrowding, poor quality shelter and homelessness.(4)

Clean, decent, and stable housing provides more than just a roof over someone’s head.

Stability for families and children.

Sense of dignity and pride.

Health, physical safety, and security.

Increase of educational and job prospects.

The transformational ability of good housing.

Clean, warm housing is essential for prevention and care of diseases of poverty like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and malaria.(5)

Children under five in Malawi living in Habitat for Humanity houses have 44 percent less malaria, respiratory or gastrointestinal diseases compared to children living in traditional houses.(6)

 Read more: http://www.habitat.org/how/why.aspx

Gaia Vince – Slums and The Future of Cities

bbc.com – January 14,  2013 – by Gaia Vince

Improvements are being made – some 230 million people have moved out of slum housing since 2000, for example. But whether the city of the Anthropocene will be environmentally sustainable depends on how places like Khulna evolve.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130114-slums-and-the-future-of-cities/3

About the author

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster who is particularly interested in how humans are transforming planet Earth and the impacts our changes are having on societies and on other species. She has visited people and places around the world in a quest to understand how we are adapting to environmental change. You can follow her adventures at www.WanderingGaia.com and on Twitter at @WanderingGaia.

Kathleen Scanlon & Christine Whitehead (Eds.) Social Housing in Europe II – A Review of Policies and Outcomes

Published by LSE London, London School of Economics and Political Science

From the Preface:

This is the second book to be produced by a multidisciplinary group of housing
experts that was set up as a result of an initiative by a number of French academics
based at different Paris universities. The group was organised through
the GIS Réseau Socio-Economie de l’Habitat network, which receives support
from the PUCA (Plan Urbain Construction Amenagement, the Research Office
of the Ministry of Capital Works and Housing). Since publication of the first book,
Social Housing in Europe, the group has met three times. In November 2007 a
major international conference was organised in Paris, by the GIS. The papers
presented there, together with a great deal of further input by authors, form the
basis for this text. Since then the group has met in Vienna and in Dublin to discuss
a range of issues core to the continued development of social housing and
will work further on issues of both principles and policy over the next year. We
are extremely grateful for all those who have supported these meetings and for
their interest in ensuring the work can continue. (…) Read more

Joshua Hammer – A Look Into Brazil’s Makeover of Rio’s Slums

Photo by Claudio Edinger

The Brazilian government’s bold efforts to clean up the city’s notoriously dangerous favelas is giving hope to people who live there – By Joshua Hammer – Photographs by Claudio Edinger – Smithsonian magazine, January 2013

Marcos Rodrigo Neves remembers the bad old days in Rocinha, the largest favela, or slum, in Rio de Janeiro. A baby-faced 27-year-old with a linebacker’s build and close-cropped black hair, Rodrigo grew up dirt poor and fatherless in a tenement in Valão, one of the favela’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Drug-trafficking gangs controlled the turf, and police rarely entered out of fear they could be ambushed in the alleys. “Many classmates and friends died of overdoses or in drug violence,” he told me, sitting in the front cubicle of the Instituto Wark Roc-inha, the tiny art gallery and teaching workshop he runs, tucked on a grimy alley in the heart of the favela.

Read more: Joshua Hammer – A Look Into Brazils Makeover of Rios Slums

Rem Koolhaas – Lagos

IIDE Proceedings 2014 ~ Social Change in Our Technology-Based World ~ Contents & Preface and Acknowledgements

• by: Mark Rathbone, Fabian von Schéele & Sytse Strijbos (Editors)

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements 
Sytse Strijbos – Introduction: Social Change in our Technology-Based World
Michael Heyns – A Transcendental Inquiry into ‘Academic Capitalism in the New Economy’
Mark Rathbone – Corporate Social Responsibility, Deconstruction and Justice: A Response to Campbell Jones and Richard T De George
Attie van Niekerk – The Cultural Basis for a Sustainable Community in a South African Township
Lindile L. Ndabeni – The Informal Sector and Local Economic Developments in South Africa: An Evaluation of Some Critical Factors
Natallia Pashkevich, Darek M. Haftor – About IT Unemployment: Reflecting on Normative Aspects of the ‘Broken Link’
Darek M. Haftor, Erdelina Kurti – Toward Post Systems Thinking in the Conception of Whole-Part Relations
Fabian von Schéele, Darek M. Haftor – Cognitive Time Distortion as a Source of Risk in Economic Organizations: Conceptual Foundations
Anita Mirijamdotter, Mary Sommerville – Information -The ‘I’ in 21st Century Organizational IT Systems: An Informed Systems Methodology
Andrew Basden – A Dooyeweerdian Understanding of Affordance in Information Systems and Ecological Psychology
Maarten J. Verkerk – The Triple I model: A Translation of Dooyeweerdian Philosophical Concepts for Engineers
Darek M. Haftor – Dealing with Complexity: Some Critical Reflections upon Verkerk’s ‘Triple I Model’
Information about the International Institute for Development and Ethics
Information about the Annual Working Conferences

Preface and Acknowledgements

In 1995 an international and interdisciplinary research cooperation started, initially between researchers from some universities and institutions in Sweden and the Netherlands. In later years this initiative quickly expanded into a network of interested colleagues from the UK and South Africa. To summarize a long story in short: a stable core group with converging research interests was born that since then has operated fruitfully. The annual working conferences (AWC’s) have served as an international platform for researchers with a common interest for the use of Dooyeweerdian thinking in the interdisciplinary study for a broad range of issues regarding ‘technology and society’.

Looking back on the AWC 2014 we feel this international collaboration has again proven to be successful format. We take pride in hereby to present the final result of a wonderful conference with inspiring discussions and constructive input in each other’s research paper. All selected papers after the conference went through an intensive process of rewriting, based on the reports of the reviewers, and the instructions of the editors. While each chapter has been written as an independent piece of scholarly work, we hope that an introductory chapter authored by one of the editors is helpful for the reader to see the unity in diversity.

Finally, the editors wish to express their thanks to the authors, to each other for the collegial cooperation, and, last but not least, to Dr. Christine Boshuijzen – van Burken for her skilful management of the conference and the production process of these Proceedings.

The Editors