TEDCity2.0 (English)

TEDCity2.0 is a daylong event to surface stories of urban ingenuity and interdependence from across the globe, featuring an unexpected mix of over 20 speakers, including several 2012 City 2.0 Award winners. Coinciding with the TEDCity2.0 anchor event, TEDx communities worldwide will envision the cities of our future and share big ideas about collaborative action and sustainable solutions.

See more: http://new.livestream.com/tedx/cityenglish/videos

Housing Team – The Housing Crisis How We Did It: Tracking Affordable Housing

The Bureau of  Investigative Journalism. The Bureau is conducting a major investigation into Britain’s housing crisis.

The first phase, published in May, focused on the human and financial cost of rising levels of homelessness. It found that councils in the UK’s biggest cities spent almost £2bn on temporary accommodation, including B&Bs, in the past four years. It also revealed the extent to which London councils are re-housing vulnerable families outside their own borough boundaries, sometimes to boroughs on the outskirts of the capital or even beyond.

The second phase of work focuses on one of the root causes of the housing crisis: the shortage of affordable homes in the UK. The Bureau’s housing team – Nick Mathiason, Will Fitzgibbon, Victoria Hollingsworth, Jude McArdle and George Turner – aimed to track the levels of low cost housing being built and how this falls short of local requirements. To assess this three datasets were compiled:

• The number of affordable homes planned as part of the biggest housing developments in 12 of the UK’s largest cities. The total numbers of affordable homes planned are measured against their local authority’s targets for this type of housing.

• The number of affordable homes built in one of Europe’s largest housing developments: the Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea Opportunity Area in central London, where plans for 16,000 new homes are at an advanced stage.

• The number of affordable homes scrapped from property developments after appeals against legal obligations to provide such housing.

Read more: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/how-we-did-it-tracking-affordable-housing/

Conférence De Antonio Meloto – “L’urbanisation Du Monde” (Anglais)

Le Forum des Nouveaux Mondes de France Business School, en partenariat avec le Figaro.fr Etudiant,
Interview de Antonio Meloto, le 26 septembre 2013, dont le thème de la conférence est “L’urbanisation du monde” (anglais)
#NewWorld #FranceBS

Louisa Vogiazides – ‘Legal Empowerment Of The Poor’ Versus ‘Right To The City’ Implications For Access To Housing In Urban Africa

diva-portal 2012. This paper compares the major arguments found in the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP) and the Right to the City discourses with particular reference to housing in urban Africa. After examining the major advocates, arguments and critiques associated with each discourse, it argues that they are based on two distinct sets of ideological and normative principles, with LEP being inspired by classical liberal ideas and Right to the City by Marxist thought. Consistent with these different ideological backgrounds, the two discourses
have different views on access to housing in urban Africa, with LEP proposing ownership formalisation and market inclusion as a solution to lack of access to adequate and affordable housing, while Right to the City calls for increased state intervention in housing provision. The paper concludes, however, that the different ideological backgrounds do not necessarily mean their policy recommendations are incompatible, and calls for further research into the influence of the two discourses on housing policies in African cities.

Read more (PDF-format): http://www.diva-portal.org/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Slum Stories: Kenya – Going To The Toilet In A Slum

This video is part of the Amnesty International www.SlumStories.org project. An online videochannel about the life in slums in different parts of the world.
All videos can be watched with English, Arab, French, Spanish, German and Dutch subtitles.

Alhassan Ziblim – The Dynamics Of Informal Settlements Upgrading In South Africa: Legislative And Policy Context, Problems, Tensions, And Contradictions

August, 2013. Approximately 1.2 million households in South Africa currently live in informal  settlements, under very precarious conditions, which pose serious threat to their health, safety, and security. Actual figures are likely higher than reported. Access to  adequate housing remains a big challenge in South Africa, notwithstanding  continuous efforts since 1994, to deliver affordable housing to the poor, through various national housing subsidy schemes. Against this backdrop, the government  introduced groundbreaking housing policy reforms in 2004, which included a
programme devoted to the upgrading of informal settlements. The new initiative, crowned as the “Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme” (UISP), had the  objective to “eradicate” all informal settlements by 2014.

After almost a decade of  implementation, and practically less than a year to its initial “slum eradication”  deadline of 2014, this study sets out to explore the policy dynamics, and  implementation of the UISP, through the lens of good governance. It seeks to identify  and flesh out the problems and challenges of the programme, in order to inform policy learning. The study draws relevant information from books, journal articles,  national policy documents, publications and news reports, as well as internet sources.  In general, while the findings pinpoint the existence of comprehensive national  legislative and policy frameworks in support of the slum upgrading initiative, the  evidence suggest that, the goal of slum eradication is still farfetched, due to several  problems and challenges. Indeed, there is an apparent gap between the policy  rhetoric, and the reality of implementation, characterised by notable inconsistencies, tensions, and problems.

These problems and challenges have so far hindered the  programme‟s ability to make realistic improvements in the lives of slum dwellers. In  effect, the report identifies the following telling governance challenges to be in need  of urgent attention by policy makers:
– Failure by municipalities to adhere to the basic principles of structured in situ upgrading as opposed to total redevelopment of slums; the
– The nominal or lack of community involvement and choice in decisions of slums upgrading;
– The lack of capacity and material resource shortages, that leads sometimes to delays in project implementation.

Read more: http://globalhousingindicators.org/