Hub for Housing Justice: strengthening global alliances for just housing futures
IIED is convening the secretariat of the Hub for Housing Justice, a collaborative initiative led by a group of civil society networks and research organisations. The hub aims to advance housing justice by co-designing agendas, sharing resources, aligning advocacy efforts and promoting learning and action across different contexts.
Ocupação Jorge Hereda, São Paulo, Brazil, 2023 (Alexandre Apsan Frediani, IIED).
The current housing crisis is a human rights crisis with implications for millions of people’s ability to live a fulfilling, healthy and good life.
Housing experiences worldwide are determined by housing systems that do not respond to the needs and aspirations of the world’s majority. These systems deepen inequalities, worsen the climate crisis, exacerbate the impacts of violent conflicts and forced migration, and limit progress towards achieving and localising the Sustainable Development Goals.
IIED has developed a portfolio of projects related to the housing justice agenda aiming to challenge the drivers of this perverse crisis.
Greater collaboration and collective efforts are needed to impact housing policy frameworks so that they are more responsive to the needs of people and the planet. This requires strengthening the capacity of civil society groups and their networks to influence policymaking, at the local, national and global level.
What is IIED doing?
The Hub for Housing Justice is a collaborative initiative. Its main objective is to influence policymaking by promoting more just and sustainable housing conditions for the world’s majority, reducing poverty and discrimination, and helping communities become more resilient to the effects of climate change.
This initiative will advance housing justice by building upon and amplifying local, regional and international efforts that advance four propositions to transform housing systems:
- Anti-discriminatory housing policy and practice
- Radically democratic forms of housing production
- Housing as an infrastructure for more sustainable, caring and fairer cities, and
- Housing policy and practice that broaden imaginations for housing futures.
IIED is convening the secretariat of the hub with the support of partner organisations. This involves coordinating with partners and allies to conduct its main functions: co-designing housing justice agendas; synchronising and aligning advocacy efforts; curating and sharing resources; and facilitating opportunities for learning, exchanges and action.
In addition to convening the secretariat, IIED will work with partners through the hub to undertake action-research and advocacy initiatives that build on its housing justice portfolio, including work on civic media for housing rights and access to affordable and resilient building materials in informal settlements among others.
The attendees of the Hub for Housing Justice steering group come together with peers in June 2024 (Photo: Camila Cociña, IIED)
By doing so, the initiative contributes to IIED’s proposition to evolve cities as places of inspiration and justice in its efforts to tackle the triple crises of climate change, nature loss and inequality.
The Hub for Housing Justice team
The IIED team engaged in the Hub for Housing Justice includes a multidisciplinary group of researchers, bringing different perspectives and areas of expertise:
- Alexandre Apsan Frediani and Camila Cociña co-convene the housing justice work
- Paula Sevilla Núñez acts as the main support for the hub’s secretariat
- Nora Nisi, Marcelle Mardon and Nathaniah Jacobs contribute as researchers – exploring and establishing links between housing justice and areas such as informality, sanitation, climate change, and land rights, among others, and
- Frances Reynolds and Morgan Jennings support as coordinators of the project.
News and updates
Additional resources
Hub for Housing Justice website
Towards housing justice. Four propositions to transform policy and practice (2024), Camila Cociña, Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Issue paper
