Special Session - Building from the ground-up…

Community-led housing — cooperatives, community land trusts, self-build networks and collective tenure arrangements — has provided homes for millions and demonstrated that dignity, affordability and resilience can be placed prioritized over profit-driven, exclusionary urban development and displacement. Yet despite this proven contribution, these approaches remain largely absent from mainstream housing policy, constrained by insecure tenure, speculative land markets and exclusion from formal planning, financing and land administration systems.

This session examines the legal, financial, institutional and political under which community-led approaches can move from the margins to the mainstream of national housing systems. It treats forced eviction not as an isolated issue to be managed, but as a manifestation of a broader systemic failure to recognize community agency, collective rights and non-speculative housing models as legitimate instruments of public housing policy.

Drawing on the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Expert Working Group on Adequate Housing for All (OEWG-H) intersessional work on tenure security, informal settlements and enabling land management tools for housing provision, the session will explore fit-for-purpose tenure instruments, collective land governance models, anti-eviction frameworks, participatory upgrading approaches, non-speculative financing mechanisms and equal rights to land and adequate housing for all. It will interrogate what continues to prevent community-led approaches from being recognized as mainstream housing policy instruments — and what legal, institutional and financial reforms are required to change this.

Guiding questions

1. How can governments and international organizations recognize and resource community-led housing — cooperatives, community land trusts, self-build networks, women's collectives? and collective tenure arrangements — as mainstream components of national housing systems rather than niche alternatives for the margins?
2. What legal, financial and planning reforms are needed to scale cooperative, collective and community-led housing systems, including around removing barriers for women and others traditionally at risk of exclusion?
3. What political, legal and financial conditions allow communities, including Indigenous Peoples, women-led households and residents of informal settlements, to develop and sustain locally led housing solutions, including in contexts of tenure insecurity and eviction threat and how these conditions be systematically integrated into national housing frameworks?
4. How should community-generated, disaggregated data, participatory mapping and incremental in-situ upgrading be integrated into formal planning, housing finance and tenure regularization systems — and what institutional reforms are required to make this integration durable?
5. What partnerships between governments, communities and development actors are most effective in advancing long-term, affordable and people-centred housing solutions?

Expected outcomes

The session aims to advance agreed propositions to mainstream community-led, rights-based and non-speculative housing approaches within national housing policy frameworks, housing systems and the OEWG-H normative guidance process. Moreover it seeks to contribute to strengthened recognition and visibility of community-led housing approaches within the Baku Call to Action and broader international housing policy discussions, encouraging concrete commitments from Member States, local authorities, development partners and other stakeholders to recognize, enable and resource people-led housing delivery as a central pathway toward adequate housing for all.

Objectives

Bringing together community representatives, policymakers, practitioners and experts, the session aims to advance a set of actionable propositions to mainstream community-led, rights-based and non-speculative housing approaches within national housing systems and the OEWG-H normative guidance process. The discussion will contribute directly to the Baku Call to Action and help shape the pathway toward the UN-Habitat Assembly in 2029.