The city by and for its residents. Land management, self-build housing, solidarity-based financing

By Pierre Arnold, civil engineer and urban planner, project manager at urbaMonde – France (September 2020 to June 2025). Pierre is passionate about social housing production and management and is the author of several articles on the subject as well as the book Habitat en Mouvement (2015), available online: https://habitatenmouvement.tumblr.com/livre

Cities and their spaces are often conceived and idealized from above but built from below: by the people who migrate there, settle there, build their homes there, and sometimes are displaced and have to start over. In many contexts of rapid urbanization, municipal or metropolitan authorities are completely overwhelmed by the need for planning, services, and urban renewal. For their part, central or federal authorities are overwhelmed by the need for funding to produce affordable housing for households excluded from the real estate market.

Without the authorities taking into account the city's capacity for self-production by its inhabitants, the city expands and working-class neighborhoods become denser without coherent land use planning and without protection for ecosystems and agricultural land. Nor is there any protection for established populations facing the threat of forced displacement, whether through eviction policies or the forces of the speculative real estate market.

There are many positive and inspiring examples of how to remedy this at different levels. These range from “sanitary plots” programs for self-build housing, which were part of public policy in many countries in the 1960s to 1980s, to the production of social rental housing and the conversion of empty office buildings into housing by future residents in central urban areas.

UrbaMonde, a duo of Swiss (2006) and French (2015) associations, has the slogan “sustainable cities by and for residents.” Through cooperation projects and partner networking, we promote the dissemination of practices that place residents at the center of decisions, management, and sometimes construction of their housing. Many sources of inspiration can be found in our collaborative database cohabitat.io and on the Prix Mondial de l'Habitat website.

The aim of the intervention in Guise, described in this article, was to present three initiatives that are representative of what we call “Social Housing Production and Management” and which won the World Habitat Award in 2012, 2015, and 2022 respectively.

1. Land security through the Community Land Trust. The pioneering experience of Caño Martín Peña in Puerto Rico

The Community Land Trust (CLT) model emerged in the United States in 1968 in the context of the African American civil rights movement. It was created to protect the farmland of African-American farming families from the appetites of large white landowners in the state of Georgia. The “Trust” is a non-profit entity (foundation, association) that owns land for the benefit of the community. It can lease or transfer rights of use, but under no circumstances can it sell the land. A few years later, this CLT principle was applied in urban areas to produce permanently affordable housing: legal entities or individuals who purchase homes on CLT land can resell them, but without making a profit, which permanently blocks speculation on these homes.

In the classic US model, one-third of the trust's board of directors is made up of representatives of residents; one-third of representatives of non-resident community members (associations, businesses, neighbors, social landlords, etc.); and one-third of representatives of local authorities (municipality, county, state).

This ensures that, in the long term, the interests of the community will prevail in the management of the CLT's land and assets.

There are currently 310 CLTs in the United States, 175 in the United Kingdom, 40 in Canada, as well as in Australia and Belgium, and pilot projects in many countries (map).

In the middle of the Caribbean, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is the first CLT to manage land that was previously informal, with housing built over decades on land reclaimed from the Caño Martín Peña waterway. Following its creation in 2009, ownership of 80 hectares of public land was transferred to the CLT of Caño Martín Peña.

Supported by a public institution (ENLACE) created to implement the widening of the waterway and the improvement of the surrounding neighborhoods, the CLT is carrying out the legal procedures to regularize the situation of families living on collectivized land. Instead of a title deed, they receive a surface right worth 25% of the potential market value of their plot and building. This right, which is recorded in the property register, can be inherited and mortgaged. The CLT has a right of first refusal on the sale of surface rights. In addition, the CLT can lease land to businesses, places of worship, public or private facilities, and thus generate income, or exempt social and solidarity economy initiatives from rent.

After two years of participatory workshops, debates, and research on legal forms, the residents of the neighborhoods around Caño Martín Peña chose the CLT form rather than individual property titles in order to protect themselves. In fact, a neighboring informal neighborhood (Tokio) where residents had previously received individual titles was very quickly emptied of its inhabitants. Real estate developers quickly bought up all the homes at very low prices compared to the profits they made by demolishing the houses and building apartment buildings. The location of this area in the heart of San Juan makes it a target for real estate speculation, with the local community as the victims rather than the beneficiaries. After selling their titles, many families in Tokio found themselves once again in precarious conditions, on the outskirts of the city or in social housing.

Interest in the Puerto Rico case is growing. Several Brazilian communities have already incorporated CLTs into their municipal instruments to regularize informal neighborhoods, under the impetus of the Brazilian NGO CatComm, a partner of urbaMonde.

More information:

· World Habitat Award 2015. Description of the project in French.

· International Center for CLT. Bibliography on CLTs in French.

· Community Land Trust of Brussels. The CLT model.

2. Self-build housing cooperatives. The Uruguayan method of FUCVAM

Uruguayan mutual aid housing cooperatives, promoted by their national federation FUCVAM, are a reference and inspiration for many housing movements around the world.

The Uruguayan Cooperative Center (CCU, 1961) created three pilot housing cooperative projects in 1966 in rural Uruguay to house rural workers with funding from MISEREOR and loans from the National Institute of Economic Housing.

The CCU team drew inspiration from mutual aid projects among indigenous peoples in the Andes and Venezuela, Swedish user cooperatives, and collective savings housing cooperatives run by the Catholic Church in Chile (INVICA).

In 1968, the new national housing law included a comprehensive article on mutual aid housing cooperatives and their financing (Art. 10), and the following year the implementing decrees were published. Two national federations quickly emerged, one for cooperatives with member contributions in the form of savings (FECOVI, 1969) and the other for labor contributions (mutual aid) for working-class families without savings (FUCVAM, 1970).

Mutual aid cooperatives are the most numerous, numbering around 1,000 and accounting for nearly 60,000 homes in the country (5% of the country's housing stock). Cooperatives are non-profit organizations whose decision-making body is the general assembly of members, who are the (future) residents, on the basis of one household, one vote.

Mutual aid is provided during collective self-build or renovation projects in the evenings or at weekends, with each household contributing 21 hours per week to the cooperative. This allows them to contribute 15% of the cost of housing in labor rather than savings. This mutual aid, like the self-management of loans granted to the cooperative by the Uruguayan Mortgage Bank (BHU) for the purchase of land and the construction or renovation of buildings, is supported by Technical Support Institutes (multidisciplinary project management assistance teams hired by the cooperative).

In addition to direct democracy, self-management, and mutual aid, the final fundamental pillar of the FUCVAM method is collective ownership. The cooperative is the sole owner of the land and buildings, and the members own shares in it. These shares can only be resold to the cooperative if a household leaves, and they will be resold at the same price to a future household on the waiting list, preventing any form of speculation. Bank loans are taken out by the cooperative and members pay their share for their housing to the cooperative to enable the cooperative to repay the loans.

Unlike an individual mortgage, if a household finds itself in difficulty in repaying its share to the cooperative, it is not threatened with eviction from its home. Initially, the repayment terms can be adjusted, and in the event of significant difficulties, there is a solidarity fund, contributed to monthly by the members, which can be used until the situation returns to normal. Furthermore, when members leave the cooperative, the other members can opt to move internally to a home that is better suited to their needs (size, accessibility, etc.). This is greatly facilitated by the fact that the residents do not own the walls of the homes, but a share of the whole.

From the 1990s onwards, this Uruguayan method was emulated by Argentine, Brazilian, and Venezuelan movements for the right to housing. Since the 2000s, Swedish cooperation through We Effect (formerly the Swedish Cooperative Center) and FUCVAM have worked to spread housing cooperatives across different continents with varying degrees of success. While in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay, laws and public programs have made cooperatives viable, elsewhere (Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, Mexico, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Zambia) they have remained at the pilot project stage. In the Philippines, cooperatives are collectively owned but delegate construction to companies, while in Brazil, housing is self-built but managed as condominiums.

Further information:

· World Habitat Award 2012. Description of the project in French.

· UrbaMonde. Support for housing cooperatives in South America.

· Arnold, Pierre & Lemarié, Charlène. 2015. Habitat en Mouvement. Voyage à la rencontre de l’habitat populaire en Amérique du Sud. Self-published. Available online.

· González, Gustavo. 2013. Una historia de FUCVAM, Montevideo: Trilce. Available online.

· Nahoum, Benjamin. 2013. Algunas Claves. Reflexiones sobre aspectos esenciales de la vivienda cooperativa por ayuda mutua. Montevideo: Trilce Available online.

3. Revolving funds for housing improvement. The emerging movement in French-speaking West Africa.

What can be done where there is no housing policy for the most vulnerable households? There are not many options for providing access to loans to poor households that are excluded from the banking system because of their informal, intermittent, or insufficient income. Microfinance is a very common option, but it is rarely geared towards improving or building housing. Above all, it is a very expensive option, with interest rates that can exceed 50%. If repayment is impossible, microfinance institutions recoup their losses by seizing the property of indebted families, who are further humiliated.

A better option emerged in the 1980s and was disseminated in Africa and Asia by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR, 1988) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI, 1996) networks. These are “urban poor funds,” revolving funds for the urban poor based on the principle of solidarity savings groups. These are grouped into a regional or national federation that manages a revolving fund fed by deposits from savings groups. This giant “tontine” allows savings groups to borrow from the fund when one of their members needs to invest in income-generating activities or to improve their housing. The loan is repaid at a very low interest rate and the members of the group are jointly liable for this repayment so as not to disrupt the system if individuals are unable to repay their loans within the specified time frame.

The larger the revolving fund, the more it can lend to savings groups at the same time. This is why urbaMonde supports its partners in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Côte d'Ivoire by injecting international cooperation funding (development aid, grants, donations). This funding injected into the revolving funds has a multiplier effect, as it will be used and then repaid, and so on, benefiting many families by improving their housing.

In Senegal, the NGO urbaSEN and the Fédération Sénégalaise des Habitants (FSH) have more than 15,000 members, 95% of whom are women. They are organized into savings groups of 30 to 35 members who contribute to the FSH's Housing Improvement Fund. In addition to the basic federal savings owed by each group to the fund, members can deposit “housing” savings that will enable them, when the time comes, to take out a loan to carry out work to protect their homes from water infiltration, repairs, and the installation of sanitary facilities and septic tanks. The work is validated by urbaSEN, which monitors the construction site with the beneficiary residents.

Since the fund was set up in 2016, more than 1,100 homes have been repaired and protected from flooding. The fund has also financed the construction of nearly 300 community sanitation facilities on the outskirts of Dakar. It will also be used to finance the construction of 150 earthen houses in the Cité FSH eco-neighborhood for members of the federation and their families in Diender, on the outskirts of Dakar.

The Senegalese fund is the most developed in the region. It totals €1.5 million, 48% of which comes from international cooperation and the rest from savings and interest repayments. Having become SDI's “learning center” for UEMOA countries, urbaSEN and FSH coordinate the C8 network with NGOs and residents' federations from seven other countries in the region wishing to apply the model in their contexts: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Niger, and Togo.

Further information:

· World Habitat Award 2023. Project description in French.

· UrbaMonde. Support program for the Senegalese Federation of Residents and Support for the Integrated Flood Risk Management Program.

· Leporcq, Pauline (2024). THE ROTATING HABITAT FUND. A tool for financing decent housing for residents in precarious situations. Presentation brochure. urbaMonde. Available online.

· Tiemtoré, Soayouba; Dadjouari, Lébrini; Keita, Papa Ameth; Leporcq, Pauline; Coly, Assane; Moles, Olivier; Chamodot, Mathilde; Hinschberger, Bénédicte (2023). Living and living better in informal settlements! Bringing together the residents of the precarious neighborhood of Boassa (Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou) to give them access to decenthousing. CRAterre éditions. Available online.

· Hinschberger, Bénédicte & Varnai, Bea. 2025. “Community finance and savings systems: innovative and inclusive tools for addressing the housing needs of the urban poor.” In Housing Finance International. Spring 2025. International Union for Housing Finance. pp. 26-31.

Explore Pierre Arnold's presentation at the Campus on March 5, 2025, at the Familistère de Guise on the topic.

This English translation was prepared with the assistance of DeepL, a language model developed by OpenAI, based on the original French article published in May 2025 on the AdP – Villes en Développement bulletin website.