Habitat International Coalition is the offspring of NGO committee formed to help organize and coordinate the NGO input into the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976. This committee begun to work after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 --where the active engagement of many NGOs and other civil society groups working on housing issues set a precedent that was then followed at other global UN conferences from the early 1970s to the present. After the conference, this committee recognized the need for continued encouragement and support for NGOs to pressure governments and international agencies to follow up the recommendations they had officially endorsed at the 1976 conference. It also sought to represent NGO interests at the new UN agency set up after the 1976 conference – initially called the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) and later the UN Human Settlements Programme. At the time, HIC was called the Habitat International Council.

Between 1976 and 1987, HIC grew with civil society organizations based in the North but had difficulties widening its membership in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. During this period, many NGOs in these regions developed innovative ways of working with low-income groups and their community organizations to improve housing conditions or to put pressure on governments to address housing needs. In 1985, HIC launched a project to document what NGOs were doing in this field, and this resulted in the production of a catalogue of many innovative projects and a book on “building community”.(i) As part of the preparations for the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987, HIC members organized a conference in Limuru, Kenya, bringing representatives from over 40 NGOs from Africa, Asia and Latin America and many international NGOs. This provided the opportunity to discuss how to make HIC more representative of NGOs and CSOs from these regions. Those discussions stimulated a new structure for HIC, with a clear commitment to everyone's right to a secure place to live in peace and dignity.

During the 80s and 90 HIC lead diverse fact finding missions to denounce violations of the right to housing in Santo Domingo (1988); Seoul (1990); Hong Kong (1990); Narmada (1992); Panama (1992); Managua (1992); Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (1993); Rio de Janeiro (1994), Kobe (1995); Istanbul (1996) and Lima (1998).

During the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, much of HIC’s efforts within the NGO Global Forum were focused on the Urbanization Forum, where more than 140 organizations from around the world signed the statement Towards Just Democratic and Sustainable Cities, Towns and Villages. In 1993 HIC begun the preparatory process for NGO forum at the second UN Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul in 1996 (the “UN City Summit”). A highlighted achievement of this process was the inclusion the Right to Housing in the Habitat Agenda and the adoption of General Comment No. 4, on the Right to Adequate Housing. Parallel to this course of action a revision of HICs structure, strategy and mission took place, ending in 1997 with the adoption of a new Constitution.

The coordination of the World Assembly of Urban Inhabitants in 2000 brought the voices of grassroots and urban social movements to define a common strategy to mobilize struggles worldwide. During the 2002 World Social Forum, civil society representatives developed the World Charter for the Right to the City as an instrument to strengthen popular urban processes, the vindication of rights, and the articulation of struggles. The Right to the City goes beyond the conventional focus on improving peoples’ quality of life based on housing and the neighbourhood, to encompass quality of life and participation at the scale of the city and its rural surroundings, as a mechanism for protecting the population that lives in cities or regions with rapid urbanization processes. This implies initiating a new way of promoting, respecting, defending and fulfilling the civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights guaranteed in regional and international human rights instruments.

HIC has been active in the World Urban Forums in Nairobi (2002) and Barcelona (2004), in the World Social Forums and in many other UN conferences. In the last years HIC has coordinated efforts with the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing for the regional consultations on Women and Adequate Housing and the realization of fact finding missions.

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