HIC’s Participation in the Roundup Issue on the World Urban Forum IV

HIC

Dear friends of UN Habitat,

On behalf of Davinder Lamba, HIC President, find below the answers to the four questions you submitted in a note on 7 July 2008. These answers have the same contents that we already stated at WUF III.

1. Habitat International Coalition (HIC) has been active since the early 1970s pressuring governments to follow up on the recommendations they have endorsed around urbanization. Looking back over the past 30 years, what areas would you say have seen real progress, and in what terms?

Some progress has been made in the following areas, notably in what concerns a greater worldwide awareness of the existence of these major problems, but much work still has to be carried out in order to reach a satisfactory solution:

– The progressive recognition by the States of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR)

– The development of the right to adequate housing (RAH) to facilitate the defense and reparation of the violations victims.

– The awareness on the planet’s progressive global environmental suicide to protect the habitat of the most vulnerable social sectors.

– The progressive implementation of the gender-justice approach in the housing policies to facilitate gender equity.

– The confirmation that people’s assets are indispensable in providing housing and formulating sound housing policies, as has been verified by the social production of habitat (SPH).

– The capacities of the social organizations and movements to resist the negative social, material and spatial impacts of the neoliberal housing and urban policies.

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