NEW – News

200,000 people evicted in two weeks and another million threatened in Zimbabwe

HIC-HLRN repeatedly has received alarming information from local civil society sources of massive evictions in throughout Zimbabwe that already have rendered 200,000 people homeless in two weeks. Some 30,000 street vendors and people working informally have been detained and if the eviction drive continues, “the estimates are that 2 to 3 million people could be affected, which is about a quarter of (Zimbabwe's) population," as M. Kothari, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing warned in a press conference on 3 June.

A Place to Live: Women’s Inheritance Rights in Africa

This short book is written so that common women and men in Africa can read about women's rights to housing and land, and what COHRE and other people fighting for these issues think should happen to make things better for women. It includes references to African countries, international agreements on women's housing rights and a glosary of terms frequently used while defending housing rights.

Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Adequate Housing

This study was undertaken within the framework of the United Nations Housing Rights Programme – a joint initiative of UN-HABITAT and the OHCHR. The study includes a review of relevant literature, identification of case studies, the collection of primary data through direct contacts with organizations/networks of indigenous peoples and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

Urban Policies and the Right to the City

This paper aims to explore the notion of the “Right to the City,” a concept first developed by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 in Le droit à la ville. While not exhaustive in its examination of the subject, the present discussion paper is intended to examine the notion as it has evolved conceptually and as it has manifested, either explicitly or implicitly, in urban policies and practices in cities and regions worldwide over the past few decades. It will also provide the reader with an inventory of recent developments in research and policy practice and, finally, with the potential theoretical and practical limitations to the “Right to the City” concept.

CSD 13: The Slums must help themselves

Expectations that CSD 13 would correct the almost total failure of the Johannesburg-Summit regarding settlements and local development were bitterly disappointed. CSD 13 again failed to deal with the problems of the cities in the north or the east (environment, traffic, financial, social) as well as with the urban consequences of economic globalisation, privatisation, sub-urbanization, population changes.