Statement for World Habitat Day 2005

HIC

Enrique Ortiz, HIC President, 3 Octobre 2005
president@hic-net.org


Everyone’s right to a secure place where to live in peace and dignity -strategic axis of the World Campaign for the Right to Housing prompted by HIC in the 90s- reaches today greater complexity and new dimensions in advance of the serious impacts of the economic globalization and the neo-liberal policies that prompt it.

The evil utopia of infinite growth and accumulation operates inside its own logic without any respect to nature and to human beings, seeming a blind career against the life and toward the self-destruction.

The inequality, between and within the nations, and the growing impoverishment affect no longer only to the poor countries but even to the most developed and is behind of the multiple problems that they impact in the diverse fields of the human activity.

These impacts, combined to the transformation of the common goods that guarantee the life in the planet -the land, the water and even the air- in merchandise subject of the free play of the market, mainly affect the field of the human habitat generating increasingly more precarious living conditions in the rural and urban settlements.

The determining factors imposed to the poor countries through the international treaties of free commerce and of the negotiation of its external debt originate the massive migration of peasants toward the cities and toward rich countries where they face, among others many problems, the difficulty to access to a worthy place where to live; to sure land; to the infrastructure, services and necessary equipment for the healthy development of their life; to public spaces of interaction and recreation.

Nevertheless, today they face the cancellation of possibilities and supports to participate in the production and the democratic management of its habitat; at the extreme, people are criminalized for their “informal” initiatives to give a roof to children, being violated with it the most elementary commitment than assume the States signatories of the International Commitment of Cultural, Social, and Economic Rights that is: respect such Rights.

As last year, the call made by the United Nations to commemorate Habitat Day is centered in the cities under the theme “The city and the Millennium Development”, being forgot of the deep articulation that exists between countryside and city in the current processes of settlement.

More serious is that the structural causes of the phenomena of social habitat are ignored and even comes vouch for -thru the PNUD and the Economic Commission of United Nations for Europe- the wicked and simplistic approach to consider the lack of recognition and legalization of the economic assets of the poor -its house, its small business- as the cause of its poverty. Co-chaired by Hernando of Soto and Madelaine Albright, and with the guarantee of some governments -contractors of the own De Soto-, the Commission of High Level for the Legal Empowerment of the Poor has been adopted, which will impact seriously in the foreseeable future the public politics.

The undersized Millennium Development Goal in the field habitat aiming to improve in 20 years the living conditions of only a 10% of the current slum dwellers has been questioned in the recent General Assembly of United Nations, for the sake of increasing the world resources against the terrorism. For the same period, the Director of the United Nations Habitat Program estimates that due to present trends, the population living in slums will reach the figure of 1.600 million inhabitants.

Before these and other alarming facts, HIC, without forgetting the holism of the problem of the human habitat, calls to its members, partner organizations and social movements and to all those interested in the field of habitat to consider these themes and to discuss in depth the proposal of World Charter for the Right to the City in which our Coalition comes participating, jointly with other networks and social movements. It is human rights approach that seeks to build a capable, mobilizing instrument to articulate the multiple and diverse processes that face today the serious tendencies of deterioration of the spatial and social relations in the cities, between cities and between the city and the countryside.