On Tuesday through Thursday of this week, I’ll be down in Rio de Janeiro(*) as a speaker at the fifth biannual World Urban Forum:

(*) No, I won’t be on the beaches – I’ll come back paler than when I went.

If you’re there, please come see me – among other places, on Wednesday, 24 March, at 3:30 pm, at Dialogue 3, Session 3, in Hall W4-1. 

Don’t be put off by the glower; this is what passes for thinking

It’s going to be an enormous event:

In the space of a few short years, the World Urban Forum has turned into the world’s premier conference on cities. The Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing problems facing the world today: rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies, climate change and policies.

UN Habitat is the convener

Since the first meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in 2002, the Forum has grown in size and stature as it travelled to Barcelona in 2004, Vancouver 2006, and Nanjing in 2008.

Over 18,000 people are attending, from over 170 countries around the world: Afghanistan, Albania and Algeria, to Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe:

Indeed, it seems as if anybody who is anybody will be there:

Spanning the full range of actors, even if they insist on mislabeling their largest category – lumping all of us into the blobby category Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) instead of calling out the Mission Entrepreneurial Entities within:

Nearly all MEEs are NGOs, but many of the 4,262 NGOs aren’t MEEs

That WUF has grown so fast and so large is testimony to the global awareness that this is the century of cities:

With half of humanity already living in towns and cities, it is projected that in the next 50 years, two-thirds of us will be living in towns and cities. A major challenge is to minimize burgeoning poverty in cities, improve access of the urban poor to basic facilities such as shelter, clean water and sanitation and to achieve environmentally friendly, sustainable urban growth and development.

The conference will hit themes that we’ve sounded on the blog and elsewhere:

The theme for Rio 2010, “The Right to the City – bridging the urban divide” is in harmony with UN-HABITAT’s flagship report, State of the World’s Cities 2010-2011.

The US government is sending a large delegation, led by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.

HUD Secretary Donovan, White House advisor Adolfo Carrion, and Maria Otero, Undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs

On Wednesday, the good people from Wilton Park will convene a networking event around the BBC World Debate in which I participated last summer. 

Housing the Future: A BBC World debate

That same day I’ll be a featured participant in Dialogue 3: Equal Access to Shelter and Basic Services, which runs all day on Wednesday, March 24, in Hall W4-1.  The Dialogue is in four parts:

1. Equal Access to Shelter & Basic Urban Services

2. Access to Serviced Land

3. Affordable and Adequate Housing

4. Taking Forward the Housing Agenda

I’m a speaker in Part 3 (15h30 to 17h00) and Part 4 (17h30 to 18h30):

What are the most critical constraints that hinder the provision of affordable housing to low-income households? What is required in terms of policy interventions, institutional and regulatory reforms and other measures to generate a variety of housing options that meets the demand of various social groups?

My fellow panelists are:

Dan Ericsson, State Secretary and Deputy Minister of Finance, Sweden;

David Smith, director and founder of the Affordable Housing Institute, Boston, USA;

Nabil Bonduki, key advisor of the national housing policy and the national housing plan of Brazil;

Nabil Bonduki

Geoff Payne, international land and housing practitioner, consultant and advisor to several international development agencies.

Barry Pinsky, executive director of Rooftops Canada, with a particular focus on cooperative housing.

Prof. Graham Tipple, Dialogue rapporteur, moderator e-debate, University of Newcastle, UK.

Graham Tipple, met at Wilton Park

My topic, chosen by the dialogue’s organizers, is one familiar to blog readers:

Mission Entrepreneurial Entities: a favorite of ours

As you know, we’ve published a ground-breaking study of MEEs, in the form of a 250-page book, available electronically (free) or in a printed version suitable for displaying prominently on your shelves ($25 donation requested).

Faithful readers will no doubt recognize the critical importance of MEEs in reshaping urban policy, as will have become fully evident by the time we reach Session 4, the wrapup:

By the time we reach this stage of the dialogue, it should have become more evident to all panelists and the public in general that:

Equal access to shelter and basic urban services requires a multitude of actions and fundamental shifts in current land and housing policies.

Some are more obvious than others.

Nevertheless any shift in thinking and practice, in housing policy formulation and implementation aiming at producing equality in opportunities to access adequate housing is likely to require sustained political commitment and engagement of all public, private and community stakeholders.

As readers know, the rub is in that political commitment, which is often illusory.

Let me say this about that

This concluding session will review the most important contributions made by all speakers, calibrate some fundamental concepts and understanding built throughout the previous sessions and unpack fundamental steps to be pursued in search for a housing agenda for the future. The session will start with a wrap-up presentation by the rapporteur.

After the conference is over, I’ll post my few slides on the blog and Web site – but to do so now would ruin the suspense!

Good God, it’s – animated Power Point!

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Practitioners and academics

Global south and global north

US residents and international perspectives

We hand-pick the participants, capitalizing on visits to Boston by those with international experience on a topic relevant to our universe, and then pairing the guest with someone local whose credentials match our visitor’s and whose experience provides a counterpoint of perspective.  Our goal is two articulate experts, each working on the same topic but from widely separated platforms and environments, who together explore what is unique about their respective situations, and what is common.  Via this series, we hope and expect to discover resonances and surprising similarities that will shine a light on deeper structural principles important to affordable housing worldwide.

Attendance is free but space is limited.  Register online at www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/exchange or call Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar at +1 (617) 502 5917.

We expect the subways to be packed with people clamoring to attend

The Exchange Seminar Series will start off with a bang, with a great topic and a pair of speakers:

Leading from the Pack: Peer-Group Networks as Change Agents

Tom Bledsoe, Housing Partnership Network

Joel Bolnick, Slum Dwellers International

Friday, March 20, 9:00 to 10:30 am

38 Chauncy Street, Suite 600/ Boston, MA   02111

Joel Bolnick, Secretary of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (headquarters in Cape Town), a global network of over 25 national federations of savings cooperatives of the world’s poorest urban dwellers.  Using a $10,000,000, three-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SDI has created the Urban Poor Fund International, a self-managed revolving facility of risk capital to undertake nation-changing demonstration projects in their countries.

Joel Bolnick, Secretary, Slum Dwellers International

Thomas Bledsoe, Chief Executive Officer of the Housing Partnership Network, a peer network of nearly 100 of the leading non-profit housing enterprises in the US with strong track records in development, financing, and management. Its members have developed or financed more than 500,000 affordable homes and the Network has created pooled structures for insurance, financing and group buying to enhance their performance. 

Tom Bledsoe, executive director, Housing Partnership Network

Why these two speakers?  Because their respective organizations are global (SDI) and national (HPN) leaders in creating networks that then make change – in themselves, in their communities, and in the housing financial ecosystems in which they operate.

As our Exchange Series flyer puts it:

Networks have emerged as among the world’s most promising new approach to making change in affordable housing and urban development globally.  Networks are self-organized, self-managed adaptive clusters of similarly-motivated peer entities each operating in a distinct geographic market but across a similar intellectual and business space.   Rather than a top-down approach that big institutions know best, the network approach emphasizes experimentation and interactive learning that encourages insight, sharing, and rapid evolution, without creating resource competition among members.    

Slum/Shack Dwellers International and the Housing Partnership Network are widely-recognized leaders in this movement: the Housing Partnership Network throughout the United States, and Slum Dwellers International across the global south.  Each of these networks has moved beyond simple idea exchange to provide practical tools and services that help their members address their biggest challenges.  

Among the most striking aspects of SDI and HPN is their parallel evolution from first convenings to exchanges and sharing to the innovation of financial products. 

HPN has created members-only lending and insurance products for its members; SDI is now creating its own Urban Poor Fund International, a transnational revolving facility with the goal, as SDI’s Web site puts it, of:

Monetizing the Social and Political Capital of the Poor

Once Federations begin to negotiate with local governments around secure tenure and basic services, the next step is always to find the finance for the actual implementation and delivery. Very often the lack of access to funds delays projects and results in a loss of morale for the communities involved.

These constraints have prompted many SDI affiliates to build new institutions, called Urban Poor Funds, which monetize the social and political capital of savings groups to leverage additional resources from formal banking institutions, the State, and international donor agencies. By combining the savings of the poor with external contributions, Urban Poor Funds gear up capital for large-scale construction and infrastructure development.

SDI’s Urban Poor Funds are meant to reinforce cooperation between Federations and more powerful players in the development sector. Through the participatory design and implementation process, communities learn to build transparent, accountable finance systems, create responsive allocation mechanisms, and accommodate increases in scale and volume.

It’ll be a great event; the first, we hope and expect, of many.

Are you here for the AHI Exchange Seminar Series?

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