Update, August 4, 2009:

The BBC Web site now has the program. 

·         Click here: http://www.bbcworldnews.com/Pages/ProgrammeMultiFeature.aspx?id=196

·         Then click, “Also click here to watch in Broadband” – it should pop up and just run

As a point of information, here are five times I speak: 5:00, 12:30, 16:30, 37:00, and 40:30. 

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On August 1 and 2, BBC World News will broadcast a fifty-minute debate, “Housing the Future,” in which I was an active participant.  It’ll be on this weekend, and I urge you to watch.  For channels and times, check the BBC World News website.

Look for the BBC World Debate: “Housing the Future”

This came about during an intense four-plus-day workshop at Wilton Park, “Financing affordable housing for low income groups: innovative funding for urban housing.”  (The Power Point deck of the talk Bob Buckley of Rockefeller Foundation and I delivered is here.)  Here’s the press release:

BBC World News broadcasts debate on the global housing crisis

Saturday August 1: with more people living in towns and cities than the countryside for the first time in human history, continuing mass migration from rural areas is now stoking a global housing crisis. The UN estimates that meeting the demand for adequate, affordable housing would need 4000 new houses being built every hour. And what will happen if we continue to ignore the crisis in our cities? ‘Housing the Future’, a new BBC World News debate produced by tve and broadcast on BBC World News this weekend, goes in search of answers.

BBC World News broadcasts ‘Housing the Future’ at the following times:

Saturday August 1, 0710 GMT, 1510 GMT, 1910 GMT

Sunday August 2, 0010 GMT, 0710 GMT, 1510 GMT, 1910 GMT

BBC World News broadcast times vary around the world. For details of transmissions in your region, check the BBC World News website.

The program, and indeed the conference, was principally sponsored by UN Habitat:

A worthy goal

QUOTES

“Every year the world creates roughly four Mumbais – a city of 20 million people. Every year the world has 80 million more people, and nearly all of them live in cities. If we don’t do anything about this, cities drown in poor people.”  David Smith, Affordable Housing Institute

 “We have to take a position that this is really an indictment of all of us… This is adequate shelters for all, so we need solutions and institutions which cater for various sections of society. This romantic idea of (solutions for) just the very bottom, that is not what this business is about.  Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director, UN-Habitat

Mrs. Tibaijuka at Wilton Park

The fall-out from the housing crisis is all too visible in developing countries where vast slums surround most major cities. Here, families improvise their own informal shelters, or slum landlords provide them – but at exorbitant rents. One billion people currently live in slums – and the figure is set to rise by a staggering 25 million a year.

But it’s not just in the developing world – the global financial crash was triggered by the collapse of the high-risk mortgage market in the US. This led to mass evictions and home repossessions, with ‘tent cities’ springing up outside American major cities – a phenomenon not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.

To debate the issues, strategies and solutions to the current crisis, journalist and BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet chairs a panel of distinguished experts:

Our moderator, Lyse Doucet

Somsook Boonyabancha, Secretary General of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

Garry Garrabrant, CEO of Equity International

Raquel Rolnik, Professor of Urban Planning in Sao Paulo, Brazil

David Smith from the Affordable Housing Institute

Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, the UN Agency responsible for shelter.

‘The World Debate: Housing the Future’ was supported by UN Habitat.

The show will run 50 minutes; I haven’t seen it, and am eager to. 

Imagining the future of housing?

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