Izwe lakithi : securing land tenure for urban poor communities and demonstrating that there can be sustainable alternatives to evictions /

Preventing eviction with information: Instead of waiting for them to be evicted, the Kenyan Federation, Muungano wa Wanavijiji has surveyed Communities living along the railway line in Kibera - Nairobi's largest slum. They also took high level government officials to India to see how community surveys formed the basis for a successful relocation of 15,000 families who previously lived along the railway lines in Mumbai. They used this exchange and the survey information to negotiate resettlement and upgrading options for thousands of families in Kibera. A pilot housing project is being driven by the Federation at present and will benefit families to be relocated from the railway line.
-- Preventing with alternative planning: In Cape Town, community organizations, NGOs, professionals and civic groups are joining forces to engage the state around the N2 Gateway, a mega-project commissioned by the President. Fifteen thousand families are to be affected. While everybody wants the area to be upgraded it is clear that the current strategy being
implemented by the State is going to cause huge dislocation for the communities involved. Instead of just shouting "no", the South African Federation - with support from CORC - has responded to this expensive, top-down, secretive and ill-conceived strategy with a series of alternative plans, prepared by CORC and a set of concerned young
professionals linked to the Sustainability Institute. Two large sites of open land have been identified where it is hoped that precedent setting alternatives can be demonstrated.
-- Preventive with collective action: The big lesson Mumbai's footpath dwellers learned, after years of watching their houses being torn down and their belongings confiscated, was that as individual families, or as individual settlements, they had no power to arrest this hopeless cycle of demolition and impoverishment. But when they joined together into a movement with critical mass and began developing better alternatives to that cycle, the city gradually began to listen.

Fifteen years ago, 800,000 people were forcefully evicted from their homes in Seoul to “beautify” the city for the Olympic Games. It was the worst situation the city’s urban poor and their supporters had ever faced.

In the middle of this eviction crisis, a large number of grassroots groups and housing rights activists from all over Asia gathered in Korea to focus attention on these and other forcedevictions happening in cities around Asia.

It was the first attempt to find ways for a regional network to assist a local housing struggle like this one. It led to the first fact-finding mission, which opened the plight of Korea’s urban poor to international attention, and it inspired the formation of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR).

In 1991 ACHR made contact with squatter groups in South Africa. These groups became the South African Homeless People’s Federation who joined forces with India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation to build grassroots movements in dozens of other cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Since 1996 these movements have combined to form Slum Dwellers International.

Since then, a lot of serious work has gone into the eviction issue, helping millions to secure land, housing and infrastructure, and getting government and development institutions to acknowledge that the poor have to be part of the urban development process in our cities. But that doesn’t mean the evictions have stopped. Sadly, they are increasing algebraically, causing a colossal displacement of people around the globe. Hefty contributions to the global eviction statistics are being made courtesy of speculation, market forces, urban development and infrastructure projects. There is more than ever an urgent need to find workable alternatives to this most impoverishing practice, which is the antithesis of development.

As professionals, we can gather and disseminate information about evictions, organize letter-writing and media campaigns to express outrage, citing all the UN covenants. But what do poor communities do? How do they manage when the bulldozers come? And how, when they are supported, linked together and given a little space to think about it, can they cultivate long-term strategies for fighting eviction and finding long term answers to their housing problems?

Gift of David Satterthwaite.