CODI Update: 50 Community Upgrading Projects

This report presents 50 cases of successful housing upgrading projects in Thailand. The projects come from the Baan Mankong programme, launched by the Thai government in January 2003 as part of its effort to tackle the critical housing situation in the country’s poorest urban enclaves. (This programme was described in some detail in the paper by Somsook Boonyabancha in Vol 17, No 1 (April 2005) of Environment and Urbanization.) The programme channels government funds in the form of infrastructure subsidies and soft housing and land loans directly to poor communities, who plan and carry out improvements to their housing, environment, basic services and tenure security, and manage the budget themselves. Instead of delivering housing units to individual families, Baan Mankong puts communities and their networks at the centre of a process of developing long-term, comprehensive solutions.

The programme is being implemented by the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI – under the Ministry of Social Development), which works in close collaboration with communities, local governments, professionals, universities and NGOs to plan upgrading processes. Once a project is finalized, CODI channels the infrastructure subsidies and house loans directly to the community. These funds cover infrastructure costs, land/housing loans, administrative costs and subsidies for “process support” (aimed to promote the sharing of information among participants). The system rests on community savings activities, the use of people’s managerial skills to deal with housing problems, and especially the commitment by central government institutions to allow people to be the main actors and to decentralize the development of solutions.

The programme gives high levels of power to local communities. Five factors have been found to be important for success:

· flexible finance: when people see resources that are accessible to them (without difficult bureaucratic barriers), they will plan for what they really need and manage the resources well;
· savings groups: communities have to be organized on a collective financial basis;
· collective everything: communities have to find ways to do things together, and everyone in the community (even the poorest) has to be included in the project to (re)invigorate the groups’ strength;
· horizontal support: the whole programme is a learn-in-practice experience, where communities share their knowledge with others; and
· technical support: community architects, planners and universities are essential supports.

Five hundred and twelve projects have been approved so far, with 1,010 communities or 53,976 households benefiting. The total budget approved so far is US$ 46.1 million for upgrading subsidies and US$ 52.3 million for housing and land loans. The result is hundreds of projects, rooted in their environmental, urban and social contexts. All are different, as they all emerge after local processes of participation. They are also much smaller than the traditional state-designed social housing projects. Moreover, land tenure is key to success, as are diverse methods of converting idle public or private land plots into liveable residential communities. Landowners who traditionally have been reluctant to accept slum allocation on their plots now offer land for the projects. Finally, high building costs have also been reduced as a result of the increasing number of community-built projects that use the people’s building skills. The report is illustrated with many photos, maps and drawings.