Consequences of Alternative Feminist Approaches to Land and Housing Security

In September 2013, the Huairou Commission, an international non-governmental organization that works with grassroots women, and Espacio Feminista, who work with landless women in Recife, Brazil, held an expert group meeting.  Patricia Chavez, founder of Espacio Feminista, said:

We need to go deep into what development is; we are just accepting a process of urbanization; people are not obliged to live in riverbanks, hills.  We are being forced out of fields, to open up space.  [There is a] model of development that is being imposed . . . let us not be transformed into something that is not compatible with our needs.

 

Increasing numbers of poor households, primarily headed by women, desperate for jobs, will flock into cities of the South and be stuck in the informal labor market that pays low wages and offers no protections.  Land and housing ownership is seen as key to changing the current realities for women.  The UN-Habitat and the World Bank have put forth a continuum of land ownership that carries with it different degrees of security but remains weighted towards individual titling.

This paper will offer guidelines that member groups of the Huairou Commission are recommending as an alternative to business as usual.  This will be compared to ideas of the “diverse” economy as developed by J.K. Gibson-Graham, authors of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It):  A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996, 2006).  The diverse economy is defined by different transactions (alternative market and nonmarket), labor (alternative paid and unpaid), and economic enterprise (alternative capitalist and non-capitalist).  On-the-ground practices by Huairou Commission groups in Brazil and the Philippines will be compared in order to assess consequences of gender approaches for the future development of urban spaces.