Securing Communities, and Trust, in the Global South

More than a billion people worldwide—about one in four urban residents—live in informal settlements, according to UN Habitat, with the greatest concentrations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Such settlements, which generally form in response to a lack of adequate, affordable, and well-located housing, can offer residents access to community support networks and economic opportunity. But informality also tends to leave residents in a state of perpetual precarity, without legal rights to their homes or the land they occupy, and often without essential infrastructure or services. 

A forthcoming Policy Brief from UN-Habitat explores whether community land trusts (CLTs), which are made up of individually owned homes on collectively owned land, might be a useful tool to help provide more security and stability to residents of informal settlements, particularly in the Global South.

“Community land trusts could help a lot of groups in the Global South, but few people know about the model,” says Tarcyla Fidalgo, who, as head of the Global South Initiative at the International Center for Community Land Trusts (ICCLT) and lead author of the UN-Habitat report, has been working to map and learn from collective land tenure models globally and to broaden understanding of CLTs in Brazil and beyond.

“I think the community land trust answers a very old and complex question facing the social movement here in Brazil,” Fidalgo says, “that is how to keep a collective framework while also respecting individuality.”

Earlier this year, Fidalgo joined dozens of other attendees for a three-day learning exchange in Cape Town to explore the legal, financial, and geographic realities of CLTs in Africa. The event, which was sponsored by partners including the Lincoln Institute and the Development Action Group (DAG), was the latest in a series of peer exchanges among practitioners and others who see potential for the CLT model to address housing insecurity in the Global South.

“One could see that event as historic,” says Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. “It opened a conversation across continents and diverse communities on the relevance and promise of CLTs that may never have happened on its own and set the stage for the adoption of CLTs at a scale never thought of.”  

‘Temporary for 100 Years’

The modern community land trust model is most prevalent in the wealthy urbanized nations of North America and Europe, where it’s largely been used to guarantee housing affordability. But Fidalgo says that, in the context of informal settlements, CLTs can be used as a tool to preserve already strong communities and to serve more broadly in the fight for housing and land rights.

“These places, even considering the precarity, even considering all the difficulties, are vibrant places with a lot of creativity, with very strong social bonds, and very strong solidarity among the residents,” she says. Yet residents of informal settlements—many of whom occupy marginal but well-located plots of land near downtown jobs—live with a constant threat of eviction and a host of other insecurities, from increased climate risk to inadequate sanitation infrastructure.

Rio de Janeiro now has over 1,000 favelas, Fidalgo says, in virtually every neighborhood, often ascending steep hillsides above the formally developed city. “We have had this typology of informal settlement since the beginning of the 20th century—our oldest favela is now 130 years old,” she says. Throughout that time, the favelas and their residents have experienced cycles of neglect, acceptance—and eviction, as during the “Mega Events” period of 2009–2016, when Rio hosted the Olympic Games, World Cup, Pan American Games, and other major international events.

“The city received a lot of money to guarantee the infrastructure for these events,” Fidalgo says. Political decisions to eradicate some of the favelas, especially those close to the Olympic and World Cup venues, she says, “led to massive waves of evictions, and a lot of people from these favelas died—not specifically because of violence, but because they lost their community, they lost the social bonds.”

Fidalgo says the threat of eviction leaves residents of informal settlements who might be able to invest in their homes and neighborhoods reluctant to do so. “If you don’t have the title of the land that you occupy, you won’t invest there, because you’re insecure about your position,” Fidalgo says. “So you just do the most basic improvements you need to survive, because it’s a temporary condition. But it’s temporary for 100 years.”

A community land trust offers residents the chance to legally and permanently keep their community intact while securing infrastructure investment and political power, and to own their own homes and remain in them for as long as they wish. But for a long time, Fidalgo says, even the few practitioners and policymakers in Brazil who had heard of the model largely dismissed it as something that only worked in the wealthier context of the Global North.

That is, until they heard about the Caño Martín Peña community land trust in the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan.

Changing the Channel in Puerto Rico

The Martín Peña channel once flowed through the center of San Juan, and by the turn of the 21st century, some 8,000 families had settled in the swampy mangroves along its banks. Long since filled with silt and debris, and with no sewer or drainage system, the channel had become extremely polluted and prone to flooding, so the government began making plans to dredge it.

Residents were relieved but also concerned: With the area so close to San Juan’s financial district, the infrastructure improvements could raise land values and force their displacement. The government wanted the community’s support for the project, so it engaged in a lengthy consultation process with residents from the eight different neighborhoods to create a Comprehensive Development Plan and a legislative bill—a key component of which included handing over the publicly owned land to its residents through a newly established community land trust.

Forming the CLT took several years and a whole lot of discussion—more than 700 community meetings in total, says Mariolga Juliá Pacheco, director of the Office of Participation at the Caño Martín Peña CLT. “It was interesting at the beginning, because you had different leaders in different communities who didn’t necessarily know each other,” she says. “But they started seeing that they were fighting the same struggles, that they had the same troubles—that if one community gets flooded, the other one will get flooded.… It was a really beautiful process in terms of facilitating the critical thinking and awakening of the community leaders.”

After some political setbacks and ensuing legal challenges, the community land trust finally gained ownership of the land at the end of 2013. Two years later, the Caño Martín Peña won a World Habitat Award, gaining recognition as a new model for transforming informal settlements and preventing displacement.

Only about a quarter of the 8,000 households joined the new community land trust (though more continue to sign up). But even having just 2,000 of the homes permanently protected by removing them from the property market has been enough to shield the entire community from gentrification pressure, because the homes are interspersed throughout the neighborhoods.

“When some agent from the real estate market comes to the community, they don’t want to buy just one house or two houses,” Fidalgo explains. “They want to buy a large piece of land to build another thing—a shopping center or whatever. And in trying to get this large piece of land, they will inevitably run into a community land trust house. So they will not be able to acquire that piece of land.”

South-South Knowledge Sharing

In 2017, World Habitat organized an international peer exchange in San Juan with the Caño Martín Peña land trust, which ICCLT director Greg Rosenberg attended. “I was blown away at what they had accomplished there,” Rosenberg says. “It opened my eyes to the potential of the community land trust in the Global South, in ways I had never imagined—that it could be a very useful tool to the one billion people living without security of tenure in self-built, informal communities.”

That inspired the ICCLT to host its own peer learning exchange in Brazil, which drew participants from 11 countries. Among them was Crystal West, executive director of the Development Action Group (DAG), a housing and economic development nonprofit based in Cape Town, South Africa.

“Our notion of CLTs was based on the Global North approach, and that of Australia, and we just found that’s not going to work here,” West says. “But going to Rio, seeing what’s happening in Brazil and Puerto Rico and these other countries, we said, actually, the principles of this model are not foreign to us.
 These are the principles that we have been working with as we support communities—it’s about ownership, it’s about stewardship, and most importantly, it’s about putting communities at the center.”

“The big challenge we are facing in South Africa at the moment with informality is that it’s not going anywhere,” West says. “The rate of informality has just grown exponentially.”

When South Africa became a democratic nation in 1994 after decades of apartheid rule—under which Black South Africans were legally barred from owning property and forcibly removed from their land—the new government, seeking to redress those harms, made many promises. “A central theme was that every person would get a free house,” West says, a lofty goal that is nowhere near being realized.

While there is a history of communal land tenure in South Africa, adopting CLTs will require navigating some legal and political hurdles, says Michael Clark, urban land researcher at DAG. “One of the things that came out quite clearly from the learning exchange is that, while a form of a community land trust would definitely be possible in the South African context, the specific form that it would take isn’t immediately available in our legal context directly,” he says, so it might require advocating for a new form of land tenure or retrofitting an existing framework.

Aside from the legal obstacles, the history of apartheid can also make residents somewhat skeptical of communal ownership. Having been legally forbidden from owning property for generations, many Black South Africans understandably see private landownership as an important symbol of freedom. “Because people have been displaced and have had their land rights taken away as part of this dehumanization that apartheid was so effective at, there’s this very big fixation on ownership as being the end goal,” Clark says.

The Cape Town learning exchange kicked off with escorted site visits to the Ses’khona and Winnie Madikizela Mandela informal settlements, where participants were able to speak with residents and get a deeper understanding of the precarity they face.

“Those site visits were very important to ground the conversation, to locate the different people that were part of the conference to the realities of what we’re talking about,” says Akhona Siswana, projects coordinator at DAG.

“It’s really very difficult to organize around hope,” Siswana says. “There are immediate challenges that the communities are facing, and here we are coming in with conversations that are quite longitudinal in nature. But the whole learning exchange, for me, it’s given us hope that this can really fly in these communities.”

It’s a Model, ‘Not a Recipe’

Back in Puerto Rico, hopes are high as planning turns into progress at the Caño Martín Peña CLT, with dredging of the channel underway.

Residents are now envisioning what it might look like to use a cleaned-up channel for social and outdoor recreational activities like kayaking. “We have many elderly residents that remember those kinds of interactions with the caño, and we have new generations that haven’t had that opportunity,” Pacheco says. “So that’s a question, but with a smile on it.”

Reflecting on the influential and inspirational role of the Caño Martín Peña CLT, Pacheco says, “I think it’s an honor and a responsibility. For the community leaders, and for the staff also, it’s validation that it has been worth it—all the efforts, all the years of struggle, all the long nights of meetings.”

But while the Caño offers an inspiring and successful example, it is just that—one example, in one place, that has worked; there’s no single way to do it. “We’re very clear whenever we have peer exchanges and different opportunities to share our experience that you need to consider the context of the community and the people that are considering this option,” she says.

“We have had many exchanges where, at the end, we have said to the other group, maybe you don’t need a CLT,” Pacheco says. “Because it’s not a recipe. You have to take people and communities as the subjects and protagonists [of their stories],” she adds. “What the community needs, what the community wants… that’s the starting and the ending point.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: The modest homes of a favela line a hillside in Rio de Janeiro, with nearby skyscrapers visible in the background. Credit: Getty Images/Cokada.