IFHP featuring “Claudio's Curated” - a must-read list for urban professionals

By Claudio Acioly Jr.

I was asked by IFHP to endorse and highlight five references on housing that I would strongly recommend, including some of my own work. This is a colossal task and obviously challenging because you are certainly bound to make injustice to very good work done by housing practitioners worldwide.  Notwithstanding, without any order of importance:

Model picture, not representing any specific project mentioned in the text. Photo by Dylan Winterflood on Unsplash

1. One book that has inspired me a lot is the “Housing Policy Matters” by Shlomo Angel (Oxford University Press, 2000)”, whose work I have been following since the 1980’s when he was leading the seminal initiative Building Together in Thailand, his book on Land for Housing the Poor, the Housing Indicator Programme and the Global Housing Strategy for the Year 2000.  Angel is a robust scholar with a solid practitioner’s eye whose work I learned to appreciate very much. After meeting him personally and knowing the character behind the ideas, he earned a huge respect and appreciation from me.

2. “The Practical Guide for Conducting Housing Profiles by UN-Habitat“ (UN-Habitat, 2011), is another piece I recommend which amalgamates my thoughts and reflects my work into a practical oriented publication for those who want to understand how the housing sector works. This summarizes the work I had been doing during my time at the IHS, Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies. I happened to be the main UN-Habitat author of this work.

Slum/Favela Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, viewed from within. Photo from wikipedia.

3. A compendium of cases and articles published in "Low-Income Housing in the Third World: The Role of Sites and Services and Settlement Upgrading”, organized by Geoffrey Payne (John Wiley, 1984) was another inspiration during a time I was heavily involved in large scale sites and services and slum upgrading in Brasilia and discovering an international literature at the beginning of my career. Payne’s work on housing and land has been inspirational.

4. I recently delivered a webinar for the IFHP entitled “Housing in Times of Crisis: Reconciling recovery with scale, resilience and affordability” in which I share my understanding of housing and the housing sector and bring forward a series of propositions based on the idea that the Housing Sector can become the catalytic force in economic recovery and social revitalization in the post Covid-19 era. The recording is available here.

5. To complete the list of five, I flip to the other side of the coin.  Informal urbanization and the appearance of slums and informal settlements are inexorably connected to the housing sector and particularly associated with the lack of affordable housing options for people with low incomes.  I therefore recommend UN-Habitat publication Streets as Tools for Urban Transformation in Slums: A Street-Led Approach to Citywide Slum Upgrading (UN-Habitat, 2014), and the Global Urban Lecture I delivered for UN-Habitat which advocates for a shift from piecemeal project-based upgrading to a programme-scale approach and the shift towards the opening of streets as the driving force for citywide slum upgrading.

I wish you enjoyable learning and continued expansion!

All the best,

Claudio

About the author: Claudio Acioly Jr is an architect and urban planner, a development practitioner with nearly 40 years of experience in more than 30 countries working as a practicing expert, program manager, resident technical and policy advisor or short-term consultant to governments, bilateral and multilateral organizations, academic institutions, civil society organizations and community-based organizations.

Acioly specialized in housing and slum upgrading. Throughout the years he worked intensively in the nexus housing and land policies-city development strategies, combining it with capacity building, programme development and policy implementation.

We are proud to have Claudio as a member of the IFHP Council. You can read his full bio and access his works here.