Yossef Ben-Meir

(High Atlas Foundation, Hassan II University, Morocco)

 

 

Abstract: This paper presents the historic and conceptually inherent link between housing and community development. The community development approach to housing development offers special opportunities and challenges. While the approach advances housing goals, at the same time it creates the essential conditions for broad-based development and scaling up of projects and programs, bearing economic, political, and social consequences and benefits. After considering the process of how this kind of transformative change can occur (drawing from examples in Sri Lanka and Morocco), the paper examines the participatory approach to housing and community development and provides descriptions of specific community planning methods. Finally, the implications on the role of planners and facilitators of participatory social change are considered, as well as how they are effectively trained. Although the paper does not discuss the difficulties in order successfully implement participatory development, the opportunities that it does afford are just as real, and it therefore offers a potentially viable approach for government and nongovernment agencies to advance projects of a specific sector (housing) as well as other sustainable projects that meet the essential needs of local communities.

 

 

Key words: housing development; participatory planning; sustainable development; decentralization; community

 

JEL codes: I, O