Housing at the Centre of Urban Transformations: localizing the NUA and the SDG11 in cities of Latin America and the Caribbean

The Cities Alliance and UN-Habitat invite its partners to share their experience in this network event that is focused on housing practices and urban policy implementation in cities and local governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The network event is organized to provide the opportunity for a global conversation that can answer the key question: what are the local conditions that need to be met for successful implementation of SDG11.1 and the NUA? Cities in the region are plagued by large scale informal urbanization and housing remains largely being produced outside the official systems making it evident the serious housing affordability problems, exclusion and a buoyant informal land market. This is despite the existence of well-developed housing finance and ongoing large scale national housing programs and municipal housing and citywide slum upgrading policies.

The event will therefore underscore the land and housing challenges and bottlenecks that hinder the full implementation of these global agendas at the city level and ways to overcome them. For doing that, it brings together policy makers and urban practitioners from local and national governments, NGO's and private sector organizations from different countries to discuss the implementation at the local level and learn from the experiences with robust national and municipal land and housing policies found in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.

The degree of autonomy that municipal governments enjoy in Latin America coupled with a mix of local-national relations and inter-governmental policy dialogues create an enabling environment for the implementation of global agendas. The event will also address the potential of municipal governments to generate their own resources from a sound property tax regime and the deployment of land-based finance tools to self-finance housing and infrastructure investments.