Dear Friends,
The Thai Government has approved CODI's
nation-wide slum upgrading program for next year which will involve 174
communities in 42 cities. This year approval , hopefully, will be
the first batch of city-wide slum upgrading process targeting 200 cities
in a period of about 4 years.
This new program will concentrate on building local partnership where
community network in each city will be the core actor working with
Municipality, academicians, NGOs and others in all the cities.
They will organize a form of joint committee or joint working team
together. This local joint committee will survey all communities in the
city together and plan to develop upgrading process covering all
communities in the city in the period of 3-4 years. CODI will
facilitate the process and pass the budget for development from the
government to this local mechanism or to community directly. This
will be a new process of city-wide community-driven upgrading and trying
to build local partnership and development capacity together as a team
at the same time.
The budget for development approved for CODI are as following :
1. subsidy for
infrastructure/ environment/ social infrastructure,
2. management cost for local
development work,
3. subsidy for housing loans
(2%, enable community to get loans as group at 2 % per annum) and
4
development budget for building capacities, exchanges, meetings,
documenting, mapping etc.,.
Budget 1 and 2 will be passed
to the local groups to manage together.
Total budget of about 25 US$
million has been granted from the government and about 2.5 million from
CODI Fund.
The important elements of this upgrading
program are
physical improvement of the
community from on-site upgrading to total reconstruction or land-sharing
or resettlement by communities,
building strong and
legitimate community social and economic unit with community own
management system,
integrate new community
environment initiatives,
building legitimate and
stronger relationship with others in the city.
So it will be much more
than just the infrastructure upgrading as in the past.
So it will keep us busy throughout the next year process since there
will be so much work to do to make it possible to demonstrate new way of
development by people in a large scale in our city and society.
I
hope this going to be very hard work will also help contribute to the
work you are all doing in different places , different parts of the
world. I strongly feel that this work with urban poor communities
that many of us have been doing all our lives or more than ten -twenty
years have come to an important turn in many places, in the world, at
different paces and development stages, but they all have great
potential to develop into this direction.
It is the new direction of large scale development by the poor
people as key development actors with support from local partners and
development actors.
It is very important that we have clear vision along this
direction then we can help strengthen it rightly which could lead to
powerful change process on a large scale. The change, of course,
will not only affect the quality of housing or infrastructure conditions
but also so much more impact on many other aspects of people lives and
their relationship with city as a whole,
unlike the narrow sectoral development by outsiders that governed
our field and ways of work for decades, and still do.
Regards
Somsook
