Habitat en Mouvement

The project in a few words

Habitat in motion is an initiative and a challenge that we have set up and which consists in a journey from 6 months to a year across South America to meet initiatives and movements who the popular habitat and self-management. This educational project involves traveling slowly with a route that will be built as we go along meeting people, following recommendations and opportunities.

In each visited countries (Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay) we will document the context of emergence and peculiarities of social and solidary habitat-experiences in various forms (interviews, articles, series of photographs, drawings, portraits...) to assemble them in a book that is both a travelogue across a spectacular continent and a manifesto for a more inclusive and sustainable cities construction.

At our return to France, the second phase of the project will be the self-edition of this book and the dissemination of our learnings in French cities, in order to generate debates on viable participative generation of housing and cities.

Who are we

Young 25-year old french couple of urban planners; we left France two years ago to live in Latin America after studying together at the Institute of urban planning of Grenoble. We lived more than a year in Mexico and 8 months in Buenos Aires, working in different public agencies and participating in solidarity initiatives, in particular in the areas of housing and the right to the city. 

Genesis of the project

We started in 2013 to publish our articles on our themes of work, travel experiences and looks over the city governance, through our website http://metropoleaks.wix.com/metropoleaks. Multiple encounters and experiences made in Mexico as well as in Buenos Aires motivated us to know more about Latin American local experiences and social movements that seek to reduce social inequalities and build new urban cultures, based on collective practices, mutual-aid and respectful of the environment.   

So, we finally decided to combine our passions for urban planning, writing, photography, travel and exchange and to initiate the project Habitat in motion in July 2014!

Interviews of families from informal neighborhoods of Buenos Aires relocated to social housing... stories, teachings and limits of the housing policy!

Fist movements…

Living in Buenos Aires we have already had the opportunity to start researches for our project through meetings, discussions and visits of self-managed housing cooperatives and the housing authorities in Argentina as in Uruguay. It's a feedback of many decades about social construction of housing and collective property which is interesting to analyze now a days, while France just recognized grouped housing for the first time in the urbanism and housing law (March 2014) and internationally debates are growing around new forms of housing (Cooperative, Communal and Collective forms of Land Tenure).

In July 2014 we will therefore leave Buenos Aires in the direction of the Andes and Chile en route to new human experiences and teachings about popular habitat (groups of inhabitants in struggle against Chile, self-managed communities in Peru, the bolivarian Great Mission of Housing in Venezuela, social urban planning and slum upgrading in Colombia, movement of workers without roofs and anti-speculative policies in Brazil among others)!

You will be able to follow us via our website as well as help us to build our route through an interactive map for suggestions of social experiences to visit, sightseeing, and any ather usefull tips!

Portrait of José Maria owner of an empty hotel in Buenos Aires, victim of a speculative and unequal urban policy, while the number of homeless and slum-inhabitants is growing fast / Visit of a recycled industrial building into apartments by a housing and self-management cooperative.