Every home is the centre of one’s world

The forum opened with a powerful reminder drawn from Azerbaijani wisdom: “Every home is the centre of one’s world, their sanctuary”. This simple but profound idea captures what is often lost in housing policy debates: housing is not merely a unit or an asset, but a space of dignity, identity, and belonging. It reminds us that adequate housing must reflect the social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of human life.  

Diagnosing the global crisis 

A second Azerbaijani proverb: “Drop by drop, a lake is formed, and by flowing, a river is made”- offered an equally compelling metaphor. Achieving adequate housing for all depends on cumulative and sustained efforts across scales. In that sense, the Baku Call to Action reflects a collective, co-produced, and inclusive process. Developed through consultations with a wide range of stakeholders, it signals an important shift:  

The Baku Call to Action is clear that the global housing crisis is not accidental, but the result of structural, systemic, and governance failures. It identifies dispossession, colonisation, racism, inequality, financialisation, poor land governance, shrinking public investment, conflict, climate change, and forced evictions as key drivers of the crisis. This diagnosis rejects the notion that housing is simply a supply problem. Instead, housing is framed as part of a broader system shaped by finance, governance, land, infrastructure, services, rights, and social relations. The goal is not merely to produce units to "close the gap," but to enable systems that deliver dignity, justice, and long-term sustainability. 

Housing as an integrative force

Against this backdrop, WUF 13 marked an important shift in emphasis. Housing is no longer treated as a secondary sectoral concern but was placed much more firmly at the center of the urban agenda as an integrative force - one that connects land, infrastructure, livelihoods, climate resilience, public health, and social inclusion. In this framing, housing emerged not simply as an outcome of urban development, but as a foundational pillar of inclusive, resilient, and just cities. 

This recognition aligns closely with the 5 As principles of adequate housing developed by IHS over the past decade. These principles - availability, accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and adaptability - offer a way of understanding housing not only as a physical product, but as a multidimensional condition shaped by policy choices, institutional arrangements, and lived realities. As such, they provide both a normative and an analytical framework for thinking about how housing policies are designed, how they are implemented, and what outcomes they produce. 

Seen through this lens, housing adequacy becomes the pathway to housing justice. Housing justice is achieved when housing is available, accessible, affordable, acceptable, and adaptable for all, and when these conditions are secured in ways that are equitable, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. What WUF 13 underscored was that housing cannot be addressed in isolation: it must be understood as central to the wider urban question, and as a critical entry point for reducing inequality and shaping more just urban futures. 

Housing shapes not only where people live, but also how they access opportunities, experience safety, maintain health, and build families and communities. This is why housing must be understood as a (social) process that impacts all aspects of human development -rather than simply a product. This process-oriented perspective places housing at the core of city-making and directly connects it to the achievement of SDG 11. Emphasising the exchange-value of housing has largely resulted in the commodification and financialisation of housing production as the prevailing exclusionary process that has further deepened the housing affordability crisis. Therefore, the use-value of housing needs to be brought back in the discussion and given the appropriate weight to counteract this trend. 

A recurrent discussion which needs to be put at the centre

Much of what was discussed centred on fundamental questions:  Is housing produced in sufficient quantity? Does it reach those who need it most? Does it remain financially attainable? Does it reflect people's lived realities and cultural standards? Can it adapt to environmental and social change?  And yet, much of what was said to answer these questions was not fundamentally new. The forum largely reaffirmed what has long been known: the housing crisis persists not because of lack of understanding, but because of systemic failures in delivery. Supply continues to fall short of real demand, revealing enduring gaps in availability. Accessibility remains uneven and often exclusionary, particularly in rapidly urbanising regions where informality, weak institutions, and limited access to information constrain who can benefit from housing systems. At the same time, affordability is worsening globally, as housing remains embedded in financialised systems that prioritise accumulation over social function.  

The social function of housing - repeatedly invoked during the forum - represents a social contract that seems largely broken, considering the millions living in insecure, undignified, and inadequate conditions. 

Global North vs. Global South: Different manifestations of the housing challenge 

The housing crisis takes different forms across the Global South and the Global North, but in both contexts, it reflects a common failure: housing systems are not delivering adequate, affordable, and accessible homes at the scale people need.  

In the Global South, this failure is most visible in the continued growth of informal settlements. Although the proportion of urban residents living in such settlements has declined in some countries, the absolute number has risen from 895 million in 2000 to 1.16 billion in 2024, according to UN-Habitat. This makes clear that progress has not kept pace with urbanisation and population growth. Important lessons nevertheless emerge from practice. In the Global South, well-known initiatives such as Favela-Bairro in Brazil, the Baan Mankong Programme in Thailand, and the Kampung Improvement Programme in Indonesia demonstrate that slum upgrading, participatory planning, and in-situ improvement can significantly improve living conditions. Similarly, incremental housing approaches, including some Sites and Services schemes, have shown over time that initial interventions through time, regardless of how modest they were, can evolve into adequate housing if the time required to allow for change is not only given, but also supported. 

In the Global North, the challenge is mostly expressed through housing unaffordability, homelessness, and exclusion. Countries such as Austria and the Netherlands show how social and affordable housing systems can provide more stable alternatives. Yet even in these contexts, many cities face growing homelessness, housing insecurity among low-income households, minorities, and refugees, and a shortage of affordable rental and ownership options for younger and newly formed households. 

The key issue is not the absence of successful models, but the difficulty of scaling them. Their limited replication points to a deeper structural problem: the lack of enabling conditions needed to turn local success into broader systemic change. These conditions include effective governance, appropriate incentives, long-term financing, secure tenure, and context-sensitive policies that respond to different social, economic, and institutional realities. 

Housing informality at the center of the housing adequacy debate 

One fundamental issue that was largely present throughout the forum was the need to acknowledge that much housing across the Global South is already self-built. In some countries, around 80 percent of housing is self-produced, yet policy often fails to support these practices effectively. A value chain approach to informal housing delivery rooted in the belief that housing is a basic need and a human right could help better recognise and strengthen self-building as a major housing delivery system in many parts of the world, rather than treating it as illegal, marginal or informal.  

The call is to decriminalise the right of people to build and improve their own homes and to recognise their agency as a legitimate foundation for housing policy. In much of the world, self-built and incrementally developed housing is not an exception but a central way in which urban residents secure shelter, often in contexts where formal housing markets and public delivery systems fail to meet demand. Recent UN-Habitat analysis underscores that residents of informal settlements are not passive beneficiaries but active producers of housing and neighborhoods, investing labor, resources, and social organisation to meet their needs. This means that informal housing processes should not be treated simply as illegality to be suppressed, but as a reality that housing and land systems must engage, support, and progressively improve. 

This perspective has deep intellectual roots. From the late 1960s onward, John F. C. Turner argued that people are often the best judges of their own housing needs and that, when given room to act, they can produce housing solutions better suited to their circumstances than standardised, top-down provision. His work helped shift international thinking toward self-help, incremental development, and more enabling approaches to housing policy. That insight remains highly relevant today: rather than criminalising people-led housing processes born out of exclusion and necessity, governments should create enabling policies that provide secure tenure, basic services, infrastructure, technical support, and access to land and finance. 

A growing international consensus supports this direction. UN-Habitat increasingly emphasises adequate housing, security of tenure, and inclusive upgrading over eradication or forced displacement, while also warning that the global housing crisis continues to deepen.  In that sense, recognising and supporting people's housing practices is not about romanticising informality; it is about building more realistic, just, and effective housing systems that start from how people already solve their housing needs and then work to expand their choices, safety, and dignity. 

Reconciling supply innovations with adequate housing 

Despite this increasingly shared recognition of the value of informal housing processes, many discussions at WUF 13 still appeared to remain anchored in a predominantly supply-side logic. Much of the emphasis was placed on construction, technological innovation, and market-efficient solutions, often expressed through mass housing production or large-scale developments on the urban periphery. While such approaches may help increase housing supply, they often do not sufficiently address affordability or accessibility, and they rarely engage seriously with questions of cultural acceptability or the lived realities of low-income communities. This exposes a persistent tension: how can innovation, efficiency, and resilience be reconciled with the need to provide housing that is not only abundant, but also genuinely adequate for people living in precarious conditions? 

Part of the answer lies in reframing housing as human settlement planning rather than treating it merely as a construction output or financial asset. 

Adequate housing therefore depends not only on the dwelling itself, but also on how these elements come together to form supportive, connected, and sustainable neighborhoods, communities, and urban quarters. 

Such an approach requires a human- and nature-centered perspective that seeks synergy between built environments and ecological systems. Human settlements are produced and managed by a wide range of actors - including households, communities, civil society organisations, NGOs, governments, private developers, financial institutions, and infrastructure providers - whose decisions are shaped by governance arrangements, financing systems, land dynamics, and growing climate pressures. Rather than imposing settlement development on the environment, the challenge is to plan and build with nature, while at the same time responding to people's needs, capabilities, and everyday practices. In this sense, housing policy must move beyond the narrow goal of delivering units and toward the broader task of creating inclusive, resilient, and just human settlements. 

Towards housing and land justice 

From a housing justice perspective, the question posed -directly and indirectly- throughout the forum was whether the current housing systems are truly equitable and environmentally conscious. It compels us to ask fundamental questions: Does everyone have access to affordable resilient housing? How can housing be a driver of mitigation efforts to sustain the ecological balance of the world instead of a contributor to its imbalance? And also, coming back to the last edition of the WUF that took place in Cairo in 2024: How do we ensure that no one is left behind in this process? These questions resonate with broader notions of spatial, distributive, procedural, and restorative justice. This reminds us that adequate housing is not only about outcomes, but also about processes, power, and justice. 

From a land justice perspective, location of housing keeps being a main issue that affects sustainable urban development, equitable access to urban infrastructure and livelihoods, urban integration, and quality of life. Discussions around how land value capture tools can achieve socially just housing by aligning private housing development with public goals were highlighted as pathways to achieving justice in land and housing. These tools include land readjustment, land sharing, density-based incentives and inclusionary housing/zoning which have been tried in across the world in countries such as Ethiopia, Angola, South Africa, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, Turkey, UK, USA, Mexico and Canada.  

IHS at WUF13: Translating dialogue into action

The week in Baku was dynamic and rewarding for both the IHS delegation and the thousands of participants from Azerbaijan and around the world who joined the event. High-level speeches and more intimate panels alike highlighted the extent and severity of the global housing crisis, while sharing innovative and scalable responses that have worked in varying contexts around the world. Throughout, there was a welcome recognition that housing is at the core of the urban experience: providing not only shelter but also a basis for fulfilled lives and decent work for billions of urban residents. IHS staff participated in more than 20 events, ranging from focused discussions to high-level panels. Our decades of experience in education, research, and advisory work informed these global debates, while the forum’s outcomes revealed important pathways for us to pursue in the coming years. work. 

The takeaway from WUF 13 is clear: housing is not a siloed issue but the nexus of inequality, climate resilience, and human dignity. Acknowledging that complexity is necessary; acting on it at a significant global scale is the test that remains.  

The forum may have provided a renewed impetus - a collective moment of alignment around housing as a human right. The challenge now is to ensure this river of actions becomes a meaningful pathway toward that right. Much will depend on what the world decides next: whether efforts and ideas translate into structural and systemic reforms, whether best practices become scalable systems, and whether housing policy delivers not just more units, but genuinely adequate housing for all. At IHS, we are deeply committed to contribute and provide answers to these challenges. The WUF 13, if anything, just proved the relevance of our vision and mission as a leading institute in housing and urban development studies. 

Written by Alonso Ayala