After continued repossession in several places, 61 families, formerly street dwellers and currently members of the Homeless Workers Movement, obtained a settlement close to a large urban centre known as Comuna da Terra Dom Tomás Balduíno, in Franco da Rocha, in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, in Brazil. After INCRA (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) demarcated the land, the community faced scarcity of resources for building houses. With the support of an extension group of the University of São Paulo and of the Technical Advisory Office – USINA, a participatory solution was developed to collectively construct houses.
The dwellers together with students and technicians from the advisory company participated in all stages of the project, from design to the actual implementation. This resulted in the development of five types of housing of equal cost. These five types of housing offered solutions that met the varied requirements and needs of the families’ ways of life.
The summary of this example is in the Report “Building of rural housing by self-management, Assentamento Comuna da Terra Dom Tomás Balduíno”, produced in partnership with USINA and MST, Brazil.
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