City Occupied: A community of practice on informal land and building occupations

City Occupied: The City Occupied project explores land and building occupations in São Paulo, Cape Town, and Bogotá, calling attention to relationships between housing movements, occupiers, and municipalities. The team has generated various outputs, including a ‘zine’ focused on the residents of the Cissie Gool House occupation in Cape Town, and a documentary comparing three occupations across Cape Town, Sao Paulo, and Bogota. Additional reports and popular outputs on occupations in the inner-city of Cape Town will be launched in the course of 2023. In Cape Town, we are also actively engaged in the co-design process led by residents, movement leaders (Reclaim the City), and practitioners (Ndifuna Ukwazi), which aims to engage public and private stakeholders in efforts to obtain tenure security and transform the building into inclusive, affordable and adequate accommodation. In Bogota, we are engaged in the development and implementation of community indicators for the community of Altos de la Estancia. Other recent activities included the organisation of a panel of “Housing as commons: sites of struggle and possibility” at the EADI General conference in Lisbon in July 2023, where team members presented on their city occupied project, and conducted a site visit to informal neighbourhoods and social housing complex in the greater Lisbon area. For further details refer to city-occupied.net