Architecture and the Right to Housing: Featuring Leilani Farha and Paul Karakusevic with Karen Kubey

Join a distinguished panel of housing experts, moderated by the Daniels Faculty's Karen Kubey, as they envision how architects can contribute to the right to housing. The panel will raise urgent questions and discuss promising examples, laying the groundwork for future solutions.
About the panelists: A human rights lawyer and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, Leilani Farha is Global Director of The Shift, an international advocacy agency combating housing financialization while upholding human rights. Paul Karakusevic is a founding partner at Karakusevic Carson, an award-winning architecture firm at the forefront of public housing design across the UK.
About the moderator: An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Karen Kubey has been an Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty since 2023. The editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018), she served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture.
This event is generously supported by the Irving Grossman Fund in Affordable Housing.

[@graeme49]

I’d like to thank the U of T Daniels Faculty of Architecture and Karen Kubey for organizing this talk. Bringing architecture together with human rights is an important discussion and 90 minutes seems far too short. Many more questions were raised in my mind than could be addressed given the constraints of time.
That said, I was a little disappointed in the outcome. I suppose my disappointment was founded on the fact that it left me wanting more, much more. Just a few points:
Karen Kubey
• She mentioned ‘7 aspects’ of housing rights and said 5 of them relate to architecture - affordability, habitability, access, location, and cultural adequacy. I would say the other 2 the OHCHR identifies - security of tenure and availability of services - relate just as well as the other five. Karen, though, only lists the 5 areas where she sees a relationship but she doesn’t describe what that relationship might be. I realize that she can’t afford to spend a lot of the time better taken up with the guest speakers but, still, such a description is central to addressing ‘Architecture and the Right to Housing’.
• She quotes (at 4:08-4:18) Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center: ‘When housing is a commodity, we have to beg for it. When it’s a right we can demand it.’ Good point!
• Karen raises two questions to be answered by the discussion:
o What does the right to housing mean in practice?
o How can designers contribute?
Important questions. I think they should have been much more directly answered.
Leilani Farha
We need a transformation, particularly in advocacy.
• Entrust human rights to its proper stewards - the most vulnerable. Moving towards self-determination. This requires LISTENING
• The right-to-housing movement - cross-sectoral.
• For architecture - use your relationships (real estate, development), ask the right questions. Really her only point of intersection with the profession. Use what leverage you have to advocate for the ‘proper stewards’
I think she could have said more about 'decommodification' of housing. This relates to somehow mitigating the ongoing process of gentrification, which, in turn, relates to the right to housing.
Paul Karakusevic
Paul, as expected, showed the work of his firm. It includes current work on Regent Park (Phase 4 and 5 I think he said). His focus was on the projects. As such he indirectly addressed Karen’s second question (How can designers contribute?). His response, as I interpreted it, was ‘design beauty’. True, that should be part of the job of an architect. However, there were many questions left about the process of design and the decision-making.
• (53:20-:40) - ‘housing estates seen as ‘monocultural’ pushing (in Regent Park) for an ‘active ground floor and public realm’. This is something the Hong Kong Housing Authority was pushing towards since the 1970s. This is not a new/progressive idea. What might push this further is who governs that ‘ground floor and public realm’. Is it leased to 7-11 or is it a co-op grocery store? A walk-in clinic? etc etc.
• (54:40 - ) ‘the residents were very supportive of the process’. But the process is not described. Nor was any innovation in the architect’s engagement in that process.
Q&A
One question brought forward the issue of process: “I’m wondering if there is a different process that is undertaken in a project that involves the right to housing”
Paul - responded by talking about house types but not about the process
Leilani - talked about ‘meaningful engagement’ - this is similar to Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (1969), also Turner’s Freedom to Build (1972).
I would still like Karen's 2 questions answered. I have been asking myself these questions now for 30+ years and I don't think I have anywhere near an adequate answer to them. I see that the right to housing is there (see Art. 25 of the UDHR) but acting as a design professional to protect and promote that right is still quite a fuzzy proposition. The best response I have seen is in Community Design Centers that started to pop up after Max Bond Jr. started The Architect's Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) back in 1964.

[@leslief5859]

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