“Promoting Sustainable Housing Futures for All”

The Europe and Central Asia Housing Forum will be held from 22 to 24 April 2013 to bring together leading professionals committed to the cause of sustainable housing.  It will have four main themes: regulatory frameworks, housing solutions, housing vulnerabilities and human development.

For more details, visit ecahousingforum.eu

Information sheet

UNECE is in charge of the following Hub sessions:

Formalizing the informal - The challenges of legalization
The purpose of the session is to exchange experiences between different countries and organizations in addressing the challenge of informal settlements.  The session will seek to answer questions such as: Who are the winners and losers from legalization, and how can win-win solutions be made possible? When can legalization be an efficient and effective solution? Are there socially and economically feasible alternatives to legalization?  How can we make sure that vulnerable groups benefit from legalization or regularization programmes?

It will also aim to establish a network of interested experts that can share among them future information and to identify the needs for further research, studies and activities on this topic.

The speakers will present briefly their own case at project or policy level, highlighting some important elements (i.e.: aim and objectives of the project, efficiency (funds used), effectiveness (in reaching the target groups), replicability (ability to repeat the project in other sites and other conditions), etc.

The participants will be invited to discuss on the cases presented and to bring the experience from their own project, policy, etc.. The discussion should lead towards identifying bottlenecks, ways to address them and the type of need for assistance from the CHLM (i.e.: prepare guidelines, or a casebook with good practices, etc.)

From housing management to better energy performance
This session will focus on the importance of effective multi-family housing stock management as pre-requisite for energy efficiency investments.
As a consequence of rapid privatization in transition countries, the regulatory framework for the management and maintenance of multi-family housing blocks was often not established. Even today, the effective management of multi-family housing blocks remains a challenge in many countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, such decision-making structures are a pre-condition to agree and finance the building's maintenance – reaching from a small repair like changing a light bulb to a major repair like the retrofit of a building’s roof and envelope to improve overall energy efficiency.

We discuss the role of home owners' associations and private management companies and look closer into the role of different actors involved in housing stock management. Also, we try to identify lessons learnt from countries who made this transition.

Building safer homes in safer places: approaches to preventing risks from industrial sites to housing and land
Natural and human-generated disasters have resulted in large-scale damages to housing across the ECE region and present very important challenges to the work of governments. This calls for common efforts of member States to develop disaster risk prevention measures through building safer houses in safer places, thus contributing to the global implementation of the UNISDR Hyugo Framework for Action, the UNECE Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents, the EU "Seveso Directive" - the Directive on the control of major-accident hazards as well as to the development of a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction.

The seminar is a follow-up event to the seminar on land use planning around hazardous industrial sites  organized by the UNECE Committee on Housing and Land Management (CHLM) and the Conference of the Parties on the UNECE Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents in November 2010. The November 2010 seminar participant concluded that safety aspects were not well integrated in land use planning due to the lack of the communication and cooperation between safety experts, planners and main stakeholders. It was also outlined that although international guidelines on safety and land exist , they are not sufficiently reflected in the national legislation and regulations of most of the UNECE member States.

This seminar will be aimed to discuss the following questions: What concrete actions need to be taken by the UNECE, national authorities and stakeholders to promote implementation of the existing guidelines on safety and land use planning in the UNECE member States? Which international rules and recommendations on safety and land use should be considered while developing and implementing policies and planning practices at the national level in the ECE countries? How they should be incorporated in the national legislation?

The seminar aims to discuss the following questions:

• What concrete actions need to be taken by the UNECE Committee on Housing and Land Management, the Conference of the Parties on the UNECE Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents, national authorities and stakeholders to promote implementation of the existing guidelines on safety and land use planning in UNECE member states?
• Which international rules and recommendations on safety and land use should be considered while developing and implementing policies and planning practices at the national level in ECE countires? How should they be incorporated in national legislation?
• Which targets could be included in the draft Strategy that would support efforts of governments to prevent risks to the population from industrial sites?