France-LAC Partnership: Local Housing Strategies, a Pathway to Sustainable, Climate-Friendly and Inclusive Cities

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The objective of this Technical Cooperation (TC) is to define strategies and innovative solutions to promote housing supply in central urban areas to foster climate-friendly and inclusive cities. The focus is on supporting local authorities to implement local housing policies integrated with other local policies such as transport and land use, and to design affordable housing projects in densification and regeneration areas. By studying and learning from the French model, we want to propose instruments to encourage repopulation of urban centers and foster socially and functionally mixed areas with a view of building compact cities, taking advantage of the existing infrastructure and housing stock while controlling urban sprawl. The TC program aims to accompany four LAC cities in creating an operational model that fosters affordable housing in city-center regeneration projects. Several countries have already demonstrated interest and approached the IDB to request support. The target cities for the TC are São Paulo and Manaus, Brazil, Mexico City, Mexico and Buenos Aires, Argentina. They have been selected because of potential for implementation of pilot projects, demonstrated political will, interest for the French experience and based on a set of criteria of the area of intervention such as low density but with potential for densification (i.e. already existing infrastructure of networks, of basic services); existing real estate availability in the densification area, vacant housing; identified target population, etc. Even though their economies are among the strongest in the LAC region, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico still have serious housing problems and present a favorable context to explore and implement concrete innovative solutions that may have strong impact on urban pattern and fight against climate change and could be replicated in the region.