Beat Weber on Providing low cost land for housing in Namibia — a social enterprise approach
On 26-April, Beat Weber joined us to discuss a social enterprise approach for low-cost land and housing provision in the last installment of the 2022 Spring Urbanism Lecture Series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT.
Beat Weber is an urban planner and social engineer working on the forefront of the housing and land ownership crisis in Namibia. He is the director of the Development Workshop Namibia, a local NGO focused on sustainable urban development, informal settlements and the disadvantaged communities that reside in them. The Development Workshop works through partnership agreements with local authorities in support of national development goals. The workshop has four main programmes; land & housing, sanitation, early childhood education and urban infrastructure.
Beat leads his team to develop sustainable and inclusive urban initiatives, support local authorities, align local and government priorities, engage with the private sector and, most importantly, engage with local communities to build local solutions. Namibia’s population presents some challenges mainly due to a lack of land and housing access, at least 50 percent of the poor live in squalid temporary conditions. Half of these communities do not have consistent access to decent sanitation. The Development Workshop uses online GIS models for mapping and project monitoring and believes that though scale, projects can have meaningful impact.
By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
