We invite colleagues from around the world to submit paper abstracts for participation in a workshop exploring development housing from a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective:

Workshop – Homes for the Future? Housing and International Development

Date: Friday 16 October 2026

Location: Utrecht University, The Netherlands

In 2015 the UN laid out seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, including the goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’.[1] Eleven years on, these goals seem increasingly unattainable. Drastic cuts by Western governments to international relief funding, a global housing crisis, and the systematic destruction of housing in war zones have put both development aid and housing back on the agenda.[2] What, if anything, can we learn from the past?

Development housing – from ‘model villages’ to disaster relief housing – has a long and multifaceted history.[3] UN Housing Missions, such as the 1954 Gold Coast (Ghana) mission, are key moments in this history, but it is also worth taking a broader temporal and geographical view of ‘development’, or ‘humanitarian’ housing.[4] Housing projects in the Global South were not just part of the postwar agenda of the United Nations (UN-HTCP) and the World Bank, but also of other agents in earlier decades such as colonial officers, missionaries, and indigenous elites. Moreover, housing was, and is, more than simply an economic measure or an experiment in architecture and city planning. It was a socio-cultural phenomenon that had far-reaching motivations and influences. Housing projects affected lives and livelihoods, ways of living and homemaking, touching on fundamental questions of belonging and societal marginalization. 

In this workshop, we aim to take a fresh, interdisciplinary look at development housing, linking histories of the built environment with legacies of global ‘development’ as well as studies of (the) home and migration. 

What should we consider to be ‘development housing’? How far can we stretch the temporal parameters for this concept to still be useful? Are there other concepts that might be better suited?

Looking at this issue from the perspective of the Global South, what impact did some of these development initiatives have on local politics, social structures and everyday life? To what extent was ‘development’ housing an import from the West, or a concept shaped by local actors themselves? 

And finally, to what extent can dwellings constructed as part of these development initiatives be considered ‘homes’? How were they made into ‘homes’ and by whom? And what sorts of legacies have they left behind? 

We thus have three main aims with this workshop:

1. To map the global scope of development housing schemes and become better aware of geographical breadth. We see this as a first step toward a broader genealogy of development and/or humanitarian housing.
2. To better understand their legacies, not just in Western architectural history, but also in local environments. We thus aim to gauge the extent to which such projects were impactful, transformative, and/or meaningful to those involved in their realization and habitation.
3. To rethink the resulting physical structures through the experiences of their inhabitants, thus linking the realms of politics and architecture with social and cultural histories of everyday life.

We welcome contributions that resonate with these aims. These may include, but are not limited to:

• Small-scale and/or privately funded initiatives
• Temporary housing as well as more permanent housing projects
• Moral and normative implications of development housing projects and their reception
• South/South collaboration and socialist solidarity projects
• Questions of use, preservation, and the entangled cultural heritage of these buildings

Please submit an abstract of ca. 300 words and a short CV by 15 August 2026 to Lourens Crielaard (l.s.crielaard@uu.nl).

We welcome contributions from early career researchers.

For questions please contact: Lourens Crielaard (l.s.crielaard@uu.nl) or Britta Schilling (b.schilling@uu.nl)

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[1] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sustainable Development, Goal 11, https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal11

[2] See, e.g., the UN World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action,  https://unhabitat.org/world-cities-report-2026 

[3] Kate Stohr, ‘100 Years of Humanitarian Design’, in Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, ed. by Architecture for Humanity (New York: Metropolis Books, 2006), 32-55; Richard Harris and Godwin Arku, ‘Housing and economic development: the evolution of an idea since 1945’, Habitat International 30 (2006): 1007-1017, p2.

[4] E.g., Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 130; Mónica Pacheco, ‘Rehearsing experts and ‘inperts’: crossing transnational housing narratives in West Africa’, Planning Perspectives, 37,5 (2022): 921-948; A Scott Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams (New York/Chichester: Columbia UP, 2000), 173-192; Tom Avermaete and Charlotte Robinson, ‘Betaalbaar wonen als ontwikkelingshulp/Affordable housing as development aid’, DASH 12/13 (2016): 20-35; see also ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, nos. 21 and 22 (Summer and Winter 2023).