Building Cross-Sector Coalitions for Adequate Housing From Fragmentation to Collective Action

This training offers a practical, interactive exploration of how to build and sustain cross-sector coalitions to advance the right to adequate housing, positioning coalition-building as a tool for democratizing decision-making and strengthening urban governance. It draws on the Mexican Coalition for Housing as a real-world, policy-relevant case focused on redistributing power within housing systems, particularly toward historically excluded communities. Moderated by Martha Peña, Executive Secretary of the National Urban Development Council, the 90-minute workshop follows World Urban Forum training standards. It begins by situating the housing challenge within global and national policy frameworks, including the New Urban Agenda, the SDGs, and Mexico’s recent constitutional, programmatic, and investment advances in housing policy. Participants are introduced to the systemic nature of the housing crisis and to the limits of fragmented, technocratic, or sector-specific responses. At the core of the training is the coalition-building process as an exercise in territorial democracy. The session examines why the coalition emerged, how it intentionally brought together actors that do not usually cooperate—public institutions, civil society, academia, the private sector, and grassroots movements—and how governance arrangements were designed to include voices historically excluded from public decision-making, including community-based and social movements. Particular attention is given to managing power asymmetries, tensions, and trade-offs inherent in multi-actor governance. The workshop includes two hands-on exercises. The first guides participants in mapping actors, interests, capacities, and power relations within a specific housing context. The second supports participants in co-creating a minimum shared agenda around priority housing themes such as social housing, informal settlements, land tenure, sustainability, and alternative models of social production of habitat as instruments to democratize access to land, protect against speculation and gentrification, and foster civic learning and community organization. The training concludes with a synthesis of transferable principles for building coalitions that not only align institutions but actively redistribute power, framing the right to adequate housing as a fundamentally democratic challenge. Participants reflect on concrete next steps to strengthen community power,territorial governance.