2017 winners and finalists announced

We’re very excited to announce this year’s winners and finalists of the World Habitat Awards!

The two winners are:

• Post-Haiyan Self-Recovery Housing in the Philippines
• Mutual Housing at Spring Lake in the USA

Post-Haiyan Self-Recovery Housing helps communities self-recover and rebuild their own homes and livelihoods after the world’s largest typhoon hit in 2013.

Mutual Housing at Spring Lake provides seasonal agricultural workers in northern California with energy efficient permanent year-round homes and empowers residents with new opportunities in education and community life.

This year two projects we visited in addition to our winners receive a ‘special mention’ from the judges. These are:

• Residential Energy Efficiency in Low Income Households (Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia) helps low income homeowners in former state-owned multi-apartment blocks to improve their energy efficiency.
• Bringing light and air to homes in informal settlements (India) improves lighting and ventilation in homes of self-employed women with a simple dormer window specially designed for corrugated roofs.

Our other six finalists in the 2017 competition are:

• Building Malaria Prevention (Cameroon) reduces the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes entering homes with simple adaptations in one of the poorest informal urban settlements in the country.
• How the community rescued the historic centre of San Salvador (El Salvador) is regenerating the historic centre through community cooperatives working together to dramatically improve their own neighbourhoods.
• From Disaster to Dignity (El Salvador) is rebuilding the community after years of civil unrest and two successive earthquakes with a savings and credit cooperative run by and for women.
• Empowering marginalised women through home ownership (India) helps the most vulnerable women in rural communities to establish and fulfil their right to land and housing with self-build homes.
• Düzce Hope Homes (Turkey) is extending the right to housing to all those affected by major earthquakes through community-led activism and campaigning.
• Hemsworth Court (UK) provides purpose-built supported housing for people with dementia and cognitive impairment in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Congratulations to all ten projects!