Held Together: Research on Community Land Trusts Around the World | Webinar
February 26 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Around the world, communities are pushing back against housing systems that treat homes as financial assets rather than places to live. From Canada to the UK and Brazil, Community Land Trusts are emerging as strategies for care, resistance, and possibility.
Held Together: Research Perspectives on Community Land Trusts Around the World brings together researchers and practitioners from Canada, the UK, and Brazil to explore how Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are helping keep housing affordable, land protected, and communities intact.
This 90-minute conversation asks a simple but powerful question: what changes when housing is something we hold together, rather than something to be bought, sold, and exploited?
As global housing markets grow increasingly speculative, the impacts are felt close to home: rising rents, displacement, and the slow erosion of community life. Yet across different regions and political contexts, communities are organizing collective responses that put long-term care, stewardship, and belonging at the centre.
This webinar brings together perspectives from:
- Indigenous-led planning on the west coast of Canada
- Black-led community housing movements in the UK
- CLT initiatives from Brazil responding to financialized urban development
Together, our speakers will explore how Community Land Trusts function not just as policy tools, but as living infrastructure: models that protect land from speculation and support housing as a shared social good.
Designed for researchers, students, housing practitioners, organizers, and policymakers, this conversation balances critical research with grounded, real-world experience. Expect a thoughtful, accessible discussion that looks beyond Western silos and invites learning across borders.
Join us on February 26. Register today on Eventbrite.
Speakers
Maggie Low is an Assistant Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia and Co-Chair of the Indigenous Community Planning concentration. Of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry and a status member of Wikwemikoong Unceded Territory, she is a community-engaged scholar whose work advances Indigenous sovereignty at the nation and community level, particularly through planning and negotiated agreements. Her research and teaching focus on Indigenous planning, Indigenous community land trusts, Indigenous-state relations, and reconciliation in Canadian cities.
Tarcyla Fidalgo is a lawyer and urban planner with a PhD in Urban Planning. She leads the CLT Global South Initiative at the International Center for Community Land Trusts (ICCLT) and coordinates the Favela CLT Project in Brazil, and is a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her work centres on land rights, housing justice, and community-led responses to financialized urban development.
Claude Hendrickson is a housing advocate and founding member of the Community Self-Build Agency (CSBA), a non-profit established in 2000 to promote self-build housing for people in housing need, including those on low incomes and young people priced out of the market. A long-standing champion of BME community-led housing, he served as CSBA’s Northern Development Director and was commissioned by Leeds City Council in 2016 to 2017 to develop a 10-year strategy on self-build, custom build, and community-led housing. That work directly led to the creation of Leeds Community Homes, an enabling hub supporting community-led housebuilding across the city.