IFHP

The International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP) is a world-wide network of professional institutions and individuals of many signatures active in the broad fields of housing, urban development and planning. With a main focus on sustainable development, the Federation organises a wide range of activities and creates opportunities for the international exchange of knowledge and experience in these professional fields. By this exchange, its aim is to promote mutual learning and inspiration, and generate new ideas amongst professionals in order to equip them to find the best local solutions to the global challenges facing housing and planning today.

Among its activities, the most prominent event is the annual congress devoted to a topical theme, but they include also annual conferences, working parties, summer schools, student competitions and film & video competitions.
The official languages used in IFHP are English, French and German.

History

IFHP was founded in 1913 by Ebenezer Howard. Howard was the father of the 'garden city', a combined housing and planning concept designed to solve the problems of ever-expanding towns and cities and to create better living conditions for their inhabitants. The aim of the ‘Garden Cities and Town Planning Association’ - the name by which IFHP was originally known - was to promote the concept of housing and planning and to improve the general standard of the profession through the international exchange of knowledge and experience.

Sir Ebenezer Howard

In the first 35 years of its existence, the IFHP succeeded in getting international cooperation in the profession off the ground in a troubled period of two world wars and deep economic depression. Since the end of the 1940’s, as the general climate of international cooperation evolved, the professional scope has widened to include a virtually unlimited range of housing and planning themes, and there has been an IFHP world congress virtually every year on a topical housing and planning theme.

The IFHP is looking forward to celebrating its centenary in 2013.

Aims and approaches

IFHP is a forum for learning and networking within the profession of housing, urban development and planning. It seeks to further the gradual evolution of the profession itself and to help provide solutions for specific problems. It is in touch with the latest developments and general policy trends. IFHP provokes discussions between experts, politicians and interest groups while there is still time, i.e. before final decisions have to be made in order to solve certain problems.

The Federation believes that comparison is a valuable tool for learning. Comparison of similar issues in different geographical, economic or cultural contexts may cast a totally new light on the approach to a particular problem. At the present time, the whole world shares major common problems: climate change, the energy shift, economic globalisation and increased competition between cities, retaining livability under rapid urbanisation, demographic change and migration, efficient but democratic governance in a dynamic world. The planning and housing professions can potentially make a far-reaching contribution to facing these challenges.

So IFHP does not just facilitate the exchange of information and networking as a goal in itself, but we do this because it is a tool to help professionals in housing and planning to learn from each other and to generate new ideas to find local solutions to these common global problems.

Last Updated @ Tuesday, 11 March 2008