The document has been prepared with a series of papers focusing on the role of the private sector in meeting the challenges of affordable housing and urban economic and community development and transforming urban housing markets for poor. In order to achieve such transformation, what we must do now is increase the proportion of humans who know that they can cause change. And who, like smart white blood cells coursing through society, will stop with pleasure whenever they see that something is stuck or that an opportunity is ripe to be seized. Multiplying society’s capacity to adapt and change intelligently and constructively and building the necessary underlying collaborative architecture, is the world’s most critical opportunity now. Pattern-changing leading social entrepreneurs are the most critical single factor in catalyzing and engineering this transformation.

The pressures on slum communities have prompted national and international networks that share experience and strengths, such as Slum Dwellers International and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). ACHR has worked with over 50,000 households in Thailand to upgrade, re-block, or relocate communities, fostering creativity, hope, and unleashing commercial growth potential in urban spaces. Experimentations in low-income housing are emerging around the world, from sanitation improvements to community mobilizing that touches hundreds of families at a time. In order to provide housing with dignity for one billion and slum dwellers, the business, citizen, and government sectors need to work together. For example, citizen sector organizations may have knowledge of what low-income people need, how they make investment decisions, and whom they trust.

There is no denying that, housing is a problem for the poor. Poverty is not distributed evenly around the world; specific regions suffer its worst effects. In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions of poor people struggle for survival. Periodic disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated regions on the Indian Ocean, continue to kill hundreds of thousands of poor and vulnerable people. The divide between the global North and South—between the world’s richest and the rest—has widened.

Unfettered markets in their current form are not meant to solve social problems and instead may actually exacerbate poverty, disease, pollution, corruption, crime, and inequality, opine the the contributors on this issue.