Home sweet home? : Free housing project and integration in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract: Every year millions of human beings are forcibly displaced from their homes due to armed conflicts and natural disasters. By the end of 2019, more people than ever before were identified as Internally Displaced People (IDP), with numbers exceeding 45 million worldwide. There have been various initiatives to repair the displaced by several government, such as giving them interest-free loans, temporary shelter, subsidies and free building material. In Colombia, the government initiated a ground-breaking program that supplied more than 100.000 families with free housings. The free housing program was intended to fight inequality by alleviating the housing deficit, repair the IDPs for their losses caused by conflict, and further improve their quality of life. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the free housing community Rincón de Bolonia, which since 2016 has hosted more than 400 IDP families from various parts of the country. The objective was to compare the free housing programs objectives with the beneficiaries' experience, furthermore, if they think that the project serves the purpose of victim reparation. Intergroup Contact Theory was further adopted to analyse how the coexistence dynamics have looked and whether the government has taken initiatives to support and facilitate social inclusion in the community.  The case study showed that the interviewed IDPs do neither think that the government's free house project has improved their quality of life; neither served the purpose of victim reparation. Furthermore, it became clear that the government had not taken many initiatives to foster coexistence and cooperation between the beneficiaries.