Narelle Townsend
Honorary Patron
CHEC UN Representative
Narelle Townsend 1927-2022
Narelle was CHEC’s representative at the United Nations Headquarters in New York where she worked as an architect on housing issues for 22 years. Her path to New York was indirect. Born in Sydney, Australia in 1927, she had five younger brothers for whom she made model aeroplanes out of balsa wood. She wanted to study aeronautical design at university, but absence of facilities for women in the training school diverted her into architecture. Despite being one of only two women on the course, she was excited by the challenge of providing ‘housing for the world’ exciting. She was the first woman architect to graduate from the University of New South Wales. She gained a scholarship to go to Spain to study Spanish Art History and Literature. Subsequently she moved the UK where she worked as an architect for a few years.
Eventually, she moved to the USA, taking up various architectural jobs, before applying to work at the UN. Fortunately they were looking for more women to improve the gender balance within their staff and also to fill the quota of Australian employees within the organisation. She ended up working on ‘housing the world’, analysing global data, examining the requirements asking about how all the houses could be provided. She believed that ‘There is really no excuse for anyone to be without a home anywhere in the world’.
While doing all this, Narelle completed two M.Sc. degrees at Columbia University, New York, in Urban Planning and International Affairs (African Studies). Even after retiring, she continued working as a volunteer at the UN Global Housing Authority until 2015.
Narelle was a great activist within the UN system, particularly through the NGO Committee on Human Settlements (CHS) which carried forward the ‘housing the world’ concept. In 2000, as Secretary of the CHS, she reported to the UNECOSOC Council that among the three major NGO initiatives in the 1999 session of the Commission on Human Settlements (the forerunner of UNHabitat) was the launching of the Commonwealth Commission on Human Settlements (CCGHS), a project on which CHEC, led by Zena Daysh and Michael Mutter, had been working for some years.
1999 also saw the launch of the Global Housing Federation by the real estate entrepreneur, René Frank, with whom Narelle had been working to get the property industry to make a real contribution to alleviating the deplorable living conditions in the world’s inner-city slums. The GHF is an independent US and European-based not-for-profit organization that leverages the expertise and resources of the private real estate community to build affordable housing for the working poor around the world. Narelle spoke at several World urban Forum meetings on behalf of the CHS and GHF, being described in a 2011 symposium on ‘Private Sector – Greening the Economy’ as a ‘Human Ecologist’.
Narelle became a member of the CHEC Governing Board during the development the CCGHS and thereafter remained a constant, active and concerned supporter of CHEC, advising the Board of developments and opportunities in UNHabitat. She remained dedicated to CHEC causes, especially those related to human settlements, for the remainder of her life.
With kind thanks to Ian Douglas
7 November 2022