Housing for human and non-human flourishing

Presenting author: Sophie-May Kerr (University of Wollongong)

In recent decades, major Australian cities have witnessed unprecedented residential densification. The scale and pace of this growth is largely driven by speculative real-estate investment, alongside modernist planner visions built around notions of order, control and homogeneity. What remains opaque is the lived experience of diversity within this consolidating landscape. To what extent are apartments produced to accommodate diverse needs and evolving senses of home and belonging?

This paper seeks to answer this question through examination of parents' experiences raising children in apartments. I explore how apartment design and cultural housing norms co-produce parents' dwelling experiences. Conceptual influences from material and emotional geographies reveal apartments as discordant spaces that require ongoing work. While parents associate apartment living with locational/lifestyle affordances, their sense of home is undermined by designs that fail to respond to their needs and by persistent questioning of their parenting and housing choices. Feelings of guilt, shame, stress and frustration result, as families attempt to juggle everyday life in a setting that is materially and culturally ill-suited for children. Parents' experiences reveal that in order for apartments to support flourishing and wellbeing, public discourses and apartment design must recognise the diversity of those who call apartments home.

Presenting author: Nicole Cook (University of Wollongong)

The tragic deaths of 72 residents in London's Grenfell Tower fires in 2017 has moved the problem of non-conforming flammable cladding prominently into policy and political fora.  The Grenfell crisis spurred multiple parliamentary inquiries, including in Australia revealing a systematic problem with residential building defects.  Despite the risks flammable cladding poses to life and property, the attribution of responsibility for its use and remediation in multi-unit housing has been difficult to locate. Political actors have invoked the figure of the 'rogue developer', subsequently framing the public policy response as 'weeding out those building practitioners who are the bad apples' (the Honorable Keven Anderson MP). Drawing on conceptualisations of high-rise as a complex socio-technical system and of housing as an object of financialisation, the aim of this paper is to move beyond the localised diagnosis of a few 'bad apples', to consider the policy settings that have enabled the sale of non-conforming flammable apartments to housing consumers.

Drawing on an analysis of key parliamentary inquiries at the Australian and State Government levels, the paper argues that the origins of these crises lay not in the actions of a few rogue developers but in the late-neoliberal state characterised by labyrinthine and contradictory policies that through the redistribution of risk to consumers have facilitated the flourishing of multi-story property development as a new asset class. 

Presenting author: Cameron McAuliffe (Western Sydney University)

Other author: Dallas Rogers (University of Sydney)

In this paper we interrogate the politics of housing's values. It is a common reduction to associate housing with economic value and home with social values. The political economy of housing has become increasingly sensitive to the presence of social values through proxy valuations in financial models. Value pluralists resist such easy reduction of social values to the market, holding that plural values are incommensurable. Regime theories, such as those applied in welfare regime theory, provide a way to conceptualise an agonistic politics of housing.

We provide a review of regimes theories as the basis of a politics of value, extending the discussion to consider land as a performance of culture (cultural values), housing as an ethic of care (moral values), and the digital values of real estate (digital values), alongside the use and exchange value (labour value) and financial valuation of real estate (economic value). We are interested in the politics between these different claims about real estate value. The utility of value theory, we argue, is to show how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to try to show what the value of an object is. 

Presenting author: Louise Crabtree-Hayes (Western Sydney University)

Other authors: Dr Emma Power (Western Sydney University), Dr Piret Veeroja (Swinburne University of Technology), Dr Sidsel Grimstad (University of Newcastle), Professor Wendy Stone (Swinburne University of Technology), Dr Neil Perry (Western Sydney University), Bronwyn Bate (Western Sydney University)

Growing policy and scholarly debate centres around how housing is or should be valued. Enactments of housing policy and practice in settler colonial contexts like Australia increasingly prioritise the financial values of housing, recognising and asserting two archetypal figures: a financialised owner-investor with overarching property rights, or a resident household with rights of occupation that vary markedly according to tenures. A highly residualised third option is a dependent occupant of equally residualised social housing. Each of these archetypes is shot through with particular alignments of social, personal, and financial value. As member-based organisations responsible for various aspects of housing management, rental housing co-operatives challenge these archetypes and provide a lens for re-examining housing values. 

This paper emerges from a new ARC project that seeks to identify the values and benefits of member-run housing co-operatives. It highlights diverse vocabularies and understandings of value, each with its own-perhaps discrete-audience amongst co-operatives, resident-members, peak bodies or providers, and the State. Informed by relational understandings of property and work on the citizen values of tenure, this paper explores these understandings, presenting initial reflections on areas of convergence and divergence, and issues for further enquiry on how to enable more equitable housing systems.

Presenting author: Bronwyn Bate(Western Sydney University)

Other authors: Dr Neil Perry (Western Sydney University), Associate Professor Louise Crabtree (Western Sydney University), Dr Emma Power (Western Sydney University), Professor Wendy Stone (Swinburne University of Technology) , Dr Sidsel Grimstad (University of Newcastle)

Housing co-operatives are said to produce unique values and benefits for members and the broader community beyond other housing forms. Co-operatives are claimed to: generate employability, education and health benefits for members; build social capital in co-operatives and the communities they are located in; and, be more cost-effective than other forms of housing, including social housing. Housing co-operatives are guided by co-operative principles established by the International Co-operative Alliance including principles around autonomy, democratic decision-making, and concern for community and the environment. To date, little research has identified the key drivers of the individual and social benefits of co-operatives. Through a large ARC-funded project that explores the value of co-operative housing, we have created a typology to enable us to compare social values created across co-operative types.

Using the characteristics or attributes of almost every housing co-operative in Australia, we applied clustering methods to create and map a typology. Important variables include the degree of autonomy or influence over any co-operative housing peak body, variations in tenancy and maintenance responsibilities, and lease conditions, amongst other variables. The typology allows for international comparison and enhanced knowledge of the value of co-operative housing globally.

Presenting author: Hector Padilla (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other authors: Willand Nicola (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Horne Ralph (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Moore Trivess (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

This research aims to bring sensitivity to non-human elements that are conditioning the delivery of insulation retrofit in Victoria, Australia. Using Actor-Network Theory, we highlight the role of insulation retrofit and how its manifestations are influencing social practices aiming to improve resilient housing stock. 

Insulating existing housing has been found to deliver a range of social, economic, and environmental benefits, including lower energy consumption and carbon emissions, improving thermal performance, mitigating energy poverty and creating jobs. However, despite the low cost and considerable benefits, uptake of insulation retrofit remains problematic; for example, in Australia, insulation levels remain lower than expected by policymakers.

From semi-structured interviews held with professionals, academics, NGOs from the insulation retrofit sector, we find that insulation material is a politicised non-human actor that has developed and acquired risk. Moreover, by introducing ANT into our analysis, we highlight the role of insulation retrofit in shaping the conduct and practice of installation; in other words, its manifestation in dwellings.