Towards an ethic of care: designing and delivering alternative housing models

Australia’s housing crisis has been a long time in the making. Debates focused on improving affordability through increases to supply don’t capture the whole story. What is forgotten when we focus on the numbers is the need to also ensure our housing is diverse, well-designed, affordable and sustainable.

By better recognising the changing and diverse needs of Australians, there is an opportunity to provide greater housing choice for all people and households, catering for different lifestyles, price points, life stages and complex health requirements. The existing housing system is not meeting these needs, with supply dominated by limited market-led housing typologies and tenures, and entrenched institutional approaches to delivering care accommodation, social housing and short-term rental housing. Adopting a more person-centred approach and deeper understanding of who you are designing for is critical in delivering the housing Australians need.

Interviews conducted with four leading design practitioners showcase recent exemplary housing projects. While each project is unique, with varying scales, delivery models, resident cohorts and geographic locations across Australia, there are also consistent themes, messages and learnings which can be applied more broadly. Through these conversations, it is also clear that these key insights are relevant to the entire design and delivery process, from housing policy, through to the ongoing operation and maintenance of buildings.

The case studies provide evidence on what works well and how to overcome barriers along the way. What emerges is a rich and engaging picture of what greater housing diversity can look like. The projects include a range of affordable social housing for people with complex needs, people on low incomes who cannot afford to own or rent a home through the private market, and community housing for people on very low to moderate incomes. The case studies also include examples from the retirement living sector and specialist disability accommodation.

Essential to all examples is an inclusive approach to designing homes that seeks to increase agency for all people. Each project highlights the value of authentic and meaningful engagement across the breadth of stakeholders involved in bringing buildings to life, and the inherent social value of designing opportunities to engender both independence and community. The concept of ‘home’, rather than the impersonal ‘housing’, was critical to understanding the shift of mindset required to deliver better outcomes for everyone. Underpinning the delivery of these projects is an ‘ethic of care’ that is absent if we only talk about housing supply. And the importance of listening to the lived experience of residents, particularly when housing the many people in our communities with complex and higher needs and our most vulnerable.

Key insights

Create a home not housing

• Create homely environments — De-institutionalise social, care, rental and short-term accommodation and create beautiful homely environments to be proud of that allow for personalisation and self expression.
• Remove the language of disability / difference and normalise diversity — Create inclusive environments by removing markers of disability or difference. Increase visibility of diverse cohorts in publicly accessible areas of a development to include marginalised members of society.
• Enhance a resident's agency — Ensuring resident’s choice and control over their environments that enable them to make decisions about where, with whom and how they live which balance the need for privacy and social interaction.
  

Connect to place and the broader community

• Be a good neighbour — Ensure built-form positively contributes to the neighbourhood character and identity to create value for the broader community.
• Enhance community connections — Support residents to build new and enhance existing connections with the surrounding community to reduce social exclusion.
• Build community confidence — Embed a sustainable approach to community building to signal a commitment to long-term socially sustainable outcomes.
  

Involve people in the design process

• Adopt a person-centred approach — Designing and building for people, prioritising their needs and requirements, and balancing the needs of the asset owner and the resident.
• Value lived experience — Listen to people you are designing for or who have experience living in the type of housing you are designing, drawing from their wealth of knowledge.
• Consult widely and at the right time — Recognise that many housing models require input from multiple stakeholders, including specialists, building and asset managers responsible for on-going maintenance and management.
  

Increase diversity and choice

• Design for diversity — Design for targeted population groups, households, lifestyles or circumstances balancing specific and future needs.
• Standardisation vs customisation — Standard designs provide opportunities to scale affordable housing models, however require customisation when applied to different sites with specific zoning and construction requirements.
• Carefully select uses for mixed-use developments — Mixed-use developments can build community if the uses are complementary, and the needs of the user groups are carefully considered.
  

Building community within the development is at the core

• Prioritise shared spaces — Support residents to build community ties and design diverse spaces for socialising and interaction. Adopt a nuanced and sensitive approach towards the people you are designing for.
• Leverage the sharing economy — Housing solutions have lost sight of communal living or share houses, although aspects are evident in the sharing economy. Promote the benefits of sharing spaces with others to encourage more innovation in planning and shared amenities, facilities and equipment.
• Design for social impact — Incorporate post-occupancy evaluation to provide the evidence-base to improve design outcomes by illustrating when design adds social value.
  

Focus on simplicity

• Simplify design solutions — Do more with less. Employing simple solutions in design and construction and making the fundamentals such as passive design work harder to achieve better outcomes is a more effective and affordable use of resources.
• Work material selection really hard — Sustainable materials and products for social housing or housing providers need to be affordable, attractive to your target audience, long-lasting and cost effective for the operators.
  

Prioritise long-term good design outcomes in the budget

• Great design outcomes on affordable budgets — Design excellence and high quality build can be achieved without a high price tag.
• Prioritise spending on long-term benefits — Upfront costs for items that have long-term health, well-being and environmental benefits need to be prioritised and factored into running and maintenance costs.
  

Good outcomes require collaborative and effective governance

• Good governance supports innovation — Collaborative partnerships that support challenging the status quo are necessary to foster innovative solutions.
• The value of design champions — Design champions play an important role in challenging business-as-usual approaches and prioritising good design outcomes.
  

Design fit-for-purpose regulatory frameworks

• Demonstration projects support regulatory innovation — Encouraging experimentation in trial projects enables regulators to reduce uncertainty, gather evidence on their impacts before implementing them more widely, and supports the development of more flexible, future-proof regulatory frameworks.
• Fit-for-purpose regulatory frameworks raise design standards — Holistic regulatory frameworks play a vital role in raising the general design standard.
• Design guides for diverse needs — Guides tailored to diverse needs provide invaluable information, fill a knowledge gap and support equitable access to housing. Aligning overlapping and opposing requirements and guidelines can streamline the delivery of housing by reducing cost and time.

Produced with the assistance of the Alastair Swayn Foundation