Designing “Community”: The Significance Of Place and Urban Design In Public Housing Renewal

In the US, UK and Australia public and social housing providers are embarking on large-scale estate redevelopment projects. These projects are often presented as an urban panacea - intended to solve a large and multi-faceted urban ‘problem’ – namely  the tenant and asset management challenges that have left many estates as ‘homes of last resort’ in recent decades. In Australia, these ‘renewal’ projects are achieved by using mechanisms within the planning system to increase dwelling density on-site. By changing the tenure profiles to increase the ‘social mix’, the state hopes to attract private investment through the introduction of private market housing into formerly public housing estates. These policy objectives will see public to private housing profile changes, with the introduction of up to 70% private dwellings in some projects (Housing NSW, 2011). The built form of these states is undergoing massive change, with new construction replacing existing dwellings. Previous research has sought to understand the impact of social mixing policies (Arthurson, 2002; Briggs, 2008; Goetz, 2000; Imbroscio, 2008) or have championed a heavily materialistic understanding of urban design and renewal (Jacobs, 1961; Newman, 1972; Duany and Plater-Zyberk,1994).

This research seeks to uncover the significance of ‘place’ and ‘urban design’ for residents and built environment professionals in estate redevelopments by approaching these concepts from three directions: experience, discourse and spatial form. This ‘trialectic’ (following Lefebvre, 1991) draws on three distinct research traditions: phenomenology; discourse analysis; and spatial analysis. This approach is being taken in an effort to induce the multiplicities of place and present the lived experience of residents through the public housing renewal process.