USFD – Open Studio Event 2024

On February 1, 2024, the Open Studio Event took place at the Sheffield School of Architecture, giving students from across the programmes the opportunity to display their work. A PhD section consisted of posters submitted by a number of doctoral students currently at the School of Architecture. Here, RE-DWELL ESRs Mahmoud Alsaeed and Aya Elghandour submitted their posters to disseminate RE-DWELL and their individual projects.

Aya displayed one poster, which aimed to emphasize the importance of rethinking housing affordability's impact on health and wellbeing beyond rent-to-income ratios. It argues that oversimplified metrics may disregard dwelling quality, potentially harming national health, also highlighting the financial strain poor housing quality places on the National Health Service in England. Additionally, it presented Aya's research design and initial findings on factors defining dwelling affordability, including housing and non-housing costs, household income, and dwelling quality.

Mahmoud displayed two posters. The first poster detailed the structure of an investigation to identify the challenges in developing sustainable social housing, which had previously been exhibited at the Housing Studies Annual Conference in March 2023 and won “best research idea” at the Sheffield School of Architecture’s research poster competition in May 2023. The second poster presented the overall structure of his research project, focusing on perception of social housing and environmental sustainability, policy, and practice. This poster also showed the overall communication and dissemination activities that have been carried out.