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What does 'Being Humble!' have to do with affordable and sustainable housing?

Posted on 19-04-2023

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The provision of affordable and healthy homes in England is a complex matter involving factors from different walks of life. As an Egyptian/Portuguese and having won the ESR4 post in RE-DWELL, to be a researcher and PhD candidate in The University of Sheffield, I am exploring the English context with a fresh eye. In addition, as an architect, I have always been biased towards architecture to have the power to change things, and in particular how people live and feel in their homes. 


But since I have been learning more and more about transdisciplinarity, I have noticed that this attitude is gradually changing; it is not only about architecture ... You know, the only constant in life is change! but what made that change? 



Let us talk about it in a story. 

 

 

Recently, I travelled to Zagreb in Croatia for the RE-DWELL workshop on policy and financing for affordable and sustainable housing which is a key research in the "Transdisciplinarity" of RE-DWELL research. But, what is this word "Transdisciplinarity" that has become fashionable in research lately?



In RE-DWELL we are 15 researchers from different fields of knowledge such as architecture, industrialised construction, retrofitting, finance, politics, mobility, community participation and social sciences. We meet almost every 6 months for workshops and summer schools and continuously train in research methods and transferable skills to understand transdisciplinarity better and better. But why? Because our plan is to create a transdisciplinary framework for affordable and sustainable housing by the end of this project.



Again, why a transdisciplinary framework! Is it because you want to add a fashionable term?

 

Nope! there are a lot of things (research, news, etc.) that show how complex it is to build sustainable and affordable homes. If you stay away from what's happening in the real world, you might get the idea: Hey guys, it's not that complicated, we have videos of sustainable materials everywhere, why do not you just do it? 

 

But! the more I expand the perspective to understand how the provision of affordable and healthy homes for low-income communities on a large scale is challenging, the more I discover new challenges and new factors "the devil's in the detail". It is also becoming clearer to me that it is not just the responsibility of the architects. In fact, there are too many factors and challenges that I learn about through my ongoing interviews that tie the hands of architects. That is why transdisciplinary research is necessary!

 

Similar to the world of architecture, researchers can propose a great solution to something, but when it hits the ground, it gets a shock and break! And this is what is called the gap between research and practise. This gap, by the way, poses a problem for many researchers. In some cases, practitioners are not interested in working with researchers because they think we are in LaLa land! Here comes the importance of research that digs in to preceive the real world context. It is also important how the researcher communicate the research and its impact to others. This why we are now in the RE-DWELL Transferable Skills TS4 on Communication, Engagement, and Impact led by Lorraine-Farrelly from The University of Reading and Adrienne Csizmady from Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 

 

Fortunately, on RE-DWELL project as ESRs, we are collaborating with non-academic partners who are keen to work with researchers to better understand tricky issues and exchange knowledge with us while we develop the transdisciplinary framework for affordable and sustainable housing. And here comes the reason for: Why transdisciplinarity?

 

Transdisciplinarity is a paradigm of thinking where the biases of each discipline are set aside to focus on understanding or solving a particular problem. Hence, this paradigm is adopted by RE-DWELL. As Marja Elsinga from TU Delft during the workshop discussed with us, it is not something new!

 

Simply put, transdisciplinarity is about "Being Humble" and recognising that everyone is on a continuous learning journey and no one knows everything. The term "Being Humble" was shared with us by Leandro Madrazo while reflecting on Ashraf Salama's publication on transdisciplinarity. But for me, it really simplified what transdisciplinarity means, which in many situations was confussing. "Being Humble" means that we should listen, question others and ourselves, reflect, share and be open to change. And this is similar to what Salama referred to transdisciplinarity as a “Mutual Learning” process between various disciplines.

 

"Being humble" came back to my mind during Ana Vaz Milheiro session when she told us a story of architects in Portugal who designed houses a long time ago thinking they had a good design, but people did not like it and did not want to buy or rent it. And another example of some flat buildings that for architects may not seem to be of good design, but whose inhabitants expressed that they loved them and liked living in them. These are examples of how the monothematic mindset can sometimes not predict what will really work on the ground for the end users "the residents". 

 

Getting this real-world essence into research via interviews is one of the most common research methods in a transdisciplinary research. "How much does it cost to build an affordable and healthy house and maintain it for years?" This is the question I am currently eliciting answers for, through a series of interviews to understand the different factors that influence this and then develop a life cycle costing model to estimate these costs. So far, I am finding that interviews are interesting opportunities to talk and share knowledge. And the best part for me is this "wow" moment when I discover factors I have never thought or came across before.

 

The researcher immerse in a non-academic experience of engaging with the subject is another powerful method of a transdisciplinary research. For this reason, I am now joining South Yorkshire Housing Association, who are one of the non-academic partners of the RE-DWELL project. They provide affordable housing and also look after the wellbeing of end users through their LiveWell team. I will be working closely with SYHA Development team for 3 months adopting a transdisciplinary mindset. I will be open to learn and share knowledge with them while putting aside my own professional biases.

 

Speaking of biases, in the workshop Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway opened the discussion of how it is difficult in many cases nowadays, an in particular in housing related-studies, to say that “I have a specific discipline”.  Many of us in RE-DWELL are continously gaining experience that is correlated with various fields. That's why she is ecouraging that we need to replace the word discipline with area of knowledge. For example, in my own research, I am cooking up the work of cost consultants, sustainability consultants, architects and housing providers in one pot to produce new knowledge and share with the world.

 

So as you can see, transdisciplinary is like a conversation and a way of thinking – my favourite to say: it is also like cooking - where new knowledge is created through genuine integration - mixing - of knowledge of academics and non-academics from various fields, where own biases disappear and the main focus is on a certain subject. The results then will be hard to say: Oh! it is this specific discipline that produced it. 

 

In the end, I hope you enjoyed reading and learned something new about transdisciplinarity as I did in Zagreab Workshop: “Being Humble” is not only important in dealing with people in our daily lives, but also in the way we see our own field of knowledge. Let's put our biases and egos aside and work together to make the world a better place. 

 

Thank you for reading and Good Bye! 

 

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