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Unlocking Social Value in housing: Addressing ambiguity and establishing a common assessment approach for housing actors

Created on 14-11-2024

Design, planning and building Policy and financing
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Social value in the built environment: A gradual implementation of the Act characterised by ambiguity on key aspects and a common approach to assess it:

This challenge is about the gradual implementation of the Social Value Act in the context of housing. While the Act represents a significant step towards promoting social value in the built environment, it faces one obstacle - the lack of consensus on how to define and comprehensively assess social value. This ambiguity hampers the full potential of the regulatory framework.

In order for SV to be promoted and legal measures to be effectively implemented within the sector, it is imperative to establish common ground between the diverse actors involved. This challenge calls for a transdisciplinary lens (Godemann, 2008). Such an approach can pave the way for a people-centred conceptualisation of social value. This perspective holds promise, especially for housing providers striving to articulate the numerous programs and activities they undertake. Long-term impacts and those that address more intangible dimensions of well-being often remain excluded from current methods of monetisation and metrics used to gauge value, yet they undeniably generate value for communities.

It is important to note that while this challenge focuses primarily on the legislation of one particular country (England and Wales in the context of the Social Value Act),  the broader discussion on the holistic assessment of social value in housing is not limited to a single context. Social value principles have gradually found their way into policy frameworks in other Anglo-Saxon countries and are also gaining ground in several Western European countries (ESG criteria is becoming very relevant when allocating funds for housing projects). Therefore, the insights derived from this research can offer valuable guidance for policy-making and decision-making in other contexts with similar housing challenges.

 

Systems knowledge

Actors

Housing developers

Non-profit and for-profit housing organisations that undertake various tasks, such as the construction and management of housing.

Universities

Method

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Teams from different disciplines or fields work together to tackle complex problems, find innovative solutions and develop a broader understanding of a particular issue. This approach recognises that many real-world challenges cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of a single discipline or field.

Target knowledge

Level

Building

The structure, project or development that is directly impacted by the various building regulations.

Country

The political structure governs a specific geographical area and accommodates a specific population group.

Transformation Knowledge

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Related cases

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Related vocabulary

Transdisciplinarity

Participatory Approaches

Area: Community participation

Transdisciplinarit y is a research methodology crossing several disciplinary boundaries, creating a holistic approach to solve complex problems. A transdisciplinary approach fosters bottom-up collaboration, provides an environment for mutual learning and enhances the knowledge of all participants (Klein et al., 2001 Summary and Synthesis). Transdisciplinarity is a relatively young term, first used just over fifty years ago at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) congress by Jean Piaget. Piaget’s 1972 essay describes it in a looser sense; as “a higher stage succeeding interdisciplinary relationships…without any firm boundaries between disciplines” (Piaget, 1972 p.135). Transdisciplinarity goes beyond interdisciplinarity through a fusion of academic and non-academic knowledge, theory and practice, discipline and profession (Doucet and Janssens, 2011). Stokols (2006) asserts transdisciplinarity is inextricability linked to action research; a term coined by Lewin (1946) as comparative research leading to social action. Lewin sought to empower and enhance the self-esteem of participants, which included residents of minority communities, through horizontal and democratic exchange between the researcher and participants. Familiar devices rooted in action research, such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews are common in transdisciplinary research (Klein et al., 2001).  A transdisciplinary approach is broad and facilitates the provision of social need; and is therefore a useful tool in combination with community participation. This methodology has been used to address complex global concerns in recent decades, beginning with climate change and extending into many areas including policy and social problems (Bernstein, 2015). Lawrence et al. (2010) stress that in addressing community related issues such as housing, it is crucial a transdisciplinary approach is adopted not only to integrate various expert opinions but to ensure the inclusion of affected communities such as the residents themselves. Affordability and sustainability in housing is a complex social issue, therefore requiring such an approach to foster participation of non-academics to provide socially relevant solutions.     References Bernstein, J. H. (2015) ‘Transdisciplinarity: A review of its origins, development, and current issues’, Journal of Research Practice, 11(1).   Doucet, I. and Janssens, N. (2011) Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production: Towards Hybrid Modes of Inquiry in Architecture and Urbanism. doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-0104-5.   Klein, J. T. et al. (2001) Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society An Effective Way for Managing Complexity. doi: 10.1007/978-3-0348-8419-8_2.   Lawrence, R. et al. (2010) ‘Beyond Disciplinary Confinement to Imaginative Transdisciplinarity’, in Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination. London: Routledge, pp. 16–30.   Lewin, K. (1946) ‘Action Research and Minority Problems’, The Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), pp. 34–46. doi: 10.1037/10269-013.   Piaget, J. (1972) Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities. Available at: https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED061895.   Stokols, D. (2006) ‘Toward a Science of Transdisciplinary Action Research’, American journal of community psychology, 38, pp. 63–77. doi: 10.1007/s10464-006-9060-5.

Created on 21-07-2021

Author: A.Davis (ESR1)

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Area: Community participation

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, participation is “the act of taking part in an activity or event”. Likewise, it can also mean “the fact of sharing or the act of receiving or having a part of something.” It derives from old French participacion which in turn comes from late Latin participationem, which means “partaking” (Harper, 2000).  References to participation can be found in many fields, including social sciences, economics, politics, and culture. It is often related to the idea of citizenship and its different representations in society. Hence, it could be explained as an umbrella concept, in which several others can be encompassed, including methodologies, philosophical discourses, and tools. Despite the complexity in providing a holistic definition, the intrinsic relation between participation and power is widely recognised. Its ultimate objective is to empower those involved in the process (Nikkhah & Redzuan, 2009). An early application of participatory approaches was the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) which exerted a significant influence in developing new discourses and practices of urban settings (Chambers, 1994; Friedmann, 1994). In the late 1970s increasing attention was paid to the concept by scholars, and several associated principles and terminologies evolved, such as the participation in design and planning with the Scandinavian approach of cooperative design (Bφdker et al., 1995; Gregory, 2003). Participation in design or participatory design is a process and strategy that entails all stakeholders (e.g. partners, citizens, and end-users) partaking in the design process. It is a democratic process for design based on the assumption that users should be involved in the designs they will go on to use (Bannon & Ehn, 2012; Cipan, 2019; Sanoff, 2000, 2006, 2007). Likewise, participatory planning is an alternative paradigm that emerged in response to the rationalistic and centralized – top-down – approaches. Participatory planning aims to integrate the technical expertise with the preferences and knowledge of community members (e.g., citizens, non-governmental organizations, and social movements) directly and centrally in the planning and development processes, producing outcomes that respond to the community's needs (Lane, 2005). Understanding participation through the roles of participants is a vital concept. The work of Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) Ladder of Citizen Participation has long been the cornerstone to understand participation from the perspective of the redistribution of power between the haves and the have-nots. Her most influential typological categorisation work yet distinguishes eight degrees of participation as seen in Figure 1: manipulation, therapy, placation, consultation, informing, citizen control, delegated power and partnership. Applied to a participatory planning context, this classification refers to the range of influence that participants can have in the decision-making process. In this case, no-participation is defined as designers deciding based upon assumptions of the users’ needs and full-participation refers to users defining the quality criteria themselves (Geddes et al., 2019). A more recent classification framework that also grounds the conceptual approach to the design practice and its complex reality has been developed by Archon Fung (2006) upon three key dimensions: who participates; how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. This three-dimensional approach which Fung describes as a democracy cube (Figure 2), constitutes a more analytic space where any mechanism of participation can be located. Such frameworks of thinking allow for more creative interpretations of the interrelations between participants, participation tools (including immersive digital tools) and contemporary approaches to policymaking. Aligned with Arnstein’s views when describing the lower rungs of the ladder (i.e., nonparticipation and tokenism), other authors have highlighted the perils of incorporating participatory processes as part of pre-defined agendas, as box-ticking exercises, or for political manipulation. By turning to eye-catching epithets to describe it (Participation: The New Tyranny? by Cooke & Kothari, 2001; or The Nightmare of Participation by Miessen, 2010), these authors attempt to raise awareness on the overuse of the term participation and the possible disempowering effects that can bring upon the participating communities, such as frustration and lack of trust. Examples that must exhort practitioners to reassess their role and focus on eliminating rather than reinforcing inequalities (Cooke & Kothari, 2001).

Created on 17-02-2022

Author: A.Pappa (ESR13), L.Ricaurte (ESR15), M.Alsaeed (ESR5)

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