Aya Elghandour

  On the top floor of their building, where green trees peeked through houses that covered one of Sheffield's seven hills, a farewell party was held. It marked the end of an 11-year journey for Miranda Plowden, the business director of South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA). During this heartfelt and humble gathering, Juliann Hall, her close friend, teammate, and co-director of Care, Health, and Wellbeing, shared Miranda's story and her visionary approach to cultivating a unique "culture" within SYHA. However, this was not your typical notion of culture.   Miranda envisioned A Culture of Joy and Right to Beauty, encompassing every decision and detail at SYHA. This culture went beyond their housing schemes and influenced their daily work environment and attitudes. It stemmed from a people-first approach, firmly believing that happy and compassionate employees would naturally deliver homes that inspire happiness.       The Culture and Residents’ Health and Wellbeing   SYHA is keen to spreading joy and promoting the right for everyone to experience beauty in their housing schemes. Their strategic plan focuses on providing affordable homes where residents feel happy, healthy, and proud. This is exemplified in the elegant and modern design of their properties, such as the recent North Wingfield Road social housing complex and the Wikihouse project.   The culture of promoting beauty extends beyond housing schemes to the surrounding landscapes for residents to have beautiful views and shared spaces. SYHA actively participates in creating vibrant meadow-like landscapes in urban areas, which serve as habitats for pollinators and require less maintenance. Through careful selection of plant species, they demonstrate how urban spaces can be transformed into visually appealing and environmentally friendly areas.   The culture of joy also encompasses care for residents' health and well-being, which is evident in various initiatives. For instance, they care to conduct co-design focus groups with residents to update design briefs for future projects. They maintain good communication channels through their customer experience team. Workshops with customers are held to continuously improve their services.   An interesting insight from one of SYHA's co-production workshops is the residents' dislike of jargon. They find terms like "fuel poverty" aggressive and prefer simple language that allows them to understand and feel in control of their decisions without being stigmatized. Similarly, the term "heat pump" can cause frustration, as residents desire clear and accessible language.   SYHA's Livewell department is dedicated to supporting residents' health and well-being. They provide mental health and wellbeing support and assistance in overcoming daily challenges, regardless of whether someone is a SYHA customer or not. They also have staff members focused on helping individuals find employment and integrate naturally into the community.       A unique work Culture, deviating from usual corporate work style   As an architect, I cannot overlook how SYHA implemented their culture of joy and right to beauty in the workplace as well as in their homes and services. Working closely with the interior designer, they ensured that every detail reflects this culture. Miranda's quote describes it best:   “People expect Google to have beautiful offices, but not a charitable organisation in Sheffield. The feedback from our teams shows that design and beauty in places where they are least expected can have a positive effect on wellbeing and make people feel valued. At South Yorkshire Housing Association, we believe that everyone has a right to beauty and joy, especially people who didn’t expect to experience either.”    As cited in SYHA’s interior designer: 93ft website  (accessed on 17/07/2023)   What amazed me was SYHA's boundary-less workplace. There were no individual offices, walls, or closed doors between departments and team members. They have a bookable rooms for meetings and workshops with teams and residents. If you just want to disconnect in peace, there is a room for prayer and meditation regardless of your belief. During her speech at the farewell party, Miranda emphasized the importance of maintaining the joy at work, smiling at one another, opening doors for one another and caring for both colleagues and customers. It's the small gestures that make a lasting impact.   At SYHA, everyone, from newcomers like myself to the CEO Tony Stacey, worked together in the same open space without assigned desks. On my first day, I sat at one of the long tables alongside Miranda (the business director), Natalie (the team's head), and my new colleagues. On the same table on the next day I sat with other directors and team leads and was able to schedule an interview with them within minutes. This setup promotes collaboration and easy access to discussions. It also harnesses a sense of collaboration and support beyond hierarchies. Being physically present in this open environment allowed me actively to engage in conversations, observe ongoing discussions, and receive immediate responses to my inquiries. What better setting could I had for my Transdisciplinarity based research?       SYHA’s Culture and my Research Secondment   Understanding SYHA's core values and culture assured me that I am in a fitting workplace aligned with my research. Their belief in enabling individuals to settle into a welcoming home, live well, and achieve their full potential resonated deeply with the core motivation behind my research on Health and Wellbeing. My study aims to incorporate Life Cycle Costing into the design stages to prioritize the health and well-being of residents. Working in an environment that not only embraced meaningful slogans but also genuinely believed in and implemented them proved to be an invaluable experience for me.   As part of my Marie-Curie research project, I embarked on a three-month secondment with SYHA's Development and Asset Management team, under the guidance of Natalie Newman, the head of the team, who served as my secondment supervisor. Throughout our discussions, she openly shared her opinions, provided critiques, offered feedback, and provided guidance in approaching individuals and gathering necessary data. Likewise, my regular supervisor, Matteo Martini, supported, encouraged, and ensured my seamless integration within SYHA.   The knowledge and insights I gained during these three months at SYHA would have taken years to acquire independently. The colleagues at SYHA, with whom I discussed my topic, showed great enthusiasm and generously answered any doubts I had. They also expressed their willingness to continue supporting my research even after the end of the secondment.   By the end of secondment and being part of an association working hard to realize this culture, I felt hopeful and now eagerly look forward to contributing to the day when the belief in the Right to Beauty and Joy becomes the normal for all humans and for the betterment of our planet.       More interesting readings: How SYHA started and the influence of Cathy Come Home movie SYHA’s history and the founders mission and vision. A beautiful low-maintenance landscapes of Pictorial meadows. How did SYHA communicate their business purpose through their workplace design. 93ft sharing SYHA's interior design.    

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!   

You know those kinds of conversations that are filled with enthusiasm and passion. It's one of those moments that proves to you: yes! Passion exists and it works!   This time it was passion for design as a tool to indirectly empower people and their sense of belonging. It's about promoting social justice!   Currently in Lisbon, there are several affordable rent programmes "Programa de Renda Acessível" (PRA) run by the City Council in view of the high rent prices in the city. Some programmes are public-private partnerships like this initiative. Other programmes are purely public investments from start to finish, where people can apply for rental housing through this website, for example.   My co-supervisor Dr Vasco Moreira Rato from ISCTE - where I had my secondment - is also chief advisor to Lisbon City Councillor on Housing and Public Works, Filipa Roseta. Dealing at the front line with housing issues, the discussions with him were very informative, practical and honest, both from the research and the authorities' point of view. In the process, he wanted to show me an example of how parametric design can benefit public housing in the context of affordability to determine the suitable design parameters within a certain budget while responding to various requirements.       And here comes one of those memorable and inspiring conversations as a Marie Curie ESR.   I had a fruitful conversation with the architects Susana Rato and Joana Couto from SRU (Sociedade de Reabilitação Urbana). They were responsible for preparing the Public Housing concept design for low-cost housing projects that are fully financed by the public sector.  They explained what, why and how they created this schematic design to achieve ambitious design goals within a certain given construction budget. They had a limited budget of about 1000 euros per square metre for construction. Thus, they exploited the power of geometric parametrisation to determine appropriate modern design parameters while meeting the various requirements such as space ratios, areas, technical requirements and regulations.       It is interesting to note that one of the main objectives of this schematic design process is to ensure that future residents feel comfortable where they live and to support their right to live in affordable, durable and beautiful homes.   How did they do so?   They ensured that the spatial needs of different family structures were accommodated by adhering to Portuguese building codes and regulations. As two Portuguese ladies, they questioned the design as if this house would be their own house, that of their relatives or the future home of their children. They insisted on providing terraces for each living unit as an extension of the house to connect the residents with nature, which benefits their soul and mind. They also know that Portuguese people love being outside. Various services have also been proposed, such as a shared laundry room and a communal room. For buildings in neighbourhoods where there are no kindergartens, a kindergarten on the ground floor was proposed.   They worked with energy specialists to design energy-efficient building envelopes, define the technical requirements for walls, doors and windows, and decide on the appropriate renewable energy and water heating techniques. In addition, the distribution of daylight in the interior spaces was investigated. A construction economist accompanied all steps of their design journey, simultaneously calculating construction costs and investigating economic feasibility to modify the design accordingly without compromising the quality and performance requirements of the residential building. This hard work does not negate the fact that they were unable to work with the community itself during the design process due to the tight timeframe of the project. This reflects the reality of many architects in practise. They also expressed their interest in using the possibilities of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the future, as it would have saved them a lot of time in working with other disciplines to complete this project. It would also be an important tool for management and cost control during construction.       When I returned to Sheffield and while attending Doina Petrescu class on feminism research as part of my PhD training.   I immediately remembered Susana and Joana! Now I see their work and enthusiasm as a kind of feminist action – consistent, practical and balanced - advocating the public housing residents' rights and doing the best in the area under their control. I cannot deny that it was admirable and inspirable.       To sum up!   This conversation triggered the turning point of my PhD research. Currently, I am passionately investigating literature to answer how to design a house that promotes household health and wellbeing?   But, Why?   I dream of Affordable Happy Healthy Housing [Why not?]. Can you label a house as sustainable if it is negatively impacting your physical and mental health?   Hmmm, nope. But in reality, it does not sound that simple …   Sim Senhor [Yes Sir in Portuguese] and that is what we are here to contribute to ? See you in the next blog post! Goodbye!       Relevant Sources https://www.lisboaocidentalsru.pt/ https://www.lisboa.pt/atualidade/noticias/detalhe/camara-constroi-476-casas-destinadas-ao-programa-de-renda-acessivel https://www.publico.pt/2019/12/04/local/noticia/lancado-concurso-construcao-renda-acessivel-entrecampos-1896237

Countless examples can reflect this title, right?   But today, I will write about a story of a woman living in a deprived area in Portugal.   Joana Pestana Lages, who is an architect and urban researcher in ISCTE, shared this story with us in the latest Lisbon Workshop. The story might sound simple and common, but [Through Sustainability Lens] it is mind-stimulating. Along with other inspiring guests’ speeches, this story deep inside me reemphasized my research goal to design social housing based on occupants’ needs and different lifestyles. In addition, to continuously communicate these needs to architects in practice. At the end of the day, the final product - [The House] - where people live, grow, cook, eat, rest, read, sing, play, cry, celebrate, heal and [recently work!] is designed by architects.   However, housing studies are commonly dominated by economists, as discussed in the workshop roundtable. That’s why our Re-Dwell transdisciplinary research is bringing economics, politics, and architecture to work together to tackle the ongoing housing issues in Europe.     So, just one minute ago in my introduction, I mentioned two things that we need to question:   The first one: Did it only happen [recently] that people work from home?   The second one: Do architects design all houses?   The answer to both questions is No.     No, for many reasons that differ depending on location, politics, finance, occupation, personal preferences, etc. In this blog, I will look through the lens of self-produced places ‘Slums’ where the story happens and where it is [The Time and People] who design and build! No architects, engineers, or contractors … These were some of the words Joana Lages referred to before telling us the story. The story of a woman from Cape Verde who lived in a deprived area in Lisbon for many years. In her small house with a simple slow-paced lifestyle, she washes and reuses plastic wastes and knits it into plastic bags. She plants and raises food animals, securing work, revenue, and food from only one place [Her House]. Her life condition might be judged as insecure, informal, and particularly unhealthy when raising animals in a densely peopled area. Though from another perspective, it is more sustainable than many of us living in adequate residential areas. For instance, she uses minimum energy and transportation and produces minimum waste. In this regard, Joana Lages raised a very interesting question: What would happen to this woman if she had to move to an apartment in a building which is, from our perspective, better for her? We would be ruining her lifestyle, her work, her income, and we would be creating her new financial obligations to pay for energy and transportation, etc.   We need to be aware that it is not just a house that costs a certain amount of money. It is not just a group of people to be re-allocated from one place to another. It is people’s lives.    It is a global issue. For instance, in Europe, there are more than 30 million slum dwellers. No one can deny the urgency of the various efforts and strategies used to tackle this issue or to upgrade substandard areas to incorporate their communities in the city gradually. But before doing so, it is important to listen! And to bear in mind an inclusive and participatory approach to tackle this. We need to think: how can we give these communities a secure space to speak, care and express their needs? How should we listen to find creative solutions that respond to these various and challenging parameters?   It is not going to be easy, but it is possible.       References   https://www.dinamiacet.iscte-iul.pt/research-team/Joana-Pestana-Lages?lang=en   https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190208-tackling-slums-by-making-them-better-places-to-live-in   https://www.dw.com/en/inside-europes-slums/a-18011677   https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/21/185763979/african-cities-test-the-limits-of-living-with-livestock?t=1633387048627