Leonardo Ricaurte

To hear about the impact on society that academia and research are bringing about is becoming commonplace in discussions held by researchers in school meetings and doctoral conferences. The sector is evolving rapidly and donors increasingly want to see tangible evidence of the results and outcomes achieved by the projects they fund. It can be argued that this can bring undeniable pitfalls. This can inadvertently put pressure on universities to work, produce and compete in a field that increasingly resembles one of companies dominated by strict or rather unforgiving quantitative metrics presented on a spreadsheet in an annual report. The reality is that when researching complex societal issues, articulating the impact we create is almost as important as finding the perfect research question or formulating the best five-minute elevator pitch to explain what your contribution to knowledge is.   Providing affordable and sustainable housing in Europe is a research endeavour that requires a kaleidoscope of lenses working together in unison. This network intends to do so, and the secondments are the vehicle that links the lecture hall with the field, the idea with the end product, and the research question with the answer. We could argue that, in this context, they play a pivotal role in creating an impact on society.   My secondment in Clarion Housing, the largest provider of social housing in the UK with more than 125,000 homes across the country, began four months ago with a determined aim: to leverage the access granted to expertise, secondary data and, perhaps most valuable to my research, to the inhabitants of the housing estates. My project aims to interrogate the impact of housing design decisions on people's quality of life in the form of social value. As many researchers can attest, accessing and recruiting research participants can pose a colossal challenge to surmount to keep pace with the research plan.   Housing associations hold a privileged middle-ground position between tenants and local authorities. By definition, they have an abiding commitment to their beneficiaries as long-term stewards of the homes. Their social function should characterise and define the operation and management of the existing stock as well as the provision of new developments. This role enables housing associations to have a profound impact on people's lives, not only on those they serve directly, but also on the functioning of the wider community in which they operate. In this context, the degree of engagement with housing practice and the contribution that the research project can gain from the collaboration with Clarion can never be equated with research conducted within the strict confines of a mono-disciplinary enquiry.   Several practitioners at Clarion and partner organisations were interviewed about their approach to creating social value and the methods they use to measure and assess their impact on communities. At the same time, participant observation and interviews were conducted with the inhabitants of the estates to triangulate and obtain a comprehensive picture from the top-down and bottom-up. All of this has a particular interest in the long-term impacts of regeneration and development and the intangible outcomes associated with residents' well-being. But it is not just researchers who benefit from collaborating with industry partners. The position of a research secondee allows you to have something that sometimes becomes scarce in 'real-world' practice -time. Time to analyse, time to problematise and time to construe.   A researcher's inquisitive lens can help mentors see things from a different angle. Often practitioners' embeddedness in the real world prevents them from seeing the obvious, and sometimes the obvious is also the hardest thing to prove. Both the mentor and the mentee need to display a range of transferable skills to navigate changing contexts and engage in meaningful discussions with the variety of stakeholders involved. This is where the knowledge transfer takes place. These experiences are the bottom line of transdisciplinary housing research projects such as RE-DWELL, where it is first crucial to develop a comprehensive and shared appreciation of the problem at hand in order to come up with actionable innovative solutions. This is often referred to as the development of common ground between investigators, a must-have for the co-production of knowledge.   These reflections stem from the experience of conducting research in such a context and underpinned the course of the investigation while on my secondment at Clarion. The support of Dr Elanor Warwick has been fundamental to navigating this new scenario. Her extensive experience in deconstructing the boundaries between practice and academia, and the fact that she has been very much involved in the evolution of my PhD helped to make my time with the organisation highly productive. Broadening my understanding of the practical aspects of research in industry and the intrinsic constraints and demands of the sector.   Currently, data collection is still in progress. The journey has been bumpy and is likely to continue to be so. This is part of the contingent nature of fieldwork. As some experienced community consultation researchers within the RE-DWELL network avow, delving into the confines of people's lives and experiences is an undertaking that requires tact and dexterity, rightly conferred by experience and perseverance. In the meantime, I will wear a pair of field boots of stubbornness and determination and continue to try to uncover the lived experience of life in between the buildings.  

An academic secondment developed within the RE-DWELL network represents a remarkable opportunity to expand the boundaries of local academic setups, to foster collaboration and exchange, and ultimately to sow the seeds of transdisciplinary research. In my case, I had the chance to spend these two months at the IUGA, Institut d'urbanisme et de géographie alpine, of Grenoble Alps University. This was not only the perfect excuse for me to finally pick up the diploma of my Master's degree I had done there a few years ago and could not get because of COVID, but also to be once again among geographers and urbanists in this contrasting conurbation, recently awarded green capital of Europe, surrounded by the Alps, traversed by hundreds of kilometres of bike paths and coloured by vivid street art murals.    The time there allowed me to refine but also problematise the conceptual and methodological framework of my research project. Oftentimes this can become one of the most challenging tasks in an investigation, and concepts such as theory, conceptual framework, methodology, etc. can be intimidating and difficult to handle. I decided to use some of the time I spent there and in view of a paper that I had to submit to the RE-DWELL conference, to re-imagine a possible different approach to assessing the social value of housing design through Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE).   In recent decades, architecture geographers have questioned the way buildings and urban spaces are studied. Focusing on their impact on society and on their users, they have used qualitative methods to conduct studies of life and everyday patterns of behaviour within spaces, providing a scholarship and expertise that could be used to better understand the impact of residential architecture through POE. The methodology of researchers such as Jacobs, who see buildings as "occupied performative events" (Jacobs, 2006, p.10), is particularly compelling. They view the process of meaning-making as one that is negotiated through socially mediated practises of everyday life. Accordingly, buildings are not static objects but living entities that are 'made' or 'unmade'. Therefore, a building is understood as such as long as its users and the systems that make it up reaffirm their relationships on a daily basis. Buildings and people are part of an assemblage where time also plays an essential role. In a way, this is not far from what Stewart Brand (1995) wanted to convey with the 'Shearing layers of change'. If buildings are made up of complex systems that are intertwined with their users, the methods needed to study them must be able to capture these intricate relationships, which cannot be explained exclusively from either a social or a technical perspective.   These authors used actor-network theory ANT to formulate their investigations. This methodological approach to the analysis of inhabited spaces allows for a very complex representation of the various relationships that can exist between systems and inhabitants within buildings. The so-called 'building events' are the vehicle used by Jacobs et al. (2010), Lees & Baxter (2011) and Rose et al. (2010) to go about the investigation of the built environment by looking at the feel of buildings, feelings in buildings and feelings about buildings in a very detailed way (Rose et al., 2010), complemented by ethnographic methods and participant observation. These methods enabled them to unpack very revealing accounts of the experiences of housing estate residents, in which architectural features of key spaces within the realm of the housing estate are catalysts for human emotions that transcend the boundaries of physical space. Narratives that provide complementary insights into the territorialisation of feelings and emotions and the impact of places on citizens' quality of life.   The way architects and other professionals involved in design do research on the built environment can benefit enormously by adopting systematic research methods in collaboration with academics. POE can become the backbone of the strategy that allows us to demonstrate the value we co-create and sustain learning loops within the praxis. And as this brief account shows, geographers can open up new avenues of collaboration through research that will hopefully yield a fuller picture of the relationships between people and the places they inhabit.   References. Brand, S. (1995). How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. Penguin.   Jacobs, J. M. (2006). A geography of big things. Cultural Geographies, 13(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474006EU354OA   Jacobs, J. M., Cairns, S., & Strebel, I. (2010). More on “big things”: building events and feelings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(3), 334–349. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40890991   Lees, L., & Baxter, R. (2011). A ‘building event’ of fear: thinking through the geography of architecture. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(2), 107–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.545138   Rose, G., Degen, M., & Basdas, B. (2010). More on “big things”: Building events and feelings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(3), 334–349. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1475-5661.2010.00388.X

Several attempts to elicit guidelines that holistically respond to the issue of understanding and creating an adequate built environment have been produced, especially since the second half of the previous century. Some of them are recognised and elevated as fundamental readings for urbanists and architects alike. However, the principles of what makes a good public space or the ideal spatial configuration of a housing complex, or the adequate allocation of open spaces and communal areas to recognise the needs of children; keep being ignored or at least relegated to theoretical scenarios held in academic setups or one-off experimental works.   Buildings can be studied from a range of tenets, and through history there has always been a dominating paradigm. For Vitruvius, for instance, the ruling qualities that any architectural work might embody were compiled in three, i.e., firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis, or stability, utility and beauty, those would be detailed in his influential book De Architectura. In the XX century, in full swing of the modernist movement, Le Corbusier portrayed what would become one of the most ground-breaking books in architecture, vers une architecture (1923), enunciating a new way of living and inhabiting, which in turn was followed by a series of principles that dictated the key elements to accomplish ‘good’ architecture with a particular fixation on residential buildings[1]. Form follows function, was one of the maxims that spearheaded modernist architecture and depicted the decided break up with the past, ornament in buildings would then become unnecessary and anachronic. The zeitgeist of each era fluctuates to respond to the most demanding needs inherent to that moment in time.   From housing standardisation to adaptation   The housing design that follows flexibility and adaptability tenets is not a novelty in architecture, a feature that can be traced in Mies van der Rohe’s Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), or even more than a decade before that with Le Corbusier’s modular prototype the Maison Dom-Ino (1914); the concept has been re-introduced by few contemporary authors like Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider, as a response to current housing struggles. According to them, flexible housing should be at the forefront of the contemporary housing agenda. By avoiding the obsolescence that comes with the short-termed mono-functional housing design, and replacing it with a long-term capacity to re-adapt to evolving needs and accommodate multiple ways of life, flexibility by design renders a solution that equates with sustainable practices very much needed in the housebuilding sector.   Nowadays, climate degradation and the urgency of reducing carbon emissions have catapulted sustainability as a term that become part of the everyday jargon in a wide array of fields, an acute issue that has been at the forefront of the international debate in the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021. Architecture and the built environment are not exempt from this trend[2]. It has been argued that sustainability cannot be attained solely by using energy-friendly technologies, or incorporating labels like LEED or evaluation protocols like BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method). The triple bottom line of sustainability asserts a social dimension, and other interpretations go even further considering a fourth cultural variable attached to it (see the circles of sustainability). In that specific and often neglected niche, that of social and cultural sustainability, this study purports to focus on the housing domain.   Perhaps one of the most harmful practices of the housebuilding sector is the fact that, akin to a tech company, the products, in this case, dwellings, are planned for obsolescence. Numerous examples of designing housing for obsolescence are portrayed by Till and Schneider in their seminal book Flexible Housing (2007). They contend that such a mindset, mainly enforced by developers and architects during the design stages of a project, is the culprit of major disturbances in the urban layout in cities nowadays. Energy poverty, speculation, gentrification, spiralling land cost and urban segregation, could be attributed, at least to some extent, to poor planning practices and an impossibility, deliberate or accidental, of thinking of housing as the most important asset in our cities. This implies bearing in mind the whole life-cycle of a project and the consequences that go beyond the handover of a housing unit. Thus, a dwelling must be seen as an activity rather than seen as an object. And similarly perceived as a social asset rather than as an economic asset from a consumerism perspective. A rather complementary vision to the one contended by John Turner already in 1976 in Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Buildings Environments. Whereby, though in a totally different context, the barriada or informal settlement in Peru, he recognises housing as a process in which the users are directly implicated.   The process or the housing pathway derived from the housing practices as Clapham suggests (2002), evidence that the evolution of a housing development, along with people's housing careers, continues very much after dwellings have been sold or rented; and therefore, there must be a different approach towards housing design and production. As Till and other authors argue, flexibility and adaptability do not mean that architects are no longer relevant or that every design decision is passed to the users. Architects, according to these precepts, work more as enablers or facilitators, a veritable different approach from the controlling and godlike paradigm that accompanied architectural practice in the XX century, especially during modernism. A good design goes beyond the moment a project is handed over, the life-cycle of a housing scheme must be fully considered from the initial stages of design. A good design is one that recognises that needs change over time and that users are not static, families are formed, grow and reduce. As opposed to what Andrew Rabeneck has called ‘tight-fit-functionalism’, that is the design that follows specific requirements and that can only accommodate determined uses designated by a type of furniture layout. This attitude condemns the typology, and by extension the building, to obsolescence. That is a house that can only accommodate a family-type, a default user. Lifestyles are more fluid than ever before, the way people live has evolved especially in multicultural setups. It is no longer possible to make generalising assumptions over people needs and expectations. In other cultures, the notion of a house might have different connotations than in a traditional north European scenario. Yet, housing solutions seem to fail to respond effectively to a myriad of ways of life and aspirations. These challenges are not new and as it has been established, these debates were held decades ago. Nevertheless, the same question that Marcus and Sarkissian made in their book Housing as if people mattered: Site design guidelines for the planning of medium-density family housing (1986),  four decades in the past, still remains: “If research on people-housing relations now exists, why are the design professions not using it?” (p.5).   The empirical research that my thesis is pushing forward purports to give equitable significance to what happens inside, outside and in-between dwellings, and that is the reason that supports the intertwining of Marcus and Sarkissian’s work with the one of Schneider and Till. Marcus and Sarkissian put it clearly when insisting:   “A particular program, and the resulting built environment, may be well conceived to cope with the current daily needs of, say families with young children, but what happens when the children become teenagers or when half of the original nuclear families become single-parent families or grouping of unrelated adults? Design flexibility is often recommended, but an ambiguous space in year I is often equally ambiguous (and leads to equally ambiguous serious problems) in year 15.” (p.7)     One of the main misconceptions that as many authors cited before this research aim to address, is the idea of housing seen as a disposable commodity. People should not have to move out when their personal circumstances change, because their dwelling is not suitable anymore. Such a capitalist view of real estate, especially housing, is not socially responsible let alone environmentally sustainable. Housing provision seen through the lenses of affordability and sustainability goals must incorporate POE, social value and flexibility whether it intends to holistically respond to current concerns. When carrying out Post-occupancy evaluation of a regeneration project there are a series of tenets that shall be permanently referred to during the data collection: User participation, Flexibility by design, Affordability by design and sustainability. Then it will be clear what makes a regeneration project succeed and what aspects are crucial to monitor. This is where the responses and data collected can come in handy. As an analogue research endeavour to that carried out by Marcus and Sarkissian, this research can possibly deliver an updated roadmap for generating social value through regeneration schemes to be further applied, in this case by Clarion in other ventures. Likewise, any housing association, social landlord or non-profit investor that is actively involved in regeneration schemes, can consider these aspects as part of its comprehensive social value approach.   [1] In Les cinq points de l'architecture moderne (1927), Le Corbusier along with Pierre Jeanneret, would compile their recipe of the modern architecture : The Pilotis, Roof gardens, Free plan, Ribbon windows, and Free façade. The Unité d'habitation in Marseille (1952) represents the epitome of these principles applied to residential architecture, a formula that would be further implemented in other sites in the years on.   [2] Especially knowing that at least 8% of global emissions are produced by the cement industry alone without considering other unsustainable building techniques (Ellis, et al. 2020).   References   Clapham, D., 2002. Housing pathways: A post modern analytical framework. Housing, theory and society, 19(2), pp.57-68.   Ellis, L.D., Badel, A.F., Chiang, M.L., Park, R.J.Y. and Chiang, Y.M., 2020. Toward electrochemical synthesis of cement—An electrolyzer-based process for decarbonating CaCO3 while producing useful gas streams. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(23), pp.12584-12591.   Le Corbusier, 1946. Towards a new architecture. London: Architectural Press.   Marcus, C.C. and Sarkissian, W., 1986. Housing as if people mattered: Site design guidelines for the planning of medium-density family housing (Vol. 4). Univ of California Press.   Rabeneck, A., Sheppard, D. and Town, P., 1973. Housing flexibility. Architectural Design, 43(11), pp.698-727.   Rowland, I.D. and Howe, T.N. eds., 2001. Vitruvius:'Ten books on architecture'. Cambridge University Press.   Schneider, T. and Till, J., 2007. Flexible housing. Architectural press.   Schneider, T. and Till, J., 2005. Flexible housing: opportunities and limits. Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 9(2), pp.157-166.   Till, J. and Schneider, T., 2005. Flexible housing: the means to the end. ARQ: architectural research quarterly, 9(3-4), pp.287-296.   Turner, J., 1976. Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyars Publishers.

The RE-DWELL Lisbon workshop was a particularly challenging experience for me. It was the very first time that the entire cohort of ESR's would summon, several lectures and guest speakers would come to complement and enrich the variety of perspectives on the issues that interest us the most. The three-days programme seemed an utterly refreshing event that would inspire us to take off in this research journey. Lisbon was the perfect scenery, with its distinctive pleasant weather, sinuous alleys full of history and architectural enchant. But also with an acute housing crisis that demands immediate solutions.   All of this sounds quite positive, so you might be wondering why it ended up being so challenging. Well, simply because I was the only one that couldn’t make it to Lisbon. That’s right, the Coronavirus post-pandemic world kept stubbornly making my life difficult and what in other times would entail a really simple trip from London to Lisbon, now meant the possibility of going back to quarantine afterwards. So, I had to catch up with the team in activities that were clearly designed to be carried out within the classroom, hands-on, organic and open to, perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of (on site)-human interaction, unpredictability. The unpredictability that leads to opportunities, the doses of chaos that make workshops a fruitful encounter. And inevitably, Microsoft Teams became my best ally to plough through the 985 miles* that were separating me from the vivid tête-à-têtes that my colleagues were having those days.   However, it was not always difficult to engage during the sessions. The open roundtable with guests experts discussing transdisciplinary research on housing rendered a very refreshing debate on how to apply transdisciplinary principles and theories, and common pitfalls and opportunities when researching sustainable and affordable housing. It was the demonstration of the evolution that these ideas have had in time and an urgent call to truly consider transdisciplinary and participatory practices in decision-making boards and academia. The importance of devoting comprehensive efforts to develop the field of housing studies, assembling not only economists but also architects, urban planners and other professionals involved in the production of the built environment; and to bring about a real research culture at the heart of architecture schools, are some of the takeaways I got from this stimulating debate.   Now that the workshop is done, and after witnessing my fellow ESR's having such a prolific time there. I only have to say that I won't miss the Nicosia summer school for anything in the world! So see you in Cyprus from the 15 to 19 Nov!             *1,585.76 km. (For the ones that, like me, are still trying to get used to the odd imperial system)