The Housing Assembly: Creating Socially Valuable Housing
Join us for three days of discussion about housing that is good, and does good.
Presented by the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in collaboration with the Hallmark Research Initiative for Affordable Housing (HRIAH).
Assembly - a group of people gathered together in one place for a common purpose.
Assembly - the action of fitting together the component parts of an object or system
Date: 3 – 5 November 2021 (ONLINE)
Watch the symposium recording here
Visit the symposium website and programme here
Join us online for three days of presentations, workshops, and panel discussions that focus on the social value of affordable housing. This conference is for the people working to make housing that is good and does good.
As COVID-19 has made evocatively clear, housing is valuable. House prices and construction activity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months in Australia, building wealth for many homeowners and delivering jobs in the construction industry.
But the true value of housing goes well beyond this. A home can protect you from a virus, provide space for home-schooling and work, seed a new gardening hobby, and deliver the stability necessary to survive a global pandemic. A well-designed home can support a person with a disability to live with autonomy and reduce incidences of asthma and heart disease while reducing energy costs. Access to crisis and permanent accommodation can literally save lives. This is the social value of housing.
As Victoria and other jurisdictions across the world respond to the pandemic with unprecedented investments in social and affordable housing, we are confronted with an opportunity to maximise the social value of housing. In Victoria, the Big Housing Build will deliver over 12,000 social and affordable dwellings over 5 years. It is an opportunity to build homes while also driving better health, employment, community, environment and design outcomes – all the things that make housing truly valuable.
Who should attend
In 2021 we invite researchers, designers, service providers, developers, funders and policy makers to join the Housing Assembly.
Why you should attend
We will be addressing the social value of affordable housing to ask:
- What (beyond financial profit) makes housing truly valuable?
- How can demonstration projects play a role in inspiring new thinking, encouraging experimentation and building coalitions for best practice social housing?
- How can we harness unprecedented levels of investment in social and affordable housing to deliver the best social outcomes?
- How can we expand our conceptualization of ‘what matters’ when it comes to housing?
- What can we learn from international best practice and home-grown solutions to build a truly valuable housing system?
We will unpack these topics through international case studies, presentations from worldleading thinkers, industry-focused panel discussions and workshops.
We look forward to seeing you at our event, online, in November.