To date, studies of the health of homeless people have been cross-sectional, providing a snapshot in time of factors associated with health and disease but silent on how these links develop through time. In my study the interviews with homeless people were designed to allow a longitudinal analysis of the sequencing, combination and timing of events in health and accommodation histories. Assessment of these histories revealed two key findings. First, the majority of respondents had health problems before becoming homeless. They became and remain homeless because they have not been able to attain or sustain a place in the housing system. Second, the majority of respondents have experienced a deterioration in health that appears to be linked to the physical and servicing environments they have been exposed to since becoming homeless. This study shows that people with health problems are vulnerable to homelessness, and that the health profile of homeless people is as much a reflection of housing inequalities as inefficiencies in the health service. I argue that by tackling these inequalities, housing policy could go some way to meeting the health as well as accommodation needs of homeless people and so be harnessed to the aims of health and social policy. However, in conclusion, I question whether this theoretical goal is achievable given the recent restructuring of the housing system and the associated separation of housing from other areas of health and social policy.

The study explores the factors that sustain urban informal housing resilience to draw lessons for enhancement of housing provision. This is in response to the challenge in housing provision evidenced in the burgeoning informal housing delivery system that characterise most developing countries. Using a case study approach, involving two informal settlements in Lusaka City, Zambia, the study examines the push and pull factors that influence the resilience. This is premised on the argument that identification of the factors sustaining the resilience holds the key to making the planning system reflective of the context in which housing needs, demands and access abilities are embedded. To this end, grounded on both literature and empirical interrogations, the study shows informal housing resilience is sustained by several factors of which the following are pertinent. The study demonstrates regulatory frameworks, land property rights, contractual practices and fiscal policies which shape the general context of housing development to be influencing factors of the informal housing resilience. In this regard, the study suggests provision of housing that meets the needs of different groups and attainment of sustainable neighbourhoods, can mainly be reached through flexibilities in standards and adaptive governance approach that blend in social-cultural financing and contractual practices, building methods, innovations and land delivery systems. Besides the study shows informal housing resilience to be sustained by urban planning frameworks which are not amenable to contemporary approaches like partnerships, participation, collaborations and decentralisation for housing finance provision. In this view the study suggests new changes and approaches to housing governance anchored on these planning principles. The study further shows that informal housing resilience is influenced by location and internal structuring of residential areas which are incompatible with local dwelling contexts. Accordingly, the study demonstrates the common strategies of eviction, demolitions or relocations employed by planners and policy makers as a display of obliviousness to the realities that make people reside in particular localities considered ‘unauthorised’. In regard of this, the study suggests new changes and approaches to the planning of human settlements to include adaptation of local and social-cultural dwelling contexts and proximity concerns in lay out plans and patterns.

In this thesis two stories of participation in housing entwine across space and time. The first involves a migrant community living in an informal, self-constructed neighbourhood called Bathore on the outskirts of Tiranë, Albania, who benefitted from a participatory upgrading programme with a local planning NGO, from 1995-2005. The second involves a group of individuals in housing need who built a prototype house in collaboration with the researcher, entitled ‘Protohome’, which was temporarily sited and open to the public in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 2016. The aim of this research is to locate and test alternative approaches to housing informed by, and embedded in, the conditions of the contemporary UK context: austerity, welfare cuts and caps, rising homelessness, housing precarity and the residualisation of social housing. The research is not simply a design exercise, but seeks approaches to housing which are collaborative, participatory and socially sustainable and which have learning and transformational potential for those in housing need at their centre. Consequently, the research translates learning from Bathore, where the practices and experiences of housing have been formed through conditions of protracted scarcity. Through a critical examination of the settling and house-building process, as well as the participatory strategies used in the upgrading programme, the objective of this research is to mobilise learning from Bathore for the Protohome project. In doing so, the research draws from post-colonial scholarship, and activates this through the philosophies and practices of Participatory Action Research. Within this translocal learning process, where knowledge is translated between seemingly different contexts, the research seeks to deconstruct preconceptions about who or where holds the ‘authentic’ knowledge with regards to urban development and housing processes. As a result, in the stories presented here, of designing, building and collaborating, knowledge is deeply embedded in place, people and histories, yet this knowledge can be remapped and used to inform an entirely new context. The research thus moves between the particularities of place and more general observations. It is simultaneously located and dislocated. The translocal lens employed thus goes beyond comparison, it actively tests approaches from one location to the other. Through this translocal learning process the research uncovers how participation in housing may operate as a tool for learning, capacity building and for the creation of new social networks. Yet this is not without the interplay of power. Furthermore this is set within an often obstructive institutional context and an increasingly punitive welfare state, which makes this story complicated and, at times, despondent. However, the research highlights that organised and politicised forms of participation in housing may open up routes for potentially marginalised people to ‘speak to’ and ‘with’ formal institutions of power. In the practical testing of housing approaches on a public-facing live build, the Protohome project not only grounds these conceptual ideas, but also offers an innovative approach to research methodology and dissemination through praxis, which has multi-scalar impacts. On the basis of findings, the thesis tentatively proposes an agenda for ‘participatory housing’, where housing is a route to learning as opposed to an economic product or mere bricks and mortar.

This thesis examines the relationships between housing, housing satisfaction and quality of life using the capabilities approach developed by Sen and others as a theoretical framework. This approach is used to engage with housing-related themes and as a way of thinking about how housing contributes to quality of life. It also analyses the scope for heterogeneity in these relationships by looking at the housing experiences of migrant communities in Western Europe and the Irish Traveller community. Despite, the growth of interest in the capabilities approach as a way of structuring social science and policy analysis, there is relatively little substantial research that applies the capabilities approach to housing. This is surprising in view of the fact that the neighbourhood in which a person lives and other characteristics of their housing are likely to be associated with their experienced quality of life as well as the opportunities a person has, objectively speaking. Consequently, this thesis is an attempt to address this gap by applying the capabilities approach to the field of housing research. The thesis is divided into four substantive chapters, each one dealing with a specific aspect of the relationship between housing, housing satisfaction and quality of life. Chapter 2 sets the scene for this study by presenting the results of a critical, broad-based review and summary of the literature with regard to housing, happiness and capabilities. The following chapters build on the foregoing in an empirical context; Chapters 3 and 4 do so primarily with quantitative analyses and Chapter 5 uses a mixed-methods approach including offering some original qualitative research. Chapter 6 summarises what has been achieved and the main contribution of the thesis whilst offering some remarks regarding what might be done in future research and the policy implications of these findings.

The issue of abandoned housing project is a matter of grave importance in Malaysia. This study sought to identify the causes leading to the problem from the view point of neo-classical and institutional economic analysis. Having that aim in mind, the research focused on reviewing available literature on the applicability of neo-classical and institutional theories in land and property market analysis, understanding the abandoned housing projects, identifying institution affecting housing development in Malaysia, examining the role of market signal, identifying the causes of abandoned housing projects and recommending suitable policies to prevent and solve the problem of abandoned projects. Extensive field work was done in order to collect primary data for the study. Surveys and semi-structured interviews were done using sample study areas which comprises of 6 different states in Malaysia. The respondents in this study are sample from the population of private developers. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the cause of abandonment of housing projects relates to institutional factors and failure to respond appropriately to market signal.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to formulate long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamic models to explain house price behaviour in Taiwan. The dynamic causal relationships between house price and its determinants are also examined. There are three key elements in this study; the influence of economic growth and housing investment demand through money supply on house prices; the significance of the structural change in the late 1980s; the effect of short-run excess demand fuelling price expectations. The main contribution of this study is to use cointegration analysis to model house prices in Taiwan. The house price models basically follow the stock adjustment approach with the housing market as service and investment markets. Given the strong investment demand, particularly over the past thirty years, monetary variables are considered in the models to capture the impact of liquidity emanating both from domestic and foreign monetary expansion in the economy. In addition, both backward and forward looking concepts are introduced into the user cost term to capture the price expectations. This thesis also attempts to use the non-linear function to capture the rapid price adjustment. The long-run equilibrium model suggests that house price is a function of permanent income, housing completions and construction costs. The results find that housing completions having the largest elasticity coefficient appear to be the driving force behind fluctuation in Taiwanese house prices in the long-run. For the short-run analysis, all the dynamic house price models successfully capture the rapid adjustment behaviour of house price series and achieve satisfactory results. The investment demand variables represented by domestic and foreign monetary expansion are significant in the short-run models. The non-linear variable that captures the rapid adjustment behaviour in house price series is significant, but its improvement to model's explanation is limited.

The overall objective of this dissertation is to explore the implementation of Iris Young's notion of a politics of difference in the field of affordable housing design carrying out comparative work between the United States of America (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) (Young 1990). The focus of the dissertation rests upon the case study of the US and the UK community design movements. Community design is a term used to describe the loose coalition of design professionals who, since the 1960's, have sought: firstly, to reflect upon the social construction of their own powerful professions (principally architecture, landscape architecture and planning); and, secondly, to plan for and engineer radical ways of empowering marginalised individuals and social groups so they are able to influence the design and subsequent consumption of the built environment. To achieve this aim, the dissertation begins by developing an historical, comparative study of the US and UK community design movements in order to explore recurring dilemmas that have confronted practitioners. Out of these messy histories three sets of core issues are identified. The first recounts the tension between the design professional's dependence upon wider institutional frames for legitimation of their expert status and for material support, and their desire to act autonomously or in opposition to such enduring frames. The second set revolves around the idea of communities participating in complex decision making processes and questions include: who is the community; what are the practical logistics of large group discussion; and how is it possible to discern between competing claims? The third set of issues relates to the persistent problem of implementing radical programmes for progressive social change in the face of extremely complex urban social problems. These questions arising from the comparative historical review are then used to inform a critical analysis of current initiatives presented as promoting community design in this particular field at both national and local scales. Case studies from the US San Francisco Bay Area and from the UK Liverpool Merseyside Area are then examined in order to uncover the political dynamics of particular participatory design projects.