In this thesis, public housing was investigated with particular reference to the nature of communication between the landlord and tenant. It focussed on interactive behaviours and the incidence of litigation. The study attempts to bridge the gap between social theory and social practice through the application of existing social theory in the description and analyses of social problems. Based on a critical review of the relevant literature, the characteristics of communicative interaction and human relationships are described, together with the history of housing provision and the growth of litigation to resolve issues in public housing. Research of communicative interaction in the housing sector in general and the landlord-tenant interaction in particular has been a neglected area of research that is addressed in this thesis. An initial study surveyed both tenants and housing officers in the Sydney metropolitan area. Social analysis focuses on local interaction between landlord and tenant and how these local interactions expand into global patterns. The thesis analyses how power-relating, ideological/evaluative and ethical choices of housing officers and tenants influence their communicative interaction and the subsequent access and distribution of services and resources in the public housing sector. The theoretical framework explicates on complex responsive processes (CRP) perspective. CRP is a process theory that looks into the simultaneous and co-influencing relationship between the individual and the social and multi-agency approach in social analysis. The conceptualising framework relies on the application of this theory and the principles of Humanity, human rights and social justice to achieve a dialogical communicative interaction. The thesis applied complementary quantitative and qualitative methods where a quantitative study of a small population was conducted using structured interviews and group meetings to guide the qualitative research. The population was identified by natural experiment, i.e., identification of two populations in a public housing estate: a Participative group, comprising tenants who had consciously participated in the housing authorities?? renewal programs, and a Non-participative group of tenants who had not taken part in the Tenant Participation programs by Housing New South Wales (HNSW). The housing officers and tenants were identified using snowball and quota sampling. The findings reveal a conspicuous absence of research that focus on local interaction between housing officers and tenants in public housing. The study confirms the anti-dialogical nature of communicative interaction in public housing, which is iterated, sustained and perpetuated by the use of litigation, a mechanism that is increasingly being preferred to settle disputes, by both landlord and tenant.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/282284 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Morden, Aida, Built Environment, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded By:University of New South Wales. Built Environment |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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