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Perspectives on the Meaning of Housing Quality

Literature Review

2.4. Perspectives on the Meaning of Housing Quality

The multiplicity of disciplines concerned with the subject of housing, with its range of different interests and rationales, has led to the emergence of many discourses on and approaches to defining housing quality and determining the attributes that constitute good housing design. Following the work of Franklin (2001), disciplines engaged in the research of housing quality can be split into two categories; those involved in planning and design issues including architecture, urban design, planning and politics, and those addressing the human dimension of housing including notably environmental psychology, sociology and humanistic and cultural geography. Each discipline presents a distinct perspective on good housing design and contributes to the debate on housing quality through a particular focus or concern.

The political discourse is perhaps among the most pervasive and influential discourses of housing design and quality. For policy makers, the main focus is usually on housing supply and affordability. This includes issues related to housing demands, costs, public funds and subsidies as well as housing finance. Another focus is on design standards and control via policy documents and regulations. Regulatory and advisory bodies in many countries, especially developed ones, have produced quantifiable recommendations which they claim can be used to assess the essential elements of housing quality. The ‘Housing Quality Indicators’ produced by Housing Corporation - UK supported by DETR (1999) is a good example of that. The manual comprises 10 indicators to ensure delivering housing developments of high quality. These are:

location; site visual impact, layout and landscaping; site routes and movement; unit size;

unit layout; noise, light and services; unit accessibility; unit energy, green and sustainability issues and performance in use. A number of similar texts containing prospective or recommended standards for general or more specialised application have been produced. However, most of these publications construct housing quality as if it is

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clearly determinant, objectifying it in terms of specifications, standards, measurements and dimensions, while missing things that are potentially too subjective or which relate to the wider built environment (Franklin 2001).

For architecture the discourse of housing quality is primarily, according to Franklin (2001), of style, aesthetics and capacity of the residential building to function and communicate to the beholder, to stimulate the mind and sharpen the perceptions. This viewpoint is probably built on the basis that architecture has been moving away to a wide extent from the provision of housing. Nevertheless, it still has a role in formulating the functional quality of housing particularly with the aid of sustainability and green design discourse. In that sense, it is seen to be predominantly objective and focusing more on the scale of the dwelling or the residential built form.

Urban design is probably one of the most influential and productive disciplines in the research of housing quality. Massive amount of studies on housing quality has emerged from this discipline. These include books, articles, guidelines and instructions about the definition of housing quality and attributes of good design. Examples include the work of Biddulph (2007), CABE (2007), Lewis (2005), Carmona (2001) and Goodchild (1997). The intrinsic message of this discipline is to look at housing not in terms of isolated units, as the case with architecture, but as a part of a wider context, having a relationship with elements of the surrounding environment. That is, according to Franklin: “to set housing within the wider discourse of the built environment, wherein people, buildings, spaces, roads, transport, uses, safety etc are each but one element of a larger whole… contributing to the overarching quality of the so-called public realm”

(Franklin 2001, p: 83). Although this approach has contributed towards broadening the scope of housing quality research to cover vital contextual aspects, the attempt to bring housing more centrally into debates about urban living has been criticised for omitting the consideration of the private realm of the individual dwelling and its liveability, concentrating instead on the assemblage of urban parts.

While disciplines involved in planning and design focus on the objective dimension of housing quality, those addressing the human dimension of housing adopt a subjective

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understanding of housing quality. The social discourse, for instance, argues that social reality exists in terms of the actions and thoughts, meanings and interpretations of individuals in the course of social interaction. This in turn is shaped by social processes and institutional forces, with which individuals and the groups to which they belong consciously or unconsciously engage. According to that, housing quality is defined as a matter of individuals’ perceptions and satisfactions with housing conditions depending on the sets of personal and social attributes they hold. An extensive amount of literature undertaken on the subject of housing quality has been generated from this discourse.

Examples include the works of Adriaanse (2007), Turkoglu (1997), Amerigo and Aragones (1990) and Grubber and Shelton (1986).

On the other hand, an approach rooted in psychology brings into the discourse of housing and place quality attributes of emotion, affect and self-involvement, of privacy and territory, thus giving greater depth to an understanding of the factors which lead to attachment to place. This helps explain the need to ‘personalise’ places in order to develop and sustain the sense that this place is one’s own and the role of place in complementing the image one has of oneself and one’s neighbourhood. The concept of place attachment links environmental psychology to people-environment studies which forms - in addition to environmental psychology and the humanistic, political and cultural branches of geography - other disciplines that have emerged in housing research with the discourse of people, place and space. The central concern of such disciplines is to account for the social and cultural factors which impact the relationship between people and their environments – particularly home environment, looking at the meaning, use and perception of place in the case of environmental psychology discipline whilst geography and sociology are more interested in the socio-political and economic production and consumption of space (Franklin 2001). Research on the meaning of housing and the quality of home presents an important example of this discourse. Several researchers including Gurney (1996), Smith (1994), Somerville (1992), Saunders (1989) and Tognoli (1987) have proposed a number of attributes or types of quality that lead to the perception of a house as a ‘home’. The list of attributes is long, but includes for example comfort, safety, autonomy, personalisation, independence, privacy and belonging. Researchers working on the meaning and quality

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of home believe that home is an advanced level of housing that has attained certain types of quality and therefore, looking at these sorts of quality is part of exploring housing quality.

Building on what has been presented, it can be noticed that there has been little consensus about the concepts and means of housing quality, due to the multiplicity of disciplines engaged in the subject of housing quality. Each discipline presents a valuable, but partial, viewpoint towards the comprehensive discourse of housing quality. Disciplines engaged with planning and design were found to be more objective focusing on the physical quality of the residential environment, while disciplines such as sociology and psychology were found to be primarily subjective. The scale or scope of interest was also found to vary among disciplines. While disciplines such as urban design and sociology seem to be more concerned with the wider contextual scale of neighbourhood and the surrounding environment, architecture and, to a certain extent psychology, seems to be more concerned with the scale of residential units. Politics, on the other hand, seems to be interested with issues related to housing supply and provision.