Participatory Action Research in Affordable Housing Partnerships: Collaborative Rationality, or Sleeping with the Growth Machine?

Abstract

Participatory Action Research (PAR) emphasizes working with communities to develop questions that are relevant to their needs, then co-generating research to answer these questions. Typically, PAR focuses on empowering marginalized communities. Transforming Housing is a community–university collaborative partnership based in Melbourne Australia, with researchers asking developers, government, investors and community housing providers what they need to know in order to provide more and better affordable housing, then collectively generating ideas. After three years, this article takes a reflective practice lens to examine both possibilities and pitfalls arising from PAR with the rich and powerful. The article concludes that collaborate research on affordable housing can lead to outcomes intellectually honest, sustainable beyond political cycles and capable of effecting positive change at both the local and the metropolitan scales. However, this form of collaborative research can be easily derailed by politics, and does not address underlying structural inequalities.

Keywords:

• Affordable housing
• Participatory Action Research
• collaborative planning
• Community–University Partnerships
• Melbourne

Acknowledgements

Thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper is based on a presentation to the Australian and New Zealand Association of Planning Schools in September 2015.