Housing Industry Transitions: An Urban Living Lab in Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT

Urban housing experiments test real-world applications of sustainable, liveable, affordable and innovative developments. However, there is limited evidence of how they influence the wider building regime through the facilitation of new shared experiences, networks and relations. This paper explores the influence of a government-led demonstration project in Melbourne, Australia. Interviews with 14 key industry stakeholders reveal that, while some innovations had limited impact on practice, others resulted in take-up. The case adds to previous studies on the contested nature of sustainable building experiments and develops empirical insights on how such developments shape and are shaped by industry low carbon transitions.

城市住宅实验测试可持续、宜居、可负担和创新发展的现实应用. 然而，通过促进新的共同经验、网络和关系，它们如何影响更广泛的建筑制度的证据有限. 本文探讨了澳大利亚墨尔本政府主导的示范项目的影响. 对14个主要行业利益相关者的采访显示，虽然一些创新对实践的影响有限，但其他创新导致了接受. 该案例补充了以往关于可持续建筑实验的争议性研究，并发展了关于此类发展如何形成以及如何由工业低碳转型形成的经验见解.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban living lab
• urban transitions
• stakeholders
• Melbourne
• the Nicholson
• housing

Acknowledgments

This paper is drawn from the research for “The Nicholson: Post Occupancy Evaluation Research Project”, carried out by a multi-discipline team of researchers from RMIT University for Places Victoria, VicHealth and Moreland City Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper, we define the building regime as those key actors who produce buildings and through their practices and development of formal and informal rules, routines and norms create what we term the “building industry regime”. Specifically, we focus on the key actors involved in the delivery of essentially minimum standard medium-higher density housing in Australia including, but not limited to, developers, architects, designers, financial organisations, valuers and property managers. While we recognise that the building industry and the actors within this industry are not homogenous, within our definition of building regime applied within the paper they are seen to reproduce the same sort of practices collectively (Horne 2018). The alternative to these key actors in the regime are those of the niche emerging sustainable and affordable housing outcomes such as through the Nightingale Housing model (Doyon and Moore 2019).

2. Salt and pepper design is where there is a mix of public or affordable and private dwellings scattered throughout the same building.