Navigating Housing Approaches: A Search for Convergences among Competing Ideas

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, researchers, policy-makers and planners have searched for housing solutions. Nowadays, housing projects are closely connected to global socio-spatial challenges, such as urban equity, vulnerability and resiliency. In the context of these urban challenges, housing emerges as a local, national and global concern influenced by shifting globalized economies and dynamic real estate markets. Thus, housing can no longer be understood as a one-dimensional problem that can be solved by providing more housing units through a top-down mechanism, nor can it be perceived as personal space distinct from national and global contexts. But most studies in housing focus on one issue and explore it from a single perspective, contributing to a complex, specialized and fragmented body of knowledge. This specialization and fragmentation result in the loss of the ability to see the whole picture from its parts. By responding to these issues, this paper aims to establish the importance of (1) becoming familiar with the varied levels of housing studies as well as their underlying premises and paradigmatic boundaries and (2) exploring convergences or expansions among these levels as an initial step in establishing possible paths for a research synthesis that can support new research agendas and action strategie.

Key words:

• Synthesis thinking
• Housing theory and research
• Paradigmatic boundaries
• Mechanism
• Process
• Experience

Notes

1. Some of the projects built under HOPE VI in the United States represent an exception because their success is attributed to the architectural design (Hanlon 2010).