Conference Papers
Session Ho3.3. Housing and its role in connecting generations – AHURI research
1. Paul Memmott: Crowding in Urban Indigenous Households
The use of housing space is one way in which younger and older generations interact and connect. While this often has positive features, crowding for urban Indigenous households can also have a detrimental effect on both young and older generations. For example, recent AHURI research (see Project 80368) shows, on one hand, that crowding may occur when there is no way of allocating sleeping space without placing a person in situations that compromise the need for respect among kin. On the other hand, crowding might also occur where householders have chosen a lifestyle of substance abuse and the overcrowding results from the failure of rule-governed behaviour.
In exploring the affect of crowding on Indigenous households of all generations, this presentation draws on a current AHURI research project that is critically examining existing models of household (over)crowding. The research provides a model of crowding that is based on the stress component of crowding rather than the density model. Household crowding stress is a culturally determined phenomenon whereas a density model is determined only by numbers of occupants arbitrarily allotted sleeping space in certain combinations of numbers and genders. In order to do this, a model of crowding will be developed and tested in urban settings, and in so doing uncover the salient dimensions and properties of Aboriginal crowding. Fieldwork will occur in selected capital cities and regional cities, and across public rental, private rental and home-owner households to see how different tenures impact on distinctly Aboriginal rule-governed behaviours and coping mechanisms.
Author bio: Prof Paul Memmott is a multi-disciplinary researcher (architect/anthropologist) and the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC). He has a half-time position in the School of Architecture and a half-time position in the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR). Paul Memmott's early studies were in architecture and painting. His dual research interests during the 1970s, centred on the emerging discipline of person-environment relations and the use of space and place by Aboriginal people, and led him into the social anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. His doctorate examined the Properties of Place of the Lardil people of the Wellesley Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. By the early 1980s Paul was professionally qualified and practicing as both an architect and anthropologist, and diverging into allied areas such as settlement planning, social planning, strategic and management planning, social issue analysis, Aboriginal social organisation and land tenure. Throughout his professional career, Dr Memmott has reapplied his knowledge into teaching and publishing papers and books. By the early 1990s, he held Honorary Reader status at the Departments of Architecture in both Queensland and Sydney Universities. The nature and success of the consulting practice is based on the key role Aboriginal people play as consultants and fieldwork operatives. Dr Memmott's interests encompass Aboriginal housing and settlement design, Aboriginal access to institutional architecture, Indigenous constructs of place and cultural heritage, vernacular architecture and Native Title, social planning in Indigenous communities, sustainable remote-area buildings and villages.
2. Louse Crabtree: Community Land Trusts and Indigenous Housing Outcomes
Improving Indigenous housing outcomes is a fundamental feature of supporting interactions within households and across generations. There is growing policy interest in how different forms of housing provision can provide positive housing outcomes without necessarily being restricted to current models of housing tenure. For example, recent AHURI research shows that Indigenous people are interested in forms of homeownership that allow them to hand their property on to children and are less interested in wealth accumulation (see Memmott et al., in Project 20501). As such, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) may offer a way of providing some of the key attributes of home ownership that is both affordable and consistent with Indigenous aspirations. CLTs are a model of community-based, perpetually affordable housing that has been operating in the United States for the past 30 years. The intention is to create affordable home ownership that remains affordable across re-sales and inheritance, and establishes clear and ongoing relationships between homeowners and their community. In this way it is provides housing outcomes that support interactions within and between households, and facilitates the interaction of younger and older generations. This research project investigates the potential of Community Land Trust models to enhance tenure choices for all Indigenous households in Australia. The project includes an examination of the international evidence of the use of CLTs by Indigenous people, and establishes a replicable consultative methodology for assessing the feasibility and interpretation of the model in a variety of local situations in urban, regional and remote areas of Australia.
Author bio: Dr Crabtree was awarded her PhD in Human Geography from Macquarie University in 2007 and has been with the Urban Research Centre since 2007. Her research focuses on the social, ecological and economic sustainability of community-driven housing developments in urban Australia; on the uptake of housing innovation in practice and policy; on complex adaptive systems theory in urban contexts; and, on the interfaces between sustainability, property rights, institutional design and democracy. She is interested in the translation of the community land trust model of land stewardship from the US and UK into an Australian context and in challenges encountered in scaling up or replicating innovation in housing design and delivery. Current research focuses on complex adaptive systems theory in housing, and on models of perpetually affordable housing, multifunctional land use and adaptive co-management.