The PhD project continued the exploration of sustainability that was developed in the Honours project, developing my concern with the security of housing and land tenure into an analysis of affordable, sustainable, community-oriented housing in urban areas. The research rests on a base of recent work by Chantal Mouffe on citizenship and Bonnie Honig on the home, who interpret these as porous, embedded and politically charged phenomena. Principles of new ecology such as diversity and flexibility as key components of sustainability were utilised in assessing the sustainability of housing developments and delivery systems. Parallels can be seen between these interpretations and housing practices such as cohousing, ecovillage development, community housing and co-operative housing, which focus on the social and ecological implications and embeddedness of housing type and seek to broaden the theory and practice of housing provision and development.
The project mapped current Australian efforts to generate housing that intertwines social, ecological and economic well-being, and explored the spaces and processes for maximising the potential and support for such housing projects within the community, private and public sectors. It combined refereed journal articles, personal accounts of sustainable housing activism in Sydney and larger framing chapters into a coherent body of work.
Selected examiners’ comments
There is much to commend in this thesis. The author has demonstrated a detailed knowledge of sustainable housing development and has used her experience as an activist to explore some of the practical issues that can impede the implementation of sustainable housing within Australia…The discussion of what is meant by sustainability was strong and I liked the notion that sustainability is connected both to technological innovations alongside social and political change.
This dissertation makes a strong theoretical contribution and the author should be highly commended for her breadth of reading and effort at this intellectual level…I particularly enjoyed the rich connections that the author has drawn between ideas from fields as diverse as economics, ecology and citizenship, on the one side, and housing design, tenure and affordability, and notions of the meaning of home and place, on the other.
The PhD was completed in 2006 and awarded in 2007. Here it is in all its glory.
crabtree-phd-2006 (7.58 Mb, 238 pages)
Be sure to acknowledge the work if you use it:
Crabtree L (2006) Messy humans, dirty economies and leaky houses: citizenship, sustainable livelihoods and housing in Australia. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University, Sydney.
