UQ-HAUS: Network for Housing and Urban Studies

UQ-HAUS:

The University of Queensland Housing and Urban Studies Network (otherwise known as UQ HAUS) brings together over 60 researchers from around UQ to better understand the key issues in contemporary urban and housing policy, practice and research.

Established in 2013, the network is uniquely interdisciplinary, incorporating expertise from the disciplines of architecture, criminology, economics, geography, media studies, planning, sociology and social work. Our work is theoretically informed and pays attention to questions of mobility, inequality, power, governance and change as they relate to urban and housing matters. But our research is also of significant community and policy interest and our researchers are critically engaged in public debates.

Our mission is threefold:

  1.  To foster research excellence among UQ’s housing and urban studies scholars by enhancing collaboration across disciplines; creating an intellectually stimulating environment to foster new ideas; and building the capacity of RHD students and early career researchers.
  2. To promote UQ’s expertise in urban and housing research in local national and international arenas. 
  3. To provide a vehicle for external engagement and knowledge transfer by fostering stronger linkages with governments, business and communities in order to address global and local housing and urban challenges.   

Our research strengths

1. Housing and Homelessness

Housing is core to our program of research. Our focus on housing is broad, and primarily focuses on the provision and nature of social housing, supportive housing, and innovative models of affordable housing that draw on non-traditional funding and delivery means, such as philanthropy, private sector and community organisations. Our housing research pays particular attention to the importance of housing in urban, rural and remote areas. Our scholars are leading the way with cutting edge research about the role, form and delivery of housing for Indigenous people. We are also playing a key role in examining the importance of housing throughout the life course, with an emphasis on older people, and the significance of housing form and delivery to enable people to age in place. Our program of housing research is complemented with a large body of empirical work investigating homelessness.

People who experience homelessness are diverse. The state of homelessness is nevertheless characterised by material, social and economic exclusion. Homelessness, moreover, is evidence of systematic failures in several, and invariably interacting, domains in society, these include: structural, policy, cultural, family and individual. These dynamic forces which create, perpetrate and act as barriers to exiting homelessness conceal complex questions about what actually constitutes the social problem. Research confirms our day-to-day experiences that home is a personal, subjective and highly emotive phenomena. Because our ideas and meanings of home are embedded within our past, our families, our social expectations and even ideal aspirations for the future, it is not helpful to present homelessness, presumably the antithesis to home, in a one dimensional, objective and straightforward manner. Both home and homeless are complex and contested parts of social life and the self.

Our research is driven to build an interdisciplinary and multi-method knowledge base about homelessness and housing. We are specifically interested in examining not only people’s lived experiences of homelessness and housing, but also the policy, resource, practice and individual factors that enable people to exit homelessness, to sustain housing and improve their lives.

Our research specialist in this field include (a-z):

  • Associate Professor Lynda Cheshire
  • Dr Kelly Greenop
  • Hon. Assoc. Prof. John Minnery
  • Dr Cameron Parsell Research Fellow
  • Dr Sonia Roitman
  • Professor Helen Ross
  • Dr Thomas Sigler
  • Dr Naomi Stead
  • Dr Peter Walters

Our PhD candidates in this field include:  

  • Angela Ballard
  • Johanna Brugman Alvarez
  • Anthony Kimpton
  • Jose Tomas