Living with Urban Heat: Becoming Climate-Ready in Social Housing

Living_with_Urban_Heat

This project aims to address liveability in rapidly warming cities by focusing on the role that social practice plays in complementing technical and infrastructural cooling solutions. This project expects to generate new knowledge about equitable heat adaptive practices. It does so by working with culturally diverse social housing residents using an innovative blend of participatory action research and transition design. Expected outcomes of this project include practical, low-cost cooling strategies that can be implemented now, along with increased social input into planning for the hotter urban future. This should provide significant benefits, such as enhanced civic capacity to generate society-wide climate readiness. The project is a collaboration with social housing providers Bridge Housing , Link-Wentworth, and St. George Community Housing and advocacy organizations Faith Housing Alliance and UCA-Parramatta Nepean Presbytery and the communities they serve.

Researcher(s): Stephen Healy, Abby Mellick Lopes, Katherine Gibson, Cameron Tonkinwise, Louise Crabtree-Hayes, Sebastian Pfautsch and Emma Power with Helen Armstrong (emeritus)

Funding: $295,713

Period: 2023-2026

Project website: Coolingthecommons (opens in a new window)

Projects

Research at ICS

People at ICS

Contact ICS

Contact ICS

The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
The Institute for Culture and Society acknowledges the Dharug, Eora, Dharawal (also referred to as Tharawal)
and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.