Robustness as resilience, mobility and stability: an actor-network approach to identifying typologies of Australian pop-up shelters
Date
2019
Authors
London, K.
Pablo, Z.
Gu, N.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Conference paper
Citation
CIB World Building Congress 2019: Constructing Smart Cities, 2019, pp.1-10
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
The 22nd CIB World Building Congress (CIB 2019) (17 Jun 2019 - 21 Jun 2019 : Hong Kong, China)
Abstract
The escalation of homelessness is a growing concern in Australia. The number of homeless people increased by 14,000 between 2011 and 2016, and in the state of New South Wales the percentage of homeless persons increased by 27 percent. Root causes include economic factors like the high cost of housing as well as social factors like domestic violence and family breakdown. A number of long-term strategies have thus been mobilised to address this persistent and multifaceted issue. In New South Wales, these strategies include increased investments in homelessness services and programs as well as policies to support affordable rental and social housing, strengthen family connections and address safety from violence.
Because homelessness has reached crisis levels in key cities, a few short-term solutions have also emerged. One example is the use of pop-up shelters in buildings awaiting development or on unused government land, to provide short-term affordable accommodations to specific groups. While there are early reports about the effectiveness of these pop-ups, their benefits have also been questioned. Some stakeholders raised concerns about the wisdom of investing in short-term solutions. Other groups have also been wary of the “pop down”, when residents have to be forced to leave these settlements. A key question that we wish to address, then, is whether there are ways to make these pop-ups more robust,to mitigate some concerns about their precariousness. We use actor-network theory and qualitative techniques to examine four pop-up shelter networks in Australia. Our findings suggest that there are at least four typologies of pop-ups, with varying degrees of robustness: basic pop-ups which are readily replicable, seeking to providing short-term accommodations in a single location; resilient ones which can pop down then pop-up again in more adaptable forms; mobile pop-ups that can be built then dismantled across geographical spaces and finally stable pop-ups that can persist, even for multi-year periods, thus interrogating assumptions that pop-ups must always be highly contingent. In the course of our analysis, we identify human actors (developers, property owners, housing service providers) and non-human actors (buildings, transportable panels, transportable houses) that need to be enrolled to support such ongoing settlement programs. We also theorise on how less robust networks can be made more robust through the use of digital technologies such as dynamic digital town planning models and collaborative technologies such as Hyve 3D.