Welcome to the Getting Decisions for Homes and Cities that Work research programme

When it comes to the current housing crisis – an awful lot of blaming has gone on. Review after review has blamed some part of the building industry, the regulatory sector, councils and even householders. An array of ‘silver bullets’ – everything from parallel importing, to de-regulating or regulating more, to pre-fab, to releasing urban boundaries and more – have been promoted to make our homes, towns and cities better. Those bullets keep getting fired but many seem to just add costs on to households, ratepayers, industry, the community sector and public agencies.

This 3-year research programme says let’s stop looking for the mythical ‘silver bullets’. Let’s stop turning the cycle of blame.

Instead, let’s take a realist approach which recognises that:

• there are lots of actors and decisions that impact on our homes, towns and cities.
• its not always clear who some actors are and how much impact they have
• we don’t always understand the logics of the decisions made.

So lets focus on understanding and changing the way different actors related to each other to help us get better homes, towns and cities.