The Team
The research is being undertaken by a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, cross-organisational team lead by CRESA.
Research team members
Kay Saville-Smith — Programme Leader
Dr Kay Saville-Smith is a sociologist and director of the Centre for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment – CRESA. Kay has undertaken extensive research into housing markets, housing demand, retirement villages, accessible housing, sustainable housing, the residential building industry and neighbourhood built environments. In addition to this current programme she has led a number of public good science funded programmes or components, including: Finding the Best Fit – Housing, Downsizing and Older People in a changing Society – a three year research programme assessing the practicalities of downsizing and the conditions which determine successful transitions; Resilient Communities – Doing Better in Bad Times – a two year programme aimed at helping older people and their communities to be more resilient during adverse natural events and recover better after them; Good Homes – a five-year programme on older people’s repairs and maintenance needs in the context of ageing in place; the Sustainable Neighbourhoods Stream for BEACON Consortium; and the social science component of the Building Energy End-use Study (BEES) undertaken by BRANZ. She is also a trustee for the Marlborough Sustainable Housing Trust.
Prof Larry Murphy
Laurence Murphy is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Environment and was formerly Professor of Property in the University of Auckland Business School. He has published widely on property topics including home-ownership, social rental housing, mortgage securitisation, office development, the institutional evolution of listed property trusts, finance capital, and entrepreneurial urban governance. In 2014, he was the Helen Cam Visiting Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, and held a visiting professorship at Trinity College Dublin in 2009. In 2010, he was appointed Acting-Director of “Transforming Auckland: Institutional, Technological and Cultural Innovations for Sustainable Cities”, one of three Thematic Research Initiatives (TRI) established by the University of Auckland.
Prof Iain White
Iain White is Professor of Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Prior to this he was the Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology at the University of Manchester, UK. He specialises in subjects related to the environment, geography and town planning where he has developed and taught on Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and New Zealand Planning Institute (NZPI) accredited programmes. His research focuses upon the interface of the natural and built environments and he has written widely in this field. This work has been published in multiple disciplinary areas such as geography, town planning, urban studies and civil engineering. He has recently published Environmental Planning in Context (2015) with Palgrave and is also the author of Water and the City (2010) published by Routledge. His forthcoming (2018) edited book is The Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning and Sustainability, also by Routledge with Davoudi, S., Blanco, H., and Cowell, R.
Gauri Nandekar
Gauri Nandedkar completed her PhD thesis in May 2017 at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Her thesis explored the policy translation of Millennium Development Goal 3 (to promote gender equality and empower women) from a global aspiration into a locally-implemented life-skills education programme for adolescent girls in rural Maharashtra, India. Gauri drew on several theoretical and analytical frameworks, including Third World Feminism and Women, Culture and Development, to develop a framework that allowed her to undertake a qualitative thematic analysis of notions such as citizenship, well-being and empowerment, volunteerism and post-neoliberalism. Her work is interdisciplinary and contributes to critical policy studies, feminist studies, and development studies. Currently, Gauri is working at the University of Waikato as a Research Associate in the Environmental Planning Programme on National Science Challenge 11: ‘Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities’, as well as a Teaching Fellow in the Political Science and Public Policy Programme.
Patrick Barrett
Dr Patrick Barrett Is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato where he researches and teaches on a variety of topics related to public policy in New Zealand. Patrick has written widely on questions of security and wellbeing as they relate to population ageing, frailty and disability in old age, ‘ageing-in-place’, and family care. This includes co-authoring two books on ageing and social care, ‘The Age of Supported Independence: Voices of In-home Care’ and ‘Family care and social capital: Transitions in informal care’. His current research interests include family care and population ageing; disaster politics, depoliticisation and the policy process; and narrative policy analysis.
Dr Pip Wallace
Pip Wallace is the Convenor of the Environmental Planning programme at the University of Waikato and specialises in resource management law and practice. Pip’s research has a focus on examining the intersections between natural systems and regulatory frameworks and the implications of this for law and planning.
Francesca Dodd-Parr
Francesca Dodd-Parr is a PhD student at the University of Waikato working on research into decision-making in the housing policy space at a local government level. Her PhD is part of National Science Challenge 11, Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities for New Zealand.
Dr Fiona Cram
Dr Fiona Cram is of Ngati Pahauwera descent and has a PhD in social and developmental psychology from the University of Otago. She has lectured in Social Psychology and has also been a senior research fellow at the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Education, at the University of Auckland. In 2003 Fiona established Katoa Ltd – a Maori indigenous research organisation that undertakes Kaupapa Maori (by Maori, for Maori) research and evaluation, as well as offering a range of research and evaluation training. Fiona’s research interests are wide-ranging including Maori health, justice and education.
Dr Bev James
Dr Bev James has extensive experience in social research and evaluation, policy analysis, service design and working with community groups to develop evidence-based tools and solutions. After working as a senior lecturer, holding management and policy positions in the public service and in local government, she has been director of Public Policy & Research since 1998. Bev has been involved in a number of public good science programmes looking at housing downsizing, repairs and maintenance, community resilience and residential movement. Bev has led two monitoring projects on the Retirement Villages Act for the Commission for Financial Capability. Bev has extensive experience in working with and supporting community based research initiatives. Key areas of research are: housing; ageing society; community resilience and development and public participation in resource management.
Prof Karen Witten
Karen is the Professor of Public Health at the SHORE & Whariki Research Centre at Massey University in Auckland. She is a geographer and psychologist with an interest in urban neighbourhoods and how their design and infrastructure influences the social relationships, transport choices and well-being of residents. Recent and current studies include: investigating how the physical and social neighbourhood environment influences the physical activity behaviours of children and adults; children’s experience and use of diverse urban neighbourhoods; co-designing public space with children; transport mode use and health impacts of a street re-design intervention; residential choice and community formation in various urban development models. Karen completed her PhD at the University of Auckland in 2004.
Dr Simon Opit
Simon is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the SHORE & Whariki Research Centre at Massey University in Auckland. He completed his PhD at The University of Auckland in 2017. His thesis applied Q methodology within a mixed-methods approach to investigate the construction of young people’s housing preferences and their attitudes towards urban intensification. Simon’s current research interests are in affordable housing preservation and the assemblage of urban governance and decision-making micropolitics.
Dr Jennifer Joynt
Dr Jennifer Joynt is an urban researcher at RIMU, Auckland Council. Previously she worked for research centres at the University of West of England and the University of Bath in the UK, as well as private planning consultancies in both the UK and NZ. Jennifer is a specialist in environmental planning, with a focus on socio-technical research into housing demand, sustainable planning and infrastructure, climate change adaptation of the built environment and noise mitigation.
Since 2015 she has worked as an urban researcher for Auckland council, providing research evidence to underpin policy designed to address some of the most pressing issues facing Auckland. Her projects include: Renting in Auckland; a project that explored the impacts and causes of the housing crisis through the perspective of tenants, landlords and property managers; Pacific People and Housing in Auckland: A stocktake of issues, experiences and initiatives; social impact assessment evaluation for some of the major infrastructure programmes in Auckland and the research evidence that underpinned Council’s low carbon ‘Living Lightly’ programme. Jennifer has also published several articles and presented her work at a number of international conferences and sits on a number of committees including: Human Participant Research Ethics Committee (HPEC) Maori responsiveness committee (MRP- Te RIMU Tutahi) Housing First Auckland evaluation reference group.
For the BBHTC programme Jennifer is exploring why the supply of affordable housing in New Zealand is currently not matching expectations based on the amount of land that has been enabled and consented for development. The project is informed by interviews with both private developers and community housing providers.
Craig Fredrickson
Craig Fredrickson is a Researcher in the Land Use and Infrastructure Research team of Auckland Council’s Research and Evaluation Unit. Craig specialises in planning, property and ownership, land use, urban form, and built environment related research, with a focus on spatial analysis. His recent work has included research into understanding the potential effects of multi-owned properties on redevelopment, land assembly of residential properties, and modelling and analysis of planning rules measuring residential and business development potential (Capacity for Growth studies).
Craig’s professional interests include the increasing the use of spatial analysis in decision making and research; historical trends in the development of in Auckland’s urban area; and the effects of property topology and ownership on urban change and development. With a BSc (Earth Science) and a PGDip in Planning, Craig has worked at both local and regional councils in the Auckland region in a variety of roles since 2001.
Tim Bates
Tim is the Principal at Legal Vision, a niche construction law firm. Tim has an LLB(Hons) from Auckland University and was admitted to the bar in 1992. He has 25 years’ experience and has practised primarily in New Zealand as well the United Kingdom.
Tim has appeared extensively in the Courts of New Zealand and has significant experience in alternative disputes resolution.
Tim is the monthly columnist in the Master Builder’s publication, Building Today which he has been writing in for the last 14 years. He has presented seminar papers in construction law themed conferences for the last 9 years.
Tim is known and understood to be an expert in construction law matters by his colleagues within the profession as well as parties in the construction industry. He has been advising parties involved in leaky building litigation since 2003. This work in particular has meant his legal expertise naturally extended into unit titles advice to bodies corporate.
Dr Fleur Palmer
Dr Fleur Palmer (Te Rarawa/Te Aupouri) Fleur Palmer is a registered Architect and Associate Professor of Spatial Design at Auckland University of Technology. Māori housing, community based architecture, territorial legislation, community facilitation, social justice, ethics, sustainability and emergent technologies form the principle components to her practice. Fleur’s gold medal award winning Ph.D research and architectural practice is focused on indigenous issues, and considers the colonial legacy of segregation and exclusion of Māori from urban centres and the impact of discriminatory legislative policies which have limited economic development and the support of sustainable communities on Māori land.
Dr Alice Chang-Richards
Alice is a Lecturer with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland. She is also a visiting scholar at Purdue University (Construction Engineering and Management SPARK Laboratory) and at University of Colorado, Boulder (Department of Civil Engineering) under the New Zealand James and Hazel Lord Fellowship. Before taking on the lectureship, Alice was a postdoctoral research associate/fellow at the University of Auckland from 2011 to 2013. Her main research interests include disaster risk reduction, disaster simulation, construction informatics and technology, offsite construction, sustainable and smart housing.
Wei Zhang
Ms ZHANG Wei studied for her Bachelor of Medicine at Peking University Health Science Centre (People’s Republic of China), then Master of Public Policy at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Her research focused on health services for Chinese immigrants and the barriers they found. She has recently stated her PhD study at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and is looking for housing experiences of Chinese immigrants in New Zealand, with the scholarship from the BBHTC.
Ruth Fraser
Ruth Fraser is of Ngai Tahu descent and has trained in social policy and law. She has an LLB (Hons). She has been employed as a researcher at CRESA since October 1995. Ruth’s main interests are in the areas of the rental market, resource management, household energy use, and community development. She has extensive experience in face-to-face interviews and focus groups with a range of people and in data management and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative information. She has undertaken database design, quality control and analysis of social science data for a range of housing projects including Household End-use Energy Project (HEEP) and the 2010 and 2015 National House Condition Surveys under taken with BRANZ. She has undertaken a range of surveys with older people and agencies/organisations working with older people as part of the Finding the Best Fit, Good Homes and Resilient Communities programmes.
Nina Saville-Smith
Having worked with CRESA over many years, Nina has considerable training and experience in face-to-face interviewing with a wide range of stakeholders. She has excellent qualitative and document analysis skills and assists with a variety of research tasks at CRESA, including support at focus groups, literature and file reviews, qualitative data analysis. Nina is also completing her studies in the treatment of animals.