Interdisciplinary team to transform understandings of home and wellbeing

Published On Mon 27 Jan 2014 by Grant Hill

Ways of enhancing individual and community wellbeing through the concept of home will be explored by an interdisciplinary team from across Scotland led by the Universities of Dundee and Stirling.

The 'Home not Housing: Engaging with wellbeing outcomes' programme has been funded by a £20,000 grant from the Scottish Universities Insight Institute. The programme will bring a range of different policy areas and groups together in a series of workshops to examine the links between home and wellbeing from both individual and community perspectives.

Different organisations, services, professionals and individuals conceive of home in quite different ways. While some sectors such as policy-makers refer to it simply in terms of housing, the focus of the new project will consider home as the place for personalised care or more abstract, emotional ideas of it being a place of security and family growth and development.

Home not Housing will reconsider the individual and environmental determinants of wellbeing and explore alternative housing solutions which could improve personal and associated socio-economic wellbeing, such as encouraging more people to live in town centres. It also aims to identify priorities for action to promote and embed improved outcomes through public policy, private developer practice, third sector action and academic research.

Professor Deborah Peel (University of Dundee) and Professor Douglas Robertson (University of Stirling) will lead the project, with support from a team comprising Professor James Mitchell (University of Edinburgh), Dr Beverley Searle (University of Dundee), Dr Thilo Kroll (Social Dimensions of Health Institute), Martin Higgins (NHS Lothian), Lisa Pattoni (Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services), and Rosemary Brotchie (Shelter Scotland).

Professor Jill Grant from Dalhousie University, Canada, an expert on a range of residential environments and the influence of new urbanism on planning and development practice, will provide advice based on international experiences.

Professor Peel said, 'Home plays a vital role in supporting personal, communal and national wellbeing and is a basic human requirement. The more one unpacks the idea of home the more layered one appreciates the concept is.

'We are delighted to have been successful in securing funding from the Institute and our aim is to position home at the centre of a cross-sector debate about how to secure human flourishing and community wellbeing.'

The Programme is particularly timely given the recent launch of the Housing and Wellbeing Commission, chaired by Robert Black, the former Auditor General of Scotland and the work undertaken by the Carnegie UK Trust on measuring wellbeing.

It also comes at a time of national debate over the Government's changes in housing benefit rules, commonly referred to as the "bedroom tax". This debate centres on the difference between houses, which address the basic human right to shelter, and homes, where people live and derive their sense of belonging from.

Professor Robertson added, 'We have already had expressions of interest to participate in our Ideas Workshops from individuals working in a range of different areas, such as health, homelessness, planning and development, housing, crime, architecture, child care and social work.

'This diversity reminds us how central notions of home are to a number of different public service areas. Through developing a shared and holistic appreciation of what constitutes the notion of home we could then utilise that to potentially transform our understandings of the fundamental inter-relationships between individual, home, neighbourhood and community wellbeing.'

Two Ideas Workshops for Home not Housing will be held in the spring and early summer, followed by a seminar focussing on policy making aspects in the Scottish Parliament in the latter half of 2014.

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