Home not Housing: Engaging with Wellbeing Outcomes
As a basic human requirement, the home plays a vital role in supporting personal, communal and national wellbeing. It offers a physical and psychological space for individuals to ground their lives, so is critical in improving our understanding individual and community needs and assets. Different sectors, public service providers, age groups and settled or transient communities, however, all conceive of home in quite different ways.
This programme puts the concept of ‘home’ at the centre of a set of Ideas Workshops to develop a common vocabulary around home and wellbeing. It engages a range of sectorial policy interests such as housing, planning, social work, healthcare and design to fully debate understandings of home that can help better inform policy objectives with respect to issues such as house-building, home-working, home-care and general place liveability.
Our approach to examining the varied understandings of home will be organised around elaborating meanings and relationships through multi-professional and inter-disciplinary Ideas Workshops focusing on both personal and environmental determinants of wellbeing, including:
- a reconsideration of the relationships of both personal and environmental factors in constructions of home through better appreciating individual perceptions of belonging, identity and personal autonomy;
- discussion of alternative housing solutions which could improve individual flourishing and associated socio-economic wellbeing; and
- identifying priorities for action to promote and embed these improved wellbeing outcomes through public policy, private developer practice, third sector action and academic research.