An Australian housing conditions data infrastructure.

For the past two decades, researchers and policy makers have known very little about conditions within Australia's housing stock due to a lack of systematic and reliable data. In 2022, a collaboration of Australian universities and researchers commissioned a large survey of 22,550 private rental, social rental and homeowner households to build a data infrastructure on the household and demographic characteristics, housing quality and conditions in the Australian housing stock. This is the third and largest instalment in a national series of housing conditions data infrastructures.

Community response to COVID-19: The case of rental housing cooperatives in Melbourne, Australia and Choluteca, Honduras.

COVID-19 and its restrictions have had widely documented negative impacts for private and social rental sectors, internationally. Limited evidence exists about how the pandemic effects were experienced in alternative forms of renting such as housing cooperatives. Rental cooperatives, recognised for their principles of democratic control, education and training and concern for community, may offer different outcomes for members than more individually-oriented rental forms. This paper seeks to explore whether and how COVID-19 was responded to within cooperative rental housing models, and if the pandemic posed a challenge to cooperative principles. Using a social practices approach, the analysis first identifies cooperative members' formal and informal responses to COVID-19, and second explores the meaning of such activities in the pandemic context in Australia and Honduras cooperatives. The continuity of usual housing cooperative practices and pandemic measures were analysed via in-depth interviews with 15 residents. Findings indicate that cooperative responses acted to reduce negative impacts of the pandemic or to find effective solutions. Rental housing cooperative residents' lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, invite us to reflect on the role of housing cooperatives in the housing sector, the importance of collaborative housing models and the relevance of housing-based community resilience.

An Australian rental housing conditions research infrastructure.

Each year the proportion of Australians who rent their home increases and, for the first time in generations, there are now as many renters as outright homeowners. Researchers and policy makers, however, know very little about housing conditions within Australia's rental housing sector due to a lack of systematic, reliable data. In 2020, a collaboration of Australian universities commissioned a survey of tenant households to build a data infrastructure on the household and demographic characteristics, housing quality and conditions in the Australian rental sector. This data infrastructure was designed to be national (representative across all Australian States and Territories), and balanced across key population characteristics. The resultant Australian Rental Housing Conditions Dataset (ARHCD) is a publicly available data infrastructure for researchers and policy makers, providing a basis for national and international research.

The potential of nature-based solutions to deliver ecologically just cities: Lessons for research and urban planning from a systematic literature review.

Planning for and implementing multifunctional nature-based solutions can improve urban ecosystems' adaptation to climate change, foster urban resilience, and enable social and environmental innovation. There is, however, a knowledge gap in how to design and plan nature-based solutions in a nonanthropocentric manner that enhances co-benefits for humans and nonhuman living organisms. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review to explore how an ecological justice perspective can advance the understanding of nature-based solutions. We argue that ecological justice, which builds on the equitable distribution of environmental goods and bads, social-ecological interconnectedness, nature's agency and capabilities, and participation and inclusion in decision-making, provides a transformative framework for rethinking nature-based solutions in and for cities. A qualitative analysis of 121 peer-reviewed records shows a highly human-centred worldview for delivering nature-based solutions and a relationship to social justice with no direct reference to the dimensions of ecological justice. There is, however, an underlying recognition of the importance of nonhumans, ecosystem integrity and well-being, and a need to consider their needs and capacities through multispecies nature-based solutions design and planning. We conclude with a discussion of the critical aspects for designing and planning ecologically just cities through nature-based solutions and future research directions to further integrate these fields.

Analysing the impact of COVID-19 on urban transitions and urban-regional dynamics in Australia.

In this paper, we draw on insights from economic theory on urban growth, large shocks and spatial dynamics to assess COVID-19 flow-on effects and potential disruptive legacy in urban-regional dynamics. Urban dynamics in Australia are assessed at national, regional and intra-urban scales. Long-term and short-term urban dynamics are analysed against random growth, locational fundamentals and increasing returns theories of urban growth and adjustment. A focus in Australia and elsewhere is the potential effect of COVID-19 on where people want to live, enabled in part by technological connectivity that releases some workers from proximity to work constraints when choosing a home. Our results suggest that urbanisation trends and adjustments to shocks differ for capital cities and noncapital cities. At the inter-regional migration level, Australia's largest urban system, Sydney, is characterised by a cointegration relationship between outmigration and Sydney property prices relative to other housing markets. At finer spatial scales, COVID-19 had a negative impact on house prices within Sydney and may, for some micro-geographies and/or towns and regional centres, lead to significant change. However, typically this effect on houses (not units) began to dissipate in the period June-November 2020, when also controlling for housing policy pre- and post-COVID-19.