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Current work of the JRF Housing and Neighbourhoods committee (HANC)

We have five current R&D programmes:

1. Understanding housing markets (including the segmentation of communities)
2. Transforming the prospects of places (including work on identity and attachment to place)
3. Dynamics of poverty and place
4. Housing and neighbourhoods monitor
5. The social value of public spaces

We are not currently seeking any new proposals on these topic areas.

1. Understanding housing markets

This programme is seeking to improve our understanding of housing markets in order to identify policy interventions to counter market failure.
The three main themes are:

• social segmentation and mixed integrated communities - assessing what helps or hinders communities to stay mixed in terms of income and tenure
• predicting market change - understanding housing market dynamics in order to develop frameworks to inform useful interventions
• housing markets and ethnicity – exploring the implications of the changing housing aspirations of different ethnic groups.

The Foundation has recently published Mixed communities: success and sustainability pulling together our work on mixed communities.

2. Transforming the prospects of places

There have been successive waves of regeneration seeking to address the needs of disadvantaged places and communities, but it is not always clear that they have succeeded.

This raises hard questions about what can be done to address or manage decline and what the outlook is for deprived communities.
This programme aims to understand more about:

• the underlying forces operating to transform places, be they economic, social or environmental, and to explain the different levels on which they operate, from local to transnational
• the factors and interventions designed to transform places that are suffering from decline or to manage that decline, in order to improve the prospects of both places and the people using these places (as residents, workers, etc)
• what makes a difference to place trajectories.

3. Dynamics of Poverty and Place

There has been a considerable body of work which has examined the idea of ‘neighbourhood effects’ and how living in disadvantaged areas can compound people’s experiences of poverty. This new programme will build on this research to explore the interaction between poverty and place and relationships between where people live and the opportunities/constraints they face in their lives.

The programme seeks to:

• develop our understanding of the lived experience of people over time in different areas and facing different issues of disadvantage, identifying the issues of importance to individuals, unconstrained by particular policy approaches;
• develop our understanding of the varying impact of different regeneration policy interventions focusing on areas or individuals; and
• inform policy debates about what is needed over the longer term in terms of relevant interventions focusing on either people or place.

4. Housing and Neighbourhoods Monitor

The Housing and Neighbourhoods Monitor sets out to provide an assessment of key national trends in housing and neighbourhoods and to assess Government performance against targets set for related areas of policy and practice, drawing on a range of statistical data that have been used to develop a headline set of key indicators.

A UK wide monitor was published in 2006. Currently work is underway to scope the feasibility of developing Monitors in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

5. Social value of public spaces

This programme examined how people use public spaces. Its aim was to find out how far public spaces are shared places, and the implications this has for neighbourhoods and for the planning, design and management of public spaces.

Our research has focused on:

• how people understand and perceive public spaces
• how people use these spaces in different geographic and social contexts
• to what extent these places offer opportunities for positive contact between different cultures and lifestyles and to what extent they are hostages to space domination by some groups
• how local tensions and imbalances play out in public spaces
• how stakeholders might be able to respond.

Research in this area is largely completed and a summary of the findings: The social value of public spaces, can be found on our new mini website http://www.jrf.org.uk/public-spaces/ along with a series of photos and the full list of publications from the programme.

We are not currently seeking any new proposals on these topic areas.

Click on the following link for a list of our current work programmes, projects funded under open calls, and policy and practice development work (Word, 325KB).