Dr David Haigh

The pairing of community and sustainable development has dominated the international policy agenda for at least three decades with its assertion that the imperatives of capital accumulation can be balanced for the needs of social reproduction. As a framework of state strategy, the concept of sustainable communities has come to define a particular mode of governance in which the responsibility for ameliorating the impact of unfettered growth is devolved to place-based voluntary and community associations. The community provides a model of sustainability in which the economics of collective consumption and the politics of community action can be engaged in the planning and stewardship of local development. The strategies of sustainable communities that result combine the market zeal of spatial liberalism with themes of redistributive justice and equality, finding in the concept of community both a model of resilience and self-reliance and conversely a dynamic of mutual aid and co-operation.

The growing number of older adults experiencing homelessness has attracted increasing policy concern, yet there remains limited understanding of how homelessness and ageing intersect, and how supported housing is experienced in later life. This thesis addresses this gap by placing older adults with histories of homelessness at the centre of analysis, examining how supported housing functions as a site of care, home, and social intervention, and under what conditions it promotes security, autonomy, dignity, and wellbeing. Adopting an interpretivist and constructivist epistemological stance, the study employs a qualitative multiple case study design involving four supported housing schemes in Leeds, England. Secondary quantitative data are combined with in-depth qualitative interviews with residents, housing managers, and support staff. This approach enables a life-course and housing pathways perspective, illuminating how cumulative disadvantage, intersecting vulnerabilities, and structural inequalities shape both pathways into homelessness and experiences of supported housing in later life. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis to capture shared patterns while remaining sensitive to contextual variation. The findings demonstrate that supported housing offers a critical rupture from homelessness by providing material stability and relational security, enabling residents to re-establish a sense of home and ontological security. However, experiences of wellbeing and independence were shown to be relationally and biographically produced rather than guaranteed outcomes of housing provision. Residents actively interpreted, negotiated, and at times resisted institutional routines, challenging portrayals of older homeless adults as passive recipients of care. The study further reveals that the effectiveness of supported housing is contingent upon workforce stability, staffing levels, and access to external health and social care services, highlighting persistent tensions between support, autonomy, and institutional constraint. By integrating perspectives from ageing studies, homelessness research, and relational care theory, the thesis reframes supported housing as a relational and institutional infrastructure embedded within wider, and often fragmented, systems of care. It advances theoretical understanding of ageing and homelessness, provides original empirical evidence on an under-researched population, and offers policy-relevant insights into how person-centred, flexible, and integrated approaches can enhance inclusion, wellbeing, and dignity for older adults with complex needs. The thesis concludes that supported housing can play a vital role in addressing homelessness in later life, but only when it is adequately resourced, relationally grounded, and embedded within broader health and social care systems.

This thesis examines how the social, economic and cultural impacts of homesteading schemes in the United Kingdom and Italy can be evaluated through a more holistic ROI/SROI framework. Existing regeneration appraisal systems have frequently privileged measurable financial returns, transaction completion and market indicators while under-representing lived housing experience, household burden, relational value and long-term occupation. Contemporary housing and planning systems have increasingly been shaped by financialised and rentier logics that prioritise exchange value and investment performance over sustained habitation and embedded social value. In response, the research developed a rule-governed, multi-actor and multi-timescale valuation framework designed to make both tangible and intangible forms of regeneration value visible and comparable. The study combined documentary analysis, comparative homesteading scheme taxonomy construction, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, neighbourhood observation, controlled modelling and stress testing. It identified evaluative gaps within homesteading schemes, modelled household burdens and benefits, analysed labour substitution through sweat equity, evaluated occupancy-based local circulation effects and explored the practical limits of schemes under varying economic and household conditions. The findings demonstrated that homesteading schemes could not be understood as simple asset-transfer policies. Instead, they redistributed time, labour, risk and value across households, communities and local authorities. Purchase price alone proved to be a poor indicator of affordability or regenerative success. Financial viability depended upon the interaction between property condition, refurbishment requirements, labour capacity, governance structures and occupancy patterns. Sweat equity reduced contractor expenditure and improved modelled viability within bounded limits, but transferred part of that cost into household time, responsibility, uncertainty and risk exposure. Sustained occupation was also shown to be important in translating restored property into recurring local economic and community-facing value. The thesis makes three related contributions. Methodologically, it develops a rule-governed valuation architecture capable of integrating financial, social, non-market and qualitative forms of evidence while retaining actor boundaries, temporal distinctions and controls against double counting. Conceptually, it extends understandings of home by demonstrating that risk, burden and responsibility can form part of the process through which home is made in repair-led regeneration, including what the thesis identifies as the domestication of regeneration risk. Professionally, the framework provides a transferable architecture that can be recalibrated for other forms of vacancy recovery, heritage rehabilitation, affordable housing and repair-led regeneration. Together, these contributions demonstrate that regeneration value is generated and distributed through the interaction of capital, labour, risk, dwelling condition and sustained use, rather than being adequately represented by property value or a single return ratio alone.

This paper examines a residential writing retreat for final year human geography and planning students held in a youth hostel in North Yorkshire, considering how it is experienced by students. This is a curriculum innovation for the dissertation module that combines aspects of geography fieldtrip and writing workshop to support the dissertation writing process and build community. Drawing on the concept of ‘the slow university’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016; O’Neill, 2014) where the ‘slowing down’ and ‘stripping away’ of the usual structures and patterns of teaching and learning create a critical and creative space for thinking and writing, we explore whether and how the Malham retreat makes space for writing. The study is also informed by our spatial approach to the processes and content of research and teaching as geographers (Massey, 2005). Qualitative focus group evidence was gathered on the student and staff experience and used to evaluate the field trip (Breen, 2006; Krueger & Casey, 2009; Stewart & Shamdasani, 2015). This paper presents the results of this evaluation and it is argued that the retreat made space for writing in three ways: 1. The space of countryside, nature and youth hostel. 2. The formal and informal learning spaces staff and students constructed during the retreat 3. ‘Head space’- the social, psychological and emotional room the retreat made for staff and students. This model of residential writing retreat could be transferable to dissertation and other modules involving a substantive writing project on all kinds of undergraduate courses.