Modelling sustainable regional and remote Indigenous housing and maintenance (20/PRO/73237)

This project explores what sustainable benefit-generation from Indigenous housing would constitute and cost, in the context of fluctuating populations and climate change. It reviews representative regional/remote repair and maintenance approaches, models context-appropriate housing design, identifies opportunities for resilient locally-led employment, and adopts a lifecycle perspective for cost modelling

Will Indigenous housing be inhabitable, let alone well maintained, with climate change?

• We found that the word ‘sustainability’ does a lot of heavy lifting in policy documents. It is often simply invoked as the laudable pretext for meagreness and/or business as usual. It is a form of statecraft, letting us imagine a safe technofix with democratic qualities is perfectly possible.
• Programs which systematically maintain the amenity of public housing stock on a planned rather than reactive basis can reduce costs and improve the life cycle performance of housing. We are talking about potable water coming through taps that work, safe food preparation and storage facilities, bathing and laundering facilities, toilets that flush effluent away, electricity outlets that are not fire or shock risks, and the like.
• Lest this idea seem trifling, let me add that planned maintenance in public housing is rarely achieved, whether in cities or in remote areas. The norm is erratic provision; no money or time or imprimatur to build or refurbish with quality materials; building stock featuring poor original workmanship, product design and material choice; data that is collected via multiple systems that cannot and thus do not synchronise; wearisome unresponsiveness to tenant complaints; outsourcing building maintenance to find-starved community organisations which in turn subcontract trades which in turn self-certify they are meeting deficient regulations and safety standards; and presiding over the policy ensemble that this too-brief description captures, elite bargaining worlds which naturalise corner-cutting (aka ‘WHAT ABOUT A ROOF?’] when detailed care is the only bulwark against entropic defaults.
• Our noticing of exactly what planned maintenance requires and how it can be done is thus important to negate the arsenal of disclaimers that governments have at the ready for why the housing stock they manage is so often in poor condition.
• But is what is being maintained suitable for the new pressures of climate change? To test this, we used a typology of typical housing construction types derived from ethnographic data: photos of window types, insulation in attics, cladding, layouts, architectural plans, procurement documents. That is, we were able to create a composite three-bedroom house representing a typical model.
• We kaleidoscoped this standard three-bedroom house through different scenarios: what is it like, thermally speaking, and in terms of energy consumption, with four people in the house? Seven? Eleven? Sixteen?
• What about if it was in a tropical area, or an arid zone, or a hot/mild region – that is, where the bulk of Indigenous communities are located? Under current climate ranges? Or if the world heats by 1.5oC as in the most optimistic forecasts?
• What would happen if we ‘improved’ the houses to the climate zone recommendations as these are currently laid out in the Australian National Construction Code: would that make a difference?

366 simulations later, we find the houses are not currently able to offer residents thermal comfort and will not even if a massive program of retrofitting to convert all the legacy stock to national standards. That is, even if public housing programs were built to code and superintended properly—which they often are not—and even if they are noticed properly through caring maintenance regimes—which they often are not—they do not offer thermal protection now and certainly will not in the future, even if world impossibly held steady at 1.5o warming. Policy approaches (aka do A not B) are necessary but insufficient. And there is no plan for internal relocations in Australia. There is no plan. This is the way inequality works.

Air-conditioning systems might suffice for now, immediately raising the issue of energy consumption, so the next turn is to solar power. Here again, maintenance issues cannot be avoided. Dust, debris, water and moisture seepage, vermin, hail, wind and sun damage, rust, corrosion, and mineral leaks, exacerbate deterioration. And the optimistic narrative of wind and solar as heroes, enabling lives to be the same as they ever were, wilfully ignores how we already within expanding states of infrastructural collapse. Indigenous people are at the frontlines of this already.