Overview

This interdisciplinary project between architects and medical anthropologists uses a novel participatory action research (PAR) method – room boxing – to explore how Community-Led Housing (CLH) in London may improve the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people (CYP). Working with CYP and their families, the project investigates how lived experiences of home influence mental health, and empowers participants to shape their environments. The research responds to UCL’s strategic priorities by trialling creative, collaborative approaches to evaluating early interventions in mental health and wellbeing.

Housing insecurity refers to the experience of multiple involuntary moves and the lack of affordable, stable, high-quality and healthful places to call home. Concern is increasing over the health impacts of housing insecurity, particularly for CYP. However, pathways linking housing insecurity and CYP mental health are complex and poorly understood. Urgent evidence is needed on how interventions aimed at improving housing insecurity can support CYP mental health and wellbeing.

Community-Led Housing

Community-Led Housing (CLH) is considered an optimal way of overcoming housing insecurity and the sector is growing in London in response to the capital's urgent housing crisis. Community-Led Housing is an umbrella term for a range of models including community land trusts, cohousing, cooperatives, self-help and self-build housing. A recent systematic review demonstrates that Community-Led Housing has positive impacts on individual primary health outcomes and neighbourhood level factors which impact health. However, it also highlights the lack of research on Community-Led Housing's impact on the health of children and young people, and on health inequalities. There are gaps in evidence to support the hypothesis that Community-Led Housing, as an early, complex, community-based intervention, improves children and young people's mental health and wellbeing.

Given that 'home' is a phenomenon of individual lived experience, in addition to more tangible dimensions of housing that may affect mental health – such as housing features, access to green space or bricks and mortar features – less tangible dimensions, including social, psychological and cultural values of home and place have also been recognised as important factors affecting mental health outcomes. However, good quality qualitative data that clarifies exactly what these less tangible dimensions of lived experience are in the context of children and young people living in Community-Led Housing in London does not currently exist. Novel approaches are needed.

The project will fill these gaps by working directly with 10 children and young people who live in Community-Led Housing in London to understand, through the novel participatory action research technique of crafting room boxes of homes and place, factors that shape children and young people's mental health and wellbeing. Making room boxes has been shown to elicit deep, tacit, embodied knowledge and experience, allowing the research team to capture and transfer less tangible knowledge about home that is often difficult to express explicitly, and thus often left out of recommendations.

Project leads

External collaborators

  • Dr Catja de Haas – Founding Director, Catja de Haas Architects
  • Levent Kerimol – Director, Community Led Housing London

The project is funded by UCL's Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing through the Early Career Researchers (Catalyst Grant) funding call.

Image: The Giant Dolls’ House Project Exhibition at Museum of Goa (MOG) in March 2017, photo by Catja de Hasse