Participatory Action Research on Affordable Housing Partnerships: Collaborative Rationality or Sleeping with the Growth Machine?

Transforming Housing is a university-community research partnership led by the University of Melbourne (Whitzman, 2015a). Its aim is to increase both the quantity and quality of affordable housing in Metropolitan Melbourne. The composition of this partnership – state and local government, private developers, community housing providers, and investors – are not the ‘usual suspects’ one thinks of when discussing Participatory Action Research [PAR]. Indeed, working with these powerful actors might seem opposite to the intent of empowering “‘ordinary people’ in and through research” usually associated with PAR (Kindon, Pain and Kesby, 2010: 1). In this paper, I wish to be deliberately provocative. If the theme of this conference is ‘translating urban research into policy and practice’, why not start with policy actors as ‘co-researchers’, having them help set research questions and analyse responses, as occurs in PAR? Does a PAR stance turn researchers into consultants or agents of the growth machine? Or does can it lead to research outcomes both intellectually honest and capable of increasing social justice far more effectively than the traditional “hierarchal relationship between research and action, between ‘researchers’ and ‘researched’”? (Kindon, Pain and Kesby, 2010: 1).