Cyclic functional collaboration: a scientific approach to housing

The thesis argues that Cyclic Functional Collaboration as a scientific approach to housing could provide housing researchers with a framework for collaborative creativity that will relate and integrate disparate types of research and present decision-makers with practical advice on future directions for housing. Housing, as exemplified in the history of Australian social housing, is continually changing and continually presenting decision-makers with a series of problems that need to be resolved, as well as opportunities for future development. Housing research operates across many disciplines. It is characterised by a broad range of methods, epistemological and ontological approaches and purposes. As a result, it is very diverse and very fragmented with researchers having little sense of how different types of research relate to one another. For decision-makers, the problem is how to incorporate this disparate array of research into their decisions. If housing research is to find solutions to our pressing housing problems and provide practical advice to decision-makers, it must find a solution to its fragmentation, one which will relate and integrate this disparate array of research. The thesis proposes that Cyclic Functional Collaboration (as discovered by Bernard Lonergan, a Canadian methodologist, philosopher, theologian and economist) is a framework which could hold the diversity of housing research together. Housing research is about asking and answering questions. Very few researchers, however, reflect upon the questions they ask and the type of answer their questions anticipate. Through a phenomenology of housing research the thesis identifies a series of questions. This is complemented by an analysis of research on Australian social housing which identifies different genres whose orientation roughly corresponds with different questions. However, it notes how housing research, operating largely within a common-sense framework, muddles these questions. The thesis proposes that a scientific approach to housing would distinguish different types of questions and their anticipated answers. It would ask a complete set of eight questions: an empirical question, a theoretical question, a historical question, an evaluative/critical question, a transformative question, a visionary/policy question, a strategic question and a practical question. These questions are functionally inter-related, they provide a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration and they are ongoing and cyclic, producing cumulative and progressive results. The thesis sets out a more precise understanding of these questions, their anticipated answers and their relationships. It concludes by proposing a paradigm shift in our understanding of each genre of housing research.