Journal Articles

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Placemaking for tenant wellbeing: Exploring the decision-making of public and community housing providers in Aotearoa New Zealand
(Elsevier Ltd, 2025-06) Witten K; Olin CV; Logan A; Chisholm E; Randal E; Howden-Chapman P; Leigh L
In addition to housing tenants, many public and community housing providers engage in placemaking to foster tenants’ connections to people and place. This paper reports on the placemaking practices of four community housing providers and two urban regeneration programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with provider staff – including those leading strategy, community development, tenancy management, planning and design efforts – to investigate the placemaking strategies adopted by providers and the values, priorities and investment tensions that underpin their decision-making. Common placemaking strategies included site selection to secure tenants’ locational access to community services and amenities, and designing shared ‘bump spaces’ into housing complexes to encourage neighbourly encounters between tenants. Efforts to foster a sense of community through increased stability and diversity of households were hindered by a predominance of single-person units in older housing developments, and by funding and regulatory constraints. Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, comprise approximately half of all public housing tenants and many have deep intergenerational connections to place. Where providers were engaging with Māori, early steps had been taken to incorporate cultural landscapes and values into placemaking initiatives; such practices were more evident in urban regeneration than community housing provider developments, enabled by longer-term planning horizons, broader development mandates and partnerships with iwi (Māori tribes) and local government. Nonetheless, placemaking aspirations of all providers were tethered to resource constraints and investment trade-offs, with any social infrastructure provision weighed up against the value of providing one more home instead.
Challenging the inequities of ebike access: An investigation of a community-led intervention in a lower-income neighbourhood in Aotearoa - New Zealand
(Elsevier B.V., 2024-09) Witten K; Opit S; Mackie H; Raja A
Introduction Ebiking offers positive physical and mental health benefits for riders. However, inequitable access to bike share schemes and purchase cost barriers limit ebike availability and uptake in lower-income communities. Furthermore, as bike culture differs from place to place, incentive schemes responsive to the local culture are needed to improve access to ebikes as a healthy mobility choice. Methods Three trials of ebike access were co-designed sequentially between 2021 and 2023. Give-it-a go, Ebikes in daily life, Pathway to Permanence were all designed by a community bike organisation working in tandem with a research team. Trial delivery was community-led. Trial participants’ experiences of ebike use were gathered through group and individual interviews, and the research also included a brief before and after survey of trip destination and mode use. Results Trial participants valued their ebiking experience, including the skills training and group rides, new knowledge of safe routes, health benefits of exercise, and fuel savings. During the trial, a third of weekly trips were made by ebike, while trips made by motor vehicle reduced by 25%. Cost emerged as a substantial barrier to ebike ownership. Conclusions Effective models to support ebike uptake in lower-income communities will be characterised by: adequate funding of community organisations to grow local bike culture; safe and secure bike infrastructure; community ownership of an ebike fleet to support skill acquisition and social connection; and a pathway to low-cost ebike access.
“Looks like a lot of awesome things are coming out of the study!”: Reflections on researching, communicating and challenging everyday inequalities
(Elsevier Ltd, 2021-12) Calder-Dawe O; Witten K; Carroll P; Morris T
In recent years, a growing interest in so-called ‘everyday’ inequalities is raising intriguing questions for qualitative research in psychology. How best might we canvass people's mundane experiences with inequalities given that these experiences are often normalized or entrenched to the extent that they disappear from view, or are otherwise hard to articulate in the course of a conventional qualitative research encounter? And, should we find ourselves as custodians of data that do pinpoint inequalities, what options and opportunities exist for reporting and sharing participants' narratives in challenging and transformative ways? In this article, we present a response to these questions. Moving against the attachment to standardisation that characterises much psychological inquiry, we outline a project where methodological flexibility and a focus on collaborative documentation helped us to surface rich experiential data on everyday ableism. By spending time with participants, and equipped with a toolbox of creative, collaborative and conventional methods, we built the relational foundations necessary for participants to show, tell and share their encounters with ableism with us. From here, we discuss how our experiences with creative and collaborative data collection emboldened us to experiment with a new (to us) way of sharing research findings: the comic. Outlining our research team's collaboration with illustrator Toby Morris, we show and tell the potential of illustrated narratives for sharing research on everyday inequalities – and challenging them.

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