Integrating housing and food systems through design research for resilience

This paper proposes design research for resilience as a participatory, practice-focused means of achieving new design knowledge, in the service of urban resilience. It focuses on a recent Australian doctoral study from which strategies for integrating housing and food systems were generated by designing for increased adaptive capacity, inter-scalar regenerative systems and greater food security. This fostered interplays between design and ecology, in addition to the biospheric sciences, agricultural sciences and social sciences pertaining to housing, food and consumption. The approach is expressed in relation to research into, for and through design, also demonstrating the compatibility between design research and resilience inquiry. The three-phase research design comprises: (i) social-ecological analysis of the status quo in housing, food provisioning, consumption and food culture; (ii) a multi-household ethnography in 12 food-producing settings; leading to (iii) participatory design workshops and design iterations. Key outcomes discussed include ethnographic insights relating to scale and tenure, participants’ design proposals for optimizing home-based food production, and the distillation of a design meta-brief guiding my own design process. Emergent regenerative food axis design patterns for high-density, medium-density, suburban and peri-urban housing are proposed, in addition to a strategic framework targeting design practitioners and design education.