Sufineyestani, Mina; Clifford, Ben; Pineo, Helen; (2024) Post-pandemic adaptive reuse: lessons for public health from England's deregulated office to residential conversions. Presented at: ACSP2024 Annual Conference, Seattle, WA, USA.

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Abstract

Given changing patterns of use of commercial space post-Covid, particularly offices, and situations of housing crisis being experienced in many places internationally, there is growing interest in adaptive reuse of commercial buildings for residential purposes, including in a number of North American cities. Sustainability considerations around the embodied carbon within building structures also makes such change of use schemes increasingly appealing. Alongside this, a supply-side understanding dominates discussion of how to respond to the housing crisis is many national contexts, leading proponents to call for ever further deregulation of urban planning and related built environment governance as the means to resolve the crisis, in a neoliberal imaginary. In England, in 2013 central government changed planning regulations so that developers could convert office buildings and, from 2015, retail and light industrial spaces, into housing without needing the traditional case-by-case planning permission from the local authority: a process called ‘permitted development’. Existing research has demonstrated how the deregulation has led to numerous housing quality issues, including in relation to the size of the dwellings created (‘space standards’), natural light into habitable rooms, access to outdoor space and the location of housing in relation to neighbouring land uses and accessibility (for example Ferm et al, 2021). There is a growing interest in the relationship between urban planning and public health (Pineo, 2022). Within a multi-scalar relationship between planning and health, housing quality is an important determinant of health and wellbeing and a major factor in societal health inequities (Bird et al, 2018). Given the increasing amounts of time people are often spending within their homes post-pandemic, this relationship is important, and these issues are exacerbated in socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods and for residents may have higher vulnerability than the general population. Marsh et al (2020) have shown a range of causal pathways and health outcomes which could be related to a decline in housing quality associated with permitted development (PD) housing in England, but this was based on reviews of existing studies considering other types of housing rather than new empirical research. We therefore undertook an exploratory study, adopting a transdisciplinary approach in four London boroughs: Hillingdon, Hounslow, Lambeth and Southwark. Working with housing charity Groundswell, we developed an online survey and interview guide for occupants of PD housing. We used the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWBS) wellbeing outcome measure and undertook a questionnaire survey with 218 responses and 41 in-person interviews. We found that deregulated non-residential conversions to housing pose potential health and wellbeing risks in the areas of space, overheating, amenities and perceived safety. Residents also highlighted problems with windows and outdoor space. Having sufficient space for socialising, eating together as a household and studying was strongly associated with higher mental wellbeing. A lack of colling options in the homes were associated with significantly higher risks of probable clinical depression, after controlling for household income. Individual agency and co-occurrence of housing-related challenges (for example insecure tenure) may play a role in modifying potential wellbeing impacts of PD housing. In this presentation, we provide an overview of the findings from our exploratory study. We then consider the implications from this in terms of the relationship between planning regulations and public health, and the importance of design quality in broader debates about built environment governance and the housing crisis. We argue this is particularly important when adaptive reuse is proposed for existing buildings, which may not have been originally designed for residential uses, with implications for policy-makers and planning practitioners considering increasing office-to-residential conversions elsewhere.

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