At Home in the North
For communities across the Canadian North, chronic housing insecurity is an undeniable public policy priority and human rights issue. Yet current strategies to address chronic housing need and homelessness tend to comprise policies and programs developed outside the North, and are thus disconnected from northern needs, realities, priorities and strengths. Contemporary housing interventions in Canada are, by and large, based on the CMHC housing continuum; a continuum that positions homelessness as one end of the housing spectrum, and market home ownership at the other. Similarly, supportive housing programs are premised on the existence of an integrated continuum of social and health supports.
Northern community partners are clear: the housing and support continuum in northern communities is different from what is commonly represented. As a result, programs, policies and services that are informed by southern Canadian models are ill-equipped to address the priorities of northern communities and effectively engage northern community cultures and contexts. By working in partnership with communities across the provincial and territorial Norths to advance a northern housing continuum, At Home in the North (AHiN) project will inform the development and implementation of context-based, culturally safe programs, services and models for housing and homelessness, developed by and centered in northern communities. The pan-northern and interdisciplinary approach is critical to effectively bridging the gaps between research outcomes and impact on northern housing by facilitating the translation and implementation of research into policy and practice.
At Home in the North is divided into four research design subprojects: supportive housing programs services; governance, policy and self-determination; housing, community design and the built environment; and, health synthesis stream. This project focuses on subproject 3, housing, community design and the built environment.
Guided by curiosity, the project began by asking:
How has northern housing policy shifted over the past seven decades on- and off-reserve? How has policy shaped the design outcomes of both on- and off-reserve housing?
Who was involved?
AHiN is a Partnership Development Grant project, bringing together academics, housing practitioners and community members from across Canada.
What was TDL’s role?
TDL co-led the community design and built environment stream. Through this work TDL has conducted extensive archival research to identify, trace and analyse six decades of government policy, evaluations, internal memos and reports. Additionally, TDL has collected over thirty years of housing designs by the federal government and CMHC to review and analyse changing forms and layouts.
What types of engagement occurred?
As part of understanding the differences in housing outcomes in northern Canada, housing designs developed as part of CMHC and federal housing programs have been identified and reviewed. Using a space syntax method, designs have been analysed. Space syntax provides a quantitative approach to compare and analyse built areas and architectural spaces. It was developed to understand the relationships between society and space and to describe how spatial patterns contain social information.
Space syntax argues that the ordering of space within buildings reflects the ordering of relations between people or that “social structure is inherently spatial” and that there is a social logic to space. This part of the design thematic group project will apply space syntax to analysing three-bedroom housing plans from different programs during the 1970s including plans of small and modest housing, on-reserve housing, Rural and Native housing and federal staff housing. Where space syntax argues it can reveal economic, social and ideological relations of its inhabitants, what does housing designed for Indigenous people by the federal government and agencies reveal?