Prototyping as a Means to Innovate Affordable Housing Policies and Provision: An Empirical Illustration

In the face of rising housing affordability challenges, a diverse range of stakeholders are increasingly looking to alternative forms of housing provision and policy, and in particular, a turn to more explicitly experimental and design-inflected approaches. The process of prototyping is one of these. In this paper, we look at how prototyping is being used to address housing affordability in two ways. The first draws upon prototyping’s innovation and design thinking lineage to prototype affordable housing policy. The second example is the use of prototyping to refashion assemblages of finance, regulation, consumer behaviour and built form to enable affordable housing provision. Across these examples, prototyping emerges as a practice of anticipating and prefiguring futures in which the challenge of affordable housing is more successfully addressed.<p></p>