Abstract
The background to the thesis is the crisis of affordable housing in the UK, and the emergence of community housing initiatives as a response. There are enabling organisations which provide support, but despite an increasing recognition of the contribution that housing makes to carbon emissions, affordability rather than sustainability remains the primary focus. In particular, the use of natural materials with low embodied carbon is often dismissed as unaffordable. The thesis therefore explores how a community housing enabling organisation might reconcile the apparently conflicting aims of affordability and sustainability. There is a gap in research into this area, in particular in the field of diverse/community economies research, within which this thesis is located. The fieldwork was undertaken as action research into the work of an enabling organisation over a five year period, using the methods of participant observation and reflexive narrative. The resulting data was analysed with a theoretical framework that drew on, synthesised and supplemented the work of Gibson-Graham and Ingold. The findings of the research reveal the way in which shifts in language and subjectivity are necessary in order to support changes in collective action within community economies. However, in order to bring a greater focus to considerations of sustainability, the thesis proposes that an emphasis on embodied engagement with materials and processes of making needs to be integrated with these elements. The research revealed the way in which they flowed together into an emergent and on-going meshwork of actors and contingent influences, in a way that enabled sustainability as well as affordability to be addressed. The thesis also contributes to practice in the domain of community housing by providing a transferable case study illustrating how a concern for sustainability has been integrated into the work of an enabling organisation, including new approaches to design, construction and training.
Awarding Institution(s)
University of Plymouth
Supervisor
Michael Punt, Patricia Shaw, Luigi Russi
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Date
2025
Embargo Period
2025-12-08
Deposit Date
December 2025
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Crabtree, T. (2025) Opening spaces for the emergence of community economy initiatives. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/121
