Self-organised housing in Australia: housing diversity in an age of market heat

While many jurisdictions have seen the recent failure of market and state mechanisms to respond to a crisis of housing provision and to the collapse of markets, Australia's housing prices have experienced primarily ongoing growth, amongst persistent concerns regarding a lack of affordable stock across all tenures, and the concentration of ownership of housing assets in an ageing and shrinking demographic. In this context and building on a tradition of self-organised housing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there exists a range of self-organised efforts for housing provision. However, the sector is poorly known and relatively under-researched. Consequently, this paper presents a review of various forms of direct self-organised housing provision in Australia, and of affiliated advocacy and lobbying efforts. The paper uses community economies and slow housing frameworks to present a dynamic and diverse arena for future research.