Review | Housing for Hope and Wellbeing, by Flora Samuel

As a passionate advocate of meaningful participation and user-focused design in our built environment, conversations around the quality, access, and design of homes and neighbourhoods couldn’t be more important to me. This is why I am deeply moved by Flora Samuel’s book, Housing for Health and Wellbeing.

Samuel’s work is a sobering reminder of the critical role that housing plays in our lives and the devastating consequences when it fails to deliver on our basic human needs.

The book is a remarkable truth telling piece that forces you to look hard and straight at the facts of housing’s contribution to health and wellbeing. The impact is further pronounced due to Samuel’s incredible ability to both outline the theory and the damning status quo, alongside the real-life experiences of herself and her family that cover the intersectionalities of class, socioeconomics, culture, gender, race and generation.

At Urban Symbiotics, we have also seen first-hand the impact that poor-quality housing and neighbourhoods can have on individuals and communities. This is often compounded by structural barriers that exacerbate their lack of agency in the housing design process.

If “to change your home is to change yourself”, then without this choice the impact on individuals’ mental and physical health and social cohesion within communities can be detrimental. Flora manages to clearly unpack this alongside the commonly misunderstood term “social value” to give it legs, emotions, stories, and a real significance. To communicate this, she challenges our use of language, our approach, the broken systems within which we operate and the sometimes overtly life and death consequences of how we house – and fail to house – people.

Samuel’s focus on the benefits of mapping to provide a clear evidence base for democracy is powerful

Housing for Health and Wellbeing is essential reading for everyone, whether you’re a client within the built environment, a developer, local authority, housing provider or an architect or designer. It is also just as important a reference for the individual, the renter, the homeowner the temporary accommodation user – it empowers, it challenges, it inspires.

Samuel also encourages us to think beyond the structures that bind us to malign and rigid practices. She creates a sense of excitement and reimagining of a new future for the built environment. One where new professions are born, where socially led designers are pivotal to decision making and the true shaping of place.

A future where communities and individuals are given true democratic agency to innovate their homes and neighbourhoods. Where the experience of place is all-encompassing and inclusive of the process, debate and potential for change that exists in every place. Where engagement is not a tick box, but an immersive critical experience within our daily lives.

Samuel’s focus on the benefits of mapping to provide a clear evidence base for democracy is powerful. She describes how it can be a method to explain the intangible.

And how by combining active data derived from community engagement, and overlaying user- experience, we can develop a comprehensive understanding of what’s happening in a community, as well as its key values. The same values that need to be understood, respected and enhanced as development plans are created.

This cannot be read without tears, it cannot be read without anger, it cannot be read without hope

Samuel concludes Housing for Health and Wellbeing with an incredible call to action, encompassing a series of engaging and inclusive processes, thriving community-support developments, and achievable interventions that rescue you from being disheartened and powerless.

As an architect, urban designer and cofounder of a company that advocates and carries out co-creation approaches and user-focussed design, this book is not only an insightful read, but one that encourages, highlights and supports us to continue. It affirms both the power and reality of inclusive engagement and collaborative design.

She also strikingly illustrates the dire consequences of what may continue to happen if we fail to make a collective effort to achieve this desperately needed change.

This cannot be read without tears, it cannot be read without anger, it cannot be read without hope.

Professor Samuel, we thank you!