ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Converting commercial buildings to residential use: exploring health and wellbeing impacts from the deregulatory approach taken in England

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 13 | HOUSING AND SHELTER

Speaker

Prof. Ben Clifford (University College London)

Description

Given changing patterns of use of commercial space post-Covid, particularly offices, and situations of housing crisis being experienced in many places internationally, there is growing interest in adaptive reuse of commercial buildings for residential purposes. Sustainability considerations around the embodied carbon within building structures also makes such change of use schemes increasingly appealing. Alongside this, a supply-side understanding dominates discussion of how to respond to the housing crisis is many national contexts, leading proponents to call for ever further deregulation of urban planning and related built environment governance as the means to resolve the crisis, in a neoliberal imaginary.

In England, in 2013 central government changed planning regulations so that developers could convert office buildings and, from 2015, retail and light industrial spaces, into housing without needing the traditional case-by-case planning permission from the local authority: a process called ‘permitted development’. Existing research has demonstrated how the deregulation has led to numerous housing quality issues, including in relation to the size of the dwellings created (‘space standards’), natural light into habitable rooms, access to outdoor space and the location of housing in relation to neighbouring land uses and accessibility (for example Ferm et al, 2021).

There is a growing interest in the relationship between urban planning and public health (Pineo, 2022). Within a multi-scalar relationship between planning and health, housing quality is an important determinant of health and wellbeing and a major factor in societal health inequities (Bird et al, 2018). Given the increasing amounts of time people are often spending within their homes post-pandemic, this relationship is important, and these issues are exacerbated in socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods and for residents may have higher vulnerability than the general population.

Marsh et al (2020) have shown a range of causal pathways and health outcomes which could be related to a decline in housing quality associated with permitted development (PD) housing in England, but this was based on reviews of existing studies considering other types of housing rather than new empirical research. We have therefore been undertaking a major three year transdisciplinary study to better understand the link between living in permitted development housing and health and wellbeing outcomes, including through environmental monitoring and modelling of homes, analysis of the location of conversions, a major survey, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with residents of PD housing, and interviews and focus groups with planners and related officials across England. The survey has made use of a validated instrument called the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWBS) wellbeing outcome measure.

In this presentation, we consider the emerging findings from this study, particularly data relating to residents’ own perceptions of the degree to which living in these deregulated conversion schemes impacts their health and wellbeing related to space, thermal comfort, amenities, outdoor space, windows and perceived safety.

We then consider the implications from this in terms of the relationship between planning regulations and public health, and the importance of design quality in broader debates about built environment governance and the housing crisis. We argue this is particularly important when adaptive reuse is proposed for existing buildings, which may not have been originally designed for residential uses, with implications for policy-makers and planning practitioners considering increasing office-to-residential conversions elsewhere.

References

• Bird, E.L., Ige, J.O., Pilkington, P., Pinto, A., Petrokofsky, C. and Burgess-Allen, J. (2018). Built and natural environment planning principles for promoting health: an umbrella review. BMC public health, 18(1), 1-13.
• Clifford, B. and Ferm, J. (2021). Planning, regulation and space standards in England: From ‘homes for heroes’ to ‘Slums of the future’, Town Planning Review, 92, (5), 537–560
• Ferm, J., Clifford, B., Canelas, P. and Livingstone, N. (2021). Emerging problematics of deregulations the urban: The case of permitted development in England, Urban Studies, 58(10), 2040-2058
• Marsh, R., Chang, M., and Wood, J. (2020). The relationship between housing created through Permitted Development Rights and health: a systematic review. Cities & Health, 6(4), 833-852
• Pineo, H. (2022). Healthy urbanism: designing and planning equitable, sustainable and inclusive places. Springer Nature