Home Re-imagined: safety, dignity and permanence

Housing is the defining civic question in Australia today. It sits across planning, health, construction, finance, homelessness, ageing, family violence, climate resilience and social equity. It is a question of numbers, but not only numbers. It is a question of delivery, but not only delivery. It is a question of affordability, but not only affordability.

Most of all, housing is a question of who gets to live with safety, dignity and permanence.

That was the central proposition of Home Re-imagined: Housing Tomorrow in Motion, a panel discussion hosted in ARM’s Melbourne studio as part of Melbourne Design Week 2026. The event brought together six leaders from state government, local government, affordable and community housing, health research and design.

The premise was deliberately uncomfortable: more is being spent on housing than at any point in history, but the waitlist is still growing. More homes are being delivered, but more people are experiencing housing stress. More approvals are being issued, but too many permissions do not become homes. More money is moving through the system, but too often the outcomes remain opaque. Something is not adding up.

Rather than housing as a market category, the panel discussion was about housing as the setting for a life. The insights that cut deepest are those that reframe how the problem is understood, not just how it might be solved.

1. The supply debate is too blunt
   Housing is not product – it is social infrastructure. Treating housing as yield, stock or supply is not just incomplete; it actively produces the wrong outcomes. The language of systems has displaced the language of home, which has consequences for policy, planning, design and investment.
2. A planning permit doesn’t house anyone.
   One of the sharpest themes of the night was the distinction between approval and delivery. Approvals are not outcomes. A system that measures success in permissions issued rather than homes delivered will always mistake activity for impact – and will always be vulnerable to value being captured without public benefit being returned.
3. Housing is health infrastructure
   The costs of poor housing are already being paid – just in the wrong ledger. Rebecca Bentley’s insight that housing failure shows up in health budgets, emergency services, lost productivity and disaster recovery reframes housing investment entirely. Prevention is cheaper than consequence. The system undervalues housing because it doesn’t count what bad housing costs.
4. More kinds of homes for more kinds of lives
   The system excludes people by design when typology doesn’t match how people actually live. If the only available housing types suit a narrow range of households, the system isn’t neutral – it’s making choices about whose life patterns are legitimate. Tessa Von Barron also reminded us that housing is a pathway, not a single event. A roof is necessary but not the whole solution. People need to have the right support, in the right place, with the right tenure, delivered at the right intensity. For people carrying trauma or long-term insecurity, housing without appropriate support can fail – and the person cycles back into crisis with even less trust in the system.
5. Design is necessary, but not sufficient
   Are architects being asked to solve problems that are fundamentally political and economic? Yes – and no. There are many things design can’t do (fix the price of land, fund social housing, guarantee construction viability) but it can make policy work better. It make can housing more humane, more durable, more adaptable and more socially successful. Viv’s Place and Launch Bellfield are two exceptional projects that show house social housing can be civic, carefully made and materially dignified. But exceptional projects can’t remain exceptions. The design task now is to make quality repeatable.
6. Supply ‘for whom?’ is a harder question than supply
   The volume debate is necessary but insufficient. A city can increase approvals and still fail the people most exposed to insecurity. The question of who benefits from delivery is at least as important as the scale of delivery.

The question now is not only how many homes can be built. It’s whether we can build the right homes, in the right places, with the right support, and with enough dignity that people can genuinely call them home.

From crisis response to civic responsibility

Unsurprisingly, the event didn’t produce a single solution: the housing crisis isn’t a single problem and won’t be solved by a single lever.

It requires more social housing, but also better private rental protections. It requires faster planning, but only where approvals become actual homes. It requires affordable housing contributions, but only where they become keys in doors. It requires healthy homes, because housing failure is also health failure. It requires supported pathways, not isolated interventions. It requires typological diversity, because people live in many different ways. It requires repeatable design quality, not one-off exemplars. It requires construction reform, not another prefab prototype. It requires community responsibility, not government action alone.

The task ahead is to connect what is too often separated:

• Housing and health
• Planning and delivery
• Affordability and tenure security
• Construction productivity and design quality
• Crisis response and long-term support
• Policy ambition and lived experience.

The strongest conclusion arrived at was also the simplest: housing is not product. It’s not yield, it’s not a permit. It’s not a contribution, it’s not an abstract supply number. It’s where people live.

Home Re-imagined panellists.

Our thanks to go to everyone who attended, threw in curly questions and shared their experiences – especially our panellists whose diverse backgrounds and direct experience managing housing tensions, trade-offs and opportunities provoked us to think differently about housing (pictured above, L-R):

• Marjorie Kennedy, Head of Homelessness & Housing Pathways, Homes Melbourne
• Prof Rebecca Bentley, Director, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing, University of Melbourne
• Jesse Judd, Director, ARM Architecture
• Michele Morrison, Chief Development Officer, Homes Victoria
• Contessa von Barron, Senior Manager Affordable Homes & Retirement Living, VMCH
• Jack Panton, Managing Director, Affordable Housing Solutions (moderator)

Read the full wrap: Home Re-imagined: who gets to call this place home?

In the words of our managing principal, COO, and MC on the night, Lucy Carruthers, ARM takes genuine pleasure in hosting people in our studios to discuss ideas and challenge each other. Home Re-imagined: Housing Tomorrow in Motion was presented in our Melbourne studio as part of Melbourne Design Week 2026.