Collaborative planning partnerships for affordable housing: rights, needs and interests

Abstract

In recent years, collaborative planning has become dominant in both planning theory and practice, attracting both strong proponents (Healey, 1997; Forester, 1999; Innes and Booher, 2010) and excoriating critics (Sanders, 1997; Rydin, 2007; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012). Case studies of collaborative planning, whether laudatory, critical, or somewhere in between, have tended to focus on neighbourhood planning, metropolitan strategy formulation, and environmental management (McCann, 2001; Margerum, 2002; Hopkins, 2010; Legacy, 2012) This paper takes a comparative approach to describing and analysing collaborative partnerships for affordable housing in four cities of the developed world. In Portland, US and Vancouver, Canada, affordable housing partnerships have grown out of a relatively consensual tradition of metropolitan governance, while in Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, Canada, affordable housing partnerships have found it somewhat more difficult to establish themselves in a highly fragmented and politicized local governance context. In all of these cities, affordable housing partnerships are attempting to improve policies and practices, towards both more and better housing for low and moderate income households.