Crisis is the ground in which innovation and progress can flourish if fertilised by courageous leadership and watered by a collective commitment to embracing risk to find replicable solutions that tackle the complexity, severity, and scale of the crisis. 

This blog is pulled from the script of Jez Sweetland’s recent TEDX Bristol talk, which will be released in March 2023. Find out why we’re in the crisis we’re in, and how to fix it through collective leadership. We all have a part to play if we’re to build dignity back into our housing system.

At a time when we are deeply troubled by the news of thousands of children being killed in the Middle East & many more thousands displaced from their homes, the warm fuzziness that we’re ‘supposed’ to feel at Christmas seems at best irrelevant and, at worst, offensive. However, we must hold onto a vision for change that means we commit to build a route out of the emergency we are in.

The financial cost of temporary accommodation in England is huge. £1.7 billion a year in England alone, a 62% increase over the past 5 years. It’s sending some local authorities to the brink, it’s unaffordable and has an obvious knock-on effect on local services. Although we are angry it isn’t working as it should, we are also full of hope that it can change and become a short, safe and healthy experience for those who need it.

We recently celebrated a significant milestone for the Bristol Housing Festival – our fifth anniversary! We established ourselves as a five-year project, a ‘think and do tank’ aimed at enabling change and innovation in housing. This has been a period of reflection, celebration, and an ongoing commitment to reimagining better ways to live in our cities, in Bristol and beyond!

Who’s job is it to fix the housing crisis? In this article Jessie argues that ‘collective leadership’ is the only way out of the current emergency. Amid all the busy-ness of business-as-usual, what does it look like to create space and take ownership of the wider challenge?

As a winning team of UN-Habitat’s Climate Smart Cities Challenge, Thriving Places, powered by Atkins and Edaroth are working on a ‘Thrivability Toolkit’ to create Thriving Places for people and nature in Bristol.

In a climate where traditional housing delivery is slowing down due to the volatility of house prices, the adoption of factory manufactured housing solutions is an opportunity to do things differently and deliver affordable housing at pace, at a time when we need it most.

The money hungry machine which drives the nation in which we live will just keep churning with more politicians talking talk and more policy makers installing red tape making it just a little harder each day to make a positive difference. So, what’s the point?

If you have visited IKEA lately, you may have seen the recently launched ‘Real Life Roomsets’, designed to reveal the reality of those living in Temporary Accommodation (TA). These, coupled with Shelter’s latest report ‘Still Living in Limbo’ have brought the harsh realities of TA into the spotlight, but how did we get here, and what’s the solution?

‘The most important things which are needed to help a man to reach any enduring success as a master builder, in order of their importance, are: Foresight, Honesty, Industry, Perseverance and Courage.’ House and Cottage Construction, 1923

If our homes are not built as adequate – and by this I mean inclusive and accessible - we are disadvantaging significant numbers of people, such as our ageing population and those who are disabled. When we design homes with disabled people in mind, we all benefit because many inclusive designs are innovative and useful.

As we wrap up 2022, we’ve been looking back over the year and looking ahead to an exciting 2023.

Loo offers a unique insight into the relationship between ‘home’ and mental health and featured on the Channel 4 social experiment which explored loneliness and the housing crisis across different generations. Loo’s perspective highlights one of the reasons why building homes is not just about bricks and mortar but creating places where people can thrive.

If there was one claim that would make my heart sink, it would be if someone was asking to meet me because they had the solution to homelessness.

All of us, as individuals and as organisations, make decisions regularly that impact others positively and negatively, even with the best of intentions. As a nation, a city, a neighbourhood, a community, we are interwoven more than we realise.

Boris Johnson recently commented “there really is such a thing as society” in a message released whilst he was self-isolating. The prime minister chose to contradict his Conservative predecessor Margaret Thatcher’s support for individualism made in 1987, saying: “There is no such thing as society.”