Webinar Recap: Design tools to support wellbeing in multi-unit housing with Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective

Recording, presentations, resources and notable moments from the fourth in our ‘Housing That Connects Us’ webinar series.

On October 3rd, 2024, Hey Neighbour Collective hosted Housing That Connects Us #4: Design Tools to Support Wellbeing, as part of the year-long Building Social Connections project in partnership with Happy Cities and Simon Fraser University’s Department of Gerontology. This is the fourth webinar in the ‘Housing That Connects Us ‘series, following May 2nd’s conversation about untangling the affordability puzzle with Happy Cities and Robert Brown of Chesterman Properties and Sacha Investments. 

Over the past year, Building Social Connections has brought six Metro Vancouver jurisdictions together to co-create new design policies that support wellbeing for residents in multi-unit housing. This work responds to Metro 2050, Metro Vancouver’s recently approved regional growth strategy that requires Metro jurisdictions to show how their ‘local policies and actions’ will ‘help to increase social connectedness in multi-unit housing (on page 72 of the strategy document). Building on the learnings from this project—and nearly a decade of prior research—we published a new design toolkit of evidence-based strategies to nurture social wellbeing multi-unit housing.

The Building Social Connections Toolkit provides design principles and actions to equip policymakers, planners, designers, and community members to build and advocate for more socially connected, inclusive communities. 

Participant demographics

In this webinar, we discussed the applications for sociable design guidelines in multi-unit housing. Over 200 participants joined from all around the world! As our breakdown shows, the largest identifiable group of participants were planners or planning associations, followed by public health practitioners, housing developers and associations, housing organizations, and many more. We are thrilled that our work is able engage such diverse sectors.

Participant location and demographics

Webinar recording and slide decks

Featured presentations

Michelle Hoar, Project Director at Hey Neighbour Collective, opened the event by linking the risks of chronic loneliness and a lack of social connection among neighbours as a major reason for focusing on creating more thoughtful housing design policies. Above all, she emphasized that homes must be affordable, safe, and secure first for residents to feel a sense of belonging and to engage with their neighbours.

A visual graphic of a pyramid, showing the interplay between policy, programming, and physical design: in order to achieve these, there has to be a base of affordability, safety, and security (the bottom of the pyramid, in blue); on top of that a sense of belonging (the middle of the pyramid, in red); and engagement at the top (in green).
Housing fundamentals

Learn more: 

[00:14:30] Madeleine Hebert, Senior Housing Specialist with Happy Cities, followed Michelle and spent time introducing the importance of social connection, especially in the context of multi-unit housing. Her presentation then discussed the toolkit design principles and shared ways in which the 13 principles could be applied. Notably, she emphasized the applicability of the design principles across both new and existing buildings, as well as market and non-market housing.  

A graphic showing areas of action where the multi-family design toolkit for social connectedness might be applied.
Areas for action (graphic provided by Happy Cities)

Learn more:

“We need to intentionally think of a building as a social ecosystem.”

Michelle Hoar

The buildings we design now will be with us for a very long time.”

Madeleine Hebert

Discussion highlights

Following the presentation, we opened up the discussion and invited participants to ask questions. Raymond Kan, Manager of Research and Policy at the Planning Institute of BC (PIBC) and a Director on the Board of the Canadian Institute of Planners, got things kicked off.

“The team has produced a really extensive library of work over the last few years: today’s toolkit, technical reports, and guidelines for different audiences. Can we look forward to these toolkits and guidelines being produced in other languages in the future, to help expand the reach of your work and implementation?

Interestingly, this sparked a popcorn response from our incredible participants! Before we had even begun answering the question, several folks piped up expressing their interest in helping to translate the toolkit into Farsi, Japanese, German, French, Chinese, and Korean. We were blown away by this outpouring of engagement and we are already brainstorming ways to make this a reality. 

Future work

We continue to be inspired by the conversations that arise in these webinars and are looking at the potential for further deep-dive sessions with municipal planners and other housing sector and finance stakeholders here in BC and across Canada. 

Keep an eye out for future opportunities for discussing ways to foster age-friendly, socially connected and resilient multi-unit housing.

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