Inside offsite: everyday dwelling in factory-built apartments

The majority of offsite construction research focuses on technologies, processes and/or economics. In contrast, this paper examines how factory-built housing is lived in and experienced in everyday dwellings. This informs how such construction methods shape home-making and everyday life, and how these lived experiences relate to residents’ understandings of construction. Drawing on qualitative interviews with residents (n = 6) and builders/manufacturers (n = 7) of such apartments in Melbourne (Victoria), Australia, this paper re-examines how material assemblages and urban-housing relations can help shed new light on factory-built housing. A focus on everyday experiences of comfort, maintenance, and spatial belonging reveals symbolic, affective and urban qualities of modern methods of construction (MMC) apartments. Although MMC apartments contribute to perceptions of improved material quality, these are primarily revealed through everyday practices rather than being consciously attributed as outcomes of industrialised production. MMC apartments are experienced by residents as ordinary, with the industrialised processes’ role muted in the living experience they enable, and in their presentation by manufacturers. The effects of the MMC apartments were mediated through design quality, urban location and everyday rhythms, while their acceptance develops without explicit recognition in everyday life.

POLICY RELEVANCE

Housing markets often position consumer demand and public acceptance as key to the uptake of MMC. This framing assumes that homebuyers actively evaluate, then support or resist, this mode of production. However, residents tend not to identify the construction method of their homes, and the construction method seldom influences residents’ choices in apartment markets, due to their tenure or restricted resources and access to housing generally. Instead, their experiences are shaped by design quality, comfort, location and everyday functionality. The limited uptake of MMC apartments cannot be fully attributed to lingering negative perceptions or insufficient public acceptance. Rather, demand is shaped by broader housing market dynamics, design outcomes and development practices. Policy approaches that seek to enhance consumer education or perception change should instead focus on design quality, urban integration and delivery to support industrialised housing as an increasingly expected and accepted form of apartment living.