1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 RETHINKING DEMAND AND THE PERCEPTIONS OF OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION
‘Modern methods of construction’ (MMC) emerged in the 2000s as an umbrella term referring to the application of offsite manufacturing techniques and digital tools to the construction sector, and it can be defined as:
forms of off-site manufacture for construction, including modular and panellised systems, and timber or steel framed homes.
This paper uses the term ‘MMC apartments’ to designate the mid-rise apartments selected for the study. The term ‘MMC’ is also found interchangeably with terms such as ‘factory-built’, offsite-built’, etc. MMC housing is broadly recognised by governments as a key opportunity to meet housing supply targets and enhance construction industry productivity.
In the face of this opportunity, many commentators seem to view progress as too slow, explaining this lack of pace to a range of ‘barriers’, including high upfront capital costs and supply chain gaps (Alhawamdeh & Lee 2025), reticence from lenders and developers (Looby et al. 2022; Zolghadr et al. 2022), and negative consumer perceptions of prefabricated structures (McCrum & Wang 2024). The latter is of particular importance for this paper. Debates persist over whether factory-built homes have enduring negative connotations in society, associated with cheap, flimsy and temporary structures, rooted in memories of post-war prefabrication and portable school buildings designed for temporary use. At the same time, public perceptions have evolved alongside advanced manufacturing and the generalisation of ‘smart home’ technologies (Maalsen 2020), and there is other evidence that barriers to MMC housing adoption also arise among lenders and insurers, rather than solely from householders’ perceptions (Laing et al. 2001; Craig et al. 2005).
Nevertheless, residents’ experiences and expectations of MMC housing remains largely missing from research and policy, often captured through satisfaction surveys (Iuorio et al. 2019; Wallace et al. 2025) and post-occupancy evaluation (Maslova & Burgess 2023), rather than by in-depth qualitative engagement. As a result, residents’ voices are either missing or insufficiently understood. Moreover, MMC spans a broad category and the construction methods involved are not always clearly articulated, categorised or visible in day-to-day contexts.
MMC housing demand is frequently reported through perception studies that insufficiently account for how people actually live and how they come to be in particular dwellings. The apartment sector in particular is not demand-driven in the same way as other consumer markets, such as the automobile industry. Instead, it is largely supply-driven, with residents rarely selecting housing from a position of having an open ‘choice’, resulting in dwellings that do not necessarily correspond to their needs (Cook et al. 2023). Many residents, particularly renters and low-income households, are constrained by obligations, resources, tenure, the availability of suitable dwellings, etc. (Easthope et al. 2020). Debates about housing demand tend to overlook how everyday dwelling shapes familiarity with housing function, and how construction systems are encountered ‘from within’ through design, material qualities and everyday practices, rather than by direct recognition and ‘choice’ (Kerr et al. 2018; Nethercote & Horne 2016).
This paper examines how MMC apartments shape everyday dwelling, not solely through material performance but through how homes are inhabited, interpreted and valued. It adopts a relational and affective understanding of home, drawing on established work in housing and apartment home studies (Baxter 2017; Blunt & Dowling 2006), while focusing on how MMC apartments shape, and are shaped by, everyday practices. The aim is not to produce a post-occupancy evaluation of MMC. The methodology was therefore not designed to ask residents explicitly about specific MMC features. Instead, it enabled residents to express everyday sensations, thoughts and feelings without extensive prompting or explicit technical links to construction. Accordingly, the three research questions are as follows:
RQ1: How is MMC encountered in everyday dwelling in urban apartments?
RQ2: How do MMC apartments shape lived experiences, and vice versa?
RQ3: What implications emerge from RQ1 and RQ2 for the wider social acceptance of MMC apartments?
1.2 APPROACH AND CONTEXT
In-depth interviews with residents and industry participants were undertaken in greater Melbourne (Victoria), Australia. While this context carries specific aspirational histories and futures, regulatory contexts, and policy urgencies, it also reflects common experiences observed across other jurisdictions around housing affordability pressures, densification policies and reduced access to detached homeownership. This and the lack of research on lived experience of MMC housing together make this work more broadly applicable. In the Australian housing market context, apartments and townhouses—particularly mid-rise infill developments—have been framed as a typology solution to housing supply and affordability challenges (Infrastructure Victoria 2023; NSW Government 2023). However, these policy objectives are faced with an economic context in which apartment development has become more financially constrained, with stagnant values and shifting post-COVID housing aspirations (Cook et al. 2023).
Industrialised housing policies intersect with broader densification agendas, including in-fill, greyfield, gentrification and urban regeneration agendas in Australian cities (e.g. pattern books in New South Wales (NSW), Future Homes in Victoria), and public procurement initiatives across all major states. In this paper, MMC apartments refer to mid-rise housing delivered by using substantial offsite pre-manufacturing, broadly corresponding to categories 1 and 2 of the UK MMC definition framework (MHCLG 2019), which is commonly adopted as an analytical classification in the Australian context. Additionally, MMC is approached in this paper as a mode of housing production rather than as a set of technologies. Australia’s highly financialised, cyclical and risk-averse apartment housing system (Sharam & Bryant 2026) continues to favour conventional, site-based construction, contributing to productivity issues (Sharam et al. 2026), financial viability constraints and environmental impacts (Prasad et al. 2022).
Drawing on qualitative interviews, the paper examines MMC apartments through two key threads of apartment housing research: material assemblages and urban-housing relations. It contributes to understanding how MMC apartments are encountered in practice, and how the effects of production methods are mediated through design, location and everyday life, rather than primarily through explicit awareness of construction systems.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on MMC and apartment living from the perspectives of housing studies and urban geography. A description of the methods employed follows in Section 3. The findings are then presented and discussed in Section 4, with conclusions in Section 5.
2. MMC AND EVERYDAY APARTMENT LIVING
Research on apartment living has long emphasised the socio-material and relational nature of housing and home (Blunt & Dowling 2006), attending to how dwellings are assembled through material configurations (Horne et al. 2022), everyday practices (Baxter 2017), affective experiences (Dorignon & Nethercote 2021) and relations with urban surroundings (Blunt & Sheringham 2018). Within this literature, apartments are understood not simply as built forms or market products but as lived environments shaped by spatial and temporal negotiations, socio-material arrangements and (dis)connection to the city (Jackson et al. 2021). Importantly, apartment buildings and homes participate in the production of urban imaginaries, understood here as collective understandings of how urban life is organised, experienced and expected to develop (Lindner & Meissner 2018). These perspectives from urban geography and housing studies provide a critical lens through which to examine how MMC apartments are encountered in everyday life, not as a visible construction system but through effects on dwelling practices and rhythms. This section reviews how MMC has been conceptualised in the social sciences, and assesses its contributions and gaps in illuminating everyday dwelling in offsite apartments.
As MMC is primarily framed as an industry or manufacturing process, it has largely been studied from the perspective of industry actors or indirectly through assumptions about consumers’ decision-making (Csernák-Csorba & Tóvölgyi 2025; Looby et al. 2022). These approaches treat MMC primarily as an object of normative evaluation rather than as a condition of everyday dwelling, and the ways in which construction systems are encountered (or not) remain underexplored. In housing studies and urban geography there has been very limited work undertaken to critically interpret and conceptualise MMC (Lovell & Smith 2010). To address this, this review considers research on MMC housing that has considered householders as residents, rather than as consumers or end-users, or the aforementioned building performance studies where lived experience is invisible (Caniato et al. 2017).
The constitution of MMC as a topic of investigation for the social sciences spans a small but growing body of work that considers the associated complex and interrelated industry shifts (Green 2022, 2024) and their direct or indirect implications for residents and housing systems (Wallace et al. 2025). While urban studies and geography have explored the entanglements between housing production and material urban processes (Lovell & Smith 2010; McFarlane 2011), the relationships between MMC and everyday dwelling are absent from this scholarship, particularly in the context of apartments. This gap also leaves related unresolved questions about whether MMC constitutes a distinct socio-material category, industry process, product, housing typology, or a policy landscape with particular procurement and regulatory logics. Of course, all of the above, but the question here is which constitution enables insights to be made about the different material qualities of dwellings (from those produced on-site) and the implications for residents (Harte 2017; Sumner & Burman 2024). Design, layouts and adaptability, thermal comfort, insulation, light, ventilation, etc. are all implicated (Bayliss & Bergin 2020), as well as the question of whether MMC truly enables the lowering of embodied carbon emissions (O’Hegarty et al. 2025). The question then becomes not simply whether offsite construction reconfigures housing, but how it is encountered in everyday dwelling, and the extent to which it reshapes residents’ experiences and understandings of home.
The earlier literature asserts that prefabricated housing comes with a stigma of cheap and temporary housing associated with trailer homes and demountable buildings (Bell 2009; Blismas 2007; Genz 2001). This raises questions about whether residents are indeed able to differentiate between housing built offsite and housing built with traditional methods of construction. And it also questions the associated industry responses, e.g. tactics to ‘camouflage’ offsite as traditional housing by using bricks for the facade (Lovell & Smith 2010).
Existing research on the experiences of offsite housing has had a strong focus on temporary and crisis accommodation, including emergency shelter and housing for people experiencing homelessness (Delleman et al. 2023; Harris et al. 2019). MMC is thus often framed as a short-term solution, with mixed outcomes for residents, and has been linked to housing precarity and instability (Ehwi et al. 2022; Haas & Hepburn 2025), with such studies often questioning the capacity of schemes associated with temporary sites to address homelessness. While this research provides important insights into the social implications of offsite construction, it remains centred on transitional housing contexts rather than on everyday dwelling in apartments.
Earlier forms of factory-built housing have strong links with collectivist, state-provided housing (Hall & Vidén 2005; Kährik & Tammaru 2010), including post-war public housing (Steinhardt et al. 2013). In Ireland, Brickell et al. (2023) conducted a rare analysis of the affective connections of public housing residents with their modular homes, and the stigma attached to not only the words but also the materials. Csernák-Csorba & Tóvölgyi (2025) also address the cause of fears and resistance towards prefabricated housing. This work highlights how limited knowledge and historical associations contribute to the ongoing persistence of fears and stigma. Some research also indicates that the terminology used can shape residents’ views, with certain labels strongly associated with lower perceived build quality and material safety (Brickell et al. 2023; McCrum & Wang 2024).
Experiences of home-ownership rather than of private rental are overrepresented in research on housing built offsite in Nordic countries (Karjalainen & Ilgın 2021, 2022; Savolainen et al. 2022). Mass timber, perceived as a ‘green’ MMC, receives much interest in these countries as well as in North America. Perceptions of timber construction are well-documented (Giorgio et al. 2022; Kremer et al. 2024; Larasatie et al. 2018). Across this literature, MMC is variously framed as a technology, a policy instrument or a housing product, but not as an everyday condition of dwelling.
A recent post-occupancy study mapped evolving attitudes and imaginaries, with residents generally aware of MMC methods, but mostly neutral towards it (Wallace et al. 2025). A rare evaluation of a modular apartment development in Melbourne by Woo (2017) found that residents were generally satisfied, but that overheating and external noise were recurrent issues. The author concluded that further research was required to determine whether these outcomes derived from modular construction or were associated with design decisions, such as lightweight floors, facades and openings. Recent work has also examined perceptions of modular housing in relation to smart and connected technologies (Seymour et al. 2025), reflecting a growing interest in assessing the ‘smart’ claims associated with MMC. Overall, these studies point to the need to assess whether the anticipated benefits of MMC are consistently realised once residents have moved in, and to move beyond consumer satisfaction and defect-reporting (Maslova & Burgess 2023) towards more fruitful and systematic analysis.
Offsite construction is rarely understood as a vehicle for creativity, yet Dickens & Edensor (2021) show how narratives around MMC can also facilitate playful and experimental urban imaginaries. While not focused on residential experiences, this research points to the meta-narratives and broader urban imaginaries, cultures or countercultures that can be associated with MMC.
This paper builds on the discussions of earlier factory-built homes and MMC housing, linking them to work on apartment inhabitancy and lived experience, affective responses (Brickell et al. 2023), and urban imaginaries (Dickens & Edensor 2021), thus emphasising the presence of MMC in apartment living.
3. METHODS
This paper draws on two sources. First, it revisits the findings of multi-sited research on apartment living, conducted in sites across Australian and European cities between 2014 and 2018 (Horne et al. 2022; Nethercote & Horne 2016; Dorignon & Nethercote 2021). Approximately 50 householder interviews were conducted in each of four cities, including in Melbourne, to explore how changing design standards impacted residents’ lived experiences across tenure and urban locations. For this study, participants were recruited via letter box drop, and interviews were mostly conducted in-person at the participant’s apartment. This work provides a comparative backdrop for analysing MMC apartments within wider patterns of apartment production, allowing the paper to distinguish between issues specific to offsite construction and those more generally associated with contemporary apartment housing (see Section 5).
The second source is a specific dataset of semi-directed interviews conducted with residents and industry participants in the provision of mid-rise MMC apartments. Data collection took place between November 2025 and March 2026 and included 13 in-depth interviews. Six householders were recruited via letterbox drops and an opt-in flyer circulated in a resident’s WhatsApp group across two mid-rise apartment buildings in Melbourne: one using high-intensity MMC (full volumetric) and the other medium-intensity MMC (panelised cross-laminated timber—CLT). Alongside this cohort, seven interviews with builders and manufacturers, recruited via email, were conducted online to understand how MMC producers understand householders’ perceptions and expectations. Although limited in number, interviews prioritised depth and richness of accounts, and were designed to capture the diverse experiences of dwelling across different forms of MMC delivery. The cohort of householders included a mix of owner-occupiers and renters, single occupants, couples and family arrangements at different life stages, with a slight overrepresentation of women over men, as is common in housing research. Householders had lived in their apartments for varying lengths of time, from having moved recently to having lived in the apartment for a few years.
The householder interview guide (see the supplemental data online) elicited participants’ accounts of their housing histories and tenure situations; their perceptions of comfort and discomfort; their everyday rhythms in and around home; and their interpretations of the material and elemental qualities (light, sound, orientation, heat, etc.) of the apartment and communal areas. It attended to social interactions and encounters in the building, as curated by design and governance arrangements specific to each case. It also explored how householders imagined and emotionally related to their homes, with the intent of retracing any entanglements between expectations and lived experience, and between the production logics and design-material qualities of their home in their everyday affective life. The manufacturers interview guide (see the supplemental data online) explored perceptions of residents framed as ‘consumer demand’ and interrogated how MMC producers aim to respond to this demand within production logics requiring a certain level of repetition and volume.
Interviews were transcribed and analysed in NVivo using a series of thematic codes. The themes were attuned to the social and material processes at play, capturing material assemblages, affective atmospheres, the temporalities of construction and dwelling, urban imaginaries and futures, infrastructure and governance, everyday housing economies, collective life, and embodied habits and practices. Analysis focused on how householders articulated their affective experiences of apartment living. MMC and the buildings’ production methodologies were deliberately not introduced in the interview guide until the end in order to allow householders to express more naturally what shaped their everyday life without prefiguring or mediating their answers. A final set of questions probed more directly into their awareness offsite construction, and how they perceived and felt about a factory-built home. Participants’ accounts were anonymised and coded as R (residents) and M (manufacturer), followed by a randomly assigned number.
The two apartment buildings in Melbourne were selected because they represent distinct forms of offsite construction. The first is a mixed-use, mid-rise apartment development of approximately 60 apartments across eight levels, delivered as a build-to-sell project and assembled from fully prefabricated volumetric units in the mid-2010s. Units were manufactured offsite, transported and assembled on-site in a constrained inner-city context. The balconies along the facade incorporate brightly coloured glass panels, which are also visible from within the apartments.
The second is a smaller scale, mid-rise building of 13 apartments over five levels. Completed in the early 2020s, it was designed and delivered using prefabricated CLT panels assembled on-site in an established urban neighbourhood about 8 km from the city centre. Its pale brick-clad facade largely conceals the timber structure, while the apartments feature warm internal hues, timber finishes and green bathroom tiles.
Together, these developments capture different intensities of MMC production, from full-unit prefabrication to structural panelisation with a focus on the use of an alternative structural material to concrete and steel for the structure. The two buildings therefore offer contrasting conditions through which householders encounter the effects of offsite construction, particularly in relation to whether and how industrialisation is known, perceived, negotiated and valued in everyday dwelling.
4. FINDINGS
The paper revisits two established analytical domains within the apartment living literature—material assemblages and negotiations (Horne et al. 2022) and urban-housing relations (Blunt & Sheringham 2018)—to examine how offsite construction is encountered in everyday dwelling. These domains are mobilised as a framework to interrogate how MMC production shapes the material, affective and spatial dimensions of apartment living. The next section examines material assemblages, then urban relations, before interpreting these findings through the notion of the MMC home as an emerging housing imaginary.
4.1 NEGOTIATING MATERIAL ASSEMBLAGES IN OFFSITE MID-RISE APARTMENTS
Residents primarily evaluated their apartments through design, layout and access to a terrace or balcony, often in comparison with previous housing, whether the conventional standalone suburban house or another recently built apartment:
Apartment living usually means small and not much outdoor space […] whereas this one’s different […] even the one-bedroom apartments have more than normal outdoor space.
(R1)
The layout quality was repeatedly emphasised, as one participant noted:
I thought it was a really good size […] not pokey at all […] quite open.
(R4)
Optimisation of storage and layout was central in residents’ accounts, with apartments described as an efficient form of living compared with both older houses and poorly designed apartments:
this building, because of how it was designed, has some extraordinary storage […] so that makes living easy.
(R2)
Apartments were deemed functional and well-designed when they still provided ‘what you want from a house’ (R1), including ‘decent storage, and spaciousness, character and different floor plans’ (R1).
The design features and perceived material and construction quality of the building contributed to a sense of safety and pride, with residents describing their homes as ‘made to be lived in […] just very well built’ (R5) and contrasting them with ‘cookie-cutter, very grey, no character’ apartments ‘that don’t really make any sense’ (R4). This highlights the perceived coherence of design, often associated with the structural organisation of the building. Through comparing their current apartments with previous homes, several residents implicitly emphasised more integrated design outcomes, highlighting features that were ‘built into the building’ (R4) and contrasting those with conventional builds where:
they didn’t have that kind of technology built in and the design wasn’t as considered.
(R4)
Design features were often attributed to the integrated design processes associated with MMC, even when not explicitly acknowledged as such.
Perceived material performance, particularly thermal and acoustic qualities, further shaped how apartments were experienced in everyday life. Several residents connected the engineered timber (CLT) system to comfort at home:
whether it’s the CLT, the insulation is amazing. […] You’re never too hot, never too cold.
(R2)
R2 relayed one neighbour’s reporting that ‘even on 43 degree day, it was 24 inside with no air conditioning on’. Residents in the CLT building also described minimal levels of internal and external noise, with R3 noting that, despite nearby nightlife, ‘I don’t ever hear a thing if I shut these doors’ (R3). Acoustic experiences were not always positive, however, and could be caused by building services rather than the structural system of build quality:
there is a noise of exhaust pipes that just goes off every five minutes […] it’s quite annoying.
(R6)
Acoustic insulation and ease of use (all on one level) were also central to how residents evaluated their housing trajectories, with apartments seen as long-term homes rather than temporary abodes: ‘it’s a sort of place that I could live at forever […] everything is easy’ (R3). Here, housing performance was experienced directly through everyday use, rather than through an awareness of the construction method. Another participant, an architect, associated prefabrication with greater stability and tighter tolerances, with:
more stable construction […] the settlement of the CLT happened very quickly […] that would be [the case with] most prefabricated systems.
(R1)
The participant linked these characteristics to fewer defects than in conventional apartment construction.
Points of originality and uniqueness also enabled processes of home-making for residents through colour and finishes. Small design features, such as adjustable lighting, played a disproportionate role in shaping comfort and homeliness:
it exceeded my expectations. […] I’ve only lived in crappy apartments before […] even the lights are dimmable […] that makes a world of a difference.
(R5)
I loved the design […] the green tiles in my bathroom.
(R4)
it felt really modern and different […] not grey and dull […] this one had a little bit of colour […] all the bench tops in green […] I just felt a bit more happy.
(R5)
In contrast, coordinated building services that residents experienced as poorly coordinated created disruptions in the use of internal spaces. R6 described abandoning a bedroom because of service noise:
I just use that spare bedroom for storage […] noisy pipes and stuff in there.
(R6)
Here, acoustic issues did not simply reduce comfort but led residents to reconfigure their dwelling and limit their living space. Material and design outcomes also came with constraints around modification and ongoing adaptation:
We effectively bought off the plan […] we did some changes […] that door […] this unit […] the raised bench.
(R2)
This reveals the limitations of standardised design, where there is only limited scope for adaptation and where changes are confined to minor alterations.
Another important factor in the perception of offsite construction was the perceived repairability of the facade. Concerns about defects, cladding flammability and potential financial costs to residents were lowered by the knowledge that individual facade elements could be repaired or simply replaced:
elsewhere they’re going to spend millions fixing the facade problems. […] I was a little bit worried about that. […] Then someone explained that these tiles are clip-on.
(R3)
This also showed how perceptions of apartment construction are shaped by concerns about cladding flammability and defect-related anxiety. Perceptions of repairability emerging from modular, easily replaceable components alleviated perceptions of structural and financial risks.
MMC apartments, like homes more generally, were seemingly never experienced as finished products; instead, they were continually improved and personalised through furniture, objects and practices, allowing residents to develop a sense of identity in otherwise relatively neutral interiors:
I’ve got a little mirror […] all my little trinkets everywhere that I’ve collected.
(R4)
Like other homes, apartments were appropriated through individual interests and activities, with layout and storage acting as a crucial enabler for the development of hobbies, creative and work-from-home practices within compact spaces which extended the apartment beyond its basic domestic function:
I do a lot of embroidery, ceramics and […] candles […] one of the bedrooms is used as an office and craft space.
(R5)
Appreciation of these qualities could also develop over time, as one resident reflected:
when I walked in, I probably wasn’t […] as impressed as I’ve come to be.
(R3)
4.2 OFFSITE MID-RISE AND URBAN RELATIONS IN THE CITY
Residents situated their apartments within broader urban relations and housing trajectories, including location trade-offs, access to amenities and everyday rhythms:
We like very much as it is here, the inner urban aspect. We’re not looking to move to the hills.
(R2)
Apartments were not viewed or experienced in isolation but as embedded in urban life biographies:
It was really important to me to be close to High Street and public transport. […] I always wanted to be close to where I grew up, but just a little bit closer to the city.
(R4)
The pale brick facade and recessed balconies of one of the buildings contrasted with the more eclectic streetscape of older low-rise mixed-use buildings, with shops at street level and dwellings above, and newer apartment developments. One resident expressed an immediate recognition of one of the buildings for its distinct design and architectural qualities:
it really didn’t take very long […] to recognise the benefits […] the design of the facade […] the colour scheme
(R3)
but also for its position and outlook in the neighbourhood:
It’s quite an iconic building […] there’s no building like it.
(R3)
it looks nicer than a lot of the buildings around this area.
(R5)
Visual connection to the city was central to everyday dwelling, with one resident describing how:
the framing of the windows looks like a picture of the city, so if it was photographed.
(R3)
This reflects the importance of feeling connected to urban life through views and proximity, ‘where everything’s going on […] always something to do, really convenient’ (R6). This also included opportunities for everyday mundane observation:
You can look down on High Street and people watch […] that’s a really comfy spot.
(R5)
Such views supported comfort and belonging, alongside access to local amenities where:
there’s a lot of cafes and food places […] a really nice community vibe around here […] very wholesome.
(R5)
Limitations were also shaped by local infrastructure and place. Such constraints illustrate how MMC is spatially situated and contingent, conditioned by urban infrastructure and negotiated constraints:
I would have loved an induction cooktop […] we weren’t allowed […] because there isn’t enough power because of the trams in the street […] it would have been a couple of hundred thousand for the developer […] so gas cooktop, which is unfortunate.
(R2)
Access to nature remained important, although reconfigured through elevation and outlook rather than via direct access, echoing suburban qualities in a different spatial logic:
having a garden […] is a nice thing […] but then you do it differently up here […] you can see quite large trees and other people’s properties […] a longer view of the vegetation […] that’s the openness.
(R1)
High levels of satisfaction and comfort with MMC apartments did not always mean that residents had the ability to stay, highlighting how home-making remains shaped by land value and broader housing market dynamics:
This is the best place I’ve ever lived in. […] I’d like to not move out, but I can’t really afford to buy the place.
(R5)
While MMC apartments were linked to positive experiences of attachments and continuity, permanence remained contingent on housing affordability, as one young resident noted:
in other places I’ve definitely been ‘it’s time to move’, but this place I just haven’t really felt that.
(R5)
Home everywhere and every way is conditioned by housing economics, access to resources and uneven opportunities. Similarly, despite noise attenuating design features, proximity to nightlife required residents to adapt their routines and expectations:
It’s above a pub […] they play loud music to like 3 […] exhaust pipes just go off every 5 minutes […] it’s quite annoying […] when I first moved in, it was kind of hard to sleep […] I got used to it.
(R6)
Once again, these accounts show that offsite apartments are not disconnected to urban conditions but rather embedded in them, creating similar challenges to conventionally built housing.
4.3 THE INDUSTRIALISED APARTMENT HOME AS URBAN IMAGINARY
The urban imaginary of MMC apartment housing refers here to the emerging and uneven ways in which it is thought of as part of ordinary urban housing provision. MMC was not always perceptible to residents, and was rarely experienced as a distinct housing typology, as noted by one resident:
most of the tenants wouldn’t know that […] it was a timber building.
some people have asked me, ‘Oh, it’s a timber building, is that the timber?’ I say, ‘Not exactly.’
(R1)
However, the benefits and points of difference of one building were often expressed, even if residents did not attribute this to specific design or production factors:
They love living here. They just probably don’t know why […] it’s a different building.
(R1)
Awareness of MMC was incidental:
I started to hear about it from people who actually had just been walking past when it was being built. Some of my clients were locals and had started walking past during COVID and had noticed the construction methods […] the wooden framing.
(R3)
Hence, this novelty was noticed by passing public during the (relatively short) on-site assembly process, yet was then typically not uppermost in the minds of occupants who expressed little or no knowledge of the relatively invisible evidence of MMC: ‘I recall them saying there’s no cement in the building. […] I could have made that up.
(R5)
Knowledge was often tentative, second-hand (through real-estate agents, neighbours and local residents), and patchy:
I wouldn’t have a clue even really now what it is […] I haven’t really asked for […] prefabricated wooden things.
(R3)
I don’t know […] something about sustainable timber and concrete slabs. […] I think most of it is made offsite and then brought in […] but I don’t really have any associations with that in terms of whether that’s sustainable or best-practice or efficient. I’m not really sure about any of that […].
(R4)
MMC was unevenly known, articulated and recognised, often emerging in accounts as incidental knowledge.
Residents sometimes interpreted finishes as structural elements, suggesting that the actual material methodology for the assembly of the building was not directly interpretable, but rather inferred through aesthetics:
there is a lot of timber used in the building, which you can see through the building, it almost looks like raw materials.
(R5)
In this case, the perceived ‘timber’ referred to plywood surfaces finishes in circulation spaces rather than to the structural CLT.
Not all design features were perceived or valued, with some participants expressing limited judgement over aesthetic elements, such as facade particularities, suggesting that some architectural intent remained mostly unnoticed among everyday routines:
I’m not very observant about the colours […] on my balcony it has some like coloured glasses like red and blue and white. […] I’m not sure.
(R6)
MMC thus presented not as a particularly distinctive design or qualitative feature, but rather as ordinary housing within expected dense housing landscapes: ‘It just looks like a normal apartment building to me’ (R6). It only became noticeable in the event of defects and related problems that necessitated material consideration. Familiarity with basic terms such as ‘prefab’ or ‘modular’ was low, and considered unimportant:
unless there is anything kind of weird about it […] everything’s fine and nothing for me to worry about. […] I don’t really know what [prefab and modular] mean.
(R6)
The limited awareness of MMC in resident’s everyday imaginaries was confirmed by MMC housing manufacturers, who actively sought this limited detectability while also seeking to deliver higher quality and more aesthetic outcomes: As one MMC manufacturer put it:
You will not know the difference [… purchasers] would have no idea it’s a bathroom pod […] they should be saying ‘this looks really nice’ and not actually know that it’s actually a bathroom pod […] that is, quality wise, better.
(M6)
Another MMC manufacturer confirmed their deliberate strategy to align with other products in the market and keep the MMC invisible:
We don’t advertise it’s prefab […] it’s just a townhouse for people buying it.
(M3)
Pride was taken here in fully embedding, even concealing technical sophistications from the non-expert eye:
It doesn’t look [like] all the smarts that are going into in terms of how it goes together. People wouldn’t even know it’s prefab.
(M3)
Manufacturers suggested that MMC housing is gaining broader social acceptance, as distinct from earlier associations with temporary or low-quality housing. As P5 explained, prefabricated buildings had previously been perceived as ‘just a container on stilts’. Moreover, ‘government acceptance of using MMC and volumetric construction as an acceptable outcome’ (P5) was seen as contributing to this shift. Manufacturers also sought to decouple MMC from housing failures emerging through the design, delivery and maintenance rather than attributing them to production systems:
The big issues for stigmatisation is poorly designed housing […] nothing to do with the construction methodology necessarily […] issues like mould or poor ventilation are about design, not MMC.
(M7)
However, these distinctions were not necessarily mirrored in residents’ everyday understandings of how their homes are produced, and what they actually valued. Together these findings show that while urban imaginaries of MMC housing are being shaped by government institutionalisation and industry narratives, it remains relatively invisible in residents’ everyday experiences.
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Residents’ experiences of modern methods of construction (MMC) apartment living reveal aspects of everyday life that link to material outcomes but do not always name or recognise housing production methods. Through these accounts, what matters to them is revealed as both affective and tangible, negotiated and relational, while also about home and place in the urban context (Blunt & Sheringham 2018). Industry participants report making significant effort to downplay, or render invisible, industrial production methods in the way MMC apartments are presented and marketed. In response to RQ1 about how MMC is encountered in everyday dwelling in urban apartments, an ambivalence pervades questions of how housing is constructed. Instead, what is made is felt, expressed in accounts of negotiating spaces, noises, light, air and feelings of safety. The term ‘accommodation’ comes to mind, as both verb and noun, as residents seek to make home in constrained circumstances, shaping the internals just as their lives are shaped by them.
This co-shaping of MMC apartments and lived experience (RQ2) extends to the relations between the apartment and the urban context, and is not unique to MMC. Referring to earlier work (Horne et al. 2022; Nethercote & Horne 2016; Dorignon & Nethercote 2021), there is continuity with the dilemmas, constraints, trade-offs and reworked imaginaries of apartment living per se. There is regular comparison with the ‘conventional’ suburban house and garden, especially for older cohorts. However, there was a clear distinction between MMC built apartments and the rest of the conventionally built stock in terms of perceived quality, performance and aesthetics, which contributed to householder accounts of high levels of wellbeing. This observation extends existing scholarship on apartment living by indicating the distinctive role of MMC in housing trajectories and the changing Australian urban landscape.
Meanwhile, the MMC sector is actively engaged in a process of normalisation through which MMC is presented as ordinary, typical and indistinct. This accords with Lovell & Smith’s (2010: 464) analysis of housing markets agencement as the configuration of social, material and technical relations through which housing production is organised and can become locked it. They observe that:
prefabricated homes are being built which closely resemble those produced by masonry methods, whereas an alternative strategy would be to use the technological capabilities of prefabricated homes to build dwellings with a very different appearance
which can be understood as a reverse distinction strategy. This ‘strategic ordinariness’ produces a mode of housing production through which MMC is deliberately absent from discourses, design features and promotional material in order to emphasise familiarity and social acceptance.
Broader housing structures matter in the life of MMC residents too. Real-estate market dynamics, housing affordability, urban location, immediate neighbourhood, the nature and quality of infrastructure all co-shape experiences of MMC apartments. MMC homes do not operate in a silo, but instead are entangled in broader socio-material urban structures. MMC thus does not operate as a visible innovation, but rather as a condition of dwelling, encountered through everyday use, layout and materials, and shaping comfort, safety, and belonging. This relative invisibility of MMC does not mean that MMC does no work in constituting dwelling, but rather it points to the nuanced ways in which it is built into—and reflective of—everyday housing experiences.
The industrialised apartment home can be understood as co-constituted through the accounts of the households and manufacturers. The gaps in the narrative are as important as what is being said and the dynamic and emergent urban imaginary of MMC housing is uneven, mediated and highly fragmented. Moreover, it is quiet, invisible to the lay person, and most residents interviewed in this study were not consciously in a position to articulate defined views around what this may mean. However, MMC did have consequences for their everyday lives, as it impacted the layout, design and quality of their housing. This has implications for policy and the wider social acceptance of MMC apartments (RQ3). Because MMC housing is not recognised as such by residents, then consumer demand and perceptions should not be assumed to carry significant weight in the context of apartment housing more broadly. Instead, MMC uptake appears to rely more on decision-making in development, regulatory revisions and collaborative models of procurement rather than on conventional ideas of housing demand. This points to a need for more evaluation and public discussion about MMC apartments, and support for broader discourse about the implications of MMC in apartments, in particular in relation to security, quality, safety and amenity.
It is recommended that future lived-experience studies could be translated into popular media to legitimise and enable a national discussion on MMC apartment living. This would provide a language, rather than it being a discrete, poorly understood phenomenon. More lived-experience research could provide evidence about how homes are actually lived in, rather than assuming that ‘good’ housing choices depend on consumers recognising and identifying a preferred construction method. By assembling MMC apartment discourses and relations in this way, affective versions of building performance can enter the lexicon, attached to MMC. The institutionalisation and broad social acceptance of MMC is partly about fitting in people’s common experiences of housing. Thus, rather than seeking to enhance consumer education or perception change, policy approaches should promote design quality, urban integration and delivery to support industrialised housing as an increasingly expected and accepted form of apartment living.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Damien Crough and Emily Hardwick for supporting recruitment by suggesting potential case-study buildings and appropriate avenues for contacting residents. They also thank all the participants for their time and invaluable insights.
AI DECLARATION
The research and writing are the authors’ work and were not generated or written by programs using artificial intelligence.
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
The research data underlying this study are not publicly available due to confidentiality agreements with the participants. The findings draw on in-depth qualitative conversations conducted under assurances of anonymity and privacy protection. Making full transcripts or recordings available would risk breaching these ethical commitments.
ETHICAL APPROVAL
This research was approved by the RMIT University DSC CHEAN (College Human Ethics Advisory Network) and complies with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC, 2023) (project number 29477). All residents and industry participants were recruited and provided informed consent in accordance with the approved ethics protocol.
SUPPLEMENTAL DATA
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.826.s1