Post-occupancy Learning

About this pattern

Post-occupancy studies are protocols for evaluating the technical performance of (called post-occupancy analysis) and/or social satisfaction with (called post-occupancy evaluation) single or multi-residential buildings after residents have moved in. This pattern seeks to extend current post-occupancy studies to emphasise the importance of learning from the experiences and practices of a community of residents. Such ongoing learning is critically important if the aim is to create liveable and sustainable places, as it could validate goals, help identify and address emerging issues and opportunities, and feed back into planning processes as a form of ‘continuous improvement’ and lifecycle planning.

Post-occupancy learning requires community engagement and outputs that can form a durable record of a living place to inform learning over time. This approach foregrounds and validates community expertise in the lived context, which is under-represented in the literature about liveability. Community stakeholders may initiate engagement around a particular common concern, on a one-off or regular basis. Concerns might be explored via regular resident walking meetings, workshops or social ‘living labs’. Mechanisms to ‘carry over’ learning to improve the planning and development process needs to be created, with precedents existing in the form of collaborative governance arrangements (see Report). Post-occupancy learning could facilitate enhanced openness and trust and enable community-led innovation in planning and development processes. It could also prime communities to explore the transition to new practices, for example energy sharing, or new forms of water or waste management. Citizen science projects recording local weather and aspects of environmental change are a form of post-occupancy learning. Retaining collected data in a local library (in addition to handing it over to the investigating body [e.g. Australian Museum or Bureau of Meteorology]) would enable future generations of residents to access this data and facilitate intergenerational place-based learning. Adopt a tree programs, where residents ‘adopt’ a young local tree planted by council and take responsibility for monitoring its health as it grows, is another example. In this case, succession planning is important, including mechanisms for intergenerational communication.

Pattern Conditions

Enablers:

• Commitments to stakeholder engagement (e.g. Landcom’s ‘Join-in Charter’).
• Engagement Evaluation and Stakeholder Risk Framework.
• Resident surveys (e.g. Healthy and Inclusive Places Survey) currently captures ‘satisfaction’ but not learning.
• Leveraging interest in citizen science for fine grain environmental monitoring.

Constraints:

• Scope limitations due to time constraints.
• Limitation of access to and facility with digital tools.
• Existing approaches to community engagement oriented to: project delivery; forward planning/ ‘visioning’; short-term and front-end engagement events. Conversely, post-occupancy learning is about lived experience.
• Access to tools to measure and capture information, experiences and practices will need to be managed.
• Legitimate pathways to loop post-occupancy learning back into project planning, will need to be developed.

Commoning Concerns

Access: Residents and relevant stakeholders. The inclusion of newly arrived residents will need to be facilitated.
Use: Residents, future-residents, community liaison officer and other development agency stakeholders.

Benefit: Community and development agency processes; potentially external partners.

Care: Community-led studies might require agreements to monitor on an ongoing basis; knowledge commons could be housed in community library.

Responsibility: Development agency liaison, community of residents, library workers.

Ownership: Knowledge commons produced by engagement processes – who owns this, who has access and where is it housed, will need to be decided.

Context information and site history – who has access and where is this housed?

Examples:

• a study monitoring bird and insect life in the residential development
• a study capturing and recording surface heat measures
• a workshop to capture commoning concerns (could be a social living lab)

What and how experiences and practices are captured, and where and how outputs are stored, are key commoning concerns.

Some members of the community may find the process ‘nosy’. This would need to be sensitively addressed.

A key commoning concern will be accessibility to tools to measure and capture information, experiences and practices.