Chapter 4 Quality or quantity? The role of qualitative research in evaluating urban renewal programmes

Urban renewal through the regeneration and redevelopment of public housing estates has become a major policy initiative in most Australian state housing authorities since the mid-1990s. These policies have involved a mix of both physical renewal and community development in response to the problems that have emerged in the public housing sector over the past two decades. While the origins of these problems are well established and reflect the changes experienced by public housing sectors in other comparable countries (Hayward, 1996; Peel, 1995), the impact of policies to address these problems in the Australian context has attracted less attention in the academic literature (Arthurson, 1998; Randolph & Judd, 2000). While there is an emerging body of evaluation and research that has attempted to assess the outcomes of renewal programmes and policies, it can be argued that there is still a relatively poor level of general understanding of what aspects of renewal are effective or what outcomes have actually been achieved. At the same time, there has been little effective development of an exchange between researchers or evaluators on the effectiveness of the various evaluation methodologies – qualitative and quantitative – that have been used to assess renewal policies. This is particularly evident at the national level (Spiller Gibbin Swan, 2000).