Abstract

Climate change challenges Queensland Affordable Housing (QAH), exacerbated by rapid population growth and demographic change in the already identified sensitive landscape of South East Queensland (SEQ), Australia. Three QAH built environment developments and their cohort become the focal point for this thesis, which performs a penetrating analysis not blurred by a false planning dichotomy. It is an analysis bound to the concepts of meaning, object, affordance, residential features, vulnerability, the social-built environment interface and which finally migrates to a legal analysis, interpretation and construction. A theoretical approach that grasps the reciprocity of the tangible and intangible interrelationships between individuals, groups of individuals, the built environment and the power of law. The study reveals through analytical interpolation based on a multi-method praxis, six QAH objectives: “safe; access; wellbeing; inclusion; livability; and affordable”. These QAH objectives are consistent with the notions of international and Australian affordable housing. Due to the neglect of statutory planners and decision makers there are constraints on QAH objectives in light of climate change vulnerability. Through the utility of a three step legal inquiry, assessment and statutory interpretation and construction, two legal mechanisms are designed that enhance QAH objectives and restrain climate change vulnerability for the QAH cohort.