Sustainable housing has been subject to research, practice and policy making for some considerable time. More recently attention has been drawn to the separate problem of declining affordability in housing. This paper describes research aimed at developing an assessment framework for both affordability and sustainability as part of the effort to incorporate both of these features into new housing projects. The research has a particular focus on developments aimed at urban densification. Background literature on both affordability and sustainability is reviewed as well as emerging schemes aimed at dealing with both aspects of housing developments. Performance indicators are identified and these are incorporated in an interim assessment framework which is tested using a group of industry experts. The research has highlighted areas where further development is required to attain quantitative assessments of affordable and sustainable housing developments

Australia, GIS, indices, poverty, region, social capital, social exclusion, social inclusion, survey, theoretical framework,

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Conventional typologies that seek to categorise indicators of urban sustainability tend to draw upon the neoliberal, silo approach for conceptualising sustainability, which positions sustainability as having economic, social and environmental dimensions. This approach has been critiqued for its inability to account for challenges to sustainability arising from interactions between social, economic and environmental variables. Models that are incapable of assessing dimensional interactions and their collective outcomes are also incapable of providing critiques that address entrenched structural challenges to sustainability. This paper proposes a new thematic approach based on Australian research to classify indicators for urban sustainability. The proposed approach shifts the categorisation of indicators from a neoliberal ontology to a social democratic foundation by proposing a model for assessing urban development relational to themes of amenity, accessibility, equity and environmental performance relative to resource conservation. The proposed approach is intended to be sensitive to integrating social, economic and environmental considerations with land use planning to improve the natural and built environments of communities.

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