Making the Unsustainable Sustainable: Towards a Transitions Management Perspective of Housing Development in England

The paper focusses upon the challenge of uptake and scaling of sustainable housing development models for the UK. It introduces a newly created Place Building System as an emergent framework designed to challenge the dominant, volume-led practices of national housebuilders and support the transition towards more socially equitable, environmentally regenerative, and economically resilient forms of development. The Place Building System was developed through a transdisciplinary, participatory methodology, engaging a Steering Group of senior UK development stakeholders. This co-creation arena enabled iterative learning, critical interrogation, and the evolution of both the Place Building System and its supporting infrastructure: the Regional Building Foundation. Framed through Geels’ Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) of sociotechnical transitions, the Place Building System is understood as a niche innovation searching for traction, with the capacity to challenge and reconfigure entrenched regime logics within the housing development sector. Mobilising the MLP framework, the paper demonstrates how systemic change in housing development may unfold through the interaction of niche innovations, landscape pressures, and regime destabilisation and reorientation, while recognising the institutional, cultural, and structural shifts required for such a transition to take root. In doing so, it specifies how regime-level lock-ins associated with finance, planning, and project governance condition niche maturation and shape the pathways through which regime reconfiguration may occur. Empirical illustrations show how place building principles operate as niche practices offering alternative sociotechnical configurations. By integrating empirical insight with transition theory, this paper contributes a novel conceptualisation of place building for sustainability as a systemic intervention and considers how it might be scaled to gain traction and reshape the future of the housing development sector in the UK.