On Thursday, the 20th of January 2022, Amarawickrama Liyanage Susantha will defend her PhD dissertation entitled: Community Co-finance and Residential Environment Quality, Identifying factors and relationships from a mixed-methods approach
The relevance of the nexus between housing finance and the quality of residential environments has been called into question due to increasing challenges associated with growing urban populations, including economic crises, housing debts and unaffordability, evictions, disasters and global pandemic situations. In her research, Susantha explores how community co-finance influences residential environment quality. As she points out, a good-quality living environment is unaffordable for certain social and economic groups across urban areas around the world - particularly low and low-middle-income communities.
She observed that the dynamics behind community co-finance through multi-actor social networking have the capacity to redefine finance, and it is no longer limited to money. Community co-finance covers collective resources embedded and shared in bonding, bridging and linking social networks in a supportive, collaborative climate. Her research shows that community co-finance as an alternative housing financing method could play a major role in enhancing residential environment quality for low and low-middle-income households. By adopting a mixed-methods approach to analysis, this research contributes an additional element that identifies and provides fine-grained understanding from the ground up of each and every factor of community co-finance and its positive influence on residential environment quality.
Her research is important not only to theory build but also to contribute to practice – in this case, the planning and development of good quality residential environments. Insights that emerge from this research project will be useful to policymakers and practitioners, contributing to knowledge building that can strengthen institutional resources, community resources and capacities, mainstreaming good practice and addressing institutional and administrative challenges related to housing issues.