Louise Dorignon

Dr Louise Dorignon is a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow and an urban geographer based at the Centre for Urban Research, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University.

Louise’s current research focuses on emerging construction and building practices as a means to sustainable urban densification. Her VC Fellowship project at RMIT (‘Factory-built homes: Investigating industry prospects and lived outcomes of modular apartment construction in Australia’) focuses on modular apartment prefabrication to analyse how it can enable the production of more sustainable and affordable homes and support everyday experiences of post-carbon housing in Australia.

Her publications so far have focused on the socio-material and emotional entanglements of lives lived in, around and out of urban apartments. She seeks to understand apartments as urban homes, and their fundamentally diverse, uneven characteristics in contemporary cities.

She has collaborated with a wide range of stakeholders, from material manufacturers and builders, to architects, developers, policymakers, regulators and householders in Australia and internationally, especially in Europe.

She has worked on several AHURI-funded projects including ‘Building materials in a circular economy‘ (2021-2023), ‘Inquiry into housing in a circular economy‘ (2021-2023), which aimed at establishing an evidence base and framework to support a transition to circular economy housing in Australia, and ‘The lived experience of COVID-19: housing and household resilience‘ (2020).

Between 2019 and 2022 she was a Research Fellow within the ARC Linkage Project HOME (Housing Outcomes Metrics and Evaluation), investigating the production of design standards and apartment lived experiences in recently built apartments across European and Australian cities.

Awarded in 2019, her jointly awarded PhD from The University of Melbourne and University of Lyon explored the privatisation of high-rise housing in affluent suburbs of Melbourne and the resulting shifts in social class relations.

Previously based in France, she participated as a doctoral candidate in two international research projects (ANR projects SKYLINE and HIGH-RISE) on the socio-political impacts of high-rise developments in Europe and South America, and in an industrial partnership addressing more inclusive housing policies (Chaire HEVD, Habiter Ensemble la Ville de Demain).

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Projects

Building materials in a circular economy

2021–2022

This project uses a circular economy framing to investigate use and waste in material supply chains to contribute knowledge so that the housing construction sector can reduce, reuse, recycle and recover resources and rely much less on virgin material

News & Blog

CUR Stories

Building houses in factories for the Commonwealth Games was meant to help the housing crisis. What now?

26 July 2023

After Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the athlete village in Parkville was largely sold off, with 320 houses going to social housing. Victoria’s now cancelled 2026 Commonwealth Games were meant to have the same effect in the state’s smaller cities.

CUR Stories

Turning the housing crisis around: how a circular economy can give us affordable, sustainable homes

12 July 2023

Australia needs a bold national project to tackle the climate crisis and support households by shifting to a more sustainable housing industry.

CUR Stories

Six actions we can take towards closing materials loops in Australian residential construction

29 June 2023

On May 10, 2023 the World Green Building Council (WGBC) and its global network launched the Circular Built Environment Playbook — a guide for the building and construction sector to accelerate the adoption of circular economy and resource efficiency principles. This builds upon a series of reports by the Sustainable Buildings and Construction programme (part of UN’s One Planet […]

CUR Stories

Report shows our homes must change for better health and living

25 November 2020

A new study examining Victorians’ lived experience during COVID-19 points to the design and quality of homes and neighbourhoods as a key mitigating factor in people’s capacity to cope with disasters.

CUR Stories

New project investigates how COVID-19 impacts housing stress

28 May 2020

RMIT urban researchers have received funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute to investigate COVID-19’s impact on housing stress in Melbourne.

CUR Stories

Meet the women helping to improve how we live in cities and with nature

05 March 2020

As our cities evolve, so too should our approach to building and planning our urban habitats. Here, six RMIT urban researchers share how their work is shaping how we live in our cities and with nature.

Publications

Building circular economy housing: An Australian story

Louise Dorignon, , , Hazel Easthope, Stefanie Dühr, Trivess Moore, Emma Baker, Tony Dalton, Illustrated by Zhen Xiong

Visual summary

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Informing a strategy for circular economy housing in Australia

, Louise Dorignon, Louise Dorignon, Hazel Easthope, Stefanie Dühr, Trivess Moore, Emma Baker, Tony Dalton, Hal Pawson, Peter Fairbrother

AHURI report

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