Louise Dorignon
Email: louise.dorignon@rmit.edu.au
Institution/Organisation: RMIT University
Position: Research Fellow
Biographical Information: Louise is an urban geographer based at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University. She is interested in high-rise housing, apartment liveability/affordability and the politics of verticality in westernised cities.
She started her role as Research Fellow at RMIT in 2019 as part of ARC LP HOME (Housing Outcomes Metrics and Evaluation, CI: Ralph Horne), looking at the production of design standards and apartment lived experiences in recently built apartments across four European and Australian cities and across a range of tenure/socio-economic situations.
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 is currently involved in several housing policy-related projects, incl. AHURI-funded project 'Building materials in a circular economy'. This project is part of the 'Inquiry into housing in a circular economy', which aims at establishing an evidence base and framework to support a transition to circular economy housing in Australia, including for apartments.
In 2020, she co-led an AHURI-funded research project entitled 'The lived experience of COVID-19: housing and household resilience'. The outcomes of this research were linked to the need for better standards in high-rise living.
Awarded in 2019, my PhD at The University of Melbourne and at 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 Lyon, France, she participated 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. As part of project HEVD (Habiter Ensemble la Ville de Demain), she helped coordinate interdisciplinary research activities addressing the production of apartment living for better and more inclusive housing practices and urban strategies.