An experiment in community infrastructure.
Government is difficult business. The to-do list is long and the constraints are vast and varied.
The Dwell Lab is where we will borrow techniques from niche corners of the universe and use them to design and deploy experiments in service of housing adequacy.
This lab is inspired by a fusion of modern place based thinkers and tinkerers. In this commons, we will design experimental techniques, document them and share them with policy-makers and explorers who might be interested in engaging as we set about deploying them.
The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council used its State of the Housing System Report 2026 to propose an "all encompassing" metrics stack to monitor progress toward housing system objectives. We criticise that proposal for the same disclaimers under which it is published, for its selective approach to identifying which elements of the housing system are included in the "all encompassing" framework and for the measurement techniques that have been adopted. They are biased. We have built what has been proposed by the Council, so that it auto updates with the release of each public source used to generate the metrics. We are working on supplementing these metrics with additional metrics, case-studies and narrative content to demonstrate why decisions made in advance of diligence have lasting adverse effects across in the housing system.
Can a low-lying coastal community fund its own flood resilience through a place-based infrastructure bond? We're testing whether the community bond model can work at street scale in Budgewoi, where the climate exposure is acute and the infrastructure spend per resident is too low for traditional capital programs. The experiment is mapping priority streets, trialling flood-resilient planting, and prototyping the bond instrument itself, with documentation aimed at other coastal councils facing the same problem.
Can simulation-based learning shift how residential property investors actually make decisions, where conventional training and disclosure regimes have not? We're testing whether the simulator format can operationalise the UN's housing-as-a-human-right framework into recognisable investor behaviours and protocols. The experiment is building the simulator with the UNGP framework and Bell's work as the rubric, piloting it with a small cohort of institutional and individual residential property investors, and documenting both the design decisions and what the cohort's choices reveal about common failure modes.
Can a voluntary certification create a market signal for housing quality where regulation has failed to? We're testing whether the B Corp/Fairtrade playbook translates to rental housing, borrowing the audit-and-register model and adapting it to habitability, fair terms, and tenancy practices. The experiment is a pilot badge in one market with a defined cohort of landlords, and we're documenting whether it shifts landlord applications, tenant choice, or property care or anything at all.