THROUGH THE EYES OF THE PUBLIC: The Promotion of Social Rental Housing (SRH) as a Focal Point in Addressing Housing Resilience Dr. Chika C. Daniels-Akunekwe 1 , Dr. Brian R. Sinclair 2 1 University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada 2 University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and sinclairstudio Inc., Alberta, Canada ABSTRACT: Comparable with the word ‘sustainable’ in the late 1980s, over the last decade, the word resilience has been used extravagantly. Resilience is deployed most popularly when enquiring about the ability of a city to assume this trait but is also invoked while exploring same in communities, institutions, systems, and infrastructure. Within the latter is housing, where recurring estimations signal the need to address the enhancement of people’s lives via holistic housing solutions – specifically as it pertains to social rental housing (SRH). The challenge we tackle in this paper attempts to minimize the continued loss of SRH; first by advocating the need for its relocation from city fringes to non- poor neighborhoods, and secondly, by identifying the chief causative factors of opposition within such neighborhoods and determining the viability of operational guiding principles to aid their successful integration. The research builds upon select pillars of resilience such as collaboration, flexibility/adaptability, transformability, and consolidation. Incorporating a case study methodology, with a mixed methods approach including literature review, phenomenology, and survey, our study discovered (amongst other things) that (I) utilizing the knowledge of the residents/public as a key source of information to create the guidelines is necessary to ensuring its applicability following completion, and (II) understanding existing governance structures, policymaking processes (on localization), and possible entry and impacts points to allow the smooth translation of the guidelines into policy, and integration of the guidelines to current strategies. Moving beyond critical analysis, the work culminated in the design of the guidelines which the authors anticipate will see conversion to policy, thereby improving institutional structure, capacity and performance. Further, the authors aim to enhance resource management, and build public participation, to more potently address urgent SRH issues. This study highlights the need for a more involved local government, which proves an indispensable network in building resilience in cities across Africa and beyond. KEYWORDS: resilience, social housing, siting, maintenance, guidelines INTRODUCTION “A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.” Nelson Mandela (in his book, Long Walk to Freedom) Jones (2017, 129) defines city resilience as the ability of cities to “manage and adapt to change, and exhibit robustness, mitigation and adjustment at all levels”. The quality of resilience in cities is identified by three keywords: absorption, recovery and preparation, and driven via four areas: its economy, society, governance and environment (OECD 2021). Within the second, the area that deals with society, there is the issue of inclusivity and cohesiveness, active networks within communities, and the citizens’ overall pleasure from access to a healthy life(style); while the aspect that focuses on the environment, is seen in the provision of infrastructure to meet basic needs, and the development of coherent policy towards land use and allocation. These two areas address myriad elements, among which is the city’s housing and its ability to shelter its inhabitants. In this paper, we deem housing to be foremost amongst the elements that can guarantee urban resilience, which is in alignment with Ernst & Young’s (EY) argument in 2018, that any kind of urban resilience discussion should commence at home/house building. Looking at housing through the lens of resilience implies considering at least three (of its) characteristics: supply, diversity and affordability. According to O’Toole (2017), affordability in housing which refers to the