Housing Resilience Policy in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of Informal Initiatives

Housing affordability in Australia can be viewed as a slow-onset stress—a persistent and cumulative disruption that undermines the long-term resilience of urban systems. This slow-burning crisis increasingly intersects with sudden climate-related shocks, such as the recent floods in Queensland and bushfires in Victoria, amplifying the pressures on vulnerable populations and exposing the fragility of Australia’s housing system. While much of the existing resilience literature has focused on risk mitigation and disaster recovery, it often overlooks the adaptive and transformative capacities of cities as complex socio-economic systems. With a focus on Australian housing, this chapter applies an evolutionary resilience framework, moving beyond the traditional ‘bounce-back’ model to explore how the housing system can adapt and transform in response to sustained affordability pressures and climate shocks. Evolutionary resilience emphasises a system’s capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation, opening up pathways for systemic reform and innovation in the face of crisis. In the absence of adequate state intervention, community-led informal housing initiatives have emerged as grassroots responses to growing housing insecurity. While these initiatives demonstrate adaptive capacity and forms of everyday resilience, they also operate under severe constraints, including regulatory neglect, structural inequities, and limited sustainability. Nonetheless, the rise of informal housing can be understood as an emergent infrastructure of care—particularly in the context of an increasingly inefficient housing system and escalating climate events. While not a long-term solution, such forms of shelter offer vital, temporary support to those facing housing precarity in the wake of environmental disasters. We argue that slow-onset stresses like housing unaffordability compound the impacts of sudden climate events and demand more than reactive policy measures. They require a dynamic, forward-looking, and equity-centred approach to resilience—one that acknowledges structural injustice and enables systemic transformation. This chapter reframes resilience not as a return to the status quo, but as a catalyst for transformative policy, institutional renewal, and behavioural change in the pursuit of climate-resilient and socially just cities.