IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Across many coastal towns in the United Kingdom, regeneration and urban revitalisation are unfolding within places often described as “left-behind” post-industrial landscapes. In these contexts, economic renewal intersects with persistent housing precarity, affordability pressures and risks of displacement. This paper examines how residents of Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, understand and experience housing adequacy within a coastal urban context shaped by regeneration and socio-economic change. Adequate housing, as defined by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, encompasses seven dimensions: security of tenure, affordability, habitability, accessibility, availability of services, location and cultural adequacy. While this framework informs housing policy and planning principles, it often overlooks how adequacy is understood and negotiated in everyday life. This paper critically interrogates the limits of policy-led definitions of housing adequacy in the context of coastal regeneration and peripheral urbanism. Drawing on methods from architectural and design practice, the research combines ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and behavioural mapping. Thematic analysis explores how housing and space are experienced through networks of people, places, memories and attachments within a coastal urban environment. The findings identify four conceptual lenses – making adequacy, inside adequacy, outside adequacy and building adequacy – which together form a framework for understanding how housing adequacy is produced and negotiated within place-specific contexts. By situating housing adequacy within coastal regeneration and peripheral urbanism, the paper reconceptualises adequacy as both fixed, defined through policy frameworks and fluid, shaped through lived experience.