The UK’s first Investment Zone has been declared spanning Sheffield city centre, the Lower Don Valley, Rotherham and beyond. The economic objectives are clear, but there is little mention of sustainability.

This feels like a major omission and a lost opportunity. The Investment Zone is home to many businesses that support a sustainable future. Sheffield has committed to net zero carbon by 2030 and is known for its pioneering work to create sustainable urban places. Why not build on this experience and know-how to create the UK’s “greenest” Investment Zone?

Imagine extending Grey to Green across Sheffield city centre and using the river, canal, railway, roads and development sites of the Lower Don Valley to showcase what an adaptive and resilient urban environment should be.

South Yorkshire Housing Association is 50 this year.

How have we managed to stay true to our founder’s mission?

Part of the answer lies in the consistency of our leadership: we have had only two Chief Executives in our 50-year history, John Belcher and Tony Stacey. It is also because of the quality of those two leaders and their commitment to our purpose.

Tony has announced his imminent, and well-deserved, retirement after 27 years. This blog uses the refurbishment of a former homeless hostel to tell the story of Tony’s contribution to South Yorkshire Housing Association.

At South Yorkshire Housing Association we have brought our Home Maintenance Team and our Neighbourhood Estate Action Team together in a new, shared depot.

The result is a depot like no other. What makes the design of this depot and the rest of our workspace uniquely South Yorkshire Housing Association's?

At South Yorkshire Housing Association we are delighted to have been named Landlord of the Year in the UK Housing Awards.

Our video submission captures the strength and integrity of our brand: how our images, stories, evidence and tone of voice come together to articulate and communicate our values and purpose.

This blog tells the story of how we developed our brand.

South Yorkshire Housing Association has ventured into a new type of housing: 225 flats for market rent in Kelham Island, Sheffield's most up and coming urban neighbourhood, recently voted one of the top 10 places to live in the UK.

These new homes are aimed at a new audience for us and needed a new approach to branding. But how to create a brand that is authentic, celebrates the neighbourhood and communicates our social values?

Another batch of Live Projects - 17 in all - has just come to an end, beautifully curated and facilitated by Sam Brown from Sheffield’s School of Architecture.

Live Projects have been a key feature of training architects in Sheffield. They have also had real impact in the city and beyond. Why do they work so well?

We know that libraries are transformational. What interests me is the difference that good design can make to elevate the transformational impact of libraries. Here are three examples:

#1 A library building - the Learning Zone in Parson Cross, Sheffield

#2 A curated library - at South Yorkshire Housing Association’s Rockingham Street workspace

#3 A Human Library - an event co-produced with South Yorkshire Housing Association’s customers and employees

Neighbourhood Strategies in north Sheffield - how it started

In the first decade of the 21st century, a small experiment took place in north Sheffield: a group of us wanted to see if we could create a strategic and visionary masterplan for 6 neighbourhoods (50,000 population) starting not with facts and technical analysis, but with local people's stories and ideas.

Two things inspired this approach.

At South Yorkshire Housing Association we want our customers’ experience with us to be a joy.

Since 2013 we have been exploring through a series of test projects how participatory arts can add value to our purpose: with us you can settle at home, live well and realise your potential. We call this programme Moments of Joy.

This year the programme has had fresh impetus as a direct result of the pandemic: as we locked down our extra care housing (homes for people aged 55 and over) we knew we had to do more to connect with people isolated in their homes.

The pandemic has helped us all notice the joy in small everyday details, the flowers, the birdsong. Staying close to home, walking daily through local streets and green spaces, has helped us appreciate the natural world around us.

And at the same time, the massive overnight reduction in road and air traffic, the resulting improvement in air quality, the reduced noise and the fragility of our food chains, has focused our minds on the bigger picture of climate change and our relationship with the natural world.

The UK officially entered lockdown on 23 March 2020, although by then many businesses had already encouraged their employees to work from home.

Overnight we have become a nation of homeworkers with a new set of acronyms (WFH anyone?), a new language and a new set of tools for working remotely.

Does this mean the office is dead? My gut instinct after even a week of home working was... no.

The concept of a settled home is important to us at South Yorkshire Housing Association. Our purpose makes this clear: "with South Yorkshire Housing Association you can settle at home, live well and realise your potential; we want your experience with us to be a joy and we plan to be here for the long term".

Like Maslow we believe that until you are settled in a home that works for you, you cannot go on to enjoy your life, form meaningful connections with others and realise your personal potential.

So it's not surprising that in choosing and designing our new workspaces, both at Rockingham Street (our new "home") and at our smaller offices, we applied the same thinking.

South Yorkshire Housing Association is the first housing association in the country (world?) to build a WikiHouse. Why did we do this?

The short answer is that in England we need to build more houses, better and faster, to hit the target of 300,000 new homes each year that is needed to tackle our housing crisis.

And we think WikiHouse could be part of the answer.

The longer answer is that while WikiHouse shares the benefits of other offsite construction methods - better/more airtight build quality, lower energy costs, higher environmental sustainability - it has some extra features which set it apart. These include: open source design, opportunities for citizen-led building, easy adaptation and distributed manufacture.

How can you make a "place" with just 28 homes? This is a recurring theme for South Yorkshire Housing Association whose 6,000 homes are dispersed across Sheffield City Region in groups of 10-100.