Brian Doucet, an associate professor at UW’s School of Planning, has created a documentary based on his housing research called Thinking Beyond the Market: a film about genuinely affordable housing. With degrees in geography from the University of Toronto and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Doucet’s research interests include but are not limited to gentrification, displacement, inequality, and transportation.

Doucet and his film recognize that homelessness and non-affordable housing are long term problems, as the housing crisis continues to grow. While this is not a newfound concern, Doucet believes that people are talking about it now because the population that “matters politically” and the people that “make and shape cities” are now also struggling to find affordable housing.

The hour and a half documentary includes Doucet’s own interpretation of housing, non-market solutions, housing interventions, different perspectives across Canada, and an original music score by Dave Mansell. “The potential behind this could maybe help build a coalition that would help to redefine what housing means,” Doucet said.

From his perspective, housing plays two roles in our society, but it can’t succeed at both. On one hand, he said, housing is shelter and a basic human right — on the other hand, it’s a commodity to make money and a source of wealth. “If we think about a housing pendulum between these two, I look for policies and programs that actively shift housing away from speculation and towards a human right,” he said. The film suggests non-market housing, co-op housing, and community housing as ways to help address core issues.

Making a documentary film has been a long-desired next step in Doucet’s academic journey. “It’s a very powerful way to present research,” he said. He expressed belief in the value in taking the information that researchers are creating and producing something with it to engage a wider audience, or what he called, “‘The 4 P’s’: planning, policy, political, public.”

A large motivational factor for Doucet in creating the film was that the content is real and relevant to people’s day-to-day lives, containing information the public knows about housing. “Discourse would benefit from the academic knowledge the film injects,” he said.

On the logistical side of making the film, Doucet and his team received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connections Grant at a value of $25,000 in funding. Doucet explained that he also helped put together the film, stating “I did a lot of the heavy lifting myself as well. I know about Adobe Premier now and learned a lot on the fly.” The team filmed over a year and created different segments that speak directly or indirectly to each other, which he labelled akin to “building a puzzle. You don’t know what each piece looks like but you know they have to eventually fit together. It was a big picture way of thinking. Where does it go in the film? What goes before and what comes after?”

Doucet’s film aims to expose inequalities and injustices behind housing as housing research has previously done. “Without academic researchers writing about it, we wouldn’t be talking about things like displacement,” he said. Reflecting on its hoped-for impact, Doucet recognizes changes in policy and planning even locally in Waterloo. The film now extends that research, and while there are many other ways to do it, he states, “Making a film talks about why things are so bad but also going into the solution on how to fix things.”

Thinking Beyond the Market: a film about genuinely affordable housing is being screened in EV3, room 1408 on September 19 at 3 p.m.