ACHR Speaker Series
See below for recorded webinars and information about future Speaker Series talks.
August 13 2026
Dr Declan Kuch
Buildings as Infrastructure of Care: Mould, Health and Housing Tenure in Australia
When cold, damp and mould take hold, who has the power to get a home fixed—and what can housing policy do about it?
Housing and health research often treats tenure as an explanation for unequal health outcomes: renters tend to be less healthy than homeowners, and this is commonly understood as a tenure effect. This talk argues that tenure is upstream: it determines who controls building care, a concept we use to capture the accumulated practice of maintaining, repairing, ventilating, and responding to material need.
Drawing on major Australian housing datasets, Declan challenges conventional explanations of the health gap between renters and homeowners and ask whether minimum standards can improve health without changing how buildings are maintained and repaired. This webinar will be of particular interest to housing and health researchers, policymakers, housing providers and anyone concerned with making Australian homes healthier.
Dr Declan Kuch is the Net Zero Social Researcher at the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), where his work spans energy standards for rental housing, virtual power plants and industrial decarbonisation. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy from UNSW and an Adjunct Research Fellowship at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Declan is the author of The Rise and Fall of Carbon Emissions Trading (Palgrave), and author of recent articles in Science, Technology & Human Values and Social Studies of Science. He co-founded the Australian Energy Social Science Research Network and has advised the Australian Council of Learned Academies on energy and technology policy.