Law School

Housing rights are becoming significant as a tool for highlighting needs and raising
housing standards across the world. These rights are now an integral part of economic,
social, and cultural rights within international human rights instruments, while
the right to adequate housing is recognized legally at national and international levels.
Among the methods of implementing these rights the human rights based approach
(HRBA) is used by NGOs, community organizations and rights advocates. Many
housing rights issues arise in relation to standards in social housing, urban regeneration
and social housing policy development. This article examines a case study
where the HRBA has been applied by local authority tenants in partnership with
community development organizations and supported by human rights expertise to
campaign for improvements to substandard housing conditions and deprivation
within a Dublin inner city social housing estate. It appraises the adoption of the
HRBA as a response to inadequate housing conditions and delayed regeneration
programmes. The impact of poor housing on the health of tenants was an integral
element of the arguments used. The outcomes of using the HRBA for the rights
holders (the tenants) are assessed. Overall, this campaign led to significant improvements
in conditions. The factors underlying the success centred on the way in which
the HRBA framework, with its focus on measurable indicators of human rights violations,
enabled community development organizations to create a human rights
based public campaign that exerted considerable political pressure through the empowerment
of tenants, leveraging of human rights experts, and considerable media
publicity. The development of solutions in parallel with the local authority was also
important. This approach transcended many established NGO and state approaches
to addressing poverty.

We are living in an algorithmic age where mathematics and computer science are coming together in powerful new ways to influence, shape and guide our behaviour and the governance of our societies. As these algorithmic governance structures proliferate, it is vital that we ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. That is, we need to ensure that they are an effective means for achieving a legitimate policy goal that are also procedurally fair, open and unbiased. But how can we ensure that algorithmic governance structures are both? This article shares the results of a collective intelligence workshop that addressed exactly this question. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider (a) barriers to legitimate and effective algorithmic governance and (b) the research methods needed to address the nature and impact of specific barriers. An interactive management workshop technique was used to harness the collective intelligence of this multidisciplinary group. This method enabled participants to produce a framework and research agenda for those who are concerned about algorithmic governance. We outline this research agenda below, providing a detailed map of key research themes, questions and methods that our workshop felt ought to be pursued. This builds upon existing work on research agendas for critical algorithm studies in a unique way through the method of collective intelligence.