RESEARCH

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo, and Carole Despres. “Mental Health and Residential Adaptations during the Pandemic: A Mixed Methods Study of Working Mothers.” Cities & Health 1:1–23.

In the Spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed dwellings worldwide into focal points of daily life. This mixed-methods study examines how women in various residential situations adapted when faced with pandemic challenges and how their adaptations influenced the meanings of home and mental health. A pool of 538 working mothers was identified from Quebec’s MAVIPAN repeated measures survey to test if their residential situations, marked by their multiple social roles as mothers, workers, wives, or teachers, and various housing conditions, were associated with mental health and their meanings of home. Four profiles of residential situations were identified through multiple factor analysis (MFA), and 33 women belonging to these profiles were interviewed. Quantitative explorations and ChatGPT-4-assisted thematic analysis revealed conditional associations linking vulnerable residential situations to adaptation difficulties, low mental health scores, and negative feelings toward home, applying to women in blended or single-parent families, in small dwellings, or self-employed.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo. 2025b. “Housing Risk Factors’ Effects on Home Conceptualizations: Exploring the Additive Impact of Residential History.” Housing Studies Journal, Accepted 1–38.

This study explores the intersection of housing risk factors and home conceptualization by examining how factors such as crowding, low housing quality, and residential insecurity influence people’s concept of their actual and ideal homes. We hypothesize that acute residential pressures stemming from housing risk factors lead to altered conceptualizations of home, with residential history amplifying these effects. Conducting semi-structured interviews in the Los Guayacanes node west of Panama City, we used the Housing Pressures Instability Index, HPII, to assess housing risk factors affecting residential experiences, and applied ordinal logistic regression to explore their relationship with participants’ actual and ideal home conceptualizations on a nine-dimension scale. Our results show significant associations in the dimensions of safety, privacy, nature connectedness, and religion, influenced by the combined effects of housing risk factors and residential history. The findings provide new insights into how housing risk factors shape actual and ideal home conceptualizations, contributing to understanding housing’s impact on health, exploring the Latin-American context.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo. 2025. “Geosociality: A Theoretical Model of the Meaning of Home Inspired by Clingerman’s Hermeneutics of Place.” Environmental Philosophy Accepted (Special Issue in Memory of Forrest Clingerman):1–12.

Clingerman’s place hermeneutics offers valuable insights for the interdisciplinary analysis of the construction of the meaning of home. This article builds upon that contribution, developing a theoretical model of meaning-making in residential places, supported by evidence from environmental psychology. Our analysis suggests that the meaning of home, akin to Clingerman’s notion of place, is relationally connected to the concepts of nature and divinity, and that this mechanism underpins the perceptual structure of place meanings. The model integrates deep meanings shaped by everyday practice, emotions reflected in measures of environmental attachment, and home’s multidimensional discourse evidenced by scientific literature.

Garcia De Paredes, Pablo. 2025. “ChatGPT-4 como herramienta de diseño: sesgos culturales, éticos y potencialidades creativas.” in El Futuro de las enseñanzas de las Artes en un Medioambiente Digitalizado: Arte, Diseño y Arquitectura. Barcelona, España: Universitat de Catalunya.

La incorporación de inteligencia artificial (IA) en el diseño arquitectónico y urbanístico abre un abanico de posibilidades innovadoras, pero también expone limitaciones críticas para su implementación en disciplinas encargadas de crear ambientes para los seres humanos. Este trabajo analiza el potencial de ChatGPT-4 como herramienta de diseño, evaluando sus implicaciones éticas, culturales y creativas a través de cinco conversaciones cuidadosamente estructuradas. Estas incluyen el desarrollo de lineamientos para una nueva tipología escolar y debates sobre la priorización de valores en los procesos de diseño.
El estudio se fundamenta en el paradigma del capitalismo cognitivo-cultural, desarrollado por el geógrafo A.J. Scott, para abordar las dinámicas de creatividad y producción del espacio en las ciudades contemporáneas. Argumentamos que el entrenamiento de la IA refuerza sesgos socioculturales y éticos al replicar sistemas de valores predominantes, lo que puede limitar su capacidad para abordar problemas específicos de contextos locales o desafíos relacionados con escenarios futuros. Este fenómeno plantea un riesgo de homogeneización, promoviendo una globalización sin reflexión a través de un futuro común imaginado. Ambos sesgos diluyen las identidades locales, restringen la posibilidad de imaginar futuros novedosos o alternativos y desconectan a los diseñadores de valores y cosmovisiones profundas. Desde una perspectiva ética, los sesgos culturales de la IA imponen una moral parcial que condiciona su operación. Como consecuencia, el motor de lenguaje natural no puede evaluar objetivamente las limitaciones impuestas por las visiones moderadoras adquiridas durante su entrenamiento, afectando lo que llamamos el “liderazgo imaginario” inherente a las disciplinas creativas.
Sin embargo, ChatGPT-4 también demuestra un notable potencial como herramienta combinatoria, sugiriendo soluciones no convencionales al diseñador, siempre que este cuente con suficiente experiencia y conciencia de sus limitaciones. Estas capacidades enriquecen los procesos tradicionales. Nuestro análisis interdisciplinario destaca tanto los obstáculos como las oportunidades que plantea la IA, abriendo un debate necesario sobre su impacto en la creatividad y la práctica del diseño en un mundo globalizado.

Duval, Estelle, Catherine Chouinard, Pablo Garcia de Paredes, and Després Carole. 2024. “Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Thematic Analysis: A Contribution to Architectural Research.” Accepted- Conference Paper 1–31.

Architectural research involves comprehensive analysis of diverse data, including user satisfaction data, interview excerpts, plans, and photographs. Analyzing such qualitative material is costly and time-consuming. While architectural programming firms often use qualitative data analysis software, many practitioners rely on informal methods. This article explores AI-assisted content analysis by comparing it with human-centered analysis in two case studies. Efficiency, accuracy, and replicability were evaluated as key criteria. Case Study 1 utilized openended responses from a survey of 356 school staff about school premises, informing design guideline development for public school renovations in Quebec, Canada. Case Study 2 analyzed 33 interviews with teleworking mothers involving architectural plans, dwelling photographs, and participant profiles aimed at enhancing home office environments. The human-centered analysis included manual transcript splitting and coding, alongside reviewing photographs and plans. Our findings show that AI-assisted analysis excels in efficiently disassembling and reassembling data, while having some shortcomings in compiling and interpreting data. It also demands considerable expertise in prompt formulation, which hinders accuracy and reliability. Human-centered analysis, although inefficient, requires data familiarity, knowledge of evidence, and research experience. All three are absent from the models’ training. In conclusion, the potential of artificial intelligence to streamline qualitative analysis is discussed.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo, Carole Despres, Marie Baron, and Annie LeBlanc. 2024. “Rethinking The Home Office: Insights From Teleworking Mothers’ Material Adaptations During COVID-19.” Accepted- Conference Paper 1–31.

This follow-up qualitative study delves into the contribution of housing on the material adaptations of teleworking mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigation concentrates on the interplay between housing conditions, the multifaceted challenge of daily routines faced by mothers, and telework setups during stay at-home orders. Insights from the adaptation process will inform flexible design criteria for home offices in the context of a global telework upsurge and enhance preparedness for future emergencies. Narrative accounts were gathered through 33 semi-structured Zoom interviews of teleworking mothers, supplemented by annotated architectural plans. AI-assisted discourse analysis using ChatGPT-4.0 was conducted on four groupings defined by comparable residential situations (defined along housing attributes, family structure, and work modality profiles). Floor plans, dwelling pictures from home offices or multifunctional spaces, participant profiles, and interview extracts were used for a thorough architectural assessment and for uncovering each group’s material adaptations. The findings were subsequently verified through qualitative analysis. Key design strategies for future housing projects and renovations to improve work modality transitions and telework productivity, especially when living in apartments or with small children, are the inclusion of flexible multifunctional rooms, quiet areas with foldable desks, portable home office setups for the self-employed on the move, small home offices for occasional meetings in sub-utilized storage rooms, modular and soundproof partitions temporarily separating open plans or shared home office spaces, visual partitions to demarcate private and work environments, designing office spaces in intermediate and exterior areas like verandas and balconies through the inclusion of glassed perimeters for winter use, and planning adaptable building systems.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo, Carole Després, Thierry Ramadier, and d’architecture Université Laval Faculté d’aménagement d’art et de design. “The contribution of the residential situation and adaptation capacity to mental health and the meaning of home during the pandemic.” Doctoral Thesis, Université Laval, Québec.

The COVID-19 crisis placed housing at the center of daily life and provided a relevant context for understanding the impact of its physical and symbolic elements on mental health. It offered the opportunity to study both acute crisis moments during lockdowns and periods of normalcy in the years that followed. This thesis contributes to understanding the influence of housing on mental health by connecting three key factors of the relationship between people and housing: (1) the residential situation, defined by material, socio-economic, and employment factors; (2) adaptations to exogenous forces, such as a pandemic; and (3) mental health. Chapter 1 outlines the organization of the research and its objectives. Chapter 2 presents a literature review on the experiences and meanings of home before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to examine the transformation of the person-housing relation and to strengthen the resilience of the housing stock. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical and methodological framework. A three-phase research protocol using mixed methods, including quantitative analysis, a mixed-methods analysis, and a follow-up qualitative study, was planned based on the longitudinal web survey “My Life and the Pandemic in Quebec” (MAVIPAN) (2020-2023). Chapter 4 presents a quantitative study on the contribution of the material characteristics of housing to mental health, using data exploration techniques assisted by AI and multivariate models. The DASS-21 and WEMWBS scales were used to measure mental health. The results suggest that housing occupation density affects stress, with living in an apartment with children under nine years old also being associated with stress. All mental health measures are strongly associated with income. Residential situations have direct effects on mental health, mainly through stress outcomes. Chapter 5 analyzes how adaptation difficulties are linked to vulnerable residential situations and how this impacts the sense of home and mental health. The responses of 538 teleworking mothers from the MAVIPAN survey, along with 33 semi-structured interviews, were analyzed using multiple factor analysis and thematic analysis with ChatGPT-4. The results show that being self-employed or living in an apartment amplifies the impact of housing variables on mental health, often associated with negative meanings of home. During confinements, housing emerged as a gendered space where women took on more family responsibilities and an increased domestic workload. In Chapter 6, a spatial and qualitative analysis explores how housing accommodated the material adaptations made by these 33 teleworking mothers during the pandemic. The data comes from the analysis of interview transcripts, architectural plans, and housing photos provided by the women. The analysis identified various strategies for adapting spaces. Based on these results, design guidelines were developed to facilitate the transition to telework for women living in apartments, small dwellings, with young children, or who are self-employed, notably through flexible rooms, quiet zones, retractable or portable desks, and soundproof partitions. Overall, the results of this research demonstrate how, in a crisis, the physical and symbolic characteristics of housing influence behavioral and material adaptations, as well as the experience, perceptions of home, and mental health.

L’avenir du climat, c’est la ville carboneutre. Le Journal de Québec.

À quoi serviront les grands projets en 2050? Le Journal de Québec.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo. 2022. Whose Evidence Counts? Exploring Evidence Pathways during the Covid-19 Crisis in Panama’s Housing Ministry. Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos, 48(2022).

This paper explores how is evidence gathered, transformed, and selected during the current COVID-19 crisis, employing Panama’s housing ministry as a case study. We wish to better understand evidence pathways and provide strategies for increasing scientific evidence uptake. Our research strategy was organized into a three-step sequential model: 1. The evidence-gathering phase: we studied Covid-19’s effects on households by deploying 135 surveys (n=135). 2. The evidence transformation phase: studying housing sector evidence assembled by different ministry divisions via 12 surveys and interviews with ministry personnel (n=12), and 3. The evidence selection phase: studying evidence employed by decision-makers, through a semi-structured interview with the housing minister (n=1). Results show that evidence pathways depend on social phenomena, including internal and external political power negotiations, social class identities, and representations of the role of government.

Garcia de Paredes, Pablo. 2022. “Universités, Complexité et Politiques Publiques en Temps de Crise.” Revue internationale du CRIRES : innover dans la tradition de Vygotsky 5(2):19–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.51657/ric.v5i2.51179

La pandémie de Covid-19 a permis de mettre en évidence les forces et les faiblesses des institutions sociales lorsqu’il s’agit de fournir des informations à l’État pour la résolution des crises. Comment est organisé le système d’information sur les politiques publiques dans les pays des Amériques et quel rôle jouent les universités ? Cet article théorique cherche à répondre à cette question et à explorer la possibilité d’un changement de paradigme pour le rôle de l’université au niveau continental. La méthodologie que nous avons adoptée est exploratoire : nous comparerons les cas publiés dans les médias numériques dans les deux régions où les universités ont été impliquées dans l’étude des phénomènes déclenchés par la crise du Covid-19. Nous analyserons ces expériences à la lumière de deux systèmes : le système de création d’informations pour les politiques publiques et le paradigme historico-culturel du développement humain. Les résultats de notre analyse montrent que l’université contemporaine peut bénéficier d’un élargissement de son rôle institutionnel. Cet élargissement permettrait aux universités d’entreprendre deux actions stratégiques face aux principaux obstacles que nous avons identifiés : (1) renforcer leur offre académique face à des facteurs qui vont à l’encontre de l’enseignement supérieur et (2) créer une plus grande compatibilité entre les connaissances générées au sein des universités et l’utilisation qui peut en être faite par les décideurs.