The utilitarian Hydro villages that dotted remote Tasmania throughout the 20th century were places of great cooperation and high productivity. They were, more than anything, home to thousands of workers and their families.

The age of the company village may be over, but do they offer lessons for our present and future housing needs?

The seemingly endless housing crisis in Tasmania has prompted the University of Tasmania School of Architecture and Design to investigate the legacy of company housing in the island state.

While the idea would evoke memories of Waddamana, Poatina, Gowrie Park and others throughout the highlands, various schemes also left their footprints on Hobart, Launceston and Burnie - legacies that can be seen today.

Since November, PhD student Van Krisadawat has cast an expert eye over the development, urban design and legacy of company housing schemes from Electrolytic Zinc in Hobart and Cadbury in Claremont, to the Associated Pulp and Paper Mills in Burnie and Patons and Baldwins in Launceston.

He is being supervised by School of Architecture and Design lecturers Andrew Steen and Helen Norrie. Dr Steen said the three-and-a-half year project was a way of thinking outside of the square when it came to housing - particularly given there appeared to be a perpetual malaise with governments over finding solutions.

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"It's turning back the clock to look at a period that's not so heavily influenced by neoliberal policy, to look at what actually happened and to see if some of that can be reintroduced back into mainstream political thinking," he said.

"It can guide the development of a sense of community, developing ideas of place that are stronger and are based on people that aren't so disengaged. There's probably a lot of disengaged people in different sites around Tasmania now."

Company housing in Tasmania could be broken down into three categories: the industrial city such as Burnie, the utilitarian Hydro villages, and the "garden city" idea developed by Cadbury.

In 1921, Cadbury had extensive plans to develop a garden village at Claremont based on a successful scheme from the UK. But its proximity to Hobart meant there was little need to build such a dense development and, in the end, only 30 houses were built.

Those houses largely remain today, while the garden village is now the site of the Claremont Golf Course.

While the Cadbury idea was significantly scaled back, Dr Steen said the original design contained interesting clues into how to build a community that brought people together.

"They really were trying to build this spirit of camaraderie," he said.

"It was almost socialist, getting to that point where you're in this group, you're all working together, living together, being on a camp together in a big team. The productivity is higher, happiness is higher, the company is better for it, it produces less wastage of sick days."

In Burnie, APPM built medical facilities and communal areas for their workers, while also contributing rail, road and wharf infrastructure that played a part in the development of the city.

But of particular interest to Van in his research was the design of the Hydro villages and why some were deconstructed while others have been repurposed.

"Part of it is thinking about the future potential of this," he said.

"Gowrie Park, for example, is a perfect through-fare town for Cradle Mountain. What used to be the community areas is now a campervan area or backpackers park. The temporary village is gone. They have a restaurant there that used to be the bar and cafeteria, they serve the tourists.

"There's a purpose still for some of it now. We're just thinking about what would it be for the future. In Tasmania, it's getting more connected between Launceston and Hobart. Every day there is some sort of development connecting it. We're looking at all these fragments of what used to be there, and what could it be for the future."

So how could company housing work in practice in the 21st century? Could multi-national companies once again be encouraged to build communities for their workers in Tasmania and, once the villages have served their purpose, could the dwellings be added to the state's dwindling housing stock? The government was critical in bringing companies to Tasmania for these projects, what role could it play in the future?

These are among the questions that researchers want to find answers to.

Dr Steen said it was clear that lateral thinking was required to address Tasmania's housing shortage.

"The government, hopefully, could see part of these legacies and see how their planning and policies fed into things that worked in certain ways, and things that didn't work in certain ways," he said.

"It might inspire them to change gears a little bit, to shed this default to neoliberal thinking, to be closer to something almost utopian.

"It's really optimistic thinking, shedding negativity, thinking optimistically, what aspirationally could happen if we actually invested in it, invested in the infrastructure, supported these things rather than standing back and hoping something might happen."

Van, originally from Thailand, came to Tasmania to carry out the research project after working as an architect in Hong Kong.

He will present his initial findings at the 2020 Australasian Urban History/Planning History Conference in Launceston this week.