Socio-Technical Dimensions for a Sustainable Housing Transition
6.10 Culture, Civil Society, and Social Movements
energy type but has also required associated changes to practices (e.g., using appliances when sufficient solar energy is being generated, or adapt- ing to different ways of heating and the different feelings of warmth those approaches delivered). In places like Australia, the ground up support for the all-electric home has grown significantly in recent years (as exempli- fied by the My Electric Home Facebook group15 which now has over 70,000 members) and this ground up support has pushed back on gov- ernment requirements to have gas connected to new housing, resulting in households removing gas connection from existing housing at record numbers. In 2022, this resulted in the Victorian government announcing that it would change requirements to allow for new housing develop- ments to proceed without connection to gas infrastructure.16 However, despite increasing support for all-electric homes, sustainability benefits may fall short if electrical grids rely on fossil fuel energy. A wider energy transition away from fossil fuel infrastructure is also needed.
6.10 Culture, Civil Society,
In many regions of the world, housing has been delivered via the use of a “less is more” regulation approach and a reliance on the wider con- sumer market to demand improvements or changes. This has resulted in the replication of tried-and-tested housing typologies, design, materials, and technologies with a business model focused on improving the finan- cial bottom line rather than quality and performance outcomes for hous- ing consumers. Key housing regime actors, such as peak industry bodies, continue to push back against calls for increasing minimum regulatory requirements for quality and performance of new and existing housing.
Regime actors are not seriously engaging with the wider structural hous- ing issues created and propagated over recent decades, rather they are protecting the status quo. This creates a range of challenges to shifting the housing industry, and housing consumers, towards a low carbon future.
Sustainable housing has emerged as a new culture within the larger housing industry. This culture is tied to ideas and actions around how housing can be more sustainable. Sustainable housing has been exploring different ways to deliver housing and, in doing so, has established new customs, values, and norms across industry stakeholders and consumers.
In the earlier years of the sustainable housing movement, sustainable housing was not primarily about replacing unsustainable materials and technologies with sustainable ones; it emerged more as a bottom-up rethinking of housing across all elements of design, construction, and use. For example, it acknowledged that bigger was not better and that improved design functionality could improve small-space living, and argued that materials should be considered for their durability and ability to improve thermal comfort (not solely aesthetics) as well as for consider- ing the end of life for materials and whole dwellings [7, 99]. These exam- ples represent a shift towards sustainability in the culture of building and designing housing.
Social movements around sustainable housing, at local and interna- tional scales, have been instrumental for challenging the housing status quo. Such social movements were developed off the back of wider move- ments engaging with ideas of sustainability, as well as from the desire to share and learn across sustainable housing projects [100]. Earlier on, these movements were grassroots, both in terms of scale (one-off projects) and actors (non-regime or traditional housing industry). Sustainable
housing communities were created through initiatives such as eco-villages and co-housing developments, which allowed like-minded people to come together and elevate the benefits of sustainable housing. These communities also served as a place of learning where ideas could be rep- licated in neighbouring building, or where communities could serve as inspiration for new developments. Finally, sustainable housing commu- nities are encouraged thinking across buildings to consider benefits at a larger scale [101]. This helped to shift the sustainable housing culture from focusing on individual dwellings to considering the role of these dwellings within the larger urban environment and wider community.
Within the wider transitions literature, there has been an increasing interest in the importance of culture, civil society, and social movements and how these play critical roles within sustainability transitions [102–104]. These elements challenge the current ways and rationale of doing things and can create wider culture change through changing social norms, values, and everyday practices [102]. In doing this, they help cre- ate protective spaces for innovation and shape the support and effective- ness of transitions policies. There has been some focus on these points within a framing of sustainable housing transitions. Our own work, for example, highlights that wider culture, civil society, and social move- ments are evolving not just within the sphere of direct stakeholders designing, building, and occupying sustainable houses, but within a much wider reach of stakeholders who intersect with the transitions pro- cess such as financial institutions who fund housing development [2, 65].
6.10.1 Renew—Organization
and Sustainability Magazines
Renew17 (formally the Alternative Technology Association) is an Australian not-for-profit organization that was established in 1980 to provide inspiration, information, independent advice, and advocacy to help people live more sustainably in their homes and communities. The organization is involved in a wide range of activities including
17 https://bit.ly/3ERjCji
undertaking sustainability consultations, providing free advice to mem- bers, organizing and hosting webinars and events (including a Speed Date a Sustainability Expert and annual Sustainable House Day event), and publishing two quarterly sustainability magazines: Renew—technol- ogy for a sustainable future (with over 160 issues) and Sanctuary—Modern green homes (with over 60 issues). The organization and publications engage with more than 250,000 people each year and have an active membership of 11,000 people (2020–21). Renew has played a key advo- cacy role in driving recent regulatory changes in Australia through dis- seminating research and continued supporting dialogue with key stakeholders (including households). Beyond just a focus on the physical home or technologies, Renew is increasingly evolving to include spaces around houses and communities (such as gardening and urban greening), new considerations of housing such as the role of electric vehicles, and addressing future climatic and resiliency challenges as a community. For example, issue 60 of Sanctuary magazine was a flood resilience special.
Through these various activities, Renew has helped reconceptualize hous- ing and sustainable housing for Australian households through a largely bottom-up community approach and, in the process, has managed to help establish new customs, values, and norms.