Socio-Technical Dimensions for a Sustainable Housing Transition
6.9 Everyday Life and Practices
carbon pollution, so drastic policy changes are needed to help the City reduce its emissions.
delivering improved thermal comfort by using more technologies (e.g., a mechanical heating and cooling systems) rather than through materials, passive design elements, building orientation, or landscaping. For many regions, this has created unsustainable practices for occupants. These unsustainable practices are often supported with policies and design, and performance-rating tools where assumptions are made around an “aver- age” user. However, averages range geographically and demographically.
These assumptions range from the hours people are at home, the tem- perature set for heating and cooling systems, and the location of housing.
Assumptions like these remove agency from users and impact current and future outcomes.
Sustainable housing starts with the (initial) users at the centre of its thinking. Sustainable housing users have been critical for the develop- ment of a wider sustainable housing community and helped shape, or reshape, policy and social norms. Questions around how the dwelling can improve a range of household outcomes (e.g., liveability, affordabil- ity, and health and well-being) are often just as important as the environ- mental impact. Increasingly, these questions are not just about the individual household, but also about how a dwelling can influence and facilitate changes in everyday life and practices. For some sustainable housing providers, this has meant moving away from a technology- focused approach to providing more agency to users through the day-to- day management of their dwelling (e.g., needing to open and close windows or lowering and raising blinds to help regulate thermal comfort and performance) [90]. In addition to increased agency, this also makes the dwelling more resilient to technology failures. However, this is not an argument against technologies; they still have a role to play in improving performance outcomes. For example, the electrification of housing and mobility, through smart home technologies, solar PV, electric vehicles, and two-way battery charging, have created benefits related to improving efficiencies within dwellings and lowering environmental impacts. These improvements have also enabled easier (or more comfortable) off- grid living.
Despite attention paid on the ground, wider transitions research has had limited interest in user practices, consumption, and the everyday life.
Where it has been included has largely been in the more technology
focused studies [59, 91–94], including within the housing and built environment and wider energy space where a number of papers have emerged in recent years. Early adopters of different design approaches, material selection, and technologies were guinea pigs testing out how things worked, and they often paid higher capital costs for the privilege [95–97]. The experiences of sustainable housing advocates and users, demonstrates the role they can play in helping to guide and accelerate transitions through different (re)configurations of structures, networks, and rules of the game to challenge the existing regime.
6.9.1 Electrification of Homes
The move towards the all-electric home has become an increasing focus amongst some stakeholders in the sustainable housing space [98]. While the use of natural gas (and other resources such as wood) was initially seen as a more sustainable energy option as compared to fossil fuel elec- tricity, this view has been revised in recent years due to the increase in renewable energy generation and the emerging evidence for the wide negative impacts of gas and other fuel types (e.g., on health and well- being). Electrification of homes has been identified as an important step towards not only delivering a more environmentally sustainable home, but also delivering a home that is more affordable to operate (due to pay- ing for only one energy type, which avoids connection fees) and is health- ier for users. The move towards electrification has been identified by researchers and policy makers in different regions as being feasible and important for achieving wider decarbonization goals. Research has also identified how an existing dwelling can transition to an all-electric home by replacing various gas (or other) appliances as they are due for replacement.
While evidence for the benefits of the all-electric home has emerged, it has been housing users, rather than policy makers, who have been actively driving the translation from research to practice. Sustainable housing users have been repositioning themselves from passive or silent actors to actors that actively shape and reshape housing, social norms, and even policies. This was not simply a matter of changing appliances or the
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.