Socio-Technical Dimensions for a Sustainable Housing Transition
6.6 Industrial Structures and Organizations
was passed in 2019. The bill essentially eliminated single-family zoning across the state. For cities with populations greater than 25,000, the bill allows duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and “cottage clusters” to be built on parcels that are currently reserved for single-family houses. In cities with populations of at least 10,000, duplexes are allowed in single-family zones. This topic is receiving a lot of attention from planners, particularly in places like the USA. In 2020, the Journal of the American Planning Association published an entire special issue on the idea of ending single- family zoning [41]. Manville et al. [41, p. 106] argue that ‘R1 is inequi- table, inefficient, and environmentally unsustainable’. Meanwhile, Kendig [42] thinks eliminating existing single-family zoning is a mistake, and Chakraborty [43] believes this topic deserves more scrutiny.
Australia) and represent most of the new residential construction. The preference of developers and volume builders is to develop larger detached housing estates rather than one-off dwellings. This provides opportuni- ties for standardizing designs, materials, and construction processes and allows for controlling costs and maximizing profits, with the focus largely around financial outcomes. This also leads to developers and volume builders having established relationships with other industry stakehold- ers, which often carry over from one project to the next. The operation, practices, norms, and discourse across similar actors in the industry are also established and enacted through peak industry and professional asso- ciations [44]. Again, there are financial and other efficiencies for main- taining these relationships, but it leads to doing things the way they have been done previously.
In many regions of the world, the wider construction industry is one which is heavily based on subcontracting labour. This has a range of implications including that it creates, to some degree, a transient work- force that follows the money or work with little connection to the employer (other than to ensure they get future work), the end product (with accountability passed back up the management chain), or the com- munity (no knowledge of the local environment). This has created mixed outcomes with research showing that the length of time to build a house in places like Australia is increasing, and that part of this additional time is due to different trades and subcontractors having challenges sequenc- ing their components of work [45]. This structure of employment also means that there is limited incentive for subcontracted workers to report issues or learnings to those in decision making roles. As such, the cycle of continuing to produce the same type of housing continues.
While some smaller builders or developers may just work on a single project at a time, many medium-to-larger building companies or devel- opers often have multiple projects underway at any one time. Part of this relates to market structures and helping to diversify risk and costs by spreading the risks and resources across multiple projects. It can also help with organizing the workforce. For example, if different trades can be sequenced across multiple projects, it can be more productive and finan- cially beneficial for both the builder or developer, and the labourer. It also means that trades can be moved to different sites should the need arise to
do certain work or meet deadlines. However, this also means that the cur- rent housing sector is highly reliant on a small number of organizations and, as increasing research finds, this is challenging to do and results in delays and other outcomes.
The current provision of housing is also heavily reliant on a select number of key industries and supply chains. Increasingly, the housing sector is becoming more globalized and a key result of this is a reliance on international supply chains for materials and technologies in many juris- dictions. This has largely been driven by the pursuit of finding cost effi- ciencies, but is in part driven by a decline in manufacturing in many regions which has forced housing industry stakeholders to look elsewhere for the materials and technologies required for housing construction.
While this has helped to improve the bottom line of some stakeholders, global supply chain issues during 2020–2022 have highlighted the over- reliance on this structure with material and technology shortages and skyrocketing costs. This has contributed to developers and builders going bankrupt when they have been unable to deliver on fixed cost contracts for construction [46].
For a long time, sustainable housing has been seen as bespoke one-offs or small groups of housing delivered by specialist designers and builders [1]. It has historically been a process where early adopters (both industry and households) have learnt by doing and attempted to fix any issues that arise along the way. As the previous dimension explored, this process has also involved sharing knowledge and learnings with the wider sustainable housing community [1]. While sustainable housing has typically been attempted with the constraints of budget in mind, there have been cost premiums for some sustainability elements and inclusions for early adopt- ers, such as with the higher cost of solar PV and battery storage. This cost premium has been used by the existing regime as a key reason why sus- tainable housing should not be more widely pursued.
However, sustainable housing has shifted over the past decade or so, from high levels of experimentation in one-off projects to replication of prior learning and upscaling [29]. This has not only had an impact on the scale of sustainable housing, but has also helped pushed the performance benchmark of housing forward. In part, this is driven by increasing knowledge and cost reductions for materials, construction methods, and
technologies. Sustainability is no longer seen as a premium feature; when sustainability is designed in from the start, it can be achieved with signifi- cant design and cost efficiencies. The cost of key sustainability technology has continued to fall, making it even more affordable to include elements such as solar PV on homes. This decrease in costs along with a change in housing culture has encouraged some sustainable housing actors to cap profits to ensure that decisions are ethically driven and they benefit the homeowner and the environment. This change in approach has also pushed actors to work with the financial industry to find innovations to fund sustainable housing construction.
Within transitions research, there is an increasing focus around the industrial structures and organizations involved in transitions. This is rel- evant for our focus on the sustainable housing transition and has been explored from a range of perspectives, including understanding business practices (e.g., how to develop, protect, and/or elevate key or new struc- tures), organizations, and industries to help challenge incumbent regimes [47–50]. Given our discussion across earlier chapters, the provision of sustainable housing will likely require housing industry actors and stake- holders to adapt or evolve. However, Sovacool [51] and others are increas- ingly concerned with the slow pace of transitions. For example, if the pace of transition is too slow, the incumbent regime is more able to resist change or make minor changes to continue provision of houses without including wider sustainability considerations. Speed is a pertinent issue for sustainable housing given that housing is a long-life infrastructure likely to last 40 or more years once built.
An important element already emerging in the sustainable housing transition has been around challenging traditional notions of finance and affordability. Within the wider transitions literature, there is an increas- ing focus on the role that finance capital plays to enable or constrain transitions [52, 53]. Given that existing housing regime practices have largely been enabled by the wider market, it stands to reason that the market, and specifically the financial structure and organization of the market, must change. This has been noted by the UNEP [54] in relation to sustainable development. Wider research has also stated that the finan- cial recovery from COVID-19 will be greater with a shift towards deliver- ing improved sustainability across a range of sectors [55, 56]. Within the
housing sector, there is a need to shift the way housing is viewed in terms of cost, value, and affordability. Furthermore, transitions researchers have highlighted the importance of new ways of doing, thinking, and organiz- ing and the role that innovation (such as digitalization) will have in restructuring various industries and sectors [57–59]. The emergence of several innovations in recent decades, such as prefabrication, has high- lighted how this might play out within the sustainable housing transition and associated sectors such as considerations of energy as a service.
6.6.1 Prefabrication
Prefabrication, or prefab as it is commonly referred to (or in some loca- tions, off-site manufacturing), is construction undertaken away from the final building site in a factory-like setting. Once constructed in the fac- tory, various prefab elements are taken to the building site where they are assembled. There are different types of prefab including modular (large modules of rooms or sections of a home including the structure and fin- ishes of roofs, walls, and floors and any built in elements such as kitchens, bathrooms, storage, and all electrical and plumbing) and panelized (where smaller sections of the home are built before being assembled into the larger structure onsite). Benefits of prefab include that it can deliver improved quality, reduce material and labour waste during construction, improve construction safety, shorten construction times onsite, reduce construction costs, create less disruption to neighbours, and reduce proj- ect risks [60–62]. Prefab offers innovation and new ways of providing housing which challenges the established cultural practices, norms, regu- lations, and discourse around housing design and construction. It also presents a different way for how the sector can operate and how they organize themselves. For example, constructing in a factory means that work is not impacted by weather, and improving sequencing of trades can improve overall efficiency by reducing construction time and costs [62].
In this way, prefab changes business practices and challenges incumbent regime actors.
Some countries have embraced the use of prefab over recent decades, while others have only more recently engaged with this different
construction approach. For example, Sweden is considered a leader in the prefab construction of housing, having been constructing housing in factory-like settings since the 1940s with prefab now representing over 80% of the housing market [61].