Providing Sustainable Housing through Sustainability Transitions
5.3 Where Do Transitions Occur?
considerations can not only help identify problems but also help shape and guide solutions and wider transitions processes [13, 40, 42–44]. This includes exploring the transitions dynamics that create, embed, exacer- bate, or reduce issues with ethics implications like poverty, inequality, and access [13]. Ethics and justice in transitions have been applied across different jurisdictions, scales, and industry sectors, including mobility [44], energy [45, 46], and cities [47]. In this book, we will consider ethics and justice within housing transitions which has not yet received much attention.
now investigating urban experiments and living labs (conceptually and empirically) as processes and pathways to connect place-base experiments to systemic change [54–56]. Living labs offer a forum for innovation to develop new products, systems, services, or processes through co-creation to explore and evaluate new ideas in complex and real-world contexts [57], contrasting with the more deliberative “innovation spaces” approach of strategic niche management. In urban living labs, society becomes the laboratory rather than the technology or businesses that produce or adopt it. Urban living labs create the place where actors and organizations test new things to improve and re-shape systems and, most importantly, learn from their successes and failures as they go [58].
Transitions occur within and across many socio-technical systems, domains, and sectors, including energy, water, food and agriculture, finance, buildings, and transportation. Many of these sectors have expe- rienced major shifts or transitions and are likely to do so again in the future [59]. Sector-focused transitions research tends to study past or ongoing transitions and the potential for (or barriers to) future transi- tions, or actively tries to facilitate transitions. Studying a specific sector provides researchers with boundaries to investigate complex problems, much like geographic scale or location. Sectors are comprised of net- works of actors, which include be individuals, firms, and other organiza- tions, institutions, which represent norms, regulations, standards of good practice, and material artefacts and knowledge [34].
One of the initial sectors that received significant attention within the sustainability transitions field was energy. This focus was largely on how previous and ongoing energy transitions occurred, as well opportunities for transitions from fossil fuel energy systems to renewable energy sys- tems [15, 60–67]. Energy transitions research has explored issues around politics, policies, markets, actors, power, and lock-in of existing fossil fuel systems. In more recent years, the focus has started to shift from energy as one large isolated domain to acknowledge the smaller scales and decen- tralized nature of energy systems and that energy overlaps across domains such as the built environment and housing. As discussed in earlier chap- ters, for the past few decades, the focus of improving housing perfor- mance from an environmental perspective has really been on improving
energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption, and (more recently) finding opportunities to shift away from fossil fuel to renewables.
Within the realm of energy transitions, there has been an increasing focus on the role of households and renewables as part of the broader sustainability transition. Bergman and Eyre [68] explored the role that small-scale renewable energy generation (microgeneration) could play in a transition to a low carbon future in the UK. What they found was that this shift in energy generation technologies had the potential to facilitate deep structural changes relating to energy consumption. For example, people who generate their own energy would go from being energy con- sumers to “energy citizens” that consume and produce energy, giving them new responsibilities, levels of awareness, and agency. This would be a significant departure from the existing energy regime and has a role to play in a transition to sustainable housing. This is already playing out around the world. For example, more than one third of dwellings in Australia now have solar PV on their roofs and this is fundamentally shifting the discussions around energy generation and what it means for sustainable housing [69].
There has also been a focus on the energy consumed to power the built environment. This includes the need to shift from fossil fuel energy to more sustainable energy alternatives (such as electric vehicles and bicycles charged by renewable energy technology) and the provision of more opportunities to move away from individual cars to improved active and public transport. Where a dwelling is built and how well it is connected to local amenities and services is important, but much of the focus on sustainability transitions for transportation has focused more on how transport can be made more sustainable. Discussions on transportation transitions have generally overlooked considerations of why people need to travel and how the provision of ideas like the 15- or 20-minute neigh- bourhood should be part of any solutions.
Across transitions studies, firms, businesses, and other industry actors are increasingly being recognized as playing important roles in sustain- ability transitions [13]. These institutions and actors are often part of the
regime,2 those who shape and influence societal elements such as policies, regulations, technologies, user practices, and cultural meanings.
Transitions scholars have typically been interested in how these industries and businesses contribute to or slow down transitions [13]. New direc- tions in this area of research include destabilization and decline of indus- tries, change across industries such as the impact of information and communications technology, the role of finance capital and regulation, institutional dynamics, and business model innovation [13, 70, 71].
Businesses and industries also offer interesting perspectives for transitions research because they intersect with other areas of study, including poli- tics, social movements, and geography [13, 70].
Another avenue of research commanding increasing attention is the need to better conceptualize different actors and their changing roles and interactions within sustainability transitions [38, 72–75]. Transitions scholars have emphasized that actors in supporting roles are important to the success of innovations and transitions processes [58, 76]. Identified as intermediaries and champions, these are individuals that create spaces for innovations to occur, facilitate innovation processes, and act as knowl- edge brokers and networkers [76]. Users are another set of actors that play an important role in transitions processes. Users are active players in these processes, championing change [76] and contributing to new inno- vations in technologies, products, and practices [77]. In addition to being consumers, users can also be voters within democratic institutions and participants in political and social movements [78]. Lastly, niche actors, those who develop or work on innovations, ‘create a starting point for systemic change’ by working within or against dominant systems [74, p. 6]; niche actors try to ‘convince the wider social world that the rules of the game need to be changed’ [23, p. 1033].
2 A regime is defined as the articulation of the paradigm sum of current practices, beliefs, methods, technologies, behaviours, routines, and rules for societal functions [16].