Homes in multiple occupancy (HMOs)residential properties containing common areas shared by several householdsare a growing feature of the housing landscape across the UK. They have often been subject to political stigmatization as a result, in part, of comprising poor quality dwellings. This paper uses a "spaces of exception" framework to explore the juridical and material mechanisms involved in the rise of fuel poverty among people living in HMOs. Having analysed evidence from interviews, census data and the secondary literature pertaining to the English context, we highlight the processes that have led to the biopolitical othering of this housing stock in institutional and infrastructural terms. We argue that the expansion and persistence of fuel poverty in HMOs are promoted not only by the disproportionate concentration of low-income residents in relation to the rest of the private rented sector, but also by the socio-technical configurations that underpin this type of housing. Fuel poverty can thus be seen as the joint outcome of broader practices of legal, political and material delegitimization.
Housing in Multiple Occupancy (HMO) includes some of the UK's worst housing stock. The tenants typically have reduced housing and social security rights, as well as reduced control and sometimes absence of basic domestic energy services. Yet, HMO is largely absent from UK policies governing energy efficiency and fuel poverty. Energy vulnerability in HMO is exacerbated by a lack of representation and recognition of HMO in official systems and statistics on the housing stock, socio-cultural preferences for traditional single-family homes, and widespread tenure prejudice based on negative imagery about HMO. An indicative typology of HMO is proposed based on five main tenancy scenarios: illegal/informal; rooms in a shared house; group of sharers; bedsits; and poorly converted flats. The purpose is to improve the recognition and inclusion of the variegated HMO sector in policy frameworks and public debates in a more nuanced fashion.
In recent years, social housing providers in the UK have become influential actors in realising the national government's decarbonisation agenda. However, when decarbonisation is considered in light of austerity measures and privatisation of public housing, a number of contradictions arise. From interviews and a workshop with policymakers and registered providers in the city-region of Greater Manchester, three tensions are highlighted. First, since the 1980s, the housing stock condition has been used as a political pawn in successive reforms to demunicipalize social housing. Second, local authorities continue to harness the collectivities that remain in the social housing sector to realise their decarbonisation goals.
Urban sustainability is an increasingly popular term used by scientists and policymakers from all disciplines, increasingly without any reference to the tradition of critical urban studies. It is often observed that the social pillar is missing, if sustainability is understood via the 'three-legged stool' concept encompassing social, economic and environmental dimensions. With a few notable exceptions, there appears to be a lack of interest also within urban scholarship to use the term 'social sustainability' to address this gap, although critical urban scholars are productive in the critique of sustainability as a social and political construct. Drawing on the idea of a politics of knowledge, this paper points to political, institutional and conceptual factors that have limited the purchase of social sustainability in research. These factors are rooted in sustainability being predominantly understood as an environmental concern, and a culture that may marginalise research subscribing to a postpositivist epistemology. This article asks whether the social pillar of sustainability could offer a discursive and symbolic tool for researchers to make the case for a critical urban epistemology in interdisciplinary research environments.
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