Rethinking home as a node for transition

Abstract

Home constitutes a key part of the everyday, the mundane and familiar, but also provides a basis for our aspirations and visions of what kind of life we wish to lead -and by extension, what kind of society we construct. How we construct home (physically, socially, and cognitively), as part of how we conceive our relation to society and the planet, has significant implications for the social and environmental impact of residential development.A critical understanding of the domestic, and the potential of the everyday, has been recognised in calls for both local and society-wide transitions from a perspective of the 'home front' (Gibson-Graham 1993;Astyk 2013), and proposes going beyond the four walls of the private dwelling to acknowledge the diverse transformative practices needed to challenge dominant norms and lock-ins. The perspective put forward in this chapter emphasises housing for degrowth as rejecting Western bourgeois and consumerist representations of home, and instead presents alternative housing practices, with examples from Sweden, which challenge a high-consuming culture of indebtedness and neoliberalisation of housing, and that reimagine home as a collaborative, decommodified and feminist engagement with people and place, and as a node for transitions to a low-impact society. Finding homeThe notion of home has been a well-explored topic in Western poetry, music and literature throughout the last centuries. Just one of many examples is the stanza from the early 19 th century song "Home, Sweet Home" by American lyricist John Howard Payne: "Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

Potential and limitations of innovative housing solutions in planning for degrowth: the case of Vienna

“…These transformations also require a profound change in management and inhabitants' participation in decision-making processes by developing alternatives such as the creation of small-scale socio-ecological projects (Schneider 2003). Moreover, in degrowth narratives, housing becomes central to enhancing individuals' quality of life and reducing their daily consumption patterns to fall within environmental boundaries (Lietaert 2010;Hagbert 2018). Collaborative housing, in the sense of "an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of housing forms with different degrees of collective self-organization" (Czischke, Carriou, and Lang 2020).…”

“…1 One stream emphasises the social benefits of cohousing in urban settings, such as fostering a higher quality of social relations in contemporary hyper-individualised urban life (Lietaert 2010), thereby contributing to a re-emerging sense of community through collaborative activities (Jarvis and Bonnett 2013) as well as fostering health, care needs, well-being and neighbourhood support (Kehl and Then 2013). A separate, more environmentally oriented research stream emphasises the potential of such intentional communities to foster more environmentally sound everyday practices (Lietaert 2010;Hagbert 2018) as well as to cultivate what Chatterton (2013) has coined "post-carbon value change". Indeed, the trend of reducing environmental footprints has already been identified across a number of studies, highlighting in particular sharing practices related to food, household appliances of different sizes and transportation as key mechanisms to reduce everyday consumption practices (Lietaert 2010;Jarvis 2011).…”

Contemporary Co-housing in Europe

“…point to four sustainability claims in co-housing that they critically explore: 1) the potential of adopting more sustainable technologies; 2) small compact dwellings; 3) whether co-housing mutually supports pro-environmental behaviour; and 4) co-housing as providing environmental advantages for small households. Chatterton (2013) moreover underlines the potential (and challenges) for cohousing communities to foster a 'post-carbon value change',w h i l eL i e t a e r t (2010) and Hagbert (2018) explore the possible links between co-housing and degrowthas the equitable downscaling of the economic throughput of society to keep within environmental limits. As such, co-housing is also posited as part of more radical transitions, challenging socio-technical and economic systems.…”

“…Xue (2015) suggests that continued growth in the housing stock provides only weak decoupling from absolute environmental impact, and instead calls for reduced expansion of the total volume of housing. Taken together, such perspectives indicate that a more radical approach is needed, including fundamentally rethinking ways of residing and the distribution of housing resources, while minimising total environmental claims, calling for a reinterpretation of sustainable housing beyond a growth logic (Hagbert 2018).…”

“…The ecological impact of modern ways of living goes beyond the buildings themselves. A narrative turn in energy research (Janda and Topouzi 2015) for example underlines the need to explore everyday practices and what people do in and through their homes (Hagbert 2018), rather than solely focusing on technical provision and buildings' energy performance. This includes critically exploring norms surrounding home and notions of comfort, as well as the market-driven framing of living standards in relation to households'' willingness-to-pay', which uphold unsustainable and inequitable patterns of residential resource use.…”