Abstract
There is a need to deliver more environmentally and socially sustainable housing if we are to achieve a transition to a low carbon future. There are examples of innovative and sustainable housing emerging around the world which challenge the deeper structures of the existing housing regime. This paper uses the analysis of socio-technical dimensions of eco-housing presented by Smith to explore the development of an emerging sustainable housing model known as Nightingale Housing in Australia within a sustainability transitions framing. While there were several similarities to Smith’s analysis (e.g., establishment of guiding principles, learning by doing), there were also some key differences, including the scaling up of sustainable housing while using tried and tested design principles, materials and technologies, and creating changes to user relations, policy, and culture. Smith’s dimensions remain a good framework for understanding sustainable housing development, but they must be located within a scaling up sustainable housing agenda. What is required now is to develop a better understanding of the processes and opportunities that such housing models offer policy makers, housing researchers, and building industry stakeholders to achieve a broader scale uptake of sustainable housing both in Australia and globally.
Highlights
Sustainable housing has been identified as a critical element in the transition to a low carbon and equitable future within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals [1], the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment reports [2] and other key research [3,4]
Guiding Principles In Smith’s study, he identified that eco-housing had core guiding principles around improving sustainability within cost-constraints. While this is very much the aim of the Nightingale Housing model, Nightingale Housing Pty Ltd. have developed a set of broader guiding principles
The Nightingale Housing model is centered around five core principles of affordability, transparency, sustainability, deliberative design, and community contribution (Table 3)
Summary
Sustainable housing has been identified as a critical element in the transition to a low carbon and equitable future within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals [1], the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment reports [2] and other key research [3,4]. Experimentation is crucial to support systemic change towards sustainable housing and the transition to a low carbon future, and there has there has long been an emphasis on bottom-up innovations and interventions (see [12,13,14,15] etc.). Smith [14] states that innovations in housing can be identified as niches or experiments able to “inform possibilities for developing more sustainable regimes”. In his analysis, Smith explored how eco-housing differs across socio-technical dimensions compared to mainstream housing, highlighting challenges for sustainable housing uptake with regulation and a building regime resistant to change. The importance of supporting niche sustainable housing developments (or experiments) through policy developments or other approaches has been identified by other researchers [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
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