Eco-Homes: People, Place and Politics 9781780325316, 9781780325309, 9781350219809, 9781780325323

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Just Sustainabilities Just Sustainabilities contributes to understanding, theorising and ultimately developing strategies toward the development of more just and sustainable communities in both the global North and South. Through a collection of solutions-orientated books, the series looks at policy and planning themes that improve people’s quality of life and well-being, both now and into the future; that are carried out with an intentional focus on just and equitable processes, outputs and outcomes in terms of people’s access to environmental, social, political and economic space(s); and that aim to achieve a high quality of life and wellbeing within environmental limits.

Series editor Julian Agyeman

Other titles in the series Julian Agyeman, Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning, and Practice Karen Bickerstaff, Gordon Walker and Harriet Bulkeley, Energy Justice in a Changing Climate: Social Equity and Low-carbon Energy Peter Utting, Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe

About the author Jenny Pickerill is a professor of environmental geography at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on how we understand, value and (ab)use the environment. She has written widely on activism, the environment and indigenous politics, with her previous books including Cyberprotest (2003), Low Impact Development (2009) and Occupy! A Global Movement (co-editor, 2015). She has a particular interest in innovative eco-housing, having worked with eco-villages and self-build eco-communities in Wales, England, Spain, Argentina, Australia, Thailand and the US.

EC O - H O M ES PEOP L E, P L A C E A N D P O L I T I C S Jenny Pickerill

Zed Books London

Eco-Homes: People, Place and Politics was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Jenny Pickerill 2016 The right of Jenny Pickerill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Plantin and Kievit by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Index: Rohan Bolton Cover designed by www.alice-marwick.co.uk Cover photo: Lama Foundation, New Mexico All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78032-531-6 hb ISBN 978-1-78032-530-9 pb ISBN 978-1-78032-532-3 pdf ISBN 978-1-78032-533-0 epub ISBN 978-1-78032-534-7 mobi

C ON T E N T S

Figures and tables | vii Acknowledgements | xi Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 Eco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2 Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 3 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4 Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 5 Affordability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 6 Comfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 7 Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 8 Mobilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 9 Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 10 Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 Notes | 274 Further reading | 326 Index | 336

FIGURE S A N D T AB L ES

Figures I.1 An English eco-home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 I.2 Case studies by country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.1 Heat leakage and draught entry points in a conventional house in a temperate climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 1.2 Three different eco-houses which are all built using different methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 1.3 Area-to-volume ratio of different structures of homes . . . . . . . . 26 1.4 Kailash eco-village, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 1.5 Sketches illustrating how passive solar heating in a temperate climate works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 1.6 A perspective sketch of a tiny home in the US. . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.7 Charlotte’s handmade house at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset, England. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 1.8 Sketch of the internal layout of Rooh’s home at Landmatters eco-community, Devon, England. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 1.9 Use of photovoltaic panels and solar hot-water panels on an earthbag house, Crestone, Colorado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 1.10 (a) Climatic elements that impact on a house and (b) the technologies commonly used to harness them in eco-houses in temperate climates in the Northern Hemisphere . . . . . . . . . 36 1.11 Retrofitting project of social housing in Newark, Nottinghamshire, England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 1.12 The control interface in the Newark retrofit project, Nottinghamshire, England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 2.1 Devonshire cottage, England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 3.1 Streets of Capileira, Las Alpujarras, Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 3.2 Walter Segal’s timber-framed house at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3.3 Hedgehog Housing Project, Brighton, England . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3.4 Autonomous House, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England, designed by Brenda and Robert Vale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 3.5 Barrel house made from a reclaimed whisky barrel at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 3.6 BedZED, designed by Bill Dunster, Wallington, London, 2002 . . . 77

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3.7 3.8 3.9

3.10 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 6.1

Wind tower (also known as wind catcher, or malqaf) design . . Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, Wichita, Kansas . . . . . Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, used as emergency accommodation for troops during the Second World War, 1940 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Balkrishna Doshi’s studio, Sangath, Ahmedabad, India, built 1979–81. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The different climatic regions of the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eco-house in temperate rainy climate at Columbia eco-village, Oregon, and eco-house in tropical rainy climate at Panya Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Path of the sun over a house in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An example of shared aesthetics between eco-homes in Spain (El Valle de Sensaciones) and in Thailand (Pun Pun) . . . . . . . LILAC, Leeds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cartoon of the work by City Repair Project at Sunnyside Plaza, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . City Repair Project community constructions – T-station at Share-It Square and YHA Pavilion, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . Simon and Jasmine’s unfinished house at Tir y Gafel, Pembrokeshire, Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cassi and Nigel’s half completed straw-bale roundhouse at Tir y Gafel, Pembrokeshire, Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Earthship, Greater World Earthship Community, near Taos, New Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ratio of key costs of house building in England 2010: land, materials, labour and professional fees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Costs of brick-and-block two-storey house construction in Britain, 2012 (excluding cost of site, professional fees, connecting costs, or landscaping) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Housing as an investment in Britain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eco-houses in Crestone, Colorado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regions of the US which do not enforce a building code . . . . House at Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . House at Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . Straw-bale homes at LILAC, Leeds, England . . . . . . . . . . . . LILAC’s Mutual Home Ownership Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kitchen at Green Hills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. .80 . . 82

. . 83 . .84 . . 96

. . 97 . . 98 . 102 . 105 . 110 . .113 . . 115 . .116 . 123 . 127

. . . . . . . . .

128 130 133 134 137 138 141 142 158

F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 10.1 10.2

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Compost toilets at Landmatters, Devon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 The bathhouse at Landmatters, Devon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Bathhouse at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 Bathrooms at Panya Project (Thailand), Earthship Biotecture (US) and El Valle de Sensaciones (Spain) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 A small dwelling at the Lama Foundation, New Mexico . . . . . . 180 Thom Wheeler’s adobe house, Taos, New Mexico. . . . . . . . . . 186 Adobe houses at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 Casa Tierra main house, San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Brick house in San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina . . . . 199 A wooden house in the village of Ban Mae Jo, next to Pun Pun in Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Jon and Peggy’s house at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . . . 203 The meeting hall at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . . . . . . . 204 Adobe house with raised roof for ventilation at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 The spatial processes of self-built eco-building innovation, circulation and adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Eco-homes at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Dancing in the community dome, Lama Foundation, New Mexico. 225 Layout of Panya Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . . . . . . . . . 229 A small adobe house at Panya Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand . . . 231 The meeting room at Los Angeles eco-village, California . . . . . 231 Layout of Peninsula Park Commons, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . 232 Peninsula Park Commons, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Simon Dale in his house, Tir y Gafel, Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 The bike rack infrastructure at Kailash eco-village, Portland, Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Sabin Green, Portland, Oregon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 New co-housing at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland . . . . . . . . . 244 Straw-bale house at Green Hills, Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Future-proofing a (straw-bale) house by building on raised brick plinths, North Yorkshire, England . . . . . . . . . . . . 264

Tables I.1 Criteria used to determine if a house is ecological for case-study selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.1 The different functions and forms of eco-houses . . . . . . . . . . . 22

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1.2

House size, embodied energy and average heating/cooling energy use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Technologies used in eco-houses to harness renewable energy resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Proportion of housing according to period of completion . . 2.1 The different ways home has meaning and is understood . . 2.2 Common features and criteria that people demand and desire of a home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 How place can be differently understood . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Sources of financial costs for private house construction . . 5.2 Summary of changes made by eco-builders in Crestone to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Summary of changes made by residents of Dignity Village to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Summary of changes made by LILAC to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs . . 6.1 Dimensions and discourses of bathing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Communal bathroom facilities and practices at Green Hills, Landmatters and Tinkers Bubble . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Assumptions articulated in the case studies about gender and eco-architecture and eco-building . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Barriers and enablers to eco-houses being built in minority world countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 The different spaces of circulation of eco-housing knowledges and practices by eco-home style . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Examples of eco-communities worldwide . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Different forms of eco-communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Benefits and limitations of building eco-homes in eco-communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 The Living Building Challenge categories (petals) and imperatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 30 . . . . 34 . . . . 38 . . . . 52 . . . . 58 . . . . 92 . . . 126

. . . .135

. . . 140 . . . 143 . . . .153 . . . 162 . . . 174 . . . 189 . . . 193 . . . 218 . . . 220 . . . 223 . . . 267

ACK N OW L E D G EM EN T S

This book would not have been possible without the help and inspiration of many different people and places. First and foremost thanks must go to all the interviewees who shared their time, knowledge and homes with me. Your generosity, hard work and creativity made this book possible. Second, several organisations’ efforts in eco-building have inspired this research. The Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales) sparked my initial interest many years ago and numerous visits to Hockerton Housing Project (England) helped me, and my students, understand how we could build and live differently. Andrew Yeates and Eric Parks (EcoArc Architects) designed me an eco-home through which I began to understand eco-buildings’ potential for change and happiness, and a group of friends have travelled the long journey from a hopeful vision to an established eco-community for the last fifteen years. I hope that this book honours and celebrates all inspiring eco-home projects – big, small, quirky and mainstream. Third, I am indebted to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust who granted me a Travel Fellowship through which most of the fieldwork for this book was undertaken. Thanks too to the University of Leicester for research leave for both the fieldwork and writing up, and to my amazing colleagues in Geography who covered my teaching and admin while I was away. Fourth, thanks must go to all those who listened to, read and gave constructive feedback on earlier versions of chapters at seminars, in my teaching, at conferences (particularly the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conferences) and public talks (to Transition Town Totnes among others). In particular, thanks must go to Professor Peter Kraftl, Dr Ben Coles and Dr Gavin Brown for reading and re-reading many of these chapters, and to Dr Kelvin Mason for sharing my love of eco-buildings and sharing his knowledge with me. In all I thank Geography for being a discipline open enough for me to embark on a new research adventure and engage with this interdisciplinary research topic. Finally, for practical help I would like to thank: Tim Watson for challenging everything I ever said about eco-homes and for putting up

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with me often being absent, physically and mentally; Maggie Farrant for proofreading, cooking and guidance; Laura Vann for digitising all the images from my poor sketches; Deb and Bob at Retreats for You for amazing writing space, good food and unwavering support; and Dr McCormack for being a brilliant GP, without whom I would not have recovered from a potentially life-changing illness. Earlier versions and fragments of three of the chapters have been previously published. Chapter 5 ‘Affordability’ builds significantly on ideas first published in Spanish in Eco-Habitar magazine (‘Construyendo eco-viviendas asequibles en todo el mundo’). Chapter 6 ‘Comfort’ builds on work previously published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers (‘Cold comfort? Reconceiving the practices of bathing in British self-build eco-homes’). Chapter 7 ‘Gender’ builds on work published in the journal Gender, Place and Culture (‘Bodies, building and bricks: Women architects and builders in eight eco-communities in Argentina, Britain, Spain, Thailand and the USA’), the book Low Impact Living Communities in Britain: A Diggers and Dreamers Review edited by S. Bunker, C. Coates, J. Dennis and J. How (‘Who builds the house?’) and Communities magazine (‘Who builds the houses? Gender in eco-communities’). This book is dedicated to friendship and laughter – for friends who believe in me as much as I believe in them, you know who you are. All photographs were taken and all images were redrawn by the author unless listed below: Figure 3.4 Autonomous House, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England, designed by Brenda and Robert Vale (© Robert Vale) Figure 3.6 BedZED, designed by Bill Dunster, Wallington, London, 2002 (© Marcus Lyon/Bioregional International) Figure 3.8 Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, Wichita, Kansas (© The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller) Figure 3.9 Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, used as emergency accommodation for troops during the Second World War, 1940 (© The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller) Figure 3.10 Balkrishna Doshi’s studio, Sangath, Ahmedabad, India, built 1979–81 (© Anja Brunt and Paulus Veltman) Figure 4.5 LILAC, Leeds (© Craig White)

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Figure 4.6 Cartoon of the work by City Repair Project at Sunnyside Plaza, Portland, Oregon (© Andy Singer) Figure 5.9 Straw-bale homes at LILAC, Leeds, England (© Craig White) Figure 5.10 LILAC’s Mutual Home Ownership Society (© Paul Chatterton/John Wiley and Sons)

INT ROD U C TI O N

It is mid-morning on a spring day in the English countryside. The sun is shining, warming the house through its large south-facing windows, generating electricity (through the photovoltaic panels on the roof) and hot water (through the solar thermal panels). The washing machine is on, making use of the rainwater collected in last night’s rain and the free electricity of the day. The thick walls are absorbing the heat, ready to radiate it back into the house after sunset. This is an eco-home (Figure I.1). It makes the best possible use of environmental processes (weather, climate, landscape, hydrological cycle) to reduce the costs (financially and environmentally) of living. The financial bills in this house are minimal: mains water is only used for drinking and bathing (costing £140 a year1) and mains electricity use is more than offset by its micro-generation (so a profit of £450 is made yearly).

I.1 An English eco-home

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The benefits of eco-homes, to both the environment and people, have been understood for decades and yet are often undermined by myths and entrenched practices. Common retorts to advocates of ecohousing are that it is too expensive, is not possible in dense urban spaces, is too primitive and quirky to appeal to the conventional resident, is uncomfortable, requires too much maintenance and is untested.2 Even with government support in places like England, eco-housing has remained marginal, or watered down to such an extent that it is more eco-bling3 than eco-housing. Indeed, the variety of definitions as to what even constitutes an eco-home further complicates understanding them and determining what they achieve. It is into this complexity and resistance to eco-homes that this book makes an intervention. While there are many experts and advocates of eco-homes, particularly architects and engineers but also housing professionals, constructors and planners, relatively little attention has been paid to the social, geographical and political issues around eco-homes. This is a mistake; for example, much of the resistance to eco-homes can be understood, and therefore tackled, through analysis of the social issues that it raises. Beyond technology This book starts from the premise that the knowledge, capacity and technology are already available to build eco-homes or retrofit existing housing stock in numerous countries worldwide. As Williams argues, ‘the technological capacity is already available to build low energy and passive house standard in a variety of climates.’4 Yet relatively few eco-homes are being built and often expensive technology, rather than simple design, is relied upon to make a house more ecologically friendly: ‘One of the major problems facing environmental architecture, aside from the absence of a strong societal endorsement, is a professional choice to over-emphasize the technological advantages and undervalue the social and aesthetic aspects.’5 This emphasis on technology as the best way to achieve environmental measures in new housing is problematic. It increases the cost of ecohousing, thus making it less appealing. Although technologies are used in part to accommodate passive occupants (in that technology reduces the need for changes in residents’ practices), the extent to which the technologies can be disrupted by residents’ occupation practices tends to be underestimated.6 Finally this approach can underestimate the

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importance of aesthetics.7 Technology alone cannot create eco-homes, in large part because their performance is reliant upon residents’ compliance. Perhaps the best example of this is the use of manual heat exchange systems that are misused by residents opening too many windows. But occupants of eco-buildings also need to be able to ‘forgive’ less-than-ideal conditions at certain times; in other words, they need to work with a building rather than expect uniform functionality.8 This is not to suggest that eco-housing does not benefit from technologies; many, such as micro-generation renewable energy systems, are central to reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Rather it is the total reliance upon technologies and the technology-first approach that ignores social, geographical or political issues which is limiting eco-housing construction. Indeed, the construction of eco-houses has been slow and they remain a marginal component of housing markets in countries such as England, the US and Australia.9 If the technology and knowledge are already available and yet there is still resistance to eco-housing, then it would seem appropriate to suggest that other issues are at play in hindering their growth. A social approach is able to reveal the complex meanings of conventional homes and thus the potentially radical challenges to residents’ values and practices that eco-homes propose.10 For example, houses made of straw bales limit what can be easily hung on internal walls; ecohomes might require more manual effort to manage heating and ventilation (not necessarily offering automated internal temperatures), and might limit excessive use of water such as using hosepipes for washing cars or drives. These examples suggest just a few ways in which ecohomes might require social changes in how people live, and thus why people might resist them. At the same time, the changes required are often exaggerated through myths and assumptions furthering anxiety about eco-homes. In all, it is not technology, or even politics, which is holding society back in adopting eco-homes; it is deep rooted cultural and social understandings of how we live and what we expect houses to do for us. There is also a spatiality to eco-homes, in the different climates in which they need to function, in their uneven distribution and in the different politics, economics and cultures between places. This social perspective to eco-homes is indebted to, and builds upon, critical architecture approaches and architectural geographies. In recent years, geographers such as Lees, Kraftl11 and Jacobs have called for architecture to be understood as spaces of ‘ongoing social practices through

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which space is continually shaped and inhabited’.12 Architecture is more than a representation; it is a lived, evolving space that is shaped (and made meaningful) through the everyday practices of those using it. Similarly, Guy13 argues for the need to take a social and cultural approach to sustainable architecture in order to understand its hybrid, fluid diversity and to open up the possibilities of both what sustainable architecture is and what it could be. Building better houses This book explores the social, geographical and political issues of eco-homes in order to better understand the forms and functions of eco-homes, how eco-homes could be improved, how to encourage more supply and demand, how eco-building knowledge travels and how to make eco-homes more affordable. Alongside these applied questions are more academic concerns that use the eco-home as an object through which to explore the concepts of place, gender, comfort, mobilisation, community, affordability and home. It seeks to extend these concepts by applying them in new contexts and asking to what extent these concepts can help us understand eco-homes, and how ecohomes can offer new meanings and challenges to these concepts. This book uses geographical theoretical concepts to ask questions about why eco-homes are the way they are in order to understand how they could be improved and more eco-homes built. In this book, certain assumptions are made about the value of the environment, the existence of climate change and the compounding impacts of human activity on CO2 levels.14 House building and house occupation have significant environmental implications, contributing, for example, in England to 50 per cent of all carbon emissions.15 Climate change will also impact housing; predictions for England are that the risks of flooding, over-heating and water scarcity will increase.16 This book is based on a belief that the environment matters, that the flora, fauna and the non-human are important, that ensuring humans minimise their ecological impact is vital for their long-term survival and that humans have the capacity to change their relationship with nature and the environment.17 Yet even if environmental degradation and climate change were not considered problematic, the financial costs of conventional housing should be. Housing is a basic fundamental need that has significant implications for health and well-being. The detrimental effects of

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homelessness or poor-quality housing are well known,18 yet many people worldwide still live in substandard housing. For example, many conventional houses in temperate regions are poorly insulated, leak heat and suffer from damp.19 As examined in greater detail in Chapter 5, ‘Affordability’, despite these houses being uncomfortable and expensive to heat, they remain unaffordable for many to buy. In England, the average house now costs six times the average salary and mortgages require hefty deposits.20 This unaffordability, and continued financial inflation of the housing market, has led to housing crises worldwide.21 This crisis has many dimensions, but is principally about a perceived shortage of housing, leading to high prices which consequently exclude many potential residents.22 The result overall is increased social inequality, repossessions and evictions.23 Eco-homes can reduce the environmental and financial costs of housing. Although eco-homes may require greater financial investment initially (this is explored further in Chapter 5), they are considerably cheaper to occupy. Their thermal efficiency, reduced leakage and (depending on their construction) passive solar gain, all significantly reduce the financial costs of heating. Advocating for more affordable eco-homes is advocating for better-quality housing.24 As to what actually constitutes an eco-home, to define one is in itself a complicated and contested process.25 In this book, eco-housing is understood as function and form. Function refers to the intended outcome of a design choice, whereas form refers to the process by which that function is to be achieved. Thus the forms of eco-housing vary enormously and include using highly technological systems or low-tech vernacular natural-build approaches, to achieve the same function of low carbon housing. The common functions of an eco-house are for a building across its whole life cycle to: • minimise resource use (in materials, in embodied energy, energy requirements, water use); • minimise waste (in materials, space, energy, leakage); • maximise use of renewable energy (such as solar, wind, water), and • maximise use of renewable materials (such as straw, sheep’s wool, wood, earth). These functions can be achieved through a diverse variety of forms of building and materials. This is discussed in greater depth in Chapter 1, ‘Eco’.

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Self-built eco-housing While there is huge diversity in types of eco-housing, this book focuses on self-built houses, particularly by those on low incomes. In this book, a self-build is when a resident has built all or part of the home in which they live, but they may have worked with, or employed, others during the build. Self-builders are not necessarily amateurs or novices – the category might include those with previous building experience or professional qualifications. Indeed, in this book the case studies include self-builders who have limited DIY experience and those who are professional carpenters and architects. What is considered to be a self-build also varies significantly internationally. In Australia, for example, the term ‘custom build’ more accurately describes how a lot of new houses are built. This is a process whereby a developer offers two or three design options and the customer chooses a design and the number of different rooms they want. The difference between selfbuild and custom-build is the level of resident responsibility, organising and interaction. Custom build tends to rely on a specialist developer who takes control of the build and deals with most of the issues, such as land purchase, construction and, in some cases, even finance. Selfbuild is a subset of a much broader category of eco-housing and as such cannot be representative of all eco-home possibilities. However, the literature upon which this book draws relates to the full range of eco-housing and as such many of the research findings are applicable beyond this subset of examples. Self-built homes were chosen because they illustrate the potential to build eco-homes cheaply and, as self-builders, residents could justify the choices they made and detail the problems they encountered. They were also chosen because ‘self-builders together now build more houses than the largest individual house-builder’.26 The whole house process, from design through to construction and occupation, was studied. There is also recognition that self-build is a good way to build more appropriate housing which meets residents’ demands and desires whilst also being affordable.27 In European countries, self-build is the norm; in France and Belgium, it accounts for about 50 per cent of all new building and in Sweden about a third of new house building is self-built.28 In England, less than 10 per cent of new housing is selfbuilt.29 According to Broer and Titheridge’s research, more self-build eco-housing is feasible in England and delivers low carbon lifestyles in a way in which conventional house construction has not.30

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Many of the case studies used in this book might be considered to exist on the radical margins of society. Some have been built without the requisite planning permission or compliance with building regulations and many, though by no means all, did not use professional services such as architects. Their use in this book is in part to make visible what is often hidden – the number and diversity of self-built eco-homes worldwide – and to facilitate a broader perspective and understanding of what an eco-home is and how they exist in multiple forms. As an intellectual project, this type of home also raises interesting questions about financial costs, materials, how knowledge is shared, gender roles in building and differing concepts of comfort. Worldwide examples Case studies from seven countries are used in this book: England, Scotland, Wales, Argentina, Thailand, Spain and the United States. This book starts with an acknowledgement of the importance of spatiality, space and place in shaping eco-homes and draws upon a number of geographical approaches in its analysis. The intention is that the use of worldwide examples enables an international perspective through which to better identify commonalities between places and to share best-practice examples and solutions. Despite this global approach, however, there is at times an emphasis upon England, which reflects the author’s longstanding work there. The empirical material on which this book is based has been collated since 2006, with most material collected during a six-month period in 2010. In all, 34 eco-homes or eco-communities were visited (the number in each country is noted in brackets): England (7), Wales (1), Scotland (2), Argentina (3), Thailand (3), Spain (2) and the US (16) (see Figure I.2). Greater detail about each case study is provided in the Appendix, but they are also described when used in the book. The criteria for case-study selection was that (a) the eco-homes were ecological, fulfilling at least two of the criteria in Table I.1, (b) the houses were self-built and (c) they were affordable, and did not cost more than 35 per cent of household income. Many of these houses were built in eco-communities (with multiple houses and land-based income projects on collectively owned sites), but not all. The community setting was of secondary importance, though its relevance is discussed in Chapter 9. The majority of cases were new-build constructions rather than renovations, though Newark retrofit (England), Findhorn

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4–13 25–34 24

14 15

19 20–23

18 16 17

1 2 3

1. El Trébol del Monte, Argentina 2. Aldea Velatropa, Argentina 3. Casa Tierra, Argentina 4. Brighton Earthship, Britain 5. Landmatters, Britain 6. LILAC, Britain 7. Newark Retrofit, Britain 8. Hockerton Housing Project, Britain 9. Tinkers Bubble, Britain 10. Straw Bale House Lincolnshire, Britain 11. Findhorn Eco Village, Britain 12. Green Hills, Britain

13. Lammas Eco Village, Britain 14. La Ecoaldea Del Minchal, Spain 15. El Valle de Sensaciones, Spain 16. Panya Project, Thailand 17. Amy’s Earth House, Thailand 18. Pun Pun, Thailand 19. Crestone, USA 20. Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center, USA 21. Thom Wheeler’s, USA 22. Earthship Biotecture, USA 23. Lama Foundation, USA 24. Los Angeles Eco Village, USA

25. Kailash Eco Village, USA 26. City Repair Project, USA 27. Columbia Eco Village, USA 28. Communitecture, USA 29. Dignity Village, USA 30. Peninsula Park Commons, USA 31. People’s Co-operative, USA 32. ReBuild Center, USA 33. Ruth’s Garden Village, USA 34. Sabin Green, USA

I.2 Case studies by country

eco-village (Scotland), Kailash eco-village, Peninsula Park Commons, ReBuild Center and Sabin Green (the US) all contained examples of retrofitting. New build was focused upon because it tended to offer more affordable housing (in that eco-retrofitting is unfortunately quite costly) and it was easier for new builds to reach a high ecological standard, whereas retrofits were often limited in the eco-features that they could install. This focus does not, of course, undermine the necessity to tackle issues in existing housing, but eco-renovation is not the main concern of this book. A participatory action research (PAR) approach31 was used to collect data, driven by requests from eco-builders in England to garner greater political and social support for, and understanding of, their projects. In other words, participants helped determine what issues were explored and what questions should be asked. A PAR approach seeks to combine research with participation and action. It starts with a focus on issues that are of concern to particular communities; in the case of this book this was self-builders of eco-homes. This approach also adopts the premise that research outcomes (scholarly and more applied

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TABLE I.1 Criteria used to determine if a house is ecological for case-study selection Criteria 1

Reduce energy use in some form (e.g. ground source heat pump)

2

High level of insulation

3

Use of renewable technology (photovoltaics, solar water heating, wind turbine)

4 Solar passive design (or shading) 5

Extensively used reclaimed or recycled materials

6 Reduce waste produced (e.g. eco-sewage systems or recycling of brown water) 7

Double- or tripled-glazed windows with a U value of 1.5 Wm2k or lower

8 Low carbon or zero carbon house 9 Rainwater harvesting or water collection systems, low water-use appliances, reductions in run-off 10

Deliberately small or compact design to reduce resource use

11 Green or grass roof for increased insulation 12

Grass roof for wildlife

13 Use of ecological materials such as adobe, straw, sheep’s wool, hemp, sand bag, reclaimed bricks, or wood (if FSC or reclaimed) 14

Passivhaus standard

15 Deliberate avoidance of using environmentally damaging materials (such as concrete, lead, bricks, etc.) 16 Built using locally available materials 17 Heat recovery systems 18

Government or NGO eco-house performance certificate

19

Air tightness of less than 5 m3/m2hr (air movement) at 50 Pa

or the community) are improved if the researcher actively participates in the activities and issues which they are seeking to understand. Finally, the PAR approach advocates that research should help enable action. In other words, research should help change the world through participation and research findings. Participation in the case studies was sought, though the extent of involvement varied significantly between case studies. When possible, I joined activities on site such as building, gardening, scything, cooking and eating communally, engaging in group meetings, socialising and staying on site for several days and up to two weeks. Participation in the process of building offered a unique research opportunity to

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learn about issues which interviewees might not have been able to easily articulate or reflect upon. Research was also conducted through learning about, and training in, eco-building techniques. For example, I attended a residential Earthship construction training course at Brighton Earthship in the spring of 2010. For each case study, in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted, photographs taken, field diary observations made, and sketches of the site were recorded. At several sites, it was also possible to access archival material. Interviewees were initially asked to volunteer, to which the self-defined builders tended to be first to respond and then others were sought on site who were building, or who were willing to talk to me. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. A total of 35 interviews were conducted, with most interviews lasting around an hour, and several lasting over two hours. All interviewees gave written consent and were able to withdraw at any time. If requested, anonymity was given to interviewees and case-study locations. That I am an advocate of eco-homes, have built and live in an ecohome and have worked with eco-communities for many years, positioned me as an ally to the case studies. This facilitated easy access to many places, but also complicated my research relationship. As Newton et al.32 argue, the ‘politics of research practices’ are complicated and my political sympathies for eco-build projects are balanced against an academic critical analysis of them. Hence, some parts of this book are highly critical of self-build eco-housing practices, but these criticisms are meant in a constructive and supportive way. Advocating for eco-homes also requires critically exploring the limitations in current approaches and identifying productive ways forward. Personally, I hope that the many people who helped me in this research, giving up their time and sharing their homes and knowledges with me, find my descriptions accurate and my analysis fair. Researching housing requires an understanding of the relations between individuals, houses and their global context. Eco-homes are entwined into the broader relations of politics, economics and culture.33 They are not the outcome of individual agency alone, and likewise individual agency alone is not enough to mitigate global processes like climate change.34 Understanding houses as situated into broader relational contexts requires studying the dynamic processes of interaction across scales, such as the micro scale of the individual house and the macro scale of national planning policies. A meso-level approach was

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adopted which sits between individual and societal scales and enables exploration of the interaction between them.35 In other words, the meso-level approach analyses households within their broader context. This was done by studying individual homes and talking in-depth to builders and residents. A social assessment was made of the materials and methods used, builders’ choices and decisions, and the tensions and compromises they have encountered and made. By staying in the eco-home, it was also possible to assess whether claims made about the performance of buildings were accurate. The broader context in which building occurs is important, as this shapes many choices made as to materials, design and function. It also influences the potential for the replication of eco-building. For example, in some countries, such as Thailand, eco-building was perceived to take too long to satisfy the desire to build quickly. The political and social context of the case studies obviously also varied significantly between countries. These differences were understood through interviews with builders, analysis of local house prices, secondary readings, and museum and archival work exploring building traditions. Chapter themes This book is organised around ten themes: eco, home, history, place, affordability, comfort, gender, mobilisation, community and future. Each of these emerged as an issue of importance to eco-homes during the fieldwork. They are about understanding what eco-homes do (eco and home), how eco-homes fit in societies (history, place, mobilisation and community), how eco-homes challenge existing practices (comfort, gender and affordability) and what the future of eco-homes might be (future). Each is analysed through a social, geographical and political lens using different case studies in each chapter. This book begins by defining what an eco-house is, with its purpose being to reduce waste – in its construction, occupation and demolition. Eco-housing involves changing the processes of building and how a house functions to minimise waste both materially and in less visible forms such as energy. Using a variety of examples, and including discussion of retrofitting projects, this chapter details how eco-houses are designed by improving the structure of the building, reducing the size of dwellings, changing resident behaviour and practices, and using technologies. In the chapter on home, the social and cultural aspects of what makes a house a home is explored. It examines the differences between

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the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘house’ and why any examination of ecohomes needs to acknowledge the dynamic relation between these concepts. As such, this is a conceptual chapter that establishes an approach used throughout the book. A home is so much more than just a house. A house is the physical structure, a form of shelter built from a range of materials to protect its inhabitants from the extremes of the weather and provide physical security. A home is a multi-dimensional concept; it is composed of multiple different influences, desires and needs, in addition to the material structure. It can be conceived of as a ‘socio-spatial system’36 or a spatial imaginary37 where it is a space and place of social relations filled with emotions, politics, tradition, economics, quests for status and multiple other influences. Home includes the psychological, cultural, economic, political and historical. Understanding people’s desires, perceptions and living practices in homes is vital if we are to know how to encourage people to choose to live in eco-homes. A failure to understand the processes through which people choose a home will result in a failure of eco-homes to satisfy these desires and needs. The chapter on history begins the process of reframing the (hi)story of eco-homes. The history of eco-homes is global, fragmented and complex, but is often understood as recent and simple. Using four trajectories – vernacular, community, deep green and modernist – contemporary eco-homes are understood as an outcome of multiple influences that reach back centuries. The story of eco-homes continues to evolve by absorbing and ignoring different influences from the past. In England, for example, the influence of the deep green experiments of the 1970s with Alternative Technology and autonomy is evident in both the government-supported concept of zero carbon housing and the radical Low Impact Development movement, but in very different forms. Thus different versions of eco-homes have emerged from one particular historical path. While the history of eco-homes has been partially written, especially by authors such as Farmer,38 Hawkes39 and Steele,40 there remain many myths about where ecohomes came from and when it all began. Until a more complete, open and long (hi)story about eco-homes is told, the misconception that it is a marginal, deep green experiment will persist, to the detriment of a greater understanding and uptake of eco-homes. Place matters: it matters where an eco-home is built in terms of climatic region, what was on the land before, and what surrounds it.

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It matters if an eco-home is in the middle of a city, or far out in the countryside. It matters how an eco-home connects (or not) to other places through the use of common infrastructure, or through social links to others near and far. Place matters precisely because it is more than just the physicality of a piece of land. Places are constructed in relation to other places, and these social relations give a place its meaning. This chapter explores how place has been understood by self-builders in their construction of eco-homes and the infrastructure that surrounds them. It ultimately argues that in some cases ecohomes are imposed over place, rather then embedded in it, and reflect a generic utopian vision, rather than the place in which the houses are being built. The chapter on affordability explores how we can (and in many places already do) build more affordable eco-housing. This requires understanding the interweaving pressures that push up the price of housing per se, from capitalist processes (housing built for profit generation and investment, market-determined prices), state/government processes (planning restrictions increasing land prices, the financial costs of complying with planning and building regulations), to social processes (opposition to new developments, demand for more spacious and luxurious homes). It also requires identifying those costs that are excluded from current calculations, such as the unaccounted environmental impacts of housing, and lifetime and maintenance costs. The current ways in which housing is ‘costed’ is limited and limiting, and the processes of why and how we build houses creates unaffordable housing. This chapter unpacks what makes houses so expensive and uses several case studies to explore innovative ways in which ecohousing can be built more cheaply. Comfort is core to what a home should provide. Yet eco-homes are often articulated by advocates and critics alike as involving a shift to a simpler lifestyle which dispenses with some of the (perceived) frivolous or environmentally damaging attachments to luxury or convenience. This shift could be perceived as the forgoing of elements of comfort. In this chapter, comfort in eco-homes is defined as an ongoing process, a negotiation between different elements (such as climate, materials and bodies) in a particular place. This chapter analyses bathrooms and bathing practices as examples of the ways in which comfort is reconfigured in eco-homes. The function, form and place of conventional bathrooms continue to change and evolve, and part of

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the reason for their de-prioritisation by the self-builders is their current association with luxury and leisure. However, a diverse set of conditions – climatic, resource, financial, political and cultural – shaped these eco-community bathing practices. Comfort was reconceived as not being reliant upon particular facilities, furniture or temperature, as not private but as collective and shared, and as being an embodied relation. The implication of these different approaches to comfort is to illustrate that comfort is not predetermined or fixed; instead it is a process that can and is being renegotiated in eco-homes. Gender emerged as an issue during fieldwork because men were presumed to be better eco-builders and designers, and thus ecobuilding was constructed as a male domain. As a result, more men than women build, and women find their design ideas and contributions to eco-building are belittled. This chapter suggests that a focus on bodies, embodiment and the ‘doing’ of building is a potentially productive way to move beyond current gender discrimination. This chapter illustrates the enduring persistence of gender divisions in architecture and building, and finds more commonalities than differences in gender discrimination across cultures and nationalities. It also outlines a number of spaces of opportunity through which more gender-neutral approaches are being developed in eco-building: (a) in challenging the need for ‘strong’ bodies, (b) by practising more embodied ways of building, and (c) by making visible women’s bodies in building. Although much work remains to facilitate more genderneutral building practices, an embodied approach has enabled women and men to begin to move beyond gender as a defining difference and to re-define their building skills and capacities in relation to their diverse bodies. The adoption of eco-housing is spatially uneven, with neighbouring countries having vastly different eco-housing projects. The chapter on mobilisation examines this conundrum – why some places have many eco-homes and others none. The concept of mobilisation is used to signify the active movement of knowledges and practices across time and space. By mapping the spatial processes of ecobuilding innovation, circulation and adaptation, it becomes possible to see how these processes act in dialogue with each other in multidirectional flows, and how the knowledges and practices evolve and diversify. This chapter acknowledges the diversity of eco-housing form – vernacular, innovative self-built, architect-designed and commercially

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mass-produced houses – and the consequent multiple ways in which environmental knowledges and practices are mobilised. None the less, it remains possible to identify similar processes of mobilisation, exchange and modification. In so doing, this approach can be applied to understanding how other environmental knowledges and solutions are designed, advocated and implemented, and how these could be facilitated further. A great many eco-homes are built within community. Such communities are also often the site of innovation and experimentation in eco-home design and function.41 This chapter explores what difference this community setting makes to eco-homes. By focusing on the buildings themselves, this chapter answers two questions: how does building houses in an eco-community (rather than individually) change the build process (design, construction, cost) and/or the requirements of a home? And can any lessons from these different ways of building, and living in, homes be of use in understanding ecohomes and their potential? Finally, the last chapter explores the future of eco-homes. By reflecting on the current state of eco-homes and the examples of best practice, suggestions for how to encourage more eco-home building are made. The remaining challenges and questions are also examined. Readership It is hoped that the themes of this book will appeal to those interested in eco-homes. This is likely to include social scientists, architects, policy makers, planners, engineers, housing professionals, the construction industry and self-builders. Chapters have been written to accommodate the breadth of this potential interdisciplinary audience by avoiding the use of jargon and making no assumptions about the readers’ familiarity with particular concepts, literatures or examples. For some readers, therefore, chapters might start with familiar and established material, or spend time explaining apparently obvious concepts. Once a baseline of knowledge has been established, the chapters quickly move on to explore new ideas and examples. The aim of this book is in part to start a dialogue with all those interested in eco-homes about the necessity of incorporating the social, geographical and political into eco-homes designs, planning, construction and occupation practices. While it is unashamedly an academic piece of work, based on years of empirical fieldwork interpreted using geographical and sociological theories, its

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findings often also point to practical ways forward. Academically, this book contributes to ongoing debates around how gender, knowledge mobility, comfort, community and place can be understood. It is hoped that the findings of this work will be of particular use to those readers looking for empirically supported research arguments about eco-homes.

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The main purpose of an eco-house is to reduce waste – in its construction, occupation and demolition. This is in order to reduce its impact on the environment. Contemporary conventional housing uses resources at an unsustainable rate (demand for resources is outstripping supply) and produces waste with negative consequences for society and our environment. Waste is produced through the inefficient use of energy (used to heat or cool spaces, or to heat water and fuel for cooking), materials (in construction, lack of recycling in demolition, short-life white goods) and water (such as using high-quality drinking water to flush toilets). Waste is also generated in transporting energy across large-scale infrastructures (such as the National Grid). In Britain, the construction industry is responsible for one-third of the total waste produced annually1 and yet the construction industry ‘has a low awareness of the sources of waste and duplication that are embedded in current construction practice’.2 Eco-housing involves changing the processes of building and how a house functions to minimise waste, both materially and in less visible forms such as energy.3 As Borer and Harris argue, ‘our building practice should alleviate as much as possible the environmental debt which the next generation is going to have to pay.’4 However, an extremely ecological house that provides no comfort does not satisfy our human need for a home. Therefore, an eco-house needs to do more than simply reduce its environmental impact.5 An effective eco-building balances our need for comfort with minimising ecological impact6 Finding the right balance between reducing waste while creating comfort, and thus creating a comfortable home which functions with minimal waste, is by no means a simple task. It is a tension that is returned to several times in this book (particularly in Chapter 6). As the needs of a home are complex and diverse (see Chapter 2), so too are the ways in which eco-houses have been designed and constructed. Eco-building is a diverse and contested array of approaches, designs and methods.7 This chapter explores the broad principles of

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how eco-houses are being built by exploring structural innovations, the size of dwellings, harnessing renewable technologies, retrofitting existing housing stock, and reducing demand by changing residents’ behaviour. The intention of this chapter is to illustrate the diversity of eco-homes and explore some of their common forms and functions. More than carbon In Britain, eco-housing has become synonymous with low or zero carbon housing.8 Although the early roots of eco-homes were diverse (and included concerns for biodiversity, materials scarcity, pollution, water-use reduction), reducing carbon became the dominant discourse that framed the need for, and function of, eco-housing;9 ‘even within the green building community, it seems we are more interested in technology than in ecology, and in saving energy more than in saving nature.’10 A concern for carbon emerged from the recognition of humans’ role in affecting climate change. The consequences of increased human-produced CO2 are rising global temperatures which in Britain are likely to result in more heatwaves, fewer frost days, increased rainfall, more intensive rain showers, a rise in sea level and coastal surge events – in other words, flooding, storms and heat.11 In Britain, ‘the construction and operation of the built environment … accounts for 45% of CO2 emissions in the UK.’12 Britain had introduced legislation seeking to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Most notably, the Labour government of 2006 committed to ensuring all new housing would be zero carbon by 2016. This progressive political response was in large part due to the economic costs of climate change, such as the costs of flood protection schemes, clean up after climatic events, changes to agricultural productivity and disruption to transport networks.13 Economic calculations suggest that preventative measures are significantly cheaper than enduring the full economic implications of unfettered climate change.14 However, in July 2015, the incoming Conservative government scrapped the zero carbon homes policy,15 along with much other environmental legislation, in order to ‘stimulate house building and help reduce house prices’.16 The government in effect removed all requirements and incentives to improve energy efficiency and incorporate energy generation into new housing. Efforts to mitigate climate change are, of course, beneficial to the environment. Climate change is probably the biggest threat to the

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continued survival of the human race, with some nations, for example, likely to be entirely submerged by rising sea levels.17 While we will not stop climate change, we can slow it down and reduce its severity. However, a focus solely on carbon, blinkered from the multiple other ways in which we have impact on our environment, is ultimately counter-productive. A focus on carbon distorts the ecological necessity of eco-housing and can result in build choices that actually harm the environment and exacerbate the impact of climate change. For example, a focus on carbon in Britain precludes any concern with water. Water does not absorb or produce a significant amount of CO2. There is a perception in Britain that we have plenty of water and thus we do not need to reduce its use.18 Climate change will, however, affect our water supply. Storm surges can pollute our supply by mixing sewage with fresh water. More heatwaves will increase demand for water for drinking, cooling and food production, while at the same time also increasing the rate of evaporation from our reservoirs. Thus conserving what water we have, understanding the hydrological cycle and building houses which do not waste water is as important as reducing CO2 emissions, even if climate change is the only rationale. The reverse scenario is evident in eco-housing choices made in Australia where water is deemed more important than carbon and energy, and consequently there are few efforts to reduce the waste of energy.19 A more holistic understanding of the environment, incorporating a concern with carbon but not focusing solely upon it, would lead to different decisions as to the forms and functions of eco-housing. Problems with conventional housing Conventional contemporary housing has multiple problems that a more ecological approach would help resolve. Housing – both in construction and use – consumes significant amounts of energy and contributes 45 per cent of all CO2 emissions in Britain.20 Of residential CO2 emissions in a house, over 50 per cent is used for space heating and 20 per cent for water heating. This is in large part because we have leaky buildings. Figure 1.1 illustrates the numerous points in a conventional house where warm air escapes and cool air enters. Many British houses are in poor condition, with draughts and damp, and are poorly insulated.21 As a result during winter, autumn and spring seasons in Britain, many households must spend significant sums heating their houses and many people suffer from fuel poverty (when an above-average percentage of someone’s income is spent on fuel to heat a house).22

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chimney gaps at ceiling-to-wall joints attic hatch

ceiling lights

gaps in walls and ceiling

glazing and gaps around windows extractor fan cracks and gaps in walls

warm air

leaky doors

floor

cold air

fireplace drains

cracks

1.1 Heat leakage and draught entry points in a conventional house in a temperate climate23

The high costs of this energy, and the high price of housing in Britain, further contributes to the problem of housing. In March 2014, the average price of a house was £169,124,24 but the median gross annual income in Britain was £27,000.25 On average, a house costs more than six times a person’s salary. These figures further hide the geographical disparity in incomes and house values across Britain.26 Many cannot afford to buy a house and even those who can are often saddled with a mortgage debt for, on average, 25 years.27 Those who do buy a house are unlikely to have much spare income with which to improve the quality of the dwelling. Our existing housing stock is not only expensive and leaky, but also often not fit for purpose. In Britain, household composition is changing and there is increased demand for more single-occupancy dwellings.28 At the same time, our existing houses have poor, inflexible internal design. Our houses have historically been small, but they are also restrictive internally, and more than half a million people in Britain live in overcrowded conditions.29 Few dwellings are open plan and

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instead have layouts which no longer suit contemporary life; this also makes them difficult and expensive to retrofit.30 Many existing houses are not able to make use of passive solar gain, as traditional British terrace houses are often dark and only have small windows to the south. These problems combine to make contemporary conventional housing wasteful, inefficient and often unsuited to residents’ needs. Eco-homes can help overcome many of these issues. Forms and functions of eco-houses Advocates of ecological architecture, a design and build process which has only recently started to receive mainstream recognition, have long argued for a closer consideration of the inherent relationships between people, buildings, environment and climate.31 Modern conventional architecture, evident across the world, often displays a dissociation from its context, and as a result must rely on energy-intensive technologies to operate (such as heating, cooling, waste disposal and water delivery systems), with residents often oblivious as to how these systems function. Indeed, as Alix Henry (Henry Architects, Taos, New Mexico), an architect who designed and built her own Earthship argues, ‘Wherever you live most people don’t understand where you get your power … They really don’t understand what it takes to get water to your house. They really don’t understand what consumption of those resources means.’ Instead, ecological architecture calls for an understanding of the peculiarities of place, materials, cultural context, climate, solar and wind patterns, people’s lifestyles and needs, and existing biodiversity. This can then all be used to design a house that requires far less energy to both build and run. Most importantly, it is the interconnectedness of these features which requires attention and understanding,32 thus: A building is very different [to a machine] because, although it is true that it can be controlled by its occupants, the driving force that acts upon the building to create comfort and shelter is the climate and its weather, neither of which can be controlled, predicted or turned on and off … Buildings are part of a complex interaction between people, the buildings themselves, the climate and the environment.33

In response to this plethora of factors that need to be taken into consideration, there are a multitude of types and forms of ecohouses. The term can include zero or low carbon houses, low-impact developments, sustainable housing, green building, passive houses

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(passivhaus), zero-net energy housing and energy-plus houses.34 This diversity has complicated attempts at defining what an eco-building is and what it does. There is greater diversity and complexity than a simple split between technocentric (which validates the use of technology in building) and ecocentric (which opposes the use of technology) approaches. As Guy and Osborn argue,35 there are a number of what they call ‘logics’ which influence why an eco-building is being built and thus its form. They identify these competing logics as ecological, smart, symbolic, comfort and community, which are not mutually exclusive but can overlap. These different logics identify eco-building as a solution to different problems; for example, for the ecological logic the issue is environmental sustainability, but for the smart logic the issue is a need for flexibility. As a result, the design choices for each logic would be quite different. While such an approach enables the heterogeneity of eco-building and its drivers to be understood, it does little to identify the core of what an eco-house is and what it does. Instead eco-homes could be better understood by distinguishing between the function and the form of a building (Table 1.1). The function refers to the intended outcome of a design choice, whereas the form refers to the process by which that function is to be achieved. Thus the forms of eco-housing vary enormously and include using highly technological systems or low-tech vernacular natural-build approaches, to achieve the same function of low carbon housing. Although highly entwined, the function of eco-housing does not always determine its form. Instead, there is a continuous evolution of architectural and building practices aiming to improve the ability of different forms of houses to achieve these functions resulting, for example, in a broad range of forms of eco-houses (see Figure 1.2). As the form of eco-housing is different from its function, then it is possible to identify certain commonalities as to what makes a house

TABLE 1.1 The different functions and forms of eco-houses Functions

Forms

Minimise resource use

Highly technological design

Minimise waste

Fabric-first approach

Maximise use of renewable energy

Using reclaimed and local materials

Maximise use of renewable materials

Retrofitted existing structures

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1.2 Three different eco-houses which are all built using different methods: (a) Hybrid house at the Lama Foundation, US, (b) El Valle de Sensaciones, Spain and (c) Earthship Biotecture, US

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an eco-house, without predisposing how that might be achieved. This openness to diversity is important because there is no agreement on the perfect way to build an eco-house. Indeed ‘sustainable construction strikes a balance between the potentially conflicting demands of the use of energy, other resources and ecology’,36 and these demands result in diverse building approaches.

The common functions of an eco-house for a building across its whole life cycle37 are to: • minimise resource use (in materials, in embodied energy, energy requirements, water use); • minimise waste (in materials, space, energy, leakage); • maximise use of renewable energy (such as solar, wind, water) and • maximise use of renewable materials (such as straw, sheep’s wool, wood, earth).

For example, a zero carbon house will achieve these functions through the form of mainly technological fixes, including decarbonising the energy supply (producing no net carbon emissions during operation) and increasing the energy efficiency and performance of the building, and through its design will also attempt to change household behaviour through simple user–technology interfaces.38 Borer and Harris39 argue that ‘sustainable housing for the future must be durable so that the energy invested … represents a prudent use of resources. It must also be flexible so that different patterns of living can be accommodated.’ Wines40 also argues for the importance of low maintenance and ‘cost-effective up keep’. Thus there are competing understandings of what an eco-house must do and achieve. This separation between function and form also helps explain some of the problems encountered by ecological architecture; a focus on function can limit eco-houses ‘to checklists of moral responsibility and remedial action’,41 rather than a broader focus on the aesthetics or a concern with developing new ways of connecting eco-housing to its cultural and natural context.42 However, a focus on materials and aesthetics can preclude adequate consideration of required building performance in terms of durability, comfort and energy supply. This can be exemplified

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in the different approaches in the case studies of Earthship building in the US and wattle and cob structures in Thailand: People are big proponents of the cradle-to-cradle design, and so some people critique the Earthship because it makes it be the end of the cycle for some of the materials, but … we’re building houses that are going to last for a thousand years if you maintain them. Whereas some people that are into pure stick and twig cob-type housing … are building things that are meant to go back to the earth. But [with Earthships] we’re talking about a different level of comfort and performance and a different longevity. (Kirsten Jacobson, Earthship Biotecture, Taos, New Mexico) With wattle and cob the framework is really fast and making the mud you literally just make it, take your dreadlock, pick it up and put it onto the wall. It’s much more innately creative. It’s much more a flowing process, much more beautiful. That’s obviously subjective but usually when people get interested in natural building they’re looking for something other than the box, something other than that square that has corners, and wattle and cob rarely has those things. It moves up and down and moves in and out, and you can even … bend the walls out. (Gregory Crawford, Panya Project, Thailand)

Both buildings are eco-houses in that they minimise resource use and waste, and maximise use of renewable energy and renewable materials. However, they achieve and prioritise the functions differently. Thus each type of eco-house deals with reducing waste differently. Improving the structure One of the simplest ways to reduce waste in housing is by changing the design of the structure or its build fabric. This can involve building in different dimensions and shapes, using different materials for the structure of the house (making better use of embodied energy), and building in order to harness passive solar energy (thereby reducing the need for additional energy sources).43 Building a house in a different shape can radically alter heat loss and gain: ‘The external structural elements are the greatest contributors to the heat losses and gains (thermal loads) of a building. This means that the more compact the house, the more energy efficient it will be.’44 This is illustrated in Figure 1.3 where the ratio of the external surface area to the volume of a house is calculated for different building types.

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Area–to–volume ratio: 1.2 Energy index: 140%

1.1 130%

0.6 100%

0.3 80%

1.3 Area-to-volume ratio of different structures of homes45

The building with the lowest area-to-volume ratio (the compact high rise) has the lowest energy index and highest energy efficiency. In basic terms, it has fewer external walls through which heat can be lost, and heat gain is able to warm a larger internal area. The globally popular bungalow design is the least efficient, and the single-family dwelling is not an ideal eco-house design. The benefits of multiple households living in close proximity are illustrated by the Kailash eco-village in Portland, Oregon. Kailash took over an old 32-unit apartment building built in 1959 on a one-acre site, and there are now forty-eight residents (Figure 1.4). It is a deliberately urban project. All the units are one-bedroom apartments with a typical living area of 565 square feet. Units were rented at approximately

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1.4 Kailash eco-village, Portland, Oregon

US$650 a month in 2010, which is low for the area. Despite being an old building, albeit one they are gradually refurbishing, the energy efficiency benefits are significant. Each apartment is gradually being remodelled using ecological principles in order to increase energy efficiency – using eco-materials, fitting low-flow showerheads, installing water meters in each unit, adding extra insulation and double-glazed windows. The very shape of the structure, whether it is particularly ecological or not, results in energy savings. Although the small size of the units might ultimately limit who can stay (as there are limited possibilities for large families), this also creates a much needed space for singles, couples and the younger and older generations. The material of the external structure of houses is also important in reducing waste. Materials vary significantly in the amount of energy required to manufacture and transport them (their embodied energy): ‘building materials require processing before they are incorporated into a building; this inevitably requires the use of energy and results in waste generation.’46 However, it is not as simple as building with materials which have the lowest embodied energy; rather the structure of a house should be carefully chosen to ensure that any embodied energy will be made good use of. For example, if a material (like insulation) will ultimately reduce the need for additional energy use in a building throughout its lifecycle, then its embodied energy might be purposefully traded against the benefits it ultimately provides to the house. The choice of material also depends upon the expected lifespan of the building: a material needs to be durable, and the longer a building lasts, the lower the environmental impact of the materials used in construction.

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This trade-off between embodied energy and how the material will perform is most evident when building to harness passive solar energy. Ensuring that the solar orientation of a building maximises passive solar gain is a simple and effective way of reducing energy-inuse requirements. As illustrated in Figure 1.5, orientating a structure so that it can capture the sun’s radiation through large windows (to the south or the north depending on the latitude) is the first step. In order to make the best use of this solar radiation, the house must be built from materials that will absorb and store the heat. The best way to achieve this is by using materials with a high thermal mass. Materials such as brick, adobe, masonry and mud store heat during the day and then, when the temperature falls, release it back into the house.47 The thermal performance of the house (achieved through high insulation, quality windows and air tightness, preventing heat leakages) determines how long that heat is conserved before it dissipates. A house which is structured primarily around utilising this approach is considered a passive solar house (or passivhaus), and their numbers are steadily increasing.48 This approach can be further adjusted to accommodate the different needs of buildings across seasons.

b.

al m er ss th ma

solar gain

day

day

Collection of heat

Storage of heat

d.

Thermal mass gives off heat

night Redistribution of heat

super-insulation and airtightness

night

Conservation of heat

1.5 Sketches illustrating how passive solar heating in a temperate climate works49

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Reducing size Reducing the size of houses has been advocated as one way in which to radically reduce waste. This approach emerges from recognition that conventional housing has gradually expanded in size. In the US, the average house size was 74 square metres in the mid-twentieth century, but by the end of the century, it was 209 square metres.50 In Australia, a similar pattern emerged: houses in the mid-1980s were 150 square metres, but by 2004 the average was 200 square metres.51 At the same time, the average family size has fallen and the number of single households has increased.52 In Britain, the trend is reversed: homes are getting smaller. A recent study compared new homes with the Greater London Authority’s space standards, which the researchers argue represent benchmark good practice: ‘the average new home in England is only 92% of the recommended minimum.’53 Overall, the average size of a new British home is now 76 square metres54 (quite a contrast to houses in Australia), whereas it used to be closer to 85 square metres.55 British homes are now the smallest in Western Europe and have no minimum space standards, though the British government is now proposing some.56 In places like the US, however, building smaller and attached housing is novel and was advocated by interviewees: The other thing that we do is build smaller units than normal. There was an interesting Oregon Department of Environmental Quality study which measured the effectiveness of green building improvements in reducing the generation of carbon. They found that the most effective thing you can do is simply build smaller and attached housing. Most of the carbon impact of housing comes from heating it, so if you have a smaller space you do not need as much energy to heat it and if it is attached, side by side with your neighbours, then you also need less heat because the common walls share the heat across the buildings. (Eli Spevak interview, Portland, Oregon)

Size and space matters for a number of reasons. For occupants, it directly impacts on how they can use their home, what they can store, who they can entertain and how comfortable they feel. It can impact on health, relationships and happiness. However, it also has a correlation to the amount of resources used in construction and occupation, though this correlation is neither direct nor necessarily

30 | ONE TABLE 1.2 House size, embodied energy and average heating/cooling energy use Country

Average floor area (m2)

Embodied energy (at 4.5 GJ/m2)

Average heating/cooling use (MJ/m2)

Australia

204

918

400

Britain

76

342

212

Canada

177

797

530

177

797

115

204

918

307

New Zealand US

positive.57 Small houses will use less embodied energy in their construction because they require fewer materials (Table 1.2) and ‘higher standards are easier to apply to smaller dwellings, and costs are lower’.58 However, whether they will require more energy-in-use depends on the climate (how much heating or cooling is required) and the normative expectations of comfort. In a large house in New Zealand with a 177 square metre floor area, the average heating/cooling energy use is 115 MJ/m2. The same size house in Canada uses 78 per cent more heating/cooling energy than a New Zealand home uses.59 In Britain, a much smaller house uses 184 per cent of the energy of the larger New Zealand house, but only 40 per cent of the energy of the Canadian house – making them require significantly more energy per square metre. This illustrates that the size of the house does not directly determine energy use. The shape and surroundings of the house are as relevant as its size. Houses with low area-to-volume ratios have the highest energy efficiency, so a building containing several small flats would waste less energy than several small individual houses. This is why small bungalows might appear to be ecological (because they minimise use of materials), but can be quite inefficient in energy requirements during occupation.60 Equally, if a small individual house is built to a high standard of thermal performance with insulated walls that prevent heat leakage, any energy waste will be significantly reduced. Perhaps the most important approach to the size of housing is that all space is used as much as possible and for many overlapping functions. A large house is ecological if multiple people occupy it, and occupy it throughout the day and night. As Nathalia of Casa Tierra Argentina (which is described in detail in Chapter 8) argues, people tend to design large

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houses believing ‘that every action needs a room, when it should be about functions and a room can be used for several functions’. Despite these caveats (about shape, build fabric and energy-in-use demands), size still matters and there are some inspiring small ecohomes being built.61 Designed carefully, with consideration of light, privacy, quiet and access to green space, these houses can be very comfortable. The tiny homes movement thrives on designing and building homes that are as small as possible and yet still provide the basic needs and comfort required of shelter. Figure 1.6 is a design from the US that proposes a modular approach to house building – constructing units that attach over time. In this design, a bed, kitchen, lounge and bathroom are all included in a space just 13 square metres.

sleeping platform

bathroom

kitchen

entrance lounge area

3.6

m

(ap

x.

pr

o pr

ox

.1

2f

t)

1.6 A perspective sketch of a tiny home in the US62

3.6

m

(ap

12

ft)

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In Britain, a country that already has small houses, self-builders have created simple spaces that enable a multiplicity of functions. Charlotte’s house at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset, Devon (see Chapter 6 for more details) is a small straw bale, cordwood, cob and pallet house (Figure 1.7). Inside, it has a large living space and then two different-level sleeping platforms high into the roof. Separate kitchen and bathroom space is not needed because these are available in the common areas of the eco-community. Similarly, Rooh’s house at Landmatters consists of a single openplan space with many functions (Figure 1.8). Landmatters is a 42-acre eco-community in Devon (near Totnes). All buildings are temporary as a condition of their planning permission, and they are limited to 50 square metres for each home. Most homes are benders – curved tents built with wooden or willow poles and covered with canvas – which are cheap, portable and adaptable. The homes are situated at the top of a hill that means that they are able to benefit from passive solar gain, photovoltaic, solar generation and wind turbines. The way in which the ‘village’ is arranged means that all that you need is nearby (water, toilet, communal kitchen), but it also challenges the notion that all that you need for a house is necessarily in one place, as the facilities are spread across the site.

1.7 Charlotte’s handmade house at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset, England

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glass plant house

win

dow

table

settee

desk

window

kitchen area

h orc ce p ran ent

wood stove

book

bed

case

kitchen area

1.8 Sketch of the internal layout of Rooh’s home at Landmatters ecocommunity, Devon, England

Both of these homes are ecological in that they have used reclaimed and natural materials wherever possible, are small, and are off-grid and reliant on renewable energy sources, but they have poor thermal performance. Much of the energy they use to heat their homes will dissipate quickly. In other words, size alone does not make these houses better environmentally. Size is important, but so are other factors that influence waste. Harnessing renewable resources: using technologies While reducing the size of houses and improving or changing their structure can do a great deal to reduce wastage during construction and in occupation, there often remains a need to harness an energy source. Energy is required to heat water, heat or cool the space, cook, and provide electricity to power lights and run electrical appliances. Conventional houses often rely on fossil fuel energy sources (coal, oil and gas), and, in Britain, nuclear-generated electricity provided via the National Grid. Eco-houses instead tend to harness less environmentally damaging renewable energy sources (sun, wind, water) through a variety of technologies (Table 1.3).63

34 | ONE TABLE 1.3 Technologies used in eco-houses to harness renewable energy resources Technologies

Renewable source

Produces

Biomass boiler

Biofuels, such as trees or plants, e.g. waste wood

Space and water heating

Combined heat and power (CHP)

Any fuel

Electricity, space and water heating

Heat pumps

Ambient air, water, or soil

Space heating

Hydro-electric power

Flowing water

Electricity

Photovoltaic panels

Solar power

Electricity

Solar thermal panels

Solar power

Water heating

Underground heating system

Ground temperature

Space heating

Wind turbines

Wind

Electricity

Most of the case studies used micro-generation on-site technologies, small-scale equipment that either powered a single house or a small eco-community. This use of off-grid energy provision further reduced wastage by avoiding the need to transport energy across large distances (reducing transmission losses).64 In the case studies, the most popular technologies used were photovoltaic panels, with solar thermal panels and small wind turbines a close second. The panels were often attached to the roof of the house (Figure 1.9), but also often simply propped up against walls. Part of the popularity of photovoltaic cells is their simplicity in installation and use – they’re often attached to an old car battery that is then used to power lights and laptops.65 The more complex (and expensive) technologies (such as heat pumps, CHP and underground heating systems) were used less frequently in the case-study self-build eco-houses and tended to be used more in the forms of eco-housing that emphasised technology. The choice of which renewable energy technologies to use is highly influenced by the location and climate of the build. The choice is also influenced (or should be) by the structure of the house (or density of community) and what the need for energy is. For example, Figure 1.10(a) illustrates the climatic elements that impact upon a house in England, in a temperate climate. The house occupants need protection from these elements (rain, wind, sun and ground humidity) and sheltering residents is a key function of a house.

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1.9 Use of photovoltaic panels and solar hot-water panels on an earthbag house, Crestone, Colorado

However, these elements can also be harnessed (Figure 1.10(b)). The power of the sun is harnessed for electricity (via photovoltaic panels), to heat water (through solar thermal panels), space heating (through structural design), and rain is collected for reuse. Problems with the use of renewable technologies for eco-houses arise when they are used inappropriately, as a bolt-on to a conventional structure, or as the only form of ecological modification. Microgeneration is inappropriate when it is used in places that it is unlikely to be effective or efficient, for example, installing photovoltaic panels on a west-facing roof. The technology also needs to be of a suitable size. In Britain, in 2006 the DIY chain B&Q started to sell a roof-mounted wind turbine for £1,900. It was hailed as affordable renewable technology, but independent research quickly questioned its effectiveness; tests proved that in some cases the turbine did not even generate enough electricity to power the turbine’s internal electronics, and in other cases it could not even power a light bulb.66 Liddell calls this use of inappropriate technology ‘eco-bling’,67 that is, when a technical fix is used which looks good but actually often performs poorly, a kind of greenwash ‘which is at best unnecessary

36 | ONE rain

a.

sun

wind

0°c

E S

N W

ground humidity

b.

rain

r t fo nd gh al a nli su herm ltaic t o ov lar so phot

manag e wind as ven tilation

sunli ght fo solar r passive heati ng

sun

recycle waste and compost Clean blackwater in reedbed collect water

insulation make use of stable ground temperature

1.10 (a) Climatic elements that impact on a house and (b) the technologies commonly used to harness them in eco-houses in temperate climates in the Northern Hemisphere69

and at worst counterproductive and ecologically damaging’.68 The alternative, eco-minimalism, still uses renewable technologies, but only after other more holistic approaches (such as a solid well-insulated structure) have been employed.

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Eco-minimalism is concerned not just with efficient environmental performance, but also financial costs. Liddell questions both the necessity of the environmental costs of materials used in the production of renewable technologies and their financial payback time. Given that the efficiency of photovoltaic panels decreases over time, that they have a limited lifespan and that ultimately the panels might default before financial payback, Liddell argues that for the same money greater financial and environmental savings could be made investing in insulation and airtight construction, which would reduce the need for space-heating technologies. For example, building to take advantage of passive solar gain ‘reduces space heat demand in dwellings by around 15%’,70 and these advantages will last the building’s lifespan (approximately 60 years depending on form), whereas any renewable technologies will likely only have a 15–25-year working period. Another example is the financial cost to save a tonne of CO2 per year compared across a variety of renewable energy technologies. Wind turbines had the worst ratio, that is, they were the least financially efficient whereas photovoltaic cells performed better. Overall, the most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 was to improve insulation and reduce the energy demand of electrical appliances.71 Using renewable energy technologies to provide energy in eco-housing is most effective after energy demand has been reduced using other methods: reducing phantom loads (for example, electrical items on standby), improving structural design and fabric or behavioural changes in residents. In other words, a fabric-first approach is required rather than a technical fix. In choosing appropriate technology, there are two further factors which need careful consideration – location and scale – and these are entwined. Renewable energy technologies are most efficient in optimal conditions at an optimal size. Wind turbines, for example, need to be big enough to generate a good return on their financial cost and to be high enough to catch enough wind to rotate regularly. They are obviously more efficient in windier places. Rather than household micro-generation, wind turbines are well suited to community-scale generation, or to remote locations (such as off-shore) feeding into a grid. Scaling technology to ensure it is of appropriate size is also important for wood-powered boilers. If their capacity is more than a house needs, then the stove is unlikely to be operated at its optimal rate, which will lead to inefficiencies. There is therefore a need for

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small-scale boilers that can be turned down.72 It is just as important, however, to place technologies such as wood stoves in appropriate locations in a building. Existing housing stock: eco-retrofitting There is a large existing housing stock in most countries, and this stock contributes significantly to CO2 emissions and environmental damage.73 Any concern with building more environmentally benign housing needs to acknowledge and tackle those houses already built.74 In Britain, 80 per cent of houses already built will still exist in 2050,75 and as illustrated in Table 1.4, 27 per cent of those houses were built before 1918, though this percentage is not as high as France, which has a particularly old housing stock. Given that ‘the least efficient properties are, generally, the oldest – all types of pre-1919 – and any others that also have solid walls’,76 then there are considerable issues with the environmental impact of existing housing stock. What is more, although the energy efficiency of houses in Britain has been increasing, energy demand has not reduced; in other words, people are simply using the additional energy.77 Retrofitting a house is often juxtaposed to new construction as an either/or choice, yet the practices of restoring existing buildings and building new ones often overlap. Buildings evolve through processes of maintenance, alteration and changing use.78 Retrofitting is used alongside practices of renovation, reinvention, refurbishment, remodelling, reuse, reclamation, restoration, or adaptation, and yet each of these approaches is subtly different. The purpose of eco-retrofitting

TABLE 1.4 Proportion of housing according to period of completion (%) Country

Before 1918

1918–45

1946–70

After 1970

Germany

27

23

37

13

Spain

–

14

42

44

France

40

11

37

12

Italy

25

26

46

3

Netherlands

29

13

42

16

UK

27

United States

19 20

32

22

40

40

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is to improve the ecological design and functionality of the building; this might involve adding or altering features to an existing structure (such as insulation or renewable energy technologies).79 However, terms such as ‘reinvention’ and ‘reuse’ signal a broader reconceptualisation of a building and might involve dismantling its component parts for reconstruction elsewhere, or radically redesigning its use.80 Reclamation can refer to the reuse of housing materials in new building projects.81 Vannini and Taggart go even further and use the architectural concept of regenerative design82 to argue that self-builders have the regenerative life skills, that is, ‘the capacity to create sustainability by improvising with the affordances of whatever materials are at hand’.83 In this way, the choices made about old buildings influence new construction. In particular, the process of deconstruction – when a house is carefully taken apart and the elements reused – provides materials for new builds.84 Despite the diversity of processes in the ways in which houses change and can be reused, there remains a need to either improve the environmental performance of existing buildings, or to demolish them.85 Unfortunately, while it makes environmental sense to retrofit buildings, economically it makes more sense to build anew.86 Moreover, relatively little is really known about what eco-retrofitting is needed and how to do it.87 Environmentally, retrofitting produces fewer carbon emissions and makes use of the embodied energy already invested in a building.88 Were a new house to be built, then more CO2 would be produced and the house would likely have a greater environmental impact: Although new homes are more energy efficient once built, 50 tonnes of carbon emissions are generated in their construction, compared to 15 tonnes for the refurbishment of an existing property. In most of the houses studied, it took more than 50 years for this difference to be compensated for by the lower carbon emissions generated from the day-to-day energy use.89

However, there remains a trade-off between reusing materials and using new materials that might be more ecologically benign. For example, Dan Phillips, a builder in the US who specialises in building from reclaimed materials, buys new items if they will significantly reduce environmental impact: ‘I buy new toilets because the salvaged ones I get are the 3-gallon flushers and we’re in the world of 1.6-gallon.’90

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Retrofitting is expensive and it requires considerable financial investment to reach the standards of environmental performance of a purpose-built eco-house. The different forms of existing houses, some of which are relatively easy to install additional insulation into, whereas others, such as houses without cavity walls, are difficult to alter, further complicate this. Of the successful retrofit projects already undertaken, the financial costs of the environmental improvements are rarely publicised. In Britain, the social housing sector is leading the way in eco-retrofitting properties. For example, First Wessex reduced CO2 emissions at twenty flats in Aldershot by 63 per cent through insulation, mechanical heat recovery systems, photovoltaic panels, and a new boiler, but no information about the cost of undertaking the retrofit was made available.91 Current estimations are that for a twostorey semi-detached house in Britain ‘a full upgrade to Passivhaus standard would cost around £75,000 (+ or – 10%)’.92 In Newark, Nottinghamshire, England, an eco-retrofit was undertaken by Hockerton Housing Project as a pilot project. Funded by the government, the project used £75,000 per house (on two semi-detached houses) to achieve a reduction of 78.6 per cent in net consumption of energy.93 These were difficult houses because they had solid walls (not cavity), and the retrofit included building a second brick skin around the house, along with insulation in the roof and floor, the addition of a sunspace, a mechanical ventilation system, triple glazing and a rainwater harvester (Figure 1.11). Minimal technology was used because of cost but also suitability; solar thermal panels were rejected because they were ‘just quite an expensive technology and there’s no south-facing roof, which was another challenge, because we tried, we decided against on-site renewals’ (Rob Cartwright, Hockerton Housing Project). Instead, money was invested into a community wind turbine project, which had a better rate of efficiency and value for money than a micro-turbine. While this was a prototype project and the houses were owned by the council and thus were not market valued, the economic cost of the eco-retrofit was more than 50 per cent of the total economic value of the house. The value of a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Newark in May 2014 was only £130,000. Rob Cartwright, one of the Hockerton Housing Project consultants on the retrofit, agreed the costs were high but argued that eco-retrofits would benefit from economies of scale if attempted nationwide:

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1.11 Retrofitting project of social housing in Newark, Nottinghamshire, England. Original structure at the top and a retrofitted version at the bottom

There are over 300,000 of these houses in the UK [no-fines concrete construction]. Wimpey were throwing them up like there was no tomorrow in the 1950s … If you were to do these as a one-off it’s quite an expensive project but if someone came to you and said I’ve got a

42 | ONE thousand of these, what can you do for me, then you’d get a much better price from a contractor to do that scale, and you’d get a much better price from suppliers, and on the equipment.

Even on a larger scale, however, significant financial investment is needed to retrofit houses in ways that would markedly increase environmental performance. As Rob notes, ‘filling empty cavities is not going to deliver an 80 per cent cut in emissions. You need to put additional insulation on that wall. It’s not just about the pathetic little cavities we’ve got at the moment.’ There are also cases of poor and inadequate retrofitting which have created further problems such as damp, dry rot and poorly fitted thermal insulation.94 Substantial changes to either the structure or technologies of a building are required.95 In Britain, the government’s ‘Green Deal’96 programme offered loans to eco-retrofit housing based on the belief ‘that the amount you pay back should be less than the amount you save on your bills so you should be better off’, but the sums did not add up, and in July 2015, the Conservative government announced it was ending the scheme.97 The economic cost of eco-retrofit will likely be more than the savings made from cheaper running costs, even over a 25-year payback period.98 Pelsmakers’ research has indicated that the average maximum amount householders are willing to spend on retrofitting is £25,000.99 Meanwhile, Jenkins estimates that it would cost up to £17.5 billion to eco-retrofit just those 550,000 fuel-poor social houses in Britain.100 As a result of the economic costs of eco-retrofitting, Boardman argues that more houses should be demolished, particularly those whose energy performance is rated low.101 In Britain, this would include many heritage buildings.102 Mohammadpourkarbasi and Sharples calculated that for a British terrace house, eco-retrofitting ‘to a near Passivhaus standard could not be justified in terms of a cost/benefit analysis’.103 Ultimately, the decision as to whether to demolish and rebuild or ecoretrofit is based on carefully assessing the costs of both the existing building and a new one – the economic costs, embodied energy, potential waste and future use of the building. Opinion differs as to the benefits of refurbishing buildings; essentially the issue resolves around how well an existing building’s energy performance can be improved. If the choice is between demolition followed by a new build, or a straight refurbishment, then the energy

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efficiency in day-to-day energy use will determine which option has the lowest environmental impact. A new building will probably have a lower environmental impact over its lifespan if it requires significantly less running energy for day-to-day use.104 These costs (environmental and economic) will vary by place. In some places, it might not be possible to demolish and rebuild a house for the same price as eco-retrofitting, or there may be aesthetic reasons for keeping buildings.105 Eli Spevak, an architect with Orange Splot, designed the Peninsula Park Commons retrofit and new-build project in Portland, Oregon and specialises in mixing eco-retrofitting with new build. He explained: Most of my projects have been a mixture of renovation and new and I try to reuse as much as possible of what already exists on the property. If you demolish you have to start from scratch and [this] creates waste. So we use the existing structure whenever possible. This is partly because we want to locate and work with existing urban communities with great urban amenities, and to do so our palette is often limited to relatively small parcels with buildings already on them and room to add a few more.

The differing opinions on whether it is worth eco-retrofitting houses have also opened up debates about the use to which existing buildings and structures are being put. There is increasing public pressure to make better use of empty homes. In the US, 18,439,000 home units were vacant in 2013, 13.9 per cent of all houses,106 and while only 2.79 per cent are officially empty in England, that still represents 635,000 empty dwellings.107 There is also increased interest in converting disused structures (water tanks, abandoned mines, school buses) into homes.108 Reducing demand: changing residents’ behaviour and daily practices Most of the approaches detailed thus far to reduce waste in housing are reliant upon residents’ compliance. Yet the occupancy factor of eco-housing has, until relatively recently, been underestimated or ignored, and as a result there is often a performance gap between design aspirations and actual results.109 Instead assumptions have been made about the ability of architectural design or technology to either compensate for, or delimit, householders’ actions.110 For example, the

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use of renewable technologies to reduce the damaging use of fossil fuel energy or reductions in the size of dwellings to reduce overall consumption has been segregated from understandings of human behaviour and practices.111 The problem with this approach is that human agency is not understood.112 There are a couple of salient examples worth exploring here. First, recent research has identified increased overall use of electricity in eco-homes because residents perceived the energy to come from ecological sources.113 However, such additional use of energy, whatever its source, is problematic because it still uses resources (which could be used elsewhere) and the feeling of abundance could easily influence residents’ practices elsewhere, a point returned to below. Second, residents have the ability to undo the effectiveness of technologies and design in their home. In the case of the Newark retrofit project, the house functions were reliant upon householders not opening the windows in winter. As Rob Cartwright explains, the mechanical heat ventilation system and the gains from passive solar heating could easily be undone: the resident needs to understand the design principles and that in winter you don’t open these [windows] … because this house might lose lots of energy … if someone’s opening windows all the time, then it’s going to get a lot colder. The Council have said to us some of their tenants they’re at home all day sitting on the sofa watching telly, smoking with the windows open … It’s about not opening windows.

Similar problems where found by Rohracher and Ornetzeder who discovered a key inefficiency in ecological apartment buildings in Austria with residents opening windows.114 In practice, house occupants’ activities are central to how an eco-home functions and to the waste produced.115 Technology alone does not alter energy consumption practices.116 As Cole and colleagues argue ‘buildings do not consume energy; inhabitants do through the medium of architecture.’117 This is not to say, however, that changes in human practices alone can necessarily dramatically alter environmental impact: ‘it is incredible to note that in many parts of the world including Britain, the challenges of trying to reduce the catastrophic impacts of buildings on the environment are still left to individuals.’118 Rather, it is in the interrelationships between broader social and economic processes and the household that ecohomes are likely to be most effective.119

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To achieve the effective functioning of eco-homes requires attendance to human behaviour, practices, habits and needs.120 To some extent, houses have to be designed and built to suit occupants’ needs: ‘the eco-house becomes a working machine in which lifestyles have to be considered carefully and matched with the supply systems built into the house.’121 However, reducing waste is as much about changing daily practices as it is about using new technologies.122 In conventional houses, residents are locked into practices by habit and infrastructures. Eco-homes are an opportunity to change daily energy use by, for example, preventing high water use in baths (by only having showering facilities) or encouraging water conservation (by installing a water meter).123 In this way, eco-house building is a balance between residents’ needs and lifestyles that are more environmentally sustainable. This tension is explored further in Chapter 6 ‘Comfort’. For an eco-house to work effectively, how people live in their homes needs to be better understood. For example, Organo and colleagues124 have identified that in sustainable contemporary households in Australia it is still women who do most of the housework. The importance of understanding gender roles in eco-housing is explored in further detail in Chapter 7 ‘Gender’. In eco-houses that employ technologies there is also a need for user-friendly control interfaces (Figure 1.12). Poor and confusing design and lack of occupant understanding of the systems installed has led to inefficiencies in the functionality of eco-houses.125 It is not just that some user control interfaces are difficult to understand, but that if eco-houses and their technologies were better designed they could act as forms of feedback to the residents which could begin to help train new behaviours and practices: ‘through its architectural and systems design, the building can produce a responsive environment that engages inhabitants in a dynamic, active, and integral role relative to its use, performance and inhabitation.’126 For example, in a US prototype, a light display in the kitchen backsplash brightens and dims according to resource use – a potentially simple feedback to household use that is likely to have more impact than the more common data monitors. This emphasis on understanding the two-way dynamic interaction between residents and buildings (that individuals shape buildings, and buildings shape individuals) is a productive way to acknowledge the centrality of people to eco-house functionality. Furthermore, minimising waste in housing might have a positive influence on daily practices in other parts of residents’ lives

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1.12 The control interface in the Newark retrofit project, Nottinghamshire, England

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and in those organisations or stakeholders involved in the construction. Fry and Sharma127 refer to this as the ‘generativity’ of eco-building, which can lead to a greater capacity for environmental responsibility per se. The ways in which eco-homes are understood also need to be contextualised into the broader social, geographical and political processes in which they operate.128 Conclusions While the intended functions of an eco-house are often quite simple, they are only achieved through complex interactions of different forms, approaches, technologies and occupants. There is no single perfectly efficient functioning eco-house; instead, eco-houses are a relative progression towards reducing waste. Different houses deal with waste issues differently and this leads to a broad variety of eco-houses. As a result, eco-houses are more heterogeneous than they are similar and this hybridity in form can complicate their advocacy.129 Understanding eco-houses as an interrelation between function and form enables a clearer understanding of this diversity, and how form can override function, or function override form. As Rob Cartwright explains of the Newark retrofit project, ‘To be honest, we didn’t give too much thought to aesthetics. It was more function over form. It was really this is what we need to do to make it perform … we weren’t really striving for aesthetics; we were striving for performance.’ Eco-houses are being built to deal with the issues of waste through structural innovations by altering size, harnessing renewable technologies, retrofitting existing housing stock and changing occupants’ behaviour and practices. Each approach has benefits, limitations and financial costs. While Roaf and colleagues argue that ‘architects who cannot incorporate energy and water conservation, reuse and renewable energy into their buildings will become dinosaurs, as will their white elephant buildings’,130 environmentally damaging practices are continuing and waste is still rife in the house construction industries. We need to do better. In part, the lack of progress is a result of a government policy agenda that prioritises a technological approach to eco-housing, and a conservative construction industry. In Britain, eco-housing is being reduced to a checklist of objects that is being resisted by developers and builders,131 and is unlikely to be as effective as hoped.132 Rather than a narrow focus on technological solutions to carbon emissions, a

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broader, more holistic approach is needed which includes a concern for the environment and non-technological approaches. Thinking beyond carbon to all environmental impacts also requires considering factors beyond the house. Chambers133 argues that ecohousing should address the fragmentation of nature, species extinction, habitat restoration and watershed protection, all issues largely ignored by current approaches; ‘it is not enough to ask how we can build green or go green. We must ask how we can rebuild and revitalise nature.’134 Thinking beyond carbon also encourages a less technological approach, what Liddell advocated as ‘eco-minimalism’. A focus on fabric-first and reduced waste through careful design minimises the need for renewable energy technologies and all their associated resources and user error implications. As Cole and colleagues argue, ‘professionals, educators, and developers should reconsider the design and building process as an opportunity for the rehumanization of architecture through inhabitants’ increased autonomy rather than automation.’135 This is not to demonise the use of technology, nor suggest that there is a dualistic choice between technological or non-technological eco-building approaches. Eco-building is the negotiation of a set of dilemmas where different logics influence the final outcome of an eco-house.136 It is amongst all the choices made in building (location, size, energy source, layout, etc.) that there is a need to resist relying on technology as an easy option and ensure its adoption is carefully considered. It is particularly important to stress that there are multiple alternatives and multiple forms of eco-houses in order to attempt to counter the enduring trend for reliance on technological fixes to deliver eco-housing. This chapter has explored what an eco-house is and what it does. The simplicity of an approach to housing that reduces waste belies the complexity of the practices required. Questions about how eco-houses are built, how ideas about them travel, who builds them, what they are built of and how they are afforded are now explored throughout the rest of the book.

2 | H OM E

On an autumnal October morning while sitting in an old Devonshire cottage I question the rationality of our housing choices. This old thatched house, with thick walls made from cob (a mix of clay and straw), and small wooden windows, is elegant in its proportions and heritage-listed for its features (Figure 2.1). It is built from local materials, but it is difficult and expensive to live in. The house is hard to heat, the roof leaks, the floor is cold, the ceilings are low and the doorframes lower, the rooms are dark and everything creaks. The house has no foundations (under the uneven kitchen floor tiles there is simply earth), and heat leaks through joints and ill-fitting windows. As energy prices continue to rise, the owners cut back on heating, creating cold rooms and being unable to prevent damp slowly spreading up some walls. Yet this property is highly sought after,

2.1 Devonshire cottage, England

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would sell for a high price and is legally protected from demolition. For many, it is an ideal countryside home, with its heritage, charm and aesthetics. Despite the promise of an economic gain in resale price (a particular feature of an inflated English housing market), buying and living in this house is far from rational. It requires constant maintenance, is costly to heat, has a rigid and unusual internal layout, limited plumbing and, because it is heritage-listed, cannot easily be altered. The desirability of a house such as this one illustrates the complexity of what we want a home to be and do, and these desires are rarely rational or straightforward. Understanding people’s desires, perceptions and living practices in homes is vital if we are to know how to encourage people to live in eco-homes. A failure to understand the processes through which people choose a home will result in a failure of eco-homes to satisfy these desires and needs. This is evident in Britain where eco-housing is still too often associated with a stigma of being too alternative, uncomfortable and unnecessary.1 This is despite the obvious economic and comfort benefits of living in a house with low energy bills, constant internal temperature, plenty of natural light, and which is easy to maintain. In other words, we can use the tension between the concepts of home and house to understand, in part, why eco-homes are not more popular. Simultaneously, there is a problematic trend of designing and building eco-homes that rely upon technological innovation to reduce waste, ignoring the importance of people and social practices in houses. In Britain, the emphasis on low carbon housing has privileged this technocratic approach.2 While underestimating the role of occupants in making eco-homes function, this approach also negates the importance of eco-homes as a learning device about environmental issues per se. As Marres notes, ‘eco-homes serve as instruments for articulating the involvement of domestic subjects in environmental problems. But they are equally deployed as technologies for absolving these subjects of the ensuing responsibilities.’3 In other words, a reliance on technology enables people to avoid having to take responsibility for the environmental implications of their practices. This chapter is foundational for many of the arguments made in this book and explores the difference between home and house and discusses why this matters. It is a largely theoretical chapter in that it does not present significant empirical material about eco-homes.

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However, through exploring the demands and desires of house and home, it identifies tensions between cultural expectations of home and eco-designs that might reduce the appeal of eco-homes. Defining home The apparent irrationality of the desirability of certain houses is in large part because a home is so much more than just a house.4 A house is the physical structure, a form of shelter built from a range of materials to protect its inhabitants from the extremes of the weather and provide physical security. A home is a multidimensional concept; it is composed of many different influences, desires and needs in addition to the material structure.5 Home is a fluid, dynamic, malleable, evolving and contested space. It can be conceived of as a socio-spatial system6 or a spatial imaginary,7 where it is a space and place of social relations filled with emotions, politics, tradition, economics and quests for status:8 ‘Home brings together memory and longing, the ideational, the affective and the physical, the spatial and the temporal, the local and the global, the positively evaluated and the negatively.’9 Home includes the psychological, cultural, economic, political and historical, and as Dowling and Mee argue, ‘home, in contrast to a house, is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life’.10 This understanding of a home seeks to separate it from the concept of a house.11 Home is co-constituted by cultural, social, economic and political values of society and is subjectively experienced.12 Home is multi-scalar – it incorporates the personal and intimate but also the global and economic.13 Duyvendak identifies the shifting understandings of home by arguing that there are four spheres of home as belonging: ‘the sphere of the individual household, the economic sphere of the workplace, the associational sphere of the community, and, finally, the politico-cultural sphere of the nation-state.’14 This categorisation captures the multi-scalar notion of home alongside the changing places of home. The concept of home is contested and relational. Its meaning is reliant upon individuals’ context and the broader social, economic and political situation. What home means will vary spatially, particularly across cultures, and temporally. For example, Wood and Beck15 argue that home is a space through which cultural values are articulated and reproduced (expressed through, in their case, prescriptive rules for

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children). Home is cultural and ‘to learn to live the room, therefore, is to learn to live.’16 Home, therefore, is complicated by assumptions made about its meaning, is not necessarily a positive and safe space and does not necessarily refer to a house (Table 2.1). TABLE 2.1 The different ways home has meaning and is understood17 Realm Cultural

Meaning As a space for family and to nurture relationships As a space through which to generate and share cultural rules A space for intimacy As a place of oppression and fear Spaces of domesticity

Economic

As a financial investment through ownership Exclusion through homelessness Status Security

Historical

A place of memories and nostalgia A space of inheritance

Political

As homeland; nationalism, migration and diaspora A challenge to collective life and instead about nuclear families

Psychological

Permeable and unstable, stretching beyond the physical walls Privacy, safety, a haven A place to experience the senses of light, space, sound and touch

Over time a myriad of identities, assumptions and stereotypes have been written onto home. These assumptions have, for example, defined the home as a private space, divorced from political, economic and global influences. Not only is this inaccurate, but the dichotomies, borders and boundaries constructed around home are often gendered and serve to restrict women to the private realm,18 for example, the assumption that a home requires a home-maker, often a woman, whose occupation is to run the home and provide for its inhabitants.19 As Blunt and Dowling argue,20 ‘home is neither public nor private but both. Home is not separated from public, political worlds but is constituted through them: the domestic is created through the extra-domestic and vice versa.’ For many, home is a

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place of labour, unpaid social reproductive work, paid home-based self-employment and also paid domestic work, which is also often gendered and racialised.21 In this way, home may not be a positive and safe space, but can just as easily be a site of oppression and fear (through, for example, domestic violence22).23 If home is often about having a sense of control and freedom over a space that enables personal choices to be made about intimate relationships, comfort, leisure and order,24 home can also be a space of lack of control and vulnerability. Home can be a site of struggle and conflict, a space of negotiation.25 Equally, however, for some, home can be a space of resistance.26 Feminist scholars have documented the ability of residents, particularly women, to challenge, reshape and build alternative home spaces,27 or use the home as a space in which to affirm their identity (often in opposition, for example, to different others beyond the home).28 How home is experienced is also determined by a person’s bodily form and impairment; the body and embodiment is central to a person’s experience of home.29 Home can also be defined by its absence, destruction, or unmaking.30 Having a home is often, for example, considered a ‘signifier of normality, and as a commitment to participation in … society’.31 When someone is deprived of a home, through, for example, old age or homelessness,32 their sense of self and psychological well-being is affected.33 Home can be important in identity formation (such as the symbolism of owning a house, or interior design choices which reflect a particular projection of self,34 or, in the case of South Africa, the process of seeking to make informal and insecure homes homely35). The tenure that residents have over their home is also vitally important. The insecurity of rental occupants and their limited ability to alter their dwelling affects people’s identity and well-being.36 Home can also be conceived of as a feeling, which might not relate to a particular house. For some, home is a distant homeland, a diaspora connection.37 The sense of belonging of ‘being at home’ may also relate to places others deem inadequate, such as a caravan, a tent or the streets.38 Home then is variously belonging, emotion, space, nostalgia, haven, homogeneity, familiarity, labour, conflict, exclusion, territory, control, memories, intimacy and ‘a feeling that people actively create’.39 How people feel about home, what meaning they invest in it, and what purpose it has, cannot be assumed or universalised.40 This complexity

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in how homes can be understood or experienced needs to be taken into account in eco-homes design and construction. Constructing home This emphasis upon understanding home, can, however, undermine the importance of the house itself. If home becomes predominantly about emotions, experiences and politics, then we lose an understanding of the material – the physical shape, structure and influence of the walls, windows, doors, floors and ceilings. As Jacobs and Smith persuasively argue,41 there is a need to bring the concept of home (often explored as a purely social phenomenon) back together with housing (too often conceived as merely material): ‘home is not simply the cultivation of a sense of belonging, nor merely a site of consumption, it is quite literally a fabrication.’42 In other words, the concepts of house and home are most usefully considered always in dynamic relation with each other (not separate discrete approaches). The case of eco-homes illustrates the necessity of examining the social with the material. Therefore, the dwelling is more than the site it occupies, the materials of which it is made, the know-how of its construction, the labour that has gone into building, the costs in time and money that have been expended upon it. The dwelling is the theatre of our lives, where the major dramas of birth and death, of procreation and recreation are played out, and in which the succession of scenes of daily living are enacted, and re-enacted in the processes of dwelling.43

Houses are already designed and built to take account of some of these understandings of home. For example, home as nostalgia is reflected in the appeal of the mock Tudor designs of modern housing estates, and home as a place of labour is reflected in the growth of home office designs. It is not possible to segregate considerations of a house from a home because ‘experience has since taught designers that it is impossible to create neutral spaces devoid of cultural connotations.’44 Indeed, ‘it is largely through (and after) their more durable materialization in steel, glass, brick, concrete and other materials, that built environments accrue their socialized significance.’45 A house is a material structure shaped by its context of cultural traditions and economic demands. For example, changing internal layouts of buildings reflect not only

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individual taste, but also broader social and cultural shifts.46 Even those economic demands, the very processes through which the price of a house is determined, are highly influenced by affective relationships; houses are valued by potential buyers through emotional rather than rational processes.47 This book embraces this re-materialising of home by exploring the whole house process: the design (often formally termed ‘architecture’), the construction and building, the finishing decoration and the occupation.48 By necessity this approach requires analysis of the people, place49 and politics of a building just as much as the structure and materials.50 Just as home needs to be understood as having a variety of understandings, buildings are more than just static material structures.51 Buildings are dynamic, they change, evolve and adapt.52 Just as buildings can be read to express the social and cultural intentions of designers and occupants, then understanding a house requires attention not only to the structure of the shelter, but to all that it contains.53 Architecture becomes a ‘continuum of space which extends from a consideration of objects and interiors at the micro scale to regional and local planning processes at the macro level’54 and understanding a house ‘becomes a task of engaging not just with architectural intention and authorship, but also with the ways that buildings are used, negotiated with and lived in; what they do in and through society once they become part of the worlds we inhabit.’55 What ‘counts’ as part of a building such as a house can be broadened to include nature and the non-human.56 Feelings are as important as materials to how and why buildings matter and consequently how social meaning is constructed.57 Houses are complicated objects – more than ideas, technology, or systems to be replicated. They are material objects, but perhaps the more interesting elements are their immateriality.58 The emotional elements of a home (memory, identity, meaning) are inextricably entwined with the material (economic, political, construction) aspects of a house.59 The process of house construction, who designs and builds the houses, and for whom, obviously determines the final house form.60 As Shove argues, because the majority of houses in England are not selfbuilt and are instead constructed to then sell on, ‘when it comes to it, houses seem to be built for other house builders rather than for actual customers.’61 There can therefore be ‘a disconnect between those who build and those who live in houses’.62 This disconnect is compounded

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by the conservative and risk-averse nature of many house-building companies who rely upon past practice and gut instinct (which over time become accepted norms) as determinants for what a house should be. As a result, house builders assert that they have little choice in house design decisions, but that they have to provide what the market wants.63 At the same time, occupiers also have little influence on a house structure: ‘people have very limited choice about the design of their houses.’64 That much of the market for housing is for secondhand homes limits not just the size of the market for new homes, but also shapes new house design because new houses have to compete and compare with the large existing housing stock. The assumptions about what a home is, who should live there and the social structure of their lives is written into the design of houses.65 This does not mean, however, that houses necessarily determine behaviour and practices. How houses are consumed and the process of home-making is reliant upon its occupants.66 Residents significantly shape their home space, even if they did not design and construct it for themselves. Choices about use of rooms, interior decoration, furniture, and DIY projects ‘evolve personal spatial orders of home in the process of finding, building, and destroying their housing’.67 There are numerous stakeholders in house construction – architects, designers, builders, mortgage providers, planners, building inspectors – who may or may not be directly involved in the choices made. The structure of houses can be heavily influenced by a country’s building regulations, planning and standards of construction. In England, for example, there are a large array of rules that constructions must follow, many of which are the result of political decisions.68 In multihouse projects, the roles in the build process can be very separated and operated by different people, but in small-scale self-build projects the roles often overlap, and thus it can be difficult to distinguish designer from builder. Day argues that this process of house design needs to be more participatory and inclusive, and involve residents. For example, school design should include children as stakeholders. This could be extended to include all inhabitants and thus include consideration of nature and non-humans in house design.69 In summary, housing and home need to be considered simultaneously. How social meaning is constructed in a home is as important as how the physical material structure of a house is constructed. In order to understand these processes a broad range of questions need to

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be asked about how a house is socially and materially constructed, by whom, for whom, where, for what purpose, with what materials and how it is lived in. Demands and desires of house and home Despite the complexity in how a home is defined and constructed, there was some commonality in the desires and needs of house and home by case-study occupants. An eco-home will only be adopted if it offers what people demand from a home and that they can live how they want to within it.70 While acknowledging a huge diversity in what people demand and desire of a home, there were some common features (see Table 2.2). Despite this table being dominated by quantifiable features such as location, size, affordability and green space, many desires of a home are qualitative and subjective. Emotions, such as feelings about the aesthetics, light and comfort of a house are often crucial in house choice; indeed ‘emotional considerations can overrule practical considerations when people are choosing their new home.’71 Owning a house and home is linked to improved well-being and health, where residents enjoy the practical and emotional benefits of home owning.72 These emotional gains far outweigh the benefits of the potential financial investments of home owning, and such financial benefits are often of secondary importance. It is this mixture of social meaning and material attributes of house choices that it is vital to understand.73 Demands and desires of a home are of course contingent on the variables of people, place and politics. Different people will attach different meanings to homes and houses and have diverse requirements of them. Many of these criteria are about the location rather than the actual house. Indeed Broer and Titheridge’s74 research in Britain identified that ‘area factors’ were the most important issues when moving to a new home. As an English building constructor argued, ‘the punters want what they have always done … they want a nice looking house, at the right price, in a decent area and I can’t see that changing anytime soon.’75 This desire for continuity is reflected in other places and cultures too; in Japan, an eco-building project involved residents in the design stages and consequently included features that were important to traditional ways of living.76 Affordability is currently judged in terms of the initial purchase price, rather than running costs (as discussed further in Chapter 5).

58 | T WO TABLE 2.2 Common features and criteria that people demand and desire of a home77 Feature

Explanation

Adaptable

Flexible in function and in response to future changing needs, especially a large main space for eating, relaxing and entertaining

Affordable

That they can attain a mortgage to buy the house or can afford it outright

Beautiful

Aesthetically pleasing looks, period features, how a place looks and feels

Comfortable

Comfortable, stable thermal temperature and to offer convenient facilities (water, bathrooms, heat, refrigeration)

Convenient

Ease of use of, e.g., built-in technologies, windows, layout

Durable

A home that is long-lasting, with high-quality construction and finish

Green space

Close to parks and green open spaces and/or its own garden

Investment

The likelihood that a financial gain will be made

Light

Natural light through large windows

Location

Close to family and friends, good access to schools, healthcare, transport links, and shops

Maintainable

Easy to maintain, does not require regular or expensive maintenance

Private

Privacy is important both from external others and that there are private spaces within a home for residents to be alone

Quiet

Low noise pollution

Secure

Secure physically and financially, low crime area

Spacious

Enough room for all occupants and their different functions, good room sizes

The valuation of a house rarely takes into account the likelihood of reduced energy bills through installed renewable technologies or additional insulation.78 Equally, potential residents tend to only value eco-features of a house in terms of financial gain, payback periods or risks of maintenance costs.79 Privacy is for many a key purpose of a house, and yet by living in close proximity to others, through dense urban housing or in a large household, privacy is, as Bermann describes, often fleeting: A building is a collection of opacities and transparencies, a theater of appearance and disappearance in which we mask our presence or make it known. Every existing wall contradicts itself with openings, places where the obduracy of matter yields to the necessity of passage:

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joints and seals, points of rupture, of flows and failures, where water seeps in and air pours through, where materials meet and pull away. There gaps present us with opportunities to be seen and heard. Yet the exchange across a building’s porous envelope makes us vulnerable. One’s presence may be betrayed by a discarded orange peel, a bit of smoke, the sound of a toilet flushing or a pipe banging as water passes through. We are revealed through these traces, the things that architecture cannot keep, the separation that it cannot provide, its secretions, the excess that leaks through like light.80

Privacy is, however, also culturally contingent. In Britain, there is a desire and need for privacy, both from external others and internally from others in the household. Externally, this privacy is created through high garden fences, window screens (once net curtains, increasingly permanent opaque windows) and individual front doors. Internally, however, the shift towards more open plan living since the 1950s (in response to demands for more space and light when high land costs meant building plots were smaller) has created greater shared and communal space for family living. Privacy then becomes negotiated between partners, children and household tasks, where women in particular crave privacy but struggle to find it;81 ‘private space within the home made an important contribution to participants’ wellbeing and was important to participants of all ages.’82 There are culturally different understandings of privacy that in turn influence house form. This British need for individual privacy is less prominent in Japan, for example, where family-centred privacy is sought rather than individual space.83 The needs of a house and home do, however, change as people age84 and as circumstances change. As Imrie notes, bodily form changes with age, and many of us are likely to suffer a form of bodily impairment that will impact our understanding and needs of a home.85 All the more need to design all homes to be inclusive. Equally, rarely do people have free choice of housing options, especially in a country like England where housing (rental and purchase) is expensive and choice limited. Shove differentiated between house buyers who were affluent and those who were less well off as having different house search processes and criteria.86 The affluent prioritised aesthetics and emotional response, while the less well off focused on convenient location, cost and favoured new houses that would not require maintenance. Thus the order of priority of these criteria of home (Table 2.2), and the extent to which

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people can obtain their desired features, shifts and changes over time and place. Conclusions Home is complex and attachments to home are often highly emotional, full of nostalgia, memories and a sense of belonging that can also be disrupted by conflict, labour, control and exclusion. A house brings a materiality to these social attributes that shapes how people live in their homes, but is also shaped by residents. It is important to understand how a house is constructed, by whom and for whom, and how a house and its use changes over time. In any analysis of eco-homes and eco-housing, it is necessary to understand how the two concepts of home and house are dynamically related and therefore should always be considered alongside each other. The desires and needs of a home by potential occupants are quantitative and measurable as well as subjective and culturally contingent. While some of these criteria are well known and understood, others require further attention. Their importance, however, should not be underestimated. We need to understand how people perceive a home in order to encourage more people to live in eco-homes. This knowledge should influence and shape how eco-homes are designed and built. In other words, we should begin with an understanding of what a home means and what it should do before we design new structures and technologies that reduce the waste in our housing. Instead, all too often, the technological aspects of housing are focused on, to the exclusion of the social aspects that will ultimately determine a design’s success or failure.87 Eco-homes must navigate and negotiate the tension between meeting existing needs and demands of a house, and seeking to reconceptualise what needs it is desirable to meet and what needs are too environmentally costly. This involves challenging social conventions, as Smith argues: ‘the values and perspective of householders has to approach that of the designers if the eco-house is to work.’88 Eco-buildings challenge many of the assumptions about what a house provides. The social innovations of shared car schemes, community leasehold agreements or shared communal spaces of some eco-home projects require changes in expectations and daily practices.89 For example, ‘Eco-houses can also place different demands on the occupants. Some favoured technologies require more active relationships – such as monitoring power levels

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in batteries, checking water levels in cisterns, closing blinds over sunspaces during evenings, maintaining grey water treatment systems.’90 Exploring the needs and desires of home enables the identification of three areas where eco-homes are potentially problematic: in the potential reduction of privacy and associated increased sharing, in the lack of continuity in house form and function, and in the emphasis on the importance of location or area factors. The need to share space and therefore have less private space is perhaps the best example of how homes are being redesigned to be more ecological. As discussed in Chapter 1 ‘Eco’, the size of individual houses has gradually increased in the US and Australia, while the decreasing size of British houses has been met with resistance and calls to set minimum space standards.91 Simultaneously, the average size of householders has fallen and the number of single households risen.92 Not only have very small eco-homes been built, but many ecohome approaches advocate sharing homes with those beyond family.93 Sharing home space takes multiple forms – co-housing provides shared communal areas and private individual dwellings, or some ecocommunities share a whole house. Sharing enables fewer resources to be used while a good quality of life is maintained. It can involve sharing food production, sharing garden and DIY equipment, and car clubs.94 Whatever the approach, however, sharing home space requires rewriting domestic norms and creating new rules of intimacy.95 Sharing space and time creates and tests new forms of sociality and engagement with others.96 For some, these processes might be easy to adopt, but for others the shift from the individualised family-centred culture of home to a more open, fluid and shared home space will require negotiation and learning new practices. As Heathcote notes,97 despite radical changes in societies, gender relations, employment, technology and quality-of-life factors, houses in Britain, the US and Australia have changed relatively little. Many of the feelings about home and desires of a house are a quest for continuity. For example, the desire for privacy remains, and despite a shift towards open-plan living, new houses still have very traditional layouts of kitchens and sitting rooms downstairs and bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs.98 This quest for continuity is also represented in the nostalgia for certain forms of house architecture that are recreated onto contemporary dwellings. For example, the imitations of white external walls covered with dark timbers to replicate a traditional

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English cottage, or the use of stone façade on a brick wall to represent a rural cottage, albeit now located in a modern suburban housing estate.99 The predominance of familiar internal house layouts and the use of imitation designs of the past represent the importance of continuity in homes and houses, a continuity which is challenged by the potentially radically different eco-homes. Finally, the location of a home and the associated area factors have been identified as of paramount importance to house buyers. This is a quest for homes to be close to family and friends, in low crime areas, and with good access to employment, school, healthcare and transport. The importance of these area factors is also evident in the spatial heterogeneity of house prices that in turn determines the extent to which a house is likely to yield a high financial return. This emphasis on location factors can be problematic for new eco-house construction, which is more likely to take place in areas with lower land costs and less established access to facilities. Some projects, like BedZED in south London and LILAC100 in Leeds, have been purposefully built in urban areas, but many others, especially eco-community projects, are in remote places. The predominance of location factors in house choice and desirability is too often ignored in eco-home design. The complexity of meanings of home and the way in which some of these desires and demands of a home are challenged and negotiated by eco-homes are explored throughout the book. In particular, the importance of housing as a form of investment and the way in which houses are financially valued is explored in Chapter 5 ‘Affordability’. The need for homes to offer comfort and be comfortable is explored in Chapter 6 ‘Comfort’, and how houses are constructed and by whom is examined and critiqued in Chapter 7 ‘Gender’.

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The flat-roofed, box-shaped stone cottages of Las Alpujarras, southern Spain, are famous architectural examples of the Moors’ occupation (eighth to fifteenth century). Built on the steep slopes of the Sierra Nevada hillsides, these houses were built from locally available materials – chestnut-wood beams, stone and clay – using whitewashed exterior walls (lime) to deflect the heat of the sun. The flat roofs were used to collect water in winter and in summer served as produce-drying areas and cooler places to sleep. Clustered closely together, the streets between them are narrow and often covered by first-storey walkways connecting the houses (Figure 3.1). Shade and cool air is generated

3.1 Streets of Capileira, Las Alpujarras, Spain

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in summer, while the sheltered streets conserve heat in winter. These houses are examples of vernacular architecture, ordinary homes built by people to satisfy the basic need for shelter. These houses are not considered eco-homes and are ignored in histories of eco-building, and yet they use local natural materials and reduce waste through design. In many countries, a stigma is attached to eco-homes that invites resistance from politicians, neighbours and potential inhabitants. In large part, this is due to the way eco-homes have emerged, their roots, and thus their associations with often radical movements. For example, in Britain, ‘the sustainable housing movement believed radical societal changes were necessary in order to achieve sustainable development, such as governance via small-scale self-sufficient communities.’1 As such, eco-homes in Britain are often perceived to have emerged from radical environmentalism, with an emphasis on broad-scale social and political changes and a rejection of all but the most appropriate and alternative technologies. These historical associations hinder wider adoption because eco-homes are considered too alternative and political, but more importantly this version of history is not entirely accurate. If history shapes our conception of what innovations ‘work’ and are valued, then we need to have an accurate and detailed understanding of that history. For example, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7, the history of women’s involvement in building and architecture has until relatively recently been ignored. The history of eco-homes is more diverse and established than is commonly recognised. Few researchers have explored the environmental history of housing (notable exceptions being Farmer,2 Hawkes3 and Steele4), and so there are significant gaps in our understanding. For example, Johnson5 conducted an in-depth analysis of the history of housing in Suffolk, England between 1400 and 1700, but paid little attention to environmental factors. He argues that we can (and should) ‘read’ old houses for what they can tell us about social and cultural changes, but in so doing misses how houses also tell us a great deal about people’s understanding of, and relationship with, the environment. In other words, we also need to re-read the history of our housing to understand its environmental characteristics.6 Houses have always been built in relation to their surrounding resources, landscape and climate, even if in so doing we may have contributed to environmental problems such as air pollution, or poor waste disposal.7 We need to understand how houses have contributed but also responded to their environmental

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challenges in order to take steps towards further reducing their environmental impact. If we were to celebrate this diversity of eco-homes and recast the (hi)story of eco-homes, this might enable more people to find a version which attracted them. The risk with this is, of course, that the radical intentions and the broader political impetus behind some eco-homes would get lost, a point to which we return later in the chapter. As with all histories there are multiple perspectives and stories which weave together but also contradict and contest each other; what is clear is that ‘pioneering movers on sustainability have existed for a long time’.8 To do a full worldwide history of eco-homes incorporating all the different global disciplinary trajectories (architecture, environmentalism, engineering, archaeology, gender studies, social movement studies and history) is necessary, but not possible in one chapter of this book, so this is a partial, selective and brief approach. Much of the material included here is quite contemporary in terms of historical periods, and the approach taken to history in this chapter is about examining connections and precedents rather than tracing a complete historical lineage. The main point is, however, that there is not a singular trajectory of the emergence of eco-building and nor is it from one place. There are multiple influences, advances and contributors to how eco-homes are now understood and built. Some of the sources for eco-building interventions are also, perhaps, quite surprising. The choice of histories to focus upon in this chapter was inspired by the case studies, as will be detailed throughout. In other words, some of the historical antecedents for the case studies were specifically examined. Vernacular architecture Many of the eco-homes drawn upon in this book are forms of vernacular architecture: buildings to satisfy basic needs of shelter, safety and survival.9 The majority of our architecture is vernacular, and yet attention is most often paid to professional formal architecture.10 Vernacular buildings are of interest precisely because they are the mundane, everyday, ordinary dwellings in which most of us live. As a result, they tend to be (but are not always) better rooted in place, environment and culture as they reflect the needs of people, the resources available and the limited finances of many.11 As Oliver argues,12 ‘all vernacular architectures are built to meet specific needs,

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accommodating the values, economies and ways of life of the cultures that produced them.’ Often these economies mean that such homes are constructed ‘with the minimum of expense and skill necessary’.13 This form of architecture is sometimes referred to as ‘amateur’ in comparison to professional architecture because it does not require formal training or architectural qualifications. Many of the key figures in eco-building only occupy the fringes of the professional occupation and draw upon vernacular inspiration (such as Mike Reynolds, designer of the Earthships, who lost his architecture licence but was later reinstated). Vernacular architecture has long inspired eco-homes because it is considered akin to the human-scale approach advocated by environmentalists.14 The emphasis in vernacular designs on traditional building skills, local natural materials (earth, stone, wood, bamboo, or reed) and the ‘aesthetic merits of simplicity and harmony’15 appeal to the eco-builder.16 Such architecture is also increasingly understood as offering contemporary builders a model of housing which has a climatic suitability for a region, using natural processes to ventilate or warm a home, and built to withstand common natural disasters and to minimise use of scarce resources.17 By definition, these examples are available worldwide and do not require the importation of ideas from elsewhere.18 Vernacular architecture also tends to be self-built: ‘the architecture of the people, designed and built by communities, families and self-builders.’19 Thus people are able to design homes to suit their requirements and values. This gives the self-builders much greater scope to creatively expand on what a house should do and be, in an era of climatic change. Vernacular approaches to building continue to influence how we build. Historic methods and aesthetics are advocated for an array of, often contesting, reasons; this includes those who associate traditional styles with conservative politics, middle-class status, or conversely a rejection of such class politics. Ultimately, Old houses … owe their continuing power to their carrying of diverse and often apparently contradictory social messages … Just as symbols now acquire their power from being derived from the past, so 16th-century symbols derived their power from referring to a medieval past. Old houses are part of a continually reinvented tradition, an endless process of appropriation of the past for the present.20

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These links back into the past and the vernacular influence on ecohomes can be evidenced in several different ways. The past vernacular designs can be understood to be ecological. Cooper and Peros21 have used an archaeological investigation of pre-Columbian vernacular housing to explore how residents in Cuba built their houses. There is evidence of abrupt climatic changes (such as flooding) which people dealt with by innovative settlement locations and building stilted wooden houses. These buildings were in the main quite flimsy and temporary, lightweight structures built using easily available local materials. But they had substantive structural posts which were resilient to hurricane winds, so when storms occurred most of the house was destroyed, but the main structure survived and was easily rebuilt. The residents also often collectively stored food in more secure areas. From this we can conclude not only that vernacular architecture is often ecological (in materials and suitability for local climates, including its sometimes abrupt variations), but that builders planned for the destruction of their homes and how they would recover and carry on afterwards. In other words, in situations such as pre-Columbian Cuba, builders had enough knowledge not to try and build indestructible houses and instead create structures that were easy to rebuild. In a completely different context, the vernacular traditional buildings in rural Wales in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were classic examples of homes made in response to need. These small, ordinary houses and cottages were made from mud, wood, stone and thatch. These houses were often erected on common land and were thus effectively ‘landless’; some were erected in a night (one-night houses – tai unnos in Welsh) in an effort to lay claim to the land.22 They tended to be single storey with some bed space in the loft, with big low roofs and small windows.23 They were ecological primarily in the materials used in construction, and in that the homes were often temporary – falling into disrepair and being naturally recycled over time. The importance of vernacular design and approaches is evident in numerous case studies. The influence of vernacular design in contemporary design can be made explicit by identifying where some of the concepts and ideas originated. For example, Earthships and contemporary cob construction are vernacular structures in their use of available local resources and simple affordable construction.24 Cob, in particular, has clear vernacular ancestry (as a popular approach in places as far afield as Devon, England and Yemen), but importantly its

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recent revival in the eco-homes of the north-west US owes a debt to the vernacular tradition of England and Wales, rather than a more local history.25 Although adobe was used in south-west US (see Chapter 9) and in some buildings built by immigrants in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1830s, cob was not a common building approach, particularly in the cooler northern regions. Ianto Evans, from Wales, imported the cob method to the US as a new form of natural ecological building in the 1990s. In 1989, he and Linda Smiley ‘built the first cob cottage constructed in the United States in the past 150 years’.26 In subsequently setting up the Cob Cottage Company, they have reintroduced a vernacular architecture to America’s Pacific Northwest and rearticulated cob as an eco-building method which provides good thermal comfort (insulating from cold and heat), uses only natural local materials, is affordable, durable and does not require extensive skills. As a result, the cob vernacular tradition was prominent in the work of the City Repair Project (see Chapter 4), ReBuild Center (a warehouse of reclaimed building materials) and People’s Co-Operative (a co-op business with a health food shop), all in Portland, Oregon. How cob was mobilised as an eco-building method is further explored in Chapter 8. Moreover, this debt to particular early Welsh and Devon cob builders is noted by Ianto Evans and this historical antecedent used by him in his advocating for why the cob building method works. The ways in which vernacular architecture has evolved, and how old houses have been altered, informs our understanding of the durability of housing, our love of the old, and how all housing is dynamic (constantly changing). Within this vernacular tradition there is also an established history of renovating, retrofitting and regenerating houses. Few buildings remain as they were designed and intended; instead they evolve as inhabitants’ needs, and fashions, change. Homes are often given additions, new façades and changes through maintenance (such as damage repair).27 This history is important both in society’s desire to keep the old (but with new twists), and the ecological need to deal with existing buildings and not rely entirely upon new construction.28 Thus, for example, the evolution and retrofitting of buildings in Newark by the Hockerton Housing Project, the Los Angeles Eco-Village (California) and the Kailash eco-village in Portland, Oregon, all continue the vernacular practices of altering existing old buildings. The (hi)story of vernacular architecture illustrates that we have long included an understanding of the natural world in how we build

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our homes, and have known how to build homes suitable for the local climate while minimising resource use. The continued use of vernacular approaches, albeit often with modifications, as contemporary forms of eco-homes confirms this continuity with the past. Community architecture This belief in the ecological nature of much vernacular design was built upon by a number of community architects in the late twentieth century. Three quite different examples of community building advocates (Walter Segal, Colin Ward, and Christopher Alexander and colleagues) will be briefly drawn upon here to illustrate the important radical history of those who sought to empower communities and individuals to have control over their houses.29 Their quest was to engender collective selfresponsibility for providing our own homes, building communities through both design and the collective acts of building together, and building in a way which reduced expense and ecological damage. This community architecture approach has had significant impact on the case study of Green Hills (England) which was inspired by Segal’s approach and by Alexander and colleagues’ philosophy. There are also shades of the Segal method evident in LILAC’s (Chapter 4) use of timber-frame pre-fabricated walls, with the frame left visible and the houses designed for community interaction. But beyond the specific case studies, many of Segal’s experiments and accomplishments shown at the Centre of Alternative Technology (Wales) and at the Hedgehog Housing Project (England) were identified by interviewees more widely as having inspired and motivated their own builds, even if they ultimately had not used a timber-frame build method. Indeed, it was the Segal house displayed at the Centre for Alternative Technology that first ignited my desire to build an eco-house, motivated by the apparent simplicity of the design and structure, and Segal’s belief that everybody had the capacity to build such a house, especially if constructed as a collective endeavour. Walter Segal30 developed a timber-frame building system which could be constructed by unskilled labour quickly and cheaply.31 It had minimal foundations, used easily available standard materials (and thus required only minimal cutting) to build simple wooden frames, and did not need ‘wet trades’ such as skilled bricklaying or plastering. The design was simple with an optimisation of resources, ‘with no waste in material or time. There was no extravagance, but (just as

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important) no imposed spartanness; it was simple rather than ascetic, plain rather than purist.’32 Segal’s approach was based on precision and calculations, but was easy to assemble (and deconstruct): The general concept is that of Meccano, in which mass-produced materials are assembled in their market sizes. The framing which I used is a traditional one: a so-called ‘balloon frame’. In the whole context of this house the infill parts of the structure are in no way fixed together … none of the basic wall and partition materials have been touched by bolt, nail or screw: they are simply held in position by friction … my job was to think of assembly methods.33

The structure would sit above the ground on stilts, removing the need for level sites or foundations, and thus making building easier on poor-quality sites. Segal did not claim his ideas were novel, but rather an advancement of the medieval English house, the American barn style and the Japanese house, and he did not copyright his designs.34 Segal’s intention was to encourage people to build their own homes, integrating the roles of designer and builder to enable people to build for their needs. His lightweight and simple design enabled those without prior experience, and those of all abilities, to get involved (an issue of accessibility explored further in Chapter 8). He also wanted people to build for their needs; he was determined that architecture should be designed around human behaviour and thus created an approach which was flexible in layout. Segal believed that if people built together they would generate community which would sustain them: ‘this place, with the social cohesion of inhabitants involved in their place making, not in shaping a made place, makes for a stronger public realm than Krier-like patterns of streets.’35 He first experimented with his simple but effective wooden design in 1932, constructing a holiday cabin (La Casa Piccola) in Switzerland for Bernhard Mayer, but it was not until he built the ‘little house’ in 1963 in his garden in London that his ideas drew significant attention. This simple wooden-framed house was quick and cheap to build, but also able to be comfortable in cold climates. Although Lewisham Self-Build Housing Association commissioned the design for three small in-fill sites in the 1970s, most of the experimentation in Segal’s methods happened after his death in 1985. An example of the Walter Segal approach was built in 1987 at the Centre of Alternative Technology (Figure 3.2), and among many other examples, the method was used at Hedgehog SelfBuild Co-op in Brighton (built in the late 1990s) (Figure 3.3).

HISTORY

3.2 Walter Segal’s timber-framed house at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Wales

3.3 Hedgehog Housing Project, Brighton, England

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Hedgehog is a self-build project of ten homes on a hill designed by the architecture firm Architype, but built by the future residents. The ecological features are the use of British wood materials, passive solar through south-facing design, sedum grass roofs and warmcel (recycled paper) insulation. Segal’s advocacy of self-building by all builds upon the vernacular tradition of building for need using minimal resources. His approach is simple, quick, cheap and as it has increasingly been updated, is highly ecological. Walter Segal had grown up in an anarchist commune in Switzerland, and this anarchism was central to his eventual commitment to community self-building.36 Indeed, anarchism has long been concerned with housing, in providing for the immediate needs of people and the environment. Anarchism is essentially self-organisation, people providing for themselves without state intervention. It has multiple variants and part of its appeal for many is the flexibility with which it can be understood and practised.37 Colin Ward was a key advocate for anarchism, especially in Britain, and was particularly interested in housing and architecture; indeed he was an architect by training. He argued that anarchism was always present in society, not a utopia in the future: ‘an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow.’38 He was interested in fragments of anarchism already in existence and wrote numerous histories tracing anarchist practice: Many years of attempting to be an anarchist propagandist have convinced me that we win over our fellow citizens to anarchist ideas precisely through drawing upon the common experience of the informal, transient, self-organising networks of relationships that in fact make the human community possible, rather than through the rejecting of existing society as a whole in favour of some future society where some different kind of humanity will live in perfect harmony.39

In particular, he documented the history of the housing of the poor, who often had to rely upon squatting land to make a home,40 and of ‘plotlands’, the self-built unofficial housing often built along the British coast as escapes for city dwellers from the 1870s to the 1940s.41 For Ward, anarchist housing is a form of liberation.42 This is achieved primarily through dweller control (after Turner43) – that there is housing for all, housing for all needs and that residents have full control over that housing (be that through direct ownership or other forms

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of secure tenure). This control is not a form of capitalist exploitative profit-making (an approach to housing rejected by anarchists such as Proudhon by his famous assertion that ‘Property is Theft’); rather it is the freedom to have a home and the land required to live. Turner argues that dweller control leads to better and cheaper housing than when provided by the state. In providing for these needs, anarchist housing often requires unconventional societal structures, such as sharing homes through multi-family occupation, communes and co-operatives. It is also likely to involve combining uses such as reintegrating work and home. This collectivisation is also evident in the construction of anarchist houses where the tasks of construction, navigating legal requirements and the cost of purchasing land are all reduced through sharing. It can thus be an act of mutual aid – people mutually supporting and helping each other. In particular, Kropotkin, another famous anarchist, called for housing to reduce the burden of household tasks on women and instead offer them liberation from drudgery; this included making the kitchen bigger and central for all to use.44 What is more, housing should be convivial, built to encourage interaction and to suit human behaviour and demands.45 An anarchist house would seek to avoid or subvert any planning restrictions, especially where the basic needs of people were not being met, hence anarchism’s strong links with squatting.46 The anarchist house is very much in the vernacular tradition of using easily available free materials to self-build, and such houses would be maintained and modified (such as by extensions) by its occupants as needs changed. Brand defined such houses as being ‘long life, loose fit, low energy’47 – easily adaptable buildings, built to last and with minimal environmental impact. The environmental features of anarchist housing are not particularly explicit in Ward’s discussions, but many anarchists such as Murray Bookchin48 and Henry David Thoreau49 understood there to be strong parallels between anarchism and environmentalism. This was expressed in housing as being about simplicity, self-sufficiency and human-scale approaches which reduced humans’ needs while restoring a concern for the environment. In other words, the anarchist house has minimal resource needs and enables interactions with the environment which in turn allows people to understand their direct environmental implications. A final, and quite different, example on the theme of community architecture is that of Pattern Language, developed by architects

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Christopher Alexander and colleagues.50 Pattern Language is an approach to design intended for non-professionals to aid them in good design. Their book is a list of solutions (patterns) to common building questions. Alexander and colleagues have identified the universal features (patterns) of homes that function, helping designers to understand what makes a building pleasant to live in. For example, it advocates small dwellings made to feel better by having lots of alcoves. It suggests that windows should overlook life, each room should have windows on two sides, seats should be built in and walls should be thick. What is particularly interesting and helpful about this approach is not just its simplicity but the way it includes a huge variety of scales within one system. Thus, questions of regional planning are dealt with alongside the design of a single room. Alexander and colleagues were also advocates of dweller control and thus against rental properties. Instead, they argued that residents should have enough control to be able to modify their homes and that every home, even apartments, should have a garden. Pattern Language is less about community architecture than Segal and Ward’s approaches, but its central concern is in how we relate to others. Its starting point is in how spaces feel and function, rather than how they look (or should look). In effect, Pattern Language tries to translate what we already know into simple patterns; thus while A Pattern Language was written in the 1970s, it draws upon centuries of approaches to building. In summary, these three very different approaches to community architecture illustrate the long history of radical housing and the ways in which vernacular knowledges and practices were woven into more recent approaches. All advocated self-provision of housing and dweller control over such housing, with architects working with communities to design for their needs rather than building monoliths to their egos. Radical and deep green experiments The dominant history of eco-building, however, as told by academics such as Lovell,51 Smith,52 Stenberg and Räisänen,53 Seyfang54 and Chambers,55 traces the start of eco-homes in Sweden, Britain and the US to the 1970s and particularly to the Alternative Technology (also known as the Appropriate Technology) movement of the time.56 Smith57 argues that this movement emerged from a few architectural schools (Cambridge, Hull and the Architectural Association in London) which provided space for experimentation for students who were motivated by

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the prevailing acknowledgement of environmental crisis (triggered by key moments such as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the radical environmental movements of the 1960s and the energy crisis of 1973). This movement was particularly practical, motivated by a belief that only through working examples would people be convinced that their radical ideas worked. Brenda and Robert Vale,58 graduates of the School of Architecture at Cambridge and central figures in this movement, argued ‘something that can be seen and touched and shown to work to some degree arouses curiosity, and curiosity in turn leads to solutions.’59 Much time was spent by researchers at Cambridge University in developing plans for a prototype, the ‘Autarkic House’, which was to be an entirely self-sufficient house; unfortunately it was never built, but its concept did live on in the work of the Vales.60 These innovators were deep green, in that they believed the best way to avoid environmental catastrophe was through broad-scale societal and political changes.61 In eco-homes, this meant putting into practice the concept of autonomy. Environmental autonomy involves building homes which are off-grid, provide their own power sources (through micro generation), capture their water and dispose of their sewage and waste onsite. It in effect decentralises provision of infrastructure from central sources to the household. In a similar way, social autonomy brings control and responsibility for understanding and maintaining a house back to the household. Thus inhabitants needed to be able to easily understand and fix any technologies used in the house. These demands were part of a broader movement ‘to design for people’s needs rather than their wants’62 and for such designers to acknowledge and practise some social and environmental responsibility. For Papanek,63 this included being anti-copyright and patents – sharing designs freely, refusing to design in obsolescence and reducing environmental impact. This quest for autonomy and development and use of alternative technology evidently shaped several case studies’ build approaches. The Earthships of the New Mexico desert, designed by Mike Reynolds,64 completely autonomous houses which rely on photovoltaics, rainwater harvesters and numerous water filters and pumps, have clear antecedents in the radical and deep green experiments of the 1970s.65 The Vales designed and built the first autonomous house in Britain (Figure 3.4); it was fully self-sufficient by generating its own energy, collecting all water needed and ecologically dealing with its sewage.66 It was also designed to look like a conventional house, in an attempt to appeal to others.

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Many, though not all, in the movement also believed that cooperative living was a productive way through which to achieve this autonomy and practical manifestations of this approach are evident in the eco-villages founded in the 1970s such as the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales, and Findhorn67 in Scotland (discussed in Chapter 9) (Figure 3.5).68 Both places were sites of significant ecobuilding experimentation and innovation, for example, Pat Borer and Cindy Harris69 designed and built many of the innovative buildings at CAT, including most recently a large rammed-earth education centre.

3.4 Autonomous House, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England, designed by Brenda and Robert Vale70

The quest to build ecological, decentralised, self-reliant housing has continued, with prominent case studies in England being the construction of the Hockerton Housing Project in Nottinghamshire (designed by Robert and Brenda Vale, an autonomous earth-sheltered community of five homes) and BedZED71 in Wallington, London (Figure 3.6) (designed by Bill Dunster72) in the 1990s. This radical experimentation has been sustained by architects and builders such as Barbara Jones,73 who introduced and advocated straw-bale methods, now adopted in council housing (case-study straw-bale house in Lincolnshire) and in large-scale contemporary builds across Britain, and is also evident in the deep green practices of the eco-communities of Lammas, Landmatters and Tinkers Bubble (explored further

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3.5 Barrel house made from a reclaimed whisky barrel at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland

in Chapters 4, 6 and 9).74 In the US, there was a similar period of experimentation from the 1970s onwards, with creative self-built houses being constructed from reclaimed materials which have inspired places like Crestone (Colorado) and Dignity Village (Oregon).75

3.6 BedZED, designed by Bill Dunster, Wallington, London, 200276

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Modernism, architecture and the environment This historical narrative, however, ignores environmental endeavours which were far more mainstream and are far older. It also ignores the role of others, particularly state actors, in developing some of the technologies on which eco-houses now rely. For example, ‘buildings such as the Crystal Palace in London (1851) and the Galleria Vittorio Emaneule II in Milan (1877) used what are today considered ecological techniques in their construction, namely, passive heating and cooling systems.’77 In the mid-twentieth century, there were pioneering experiments which attempted to harness solar power in housing.78 Your Solar House was published in 1947 with designs by American architects, and although it failed to generate significant technical experimentation, it does signal an early understanding of the potential of more ecological approaches. At the same time (1933–47), notable university research was being conducted by engineers at MIT and Purdue University (among others) who tested the potential of passive solar designs (unfortunately also noting the negative implications of heat loss from extensive glazing).79 As some of the more technological experimentations of the 1970s illustrate, such as the Autarkic House, eco-architects were drawing inspiration from the technological advancements into space. In the narrative about the Alternative Technology movement, the role of the US military in developing solar power technology (as a way to power spaceships) in the 1950s is not acknowledged.80 Although the photovoltaic effect was discovered by Edmund Becquerel (a French physicist) in 1839, it was not until the 1950s that commercial interest in the US began to drive the development of solar panels, and it was only with the aid of the US Army Signal Corps that a satellite power system was designed. This involvement of the US military is often conveniently forgotten in the deep green version of eco-homes history. At the same time the Modern Movement (also called International Style) of architecture (1920s onwards) had a tendency to be ahistorical and acontextual; in other words, it did not matter what place or time period the architects were designing for.81 This style of architecture was used as a symbol of economic progress, as scientific advancement and a rejection of natural laws. However, Steele82 argues that this focus on the ‘masculine’ and ‘heroic’ architectural approaches has obscured the social and climatic conceptualisations of many of the famous architects of this period. Steele, Farmer,83 Hawkes84 and

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Bone85 identify an environmental consciousness being practised in an era pre-1970s which is commonly perceived not to have understood the environmental impact of buildings. I have chosen a few examples of the work of architects during the early and late Modern Movement period to illustrate their differing environmental sensibilities. They are from quite different time periods and styles (or in architectural terms, ‘formal language’) and could also quite easily have included Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler, Berthold Lubetkin, Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight, Kenneth Yeang, Edward Mazria, Paolo Soleri, Alison and Peter Smithson, or Enric Miralles. Crucially, though, they are international, well-known and had significant impact upon contemporary architecture and building. Charles Rennie Mackintosh Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928, Scotland) reconciled Arts and Crafts movement handicraft principles with lessons from Scottish vernacular and industrial production in the early twentieth century.86 He adjusted the modernist ethics for harsh Scottish weather, for example, reducing the size of windows to retain more heat.87 Le Corbusier Le Corbusier (1887–1965, France) who is famed for his Purist and Brutalist approach to architecture and as a leader of the Modern Movement, actually also ‘nurtured a culturally laden, place-specific alter ego, which, with its social memory and historical associations, was ecologically grounded’.88 Le Corbusier is known for his use of a reinforced concrete post-and-slab system, but following the First World War developed the Monol system (1930s). This was a place-sensitive approach which used local materials (albeit often crushed stone aggregate to make concrete), green roofs, was small scale and cheap to build. The structure encompassed curved vault ceilings and was adjusted in his versions in India (1950s) to accommodate a tropical climate through natural cross-ventilation, high thermal mass and a water-cooled earth roof. Although the materials were not ecological in the way contemporary eco-homes demand (see Chapter 7), the designs such as the Sarabhai House in Ahmedabad, India, integrated nature, and his city design for Chandigarh (India) included wide pathways through residential areas, now shaded by trees and greenery.89 Hassan Fathy Fathy (1900–1989, Egypt) sought to embrace the climate-suitable building techniques of the Middle East, having rejected

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modernist approaches.90 For example, he incorporated traditional wind catchers (non-mechanical ventilation systems also called malqaf, Figure 3.7) into his New Baris project in Kharga, Egypt (1967). These catch prevailing winds, often across a pool of water, to create a cool internal breeze. He also used adobe (clay and straw) and vaulted adobe roofs which did not require any expensive wood or metal for support during construction.91 Other vernacular inspirations included the pierced wall (claustra) built between a courtyard and a house which acts as a filter for cool air to ventilate the building, and the carved wooden window screen (mashrabiyya) which ‘allows air to circulate through the house while maintaining privacy’.92 Such a design does not block light but instead diffuses it through the room. Unfortunately, Fathy’s New Baris project and many of his others failed, and yet he was ahead of his time, in 1936 arguing that medieval designs such as the Fatamid, Mamluk and Ottoman palaces in Cairo offered important lessons for environmental performance:93 He was one of the first of only a few architects during the early modern period to seek an alternative solution to the economic disparities caused by the onset of industrialisation, while recognizing the cultural erosion it was causing and the insensitivity of the International Style to the aspect of technological growth.94 Capped tower Wooden air ducts cool air

Wind catcher

Air shaft

Living quarters

Courtyard

Ground level

Cold water pool

3.7 Wind tower (also known as wind catcher, or malqaf) design95

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Fathy’s work influenced the architects Abdel Wahed El Wakil (Saudi Arabia) and Rasem Badran (Jordan) who, albeit in slightly different ways, have drawn upon vernacular approaches to build houses (and mosques) in the 1980s and 1990s in the Middle East. Badran’s approach also reflects the new urbanist manifesto – cities should be hybrids of uses, historical and the new combined, and cars should be limited. Overall, Fathy encouraged a form of architecture sensitive to social and environmental needs and conditions which draws upon vernacular principles, meaningful traditions and appropriate technologies.96 It is at this point that once again the different (hi)stories of eco-homes overlap and intertwine. Fathy, Abdel Wahed El Wakil and Rasem Badran all explicitly drew upon vernacular architecture in their development of contemporary Islamic architecture with an ecological concern. Richard Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983, the US) was driven by a desire to alleviate poor housing. He was critical of the standard build practices in the US in the 1920s which revolved around custom-made wooden housing. His experiences in the Navy of lightweight aluminium aircraft and his love of handmade engineering led him to develop the Dymaxion House, designed in 1928 and built in 1945 (Figure 3.8).97 This was a circular metal house with an open plan internal space (dividable with moveable walls). It was 92 m2 but weighed less than three tons and was quick to erect, taking ten people only two days. It was an early kit house, designed to be transportable, low cost and ecological.98 Despite the external structure being aluminium (which we now know has a high embodied energy, see Chapter 1), it had a number of environmental features ahead of its time.99 It was shaped (with a large internal space) to minimise heat loss when cold, but the wall panels could also be opened to enable cross-ventilation when hot, and rooftop ventilation further cooled the house. It was therefore energy efficient (in reducing the need for mechanical heating and cooling), but it also minimised water use by a system which sterilised and recycled grey water. Unfortunately the house did not move beyond a prototype, but Buckminster Fuller did go on to design the Dymaxion Deployment Unit which the US Department of Defense has since used as kit emergency housing (Figure 3.9). He is probably best known for

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3.8 Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, Wichita, Kansas100

developing the geodesic dome (1953),101 though Walter Bauersfield (of Germany) actually built the first recorded one in 1922.102 Believing building based on the geometrics of nature would be more efficient and ‘enclose a maximum amount of space, using a minimum amount of material’,103 he designed structures using triangles, octagons and hexagons. The domes were self-supporting, freeing the internal space of any structures. He also devised computerised sunshades which enabled precise climate control. This approach was less about engaging with the natural environment and more about surviving its apparently inevitable destruction. The biospheres and eco-arks which were inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes were closed environmental systems, where the internal climate was completely artificially controlled.104 Ian McHarg McHarg (1920–2001, b. Scotland), who was taught by Walter Gropius (Bauhaus) at Harvard, was a landscape architect who understood the particularity of place and believed in respecting the power of natural forces. He devised a method, through overlays of maps of natural features, to identify what should be protected and where to build. This approach aimed to prevent uncontrolled urban

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3.9 Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, used as emergency accommodation for troops during the Second World War, 1940105

sprawl, protect the most precious of natural environments, but also accommodate economic ‘realities’. This approach was most famously illustrated in his Plan for the Valleys (1962), Green Spring and Worthington valleys, near Baltimore, Maryland. Balkrishna Doshi Doshi (b. 1927, India) worked with Le Corbusier in the 1950s but went on to develop low-cost housing projects in India that were reflective of how squatter shanty town residents lived, socialised and survived economically, providing liveable space with ‘optimum orientation, light, ventilation and climatic control’.106 A good example of this is the Aranya Low-Cost Housing Project in Madhya Pradesh, completed in 1986. Although, like Le Corbusier, Doshi used concrete, he captured natural ventilation through wide openings in the walls to create a passive cooling system. He also understood the importance of a building’s orientation and surroundings to its environmental effectiveness, incorporating lawns and pavements to generate a convective current (for example, the Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad University, completed 1962 and his own studio, Figure 3.10).

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3.10 Balkrishna Doshi’s studio, Sangath, Ahmedabad, India, built 1979–81107

Jimmy Lim Lim (Malaysia) has sought to design homes which respond to cultural and climatic place, in particular, homes appropriate for the tropics. To do this he has adapted vernacular wooden designs with subtle modern twists. His design choices are driven by a desire to treat the environment as a precious resource and to replicate nature: ‘light, shade and shadow should be accentuated by the layering of forms and surfaces, blurring the conventional distinctions between spaces.’108 In practice, this has meant limiting external walls in order to maximise cross-ventilation, using local wood, minimising technologies and building on stilts to maximise air flow (for example, Salinger House, Kuala Lumpur, 1992). He has been applying this logic to high rises, what he calls ‘ecological towers’. Lim’s approach is also a reaction against other Malaysian architects of the period who looked to modernise Balinese design, replacing wood with steel and glass. The environmental impetus in the Modern Movement in architecture was motivated by a complex mixture of nationalism, postcolonialism, socialism, changing religious identity, and later, reactions to the energy crisis of the 1970s. Although many attempts at incorporating an environmental sensibility were partial, or hindered by poor choice of materials, there are several achievements or tendencies evident in these designs which pre-date the 1970s Alternative Technology movement

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and are recognisable as precursors to eco-homes design principles today. Somewhat surprisingly, given the reputation of modernism for being universalist, architects began to be context aware (in understanding place, culture, climate and surroundings) and to build for that specific context. Architects such as Doshi were as interested in the spaces between and beyond the home as within it, showing a concern that contemporary eco-architects still have for community interaction and infrastructure. There was also a concern with affordability, providing homes for masses and not just the elite. This was further reflected, in some cases, in limiting technological intervention to appropriate technologies, though quite clearly the closed environmental systems of the large-scale geodesic domes were early steps towards the renewable resource capture technologies prevalent today. Many also sought to incorporate lessons from vernacular architecture (for example, Fathy and Lim); this was most evident in the number of architects who designed natural cross-ventilation systems. Material choice (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7) often defines the structural possibilities and feel of a house. Concrete was a popular choice amongst modernist architects, but others experimented with unusual or innovative materials, such as aluminium. We now know concrete to be environmentally damaging, though there are still arguments that its high thermal mass makes this a cost worth paying in reducing heating needs. This experimentation with different materials, however, and their relationship to form and function is a core aspect of eco-building and one which has precedents in the experiments of people such as Buckminster Fuller. Finally, some of the Modern Movement architects sought to replicate nature (Lim, Buckminster Fuller), while others simply wanted to use it (Fathy, Le Corbusier). Despite the usefulness of adding in this different history to the trajectory of eco-building, it needs to be treated with some caution. Telling the story of eco-homes in modernism remains difficult because its history remains under-researched. There are still significant gaps. Most notably this history is gendered; only male architects are celebrated in the Modern Movement review by Steele, and although women were prevented from formally qualifying as architects until the early nineteenth century, there is a missing history of their contributions.109 Hawkes110 does at least include some women in his longer history, but even then they remain solely associated with their male partners.

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The history of women’s contributions to architecture has already been written by authors such as Walker,111 Friedman,112 and Martin and Sparke,113 but this has yet to be either included in the general histories of architecture of the Modern Movement, or in the history of ecoarchitecture. Indeed, by 1928, the first British commercial building was designed by a woman and by the 1930s, women were rapidly entering the formal profession of architecture.114 This theme is explored in greater depth in Chapter 8. This focus on the heroic male architect also prevents an analysis of collaborations and creative synergies (far more likely to include the story of women’s contributions), and it is only concerned with formal architecture, excluding the informal self-builder and designer, which is central to the important vernacular history of eco-homes. Thus a rereading of the environmental contributions of architects of the Modern Movement needs to be done carefully, acknowledging that histories are interpretative, subjective and forever partial. Conclusions This chapter has only explored some potential roots of the case studies examined in this book, rather than a comprehensive global history, of eco-homes. It has tried to begin the process of reframing the history of eco-homes. The history of eco-homes is global, fragmented and complex.115 This chapter has discussed four trajectories – vernacular, community, deep green and modernist – which variously overlap, subvert and ignore each other. There are, no doubt, other stories yet to be told. Contemporary eco-homes are an outcome of these different histories woven together and it certainly is not ‘new’. Contemporary eco-homes are rooted in a mixture of vernacular building practices and formal architectural approaches; they emerge from the ‘gradual intermixing between architecture on the one hand and building on the other … New ideas have always been first adopted by those who could afford them … As their ideas passed down to those below, so the buildings of less wealthy people became increasingly architect-influenced.’116 There is a power in continuity and tradition, which the deep green eco-homes, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps deliberately, challenge. In societies where ‘an endless process of appropriation of the past for the present’ is valued,117 then eco-homes become detached from this valued association with the past and their appeal consequently falters.

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The story of eco-homes continues to evolve by absorbing and ignoring different influences from the past. In Britain, for example, the influence of the deep green experiments in the 1970s with Alternative Technology and autonomy is evident in both the governmentsupported concept of zero carbon housing and the radical Low Impact Development movement, but in very different forms. Zero carbon housing had been advocated by the British government in its target for all new houses to be zero carbon by 2016 as part of its climate change mitigation strategy, now abandoned by the Conservative government in July 2015.118 This form of housing employs many of the technologies advocated by the AT movement (such as photovoltaic panels and energy-efficient appliances) but such ‘sustainable housing is about technology-intensive “smart” housing which requires no change in householders’ behaviour to deliver energy savings’.119 In other words, only the mechanical technologies, not the broader holistic approach, have been adopted in this form of eco-homes. The Labour government had divorced the technical from the social aspects of such housing.120 It was a significantly weakened version of the deep green experiments. At the same time, and at the other extreme, there has been a growth in the Low Impact Development movement. This advocates autonomous housing, self-reliance, self-built affordable homes, often in rural areas.121 This approach explicitly incorporates the holistic demands of radical social change and minimises use of mechanical technologies, using instead many of the basic principles of low technology building such as extensive glazing to the south for passive heating, green roofs, using local natural materials, and seeking to enhance biodiversity.122 Examples include the roundhouse at Brithdr Mawr123 and case study Lammas Low Impact Development, both in Wales.124 This is just one small example of how very different versions of eco-homes have emerged from one particular historical path. While the history of eco-homes has been partially written, especially by authors such as Steele, Farmer and Hawkes, there remain many myths about where eco-homes came from and when it all began. Until a more complete, open and long (hi)story about eco-homes is told, the misconception that it is a marginal deep green experiment will persist, to the detriment of a greater understanding and uptake of eco-homes.

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I stand where there were once bare farm fields, ravished by overgrazing from sheep and the harsh winter weather of west Wales. Now, emerging from the steep hillside, is a more diverse landscape, populated with willow, fruit trees, vegetable patches and a multitude of eco-homes crafted from wood, straw and mud. A new place is being built over the old, one that jars against its surroundings of farmland and stone cottages. The emerging eco-village seems discordant with its place. The weather and local climate have been accounted for in the design of south-facing windows and drainage built to accommodate and catch the heavy rains. Yet an abstract utopia appears to have been supplanted onto this hillside from afar. It feels as if the old place is being overridden and rewritten by the newcomers’ vision of what an environmental nirvana should look like. I love and crave it, recognising the familiar eco-aesthetic of other eco-villages, while at the same time recognising the loss of what came before. Something is missing here in the way that place has been considered. Place matters. It matters because of its locale and how it is currently valued and understood.1 It matters how a new eco-home connects (or not) to other places through the use of common infrastructure, or through social links to others near and far. It matters because home, as discussed in Chapter 2, can be conceived of as a particularly significant type of place.2 Place matters precisely because it is more than just the locality of a piece of land. Place is how humans experience the world. Place contains meaning, identity and memories. Place is about difference, and it can only be understood relationally through its differences from other places. Place is also bounded; a surface with limits, yet these boundaries are not static or determinable. Place is dynamic, unfinished and constantly changing.3 Place is a complex concept to define and understand. Geographers have been at the forefront of theorising place and thus it is important here to take a geographical perspective. Geographers’ work has illustrated the need to increase awareness of place in order to understand

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how important place is to how we view and experience the world. Place is therefore a useful geographical concept through which to understand the intentions and achievements of eco-builders. It is employed in this book as a way of examining how eco-builders conceive of the location in which they choose to build, what places they seek to construct and the consequences of their approaches to place. Place shapes, and is an expression of, people’s identities. Thus understanding place enables analysis of the type of world eco-builders are seeking to construct and how this construction relates, challenges, excludes or re-creates other places. The importance of place is largely overlooked by eco-builders or reduced to simple concerns about climatic location and environmental factors. Place as a social and emotional arena full of meaning, relations and cultural history is too often ignored. This discussion of the definition of place is only included here because place is a central (arguably the most important) concept through which to unpack and comprehend eco-homes. Analysis of place opens up elements of eco-building practices, processes and intentions that would be missed by other approaches. It enables recognition of not just how places are being transformed by eco-homes, but why place is being changed and to what ends. Using the concept of place, some of the less obvious consequences of eco-construction can be worked out. In other words, the ways in which place is transformed can illustrate a great deal about the intentions, perspectives and visions of eco-builders. While some architects and builders have designed for climate, integrated with local style and thought about fitting in with existing social relations, others have not.4 For every carefully considered building, there is also the generic eyesore that looks out of place and disrupts existing residents and environments. The implications of this might well be deliberate, choosing to build in a way that consciously disrupts existing locations or remaking a place to be an exclusionary ecotopia. However, there are also unintended consequences where eco-homes do not fit into place, and subsequently do not function and exist as well as their designers might have hoped.5 This chapter begins by fleshing out the definition of the concept of place. It then identifies five common ways in which place is understood by people building eco-homes: (1) as climatic location, (2) as being (re)made, (3) as interaction, (4) as exclusion and (5) as local. Using two case examples – the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, and

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the Lammas Low Impact Development in Wales – the consequences of some of these approaches to place are then explored. Place as more than location The concept of place is difficult to define, even for geographers for whom place is at the centre of their discipline.6 Too often, it is only vaguely understood as a social construction; that place is only an outcome of different social and political concerns that vary across locations.7 This perspective reduces the meaning and importance of place in shaping people’s understanding of the world. Indeed, there is an argument that valuing place too much will only lead to politically regressive actions that seek to protect places from others (such as immigrants) or assert the superiority of one place over another.8 However, as Coles argues, place is actually the way ‘in which humans construct reality and engage with the world’.9 Place is a concept, not a political statement; place is not innately good or bad. Place is important because it is what enables us to know ourselves. We are situated in place and therefore can only exist in place, or rather we come into being through place. This understanding of place makes it central to any exploration of how eco-builders engage with the world and how and why they seek to change it. Place also enables a comprehension of the consequences of new eco-homes. In many ways, eco-home builders are engaged in projects of place-making. For Sack, this is a process where ‘we cannot accept reality as it is and so we create places to transform reality into what we think it ought to be … we are then involved in a continuous and open-ended process of transformation.’10 As Kraftl suggests in relation to architecture, ‘on the simplest, most fundamental level, buildings are significant because they embody the literal act of place-making’,11 where through buildings, places ‘are made, negotiated, experienced and contested’.12 Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy. Advocated in the US by William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs13 in the 1960s, placemaking came to represent neighbourhood designs that promoted public interaction (such as plazas and squares) surrounded by mixed-income and mixed-use homes and workplaces. The approach was social in that it sought to prioritise pedestrian movement and interaction over that of motorised vehicles and to encourage resident participation in designs.14 Place through placemaking is understood as an ongoing outcome of human attempts to change and shape reality, where place is used

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as an instrument to satisfy human needs: ‘the reality we experience is thoroughly influenced by our efforts at placemaking.’15 This process is moral and political in that place is transformed in a certain way by people for particular ends.16 There is a moral imperative inherent in this placemaking, a belief that building new eco-homes is about making places better. This attempt at transformation, changing place to how it ‘ought’ to be (in Sack’s words), is driven by judgements as to what ‘better’ entails. In the case of eco-homes, this constructs place as privileging nature and the environment, and social interactions within an eco-community, but not particularly valuing social relations with others. A certain type of rural idyll is often envisioned which rejects productivist farming and instead constructs a place of simple self-sufficiency and rejection of capitalist concerns with money. Place is not a physical entity; it is much more than a location or locale. Place ‘is defined by relation to the notion of bound, limit, or surface’,17 but it is also ‘a locus of meaning, memory and identity’18 (defined using a phenomenological perspective, what Malpas calls his ‘philosophical topographic’ approach). Place can be ‘felt’ and has a (unique) character, which differentiates one place from another, while also containing difference (heterogeneity and plurality) itself. Understanding place helps us comprehend difference, and recognising difference helps us value place. Place as difference only makes sense when compared to other places, as one can only be different in contrast to something else. Therefore, place is relational and interconnected; it can only be understood in relation to other places. Place, however, is always in some way bounded: it has a surface, a limit and a structure. This boundary is not static; it has an openness which enables it to be dynamic and to change the structure of its boundaries.19 Malpas and Sack20 both compare this boundary to a horizon – it can be seen but never determined – while Larsen and Johnson suggest ‘those horizons can be crossed over, but crossing over serves only to open up new places, new situations’.21 Despite the indeterminateness of the boundary, place remains bounded.22 Through everyday practices people experience and shape place, and fill it with emotions, imagination and memories.23 As summarised in Table 4.1, place can be understood as being about location and landscape, feelings and emotions, processes and practices, perceptions and visions, and relations and context. These understandings overlap

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and interact with each other. Place is both an ontology (defining what exists) and an epistemology (a particular way of seeing).24 TABLE 4.1 How place can be differently understood25 Place is understood as … Location and landscape

Examples of how place is understood A climatic region A point on a map A landscape A scale, a local place A territory

Feelings and emotions

Love or fear of a place Sense of place Through memories

Processes and practices

A political process A moral process Experienced through everyday practices

Perceptions and visions

A nostalgic vision of the past A utopic vision of the future Through representations

Relations and context

As interconnected Only in relation to wider social processes Through material, social and discursive relations As bounded within regions

A strong sense of place is built through human experience, people tying their identity to a place, and a place displaying unique characteristics. A sense of place is about knowing where you are. Place and the processes of placemaking are also often about power – the power to define what exists (such as decreeing what can be built and what cannot) and in representing that existence (through, for example, drawing maps in particular ways and in choosing what to include and what to omit). Therefore, place is produced and represented in complex ways. The position of the natural world, nature, the environment and non-human beings remains unclear within this understanding of place. This is especially problematic when exploring the role and importance of place for eco-home builders who are largely motivated by a respect

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for, and relationship with, the natural environment. Delineating what the ‘natural environment’ consists of and how this is separate or not from human beings and social life is itself a detailed philosophical endeavour. However, empirically, it is possible to identify everyday experiences of humans’ encounters with the natural environment over which humans appear to have little control, for example, the experience of extreme weather events (tsunamis, flooding), attacks by non-humans (tigers, sharks, etc.) or the composition of soil or rock through farming. There are numerous important debates about the extent to which such encounters with nature are shaped by human choices. For example, in Australia, the rise of deadly shark attacks can be understood as a result of the rise in the number of humans swimming in the sea, and a weather event only becomes a ‘natural disaster’ if humans were in the way and could not quickly recover. Empirically, it is impossible to remove the natural environment from understandings of place. Yet Larsen and Johnson,26 who adopt Malpas’s approach to place,27 obscure nature from place. They argue that because all existence is grounded in place the natural environment cannot be a separate pre-existing entity. Rather the natural and human only appear together. Thus in their view, the natural world can only come into existence at the same time as people comprehend themselves and their existence in place, and that because everything is interconnected nature cannot be conceived of as a separate entity. They disregard Sack’s argument that some part of nature has to be taken as a given, that ‘there remain components of reality that are not humanly created or controlled and to which we must bow. These components amount to the idea that nature is simply there as a given.’28 However, it is important to find a way to bring the natural environment back into clearer view when examining place. It is possible, surely, to accept the complexity of place through Malpas’s approach alongside recognition of the importance of people’s everyday experience of, and struggle with, the natural world. Indeed, Malpas’s use of the concept of regionality to articulate some of the limits and boundedness of place potentially draws upon some of the landscape and watershed ‘givenness’ of nature that Sack describes. Rose is helpful here in her use of the term ‘eco-place’ to define ‘locatedness that is not human-centred and that is attentive to the many living things who participate in the life of a given place’,29 which opens up place to a greater recognition of the natural world. As Power has explored,30 houses are shaped by their place in the

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natural world, not just in terms of climatic location, but by the animals which also inhabit a house (invited or not) and the plant growth and environment which surrounds it. The house becomes entwined with nature and is central to how a home feels and is understood. While we should not simply reduce place to nature (or nature to place) and we should accept nature is subjective, without greater acknowledgement of the natural world the definition of place moves even further away from its common understanding. This is important because the concept of place is only useful if it helps us understand the world, not if it obscures it. Thus, while it is productive to expand the notion of place from being a location, to being inclusive of meanings, memories, identities and as made through relations, it also has to retain a clear view of the natural world as Sack advocates. This must be possible because if place is what makes us human then we need to be able to see clearly all elements that constitute place. Part of the point of trying to understand place is to delineate what an ideal, good or progressive place is. This is to ensure that places are changed for the good of all. Too often, places are created which are only of benefit to some (are instrumental) or to enable atrocities.31 Larsen and Johnson32 argue that a progressive form of place is open in the sense that it encourages sharing, compassion, tolerance and an acknowledgement of interdependence with others. This openness is also reflected in Sack’s33 assertion of a good place as one which increases our awareness of reality and increases variety and complexity which in turn makes reality compelling. This ‘awareness of the real’ is constituted through an openness of place, in ‘seeing as completely and publicly as possible how the world and its parts or places are interrelated’.34 In practice, this is about places being transparent and freely sharing knowledge. This place needs to be complex to hold our attention and to encourage us to be even more aware of the reality. Combined, these elements of a place encourage an openness, an altruism and a shared knowledge and participation in creating place. Place is understood in this chapter as bounded and containing meaning, memories, perceptions and identities. It is experienced and constructed through everyday practices and processes. Place can only be understood relationally through its differences from other places. It is dynamic, unfinished and constantly evolving. Place as used here also brings into clear view the importance of the natural environment in shaping and being shaped by people.

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Writing about place and seeking to understand how people view place, and their processes of placemaking, is complicated by the difficulty of defining place and in enabling people to recognise their own particular ways of seeing (epistemologies). In exploring place, this chapter draws upon interviews, but also participant observations, archival work and documentary photography – what Coles35 argues is a form of topography (place-writing). In so doing I am, in part, writing a particular representation of place, as well as constructing a particular vision for it. Placing eco-homes It is possible to identify five overarching trends that illustrate the different ways place is evoked and employed in the creation of eco-homes: (1) as climatic location, (2) as being (re)made, (3) as interaction, (4) as exclusion and (5) as local. In relation to how place is defined above, some of these approaches and understandings of place are conceptually limited; they underestimate the complexity of place or seek to construct it in a way which excludes others (sometimes, for example, those already living in a place). As such there are problems in the ways in which many eco-homes have understood place. A great deal can be understood about eco-homes through an analysis of their relationships to place and the different processes included or excluded in their construction of place. Place as climatic location Place is most commonly understood by eco-home builders as a physical location and landscape, which has a particular climate. Vernacular houses have long been built to withstand their climatic location (be that cold, wind, rain or heat, etc.) and an eco-home builds upon these processes to respond to and work with the climate and its weather.36 For eco-building, acknowledging the local climate is often the starting point of designing a house.37 In this understanding of place, the climate shapes what a house needs to do: create warm, cool and/or dry spaces for its residents. The global climate can be broadly categorised into five regions: tropical rainy climates (A), dry climates (B), warm temperate rainy climates (C), cold temperate rainy climates (D) and polar climates (E) (Figure 4.1). Houses built in cold temperate climates (D) need to prioritise creating dry and warm spaces, whereas houses built in tropical rainy climates (A) need to create dry and cool spaces.38

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A: Tropical rainy climate B: Dry climates C: Warm temperate rainy climates D: Cold temperate climates E: Polar climates

4.1 The different climatic regions of the world

Houses in these different climatic regions have very different requirements and designs, with those in cold temperate climates needing highly insulated walls and minimal heat leakage, whereas those in tropical rainy climates might be quite structurally open to allow natural cross-ventilation to flow through and cool a house (Figure 4.2). At the same time, the climate determines which volume-to-area ratio is most suitable (examined in Chapter 1) and which materials are most appropriate to construct a building. Across climatic regions, there are often conventional buildings which are very similar (such as the globally replicated high-rise tower39), but which therefore rely upon technology and mechanistic approaches to manage climatic influences (such as air conditioning or heating systems). In contrast, an eco-home ideally reflects its climatic location by managing, harnessing and maximising the climatic features to enable a house to benefit from natural ventilation, solar gain and passive cooling.40 There are two further overlapping aspects of place as climatic location that are often considered in eco-housing: orientation and time. In order to utilise passive solar gain (or to capture solar power for solar thermal heating or photovoltaic power), houses need to capture as

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4.2 Eco-house in temperate rainy climate at Columbia eco-village, Oregon, and eco-house in tropical rainy climate at Panya Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand

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much sun as possible. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is achieved by orientating houses to the south; in the Southern Hemisphere houses face the north (Figure 4.3), in other words, towards the equator. Temporal changes over the day-to-night cycle and seasons further complicate building for climatic suitability. As Figure 4.3 illustrates, the changing Sun’s path in summer (June) Sun’s path in spring and autumn (March and September equinox) Sun’s path in winter (December)

E

N

S

W Northern Hemisphere

Sun’s path in summer (December) Sun’s path in spring and autumn (September and March) E Sun’s path in winter (June)

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Southern Hemisphere

4.3 Path of the sun over a house in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres

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path of the sun throughout the year reduces the potential for passive solar gain in winter. Houses need to be adaptable to these temporal changes and associated fluctuations in temperature and weather.41 Perceiving place as predominantly a climatic location enables ecobuilders to consider place as a simple, quantifiable and fixed set of physical features to which they should respond, rather than something which is shaped and changed by people. However, even in this instrumental application, eco-builders are, actually, embodying place in their attempts to heat or cool their homes. As Vannini and Taggart42 describe, heating a house with renewable resources, such as wood, requires considerable effort and engagement with place. It requires involvement in place that pushes place beyond being just a static climatic location. Engagement with heat generation results in putting effort into (changing) a place and embodying a place. The pursuit of warmth engages the senses and engages place. In other words, while eco-builders might articulate that place is a fixed physical feature, their interaction with place in building and living in their home begins to suggest that there is more to place than locale. Place as being (re)made In eco-building there is some (limited) recognition that place is complex and already invested with multiple meanings. Roaf and colleagues argue that ‘whether or not we are commencing a new building or altering an old one, there is some kind of place already there. We are converting a place’:43 Buildings are only part of places, even ‘home’ is only part of a house. It is also entry, gateway and garden – and is enmeshed in street and neighbourhood. Every place has a unique spirit. Part of that spirit comes from how the place is used – the actions, thoughts and values of those who inhabit it. And part comes from how it was formed – the geology, weathering, forces of living nature, the elements and human interaction. Part also comes from how we meet it, the concept of place we then form and how this then influences our thoughts and actions.44

Chambers also argues that building interacts with places beyond the immediate site of a house: ‘they are interconnected with the larger dynamic of ecological impact from the manufacturing and processing of materials, the transportation of those materials.’45 Christopher Day,46 however, is unusual among architects for acknowledging both

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the complexity of place and its social qualities. Day understood the importance of place to how a house feels and how it enriches the senses or as he termed it ‘nourish[es] the soul’.47 Building is always about converting a place and for Day, it was necessary to ensure that the places created were varied, non-uniform and although balanced were not symmetrical. In this approach, place is about harnessing natural processes, culture, memory, meanings, identity and social inclusion in design. It is about creating places for people where ‘unfelt places cramp us inwardly as we need to shield ourselves from their message. In felt ones, we can relax, breathe freely and be wholly ourselves.’48 However, the empirical case studies examined in this book rarely acknowledge the importance of a pre-existing place full of social meaning, memories and identities. Place was viewed as no more than a fixed physical landscape which could be erased and upon which a new place made. Where eco-home builders did acknowledge place as already existing, such places were deemed inappropriate, unsustainable and undesirable, for example, the overgrazed fields where Lammas now sits, or the centrally designed grid structure of Portland city. If place was acknowledged, it was simultaneously delegitimised in order to justify the creation of a new place.49 This process of remaking place is placemaking. This inevitably involves inclusions and exclusions. For example, Larsen50 investigated the ways in which activists in Canada articulated a form of place as a political tool that (temporarily) enabled alliances between activists holding very different values. This is a process of obscuring social differences in order to frame a place as having a certain (useful) political identity.51 Sometimes exclusions might not have been intended or recognised as likely outcomes. Jacobs was criticised for failing to acknowledge the risks of creating exclusive neighbourhoods through placemaking that were then vulnerable to gentrification and consequently further exclusion. The qualities of what existed in place, and the importance of what was there, are all too often ignored in urban regeneration projects.52 However, as Brown-Saracino has argued,53 placemaking is rarely a total erasure of what went before. Residents’ search for authenticity leads newcomers to put value in social preservation and in not overwriting place, even when they are part of a broader process of gentrification. The ignorance of seeking to erase and rebuild place is at the crux of many of the contestations around eco-homes development. This

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approach to place wilfully ignores others’ attachment to place. A new home will not simply change how a place looks, but also how it feels, and in turn how other places feel. Often these changes are what nearby residents fear most about new construction – that the place they love will be altered. People can invest a great deal of emotion into the place of their home and this sense of home extends far beyond the physical boundaries of their property to include distant landscapes and horizons, sounds, smells and other difficult-to-quantify attributes such as how sunlight falls upon the structure.54 Sensitivity to the importance of place would reduce potential disharmony between eco-builders and neighbours. In England, the importance of what is already in place is formally acknowledged in planning regulations that explicitly encourage new development to aesthetically match existing homes. Yet place cannot be reduced to aesthetics alone and relying on appealing to a social norm of aesthetic preference is unlikely to entirely resolve tensions around new building. Volume house building uses ‘a housing structure that normally takes any form irrespective of location’,55 and there are numerous examples of modernist architecture, such as that by Le Corbusier (Chapter 3), which sought to deliberately challenge commonly accepted notions of what constituted a building. While there may be identifiable common desires and needs of a home (Chapter 1), there is far less agreement as to what constitutes an appropriate aesthetic. Indeed, the intention of some eco-home projects is to deliberately disrupt place to create the extraordinary. Kraftl’s56 work on the Hundertwasser-Haus in Vienna illustrates the architect Hundertwasser’s desire to create a unique, challenging eco-building that brought nature into the houses and symbolised a natural aesthetic. In this way aesthetics can be an important expression of the process of placemaking. Many eco-home projects examined in this book have a particular aesthetic that is often shared across very different places. For example, similar styles of curved decorated external walls, nonuniform windows, open shelved kitchens and makeshift bathrooms were evident in houses in Spain, England, Argentina, Thailand and the US. In Figure 4.4, these similarities can be seen between El Valle de Sensaciones, a small autonomous eco-community in Andalucía, Spain, which experiments with adobe and wood construction, and Pun Pun, a seed-saving, agricultural project in Chiang Mai, north Thailand, which is also experimenting in adobe building. There was thus a significant

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4.4 An example of shared aesthetics between eco-homes in Spain (El Valle de Sensaciones) and in Thailand (Pun Pun)

shared aesthetic that was easily recognisable and identifiable in these homes. Such aesthetics were probably shared through the same processes of mobilisation as the building techniques themselves (see Chapter 8), and carried both as knowledge and literally as objects from

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the places the builders had previously been. The aesthetics connect these eco-homes between places, but also signify these homes’ disconnection from the places in which they are now built. These aesthetics illustrate how a new place has been purposefully remade in the shape of this shared vision of how an eco-home should look and feel, regardless of the place that was already there. This notion of a vision of how a place should look and be is central to understanding how place is remade by eco-builders. For example, as Halfacree argues, those who self-build affordable eco-homes in the English and Welsh countryside often do so by attempting to create a certain type of rural livelihood ‘whereby everyday lives and “the land” mutually constitute one another’.57 A certain type of rural life is envisioned which rejects both productivist forms of farming and capitalist concerns with money. The ‘back-to-the-land’ movements, as Halfacree terms them, often articulate a particular type of landbased rurality of living off the land.58 This vision is akin to nostalgia for a past rural idyll, an imagined country of a past time of selfsufficiency and a bucolic life (a pleasant pastoral rustic existence).59 That this has rarely been achieved, in that people have rarely been productive enough to survive off their smallholdings, has not dented the quest for an embedded rural eco-existence.60 Indeed, the growth of a post-productivist agriculture, which values diversity, organic and permaculture methods and short produce delivery chains, opens up greater possibilities for just such a lifestyle.61 However, perhaps crucially, the aesthetics of this movement can be at odds with other predominant versions of a ‘rural idyll’.62 These visions, of how a place should be, are simultaneously utopian imaginations of the future and perceptions of a past rural idyll, a tension between an imagined past and distant future, which ignores the ways that place already exists. Indeed, placemaking is always caught between creating a nostalgic past and a utopian future. There is no need to build an eco-home unless one is concerned about the future. Overall, eco-builders too often consider contemporary places as devoid of value and meaning and instead seek to (re)make new places. This placemaking is a moral and political process, expressed in the aesthetics of the housing, which have particular implications for whom such a place is for. Place as interaction Placemaking is in part about constructing places that encourage and generate interactions. Eco-architects like Day63

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place great emphasis on designing places of interaction between buildings, where people will encounter others often in their daily lives. Place defined as interaction with others, and as a social location of conviviality (a place of friendliness), is rooted in the concepts of new urbanism.64 The concept of ‘liveability’ is also increasingly being used to describe a way of building that improves public wellbeing and the socio-environmental quality of life.65 New urbanism is a design movement which emphasises the importance of walkable neighbourhoods, mixed-used layouts and mixed types of housing, public spaces and contextually suitable architecture.66 This approach attempts to engineer a sense of community in place through the built physical environment, and has included regenerating urban places as well as greenfield developments.67 The success of this approach is very much in question. Empirical research has shown that new urbanism does not produce diverse communities, or where there is diversity, this does not lead to diverse social interactions, and therefore it cannot be a solution for poverty and inequality.68 Thus new urbanism potentially repackages suburban sprawl through a façade of nostalgic imagery for a small-town past.69 There are also concerns, especially by geographers, that new urbanism is imposed on places in the form of universal principles, regardless of local specificities.70 While new urbanism has had some success in, for example, reducing car use and increasing pedestrian travel, this cannot necessarily be attributed to the physical design of the place but rather other variables (such as personal attitudes) which influence travel practices.71 New urbanism has been practised and extended in many different ways, including the concept of sustainable urbanism. The influence of new urbanism in eco-homes projects can be seen in the importance given to interaction in placemaking and in community and in the use of physical construction to encourage or facilitate that interaction. Moreover, for eco-home designers and builders, this interaction is not just with other people, but also with the environmental surroundings of the construction.72 Place thus becomes about a heightened interaction with other beings, non-humans and the natural world. Place becomes about sharing (resources and space).73 Such an approach is evident in, for example, the layout of the Low Impact Living Affordable Community (LILAC) in Leeds, England, which was completed in 2013. Now home to twenty households, it is an ecological and affordable co-housing project in an urban space.

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Built on an old school site purchased from the local council in the middle of Bramley neighbourhood, LILAC worked hard to include existing residents in their plans. They have built communal gardens, a play area and a common house, which is also open to neighbours. The aim of LILAC is to reduce their environmental impact, provide a range of affordable housing for a diverse set of residents and make a positive contribution to the surrounding community. LILAC has a range of houses, from four-bedroom homes to studio flats. The homes sit around the edge of the communal garden and all front doors and balconies face inwards to the garden (Figure 4.5). This design encourages interaction with both other residents and the garden, though, as a result, there is less interaction with existing surrounding communities. Furthermore, LILAC has put considerable emphasis on walkability (by limiting car use), mixed-used layouts and mixed types of housing and in constructing a welcoming public space for the whole neighbourhood to share. LILAC has explicitly sought to use architecture to help build a sense of community. As such, there are similarities between new urbanism in its approach to place and some of the tenets of eco-home projects. These overlaps between eco-builders and designers of a more mainstream persuasion potentially undermine some of the claims made by eco-home projects as being novel. It is thus even more important that eco-builders

4.5 LILAC, Leeds74

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acknowledge the criticisms of new urbanist approaches to place and articulate how an ecological understanding of place as interaction is, or could be, improved. Place as exclusion In making place through a moral and political process, eco-builders create place as exclusion: ‘even creating the smallest place is a moral act, for it involves not only creating but also destroying, and including and excluding.’75 This is despite the emphasis on place as interaction. This is not unique to eco-homes; people are considered in place or out of place in all sorts of places.76 This is often determined by people’s appearance, gender, cultural identity or their values. Indeed, eco-home projects are seeking, in part, to deliberately exclude those who engage in environmentally destructive practices (such as, for example, flying or excessive use of water). At the same time, eco-home places, through the process of homophily (‘the observable tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to aggregate together in social networks and groups’77), results in places of exclusion by default. For example, as discussed in detail in Chapter 7, there are particular gender exclusions in the building practices used in many of the case studies of this book. A good example of an eco-community constructing place as exclusion is Matavenero in León province, north-west Spain. In 1989, an international group of people (German, Danish and Spanish) chose it as a place where they could build an autonomous and self-sufficient eco-village free from the interferences of the world beyond. The village is purposefully remote, with the nearest road a 20-minute walk away and access either by a two-hour walk through the mountains (across scree and rivers) from San Facundo (to the north), or a drive up mountain tracks via Foncebadón (to the south). Tony Wrench describes it as ‘an isolated place of extremes’.78 Along with the difficulty in accessing it, it lacks a secondary school (though the state has provided a teacher for primary education), lacks income (most people have to leave the village to earn money – that said, money has little value once in the village), and it is hard, back-breaking work to craft a sustainable lifestyle in that location, growing your own food, collecting firewood, and maintaining buildings and infrastructure. The village does not seek conversations with its neighbours, or run workshops or educate beyond its realm. Instead, it is a quiet place of peace and individual perseverance. Currently about seventy people live

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in the village, though numbers fall during winter. The winters in particular are very difficult. In other words, exclusions are created through its location, approach to livelihoods and its self-sufficiency ethos. This all hinders attracting new members and makes life hard for those who choose to live there, but it also limits Matavenero’s ability to influence others. Longhurst79 identifies a number of other processes which (as institutions which support alternatives, appealing landscapes and certain image representations of place) along with homophily, combine to produce an alternative milieu – a countercultural locality. The ecohomes themselves can sometimes serve to start this process of creating an alternative milieu, providing a base from which other initiatives begin. These alternative milieu then serve to exclude those who might be out of place. This process is akin to a claiming of territory, a form of environmental gentrification, a place upon which to build an ecotopia. Some eco-home projects seek to enact an open sense of place – sharing space, knowledge and heightening awareness of reality. For others, however, their aesthetics and values (such as veganism) can serve to exclude those who are unfamiliar or different, and despite at times seeking to share knowledge, their contributions remain obscure to newcomers. For eco-homes, particular class and racial exclusions become entrenched. Place as local Place understood as a particular scale, as in a bounded territory that could be considered ‘local’, was a popular assertion of casestudy participants. This tallies with a conception of place as a particular part of the natural environment, such as a watershed or forest. It also reflects understandings of the rural idyll as having a certain localness about it – doing things by hand, short supply chains between producers and consumers, and relying on nearby provisions. That there might be assumed an innate link between environmental sustainability and localness is evident in policy documents such as the United Nations Local Agenda 21 programme.80 A popular concept in eco-building is that of ‘human scale’, whereby buildings are built in relation to the geometric proportions of the human body (often the male body, as discussed further in Chapter 8). For Day, ‘scale and alienation are linked’,81 so there is a need to make large buildings feel approachable with walkways and lower frontages. In this way, human and local scale become articulated as more appropriate, more understandable and innately ‘better’. Localism was practically articulated in eco-build

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projects through the use of nearby building materials, reducing travel, eating seasonal food, building small dwellings and learning local languages. This approach represents a valorisation of all things local, ‘linking localness to the ideas of quality, health and rurality’.82 Thus place is understood as enabling ‘an environmentally benign localism’,83 where waste is radically reduced. The trouble with this approach is that scale is not dualistic, it is not split between local and global, and neither can one scale be good and the other bad.84 Relational ties have long existed and economically privileging one place over another as a defensive approach is unlikely to protect places in the ways its advocates might imagine.85 It is a form of isolation that fails to acknowledge how places are forever interconnected with other (global) places.86 Treating scale as a binary also constructs scale as an obstacle to be overcome, so that ‘the conceptual bases of hierarchical scale are politically regressive because they unhelpfully reproduce sociospatial inequalities and choke off possibilities of resistance.’87 The eco-builders’ articulation of localism, however, in part obscures an openness to other places which a defensive localism precludes.88 An ethics of care for distant others was identifiable in many eco-home projects as an understanding of how residents’ actions affected others elsewhere and an acknowledgement of the global implications of climate change. Yet there was also an unresolved tension between understanding place as local territory or place as relationality.89 Featherstone and colleagues argue that it is possible, through acknowledging the interconnectivity of place to create ‘generally inclusive, outward-looking place-based politics’.90 This is a place politics that is embedded in the local while also interacting with the state and beyond. This is a politics which recognises how acts in one place will impact on others elsewhere and how there is a responsibility to care for those distant others.91 However, this approach still privileges the local, which in turn undermines the ability to see the connections between all humans, non-humans and the natural world. It still considers scale as hierarchical and retains a tension between localism and the need to spatially expand the sense of socio-ecological responsibility.92 Rather than focusing on scale, and prioritising the local, Larsen and Johnson argue that ‘an open sense of place is about … finding the shared place in which all beings dwell.’93 In other words, what is important in place are ‘the complex interactions within and among social and natural processes’94 rather than necessarily the scale at which they occur.

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Placemaking in Portland Eco-building is still regarded by many opponents as being out of place by importing new ideas and approaches into areas that challenge the existing cultures of place.95 Two case studies are explored here for their different engagements with place and the consequences of these engagements. The City Repair Project is an urban reclamation project and Lammas (Tir y Gafel) is a rural low impact development. Established in 1996, the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, begins with the premise that the places in which we live extend far beyond our private homes. Home extends in the physical sense of how we use these spaces between houses, and how our use of homes is linked through shared infrastructure (such as pipes, wiring, flows of sewage and water). A house is physically connected to others through that infrastructure and the commodity chains that deliver the goods we use and consume. A home is also socially connected to others through our flows of mobility between home and beyond which extend along streets, roads and highways. For eco-homes, this means that ‘we cannot fix the problems of buildings by simply dealing with individual buildings. We have to look at the problem from the perspective of cities, towns, regions, and eventually, nations and multiple nations.’96 This attendance to the interconnected nature of housing is not particularly novel. As discussed in Chapter 3, the failure to reduce the environmental impact of these infrastructures led to the early development of autonomous housing designs. However, this recognition of the necessity to look beyond the singular structure of a house when exploring its impact comes at a time when those infrastructures and the spaces beyond private homes are being increasingly privatised.97 There has been a gradual but persistent erosion of public space, especially in cities, so that even seemingly public spaces such as pavements are becoming regulated and owned by corporate interests who are then able and willing to limit what activities can take place.98 In response, groups like the City Repair Project have sought to reclaim public space by creatively transforming urban spaces for community use. This has involved projects such as ‘intersection repairs’, where the crossroads of streets are turned into public squares. The road is literally painted as a form of traffic calming and other structures like noticeboards, benches and kiosks are built to turn the intersection ‘back from a place to move through to a place to stay’.99 This transformation

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is illustrated in Figure 4.6, in a cartoon by Andy Singer. Before the repair, car use dominated the junction and pedestrians led isolated lives polluted by vehicles. After the repair, people dominate and engage with each other in the shared public space.

4.6 Cartoon of the work by City Repair Project at Sunnyside Plaza, Portland, Oregon100

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The principle aim is to create gathering spaces, places of interaction. Mark Lakeman, a co-founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, suggests that the US has ‘the lowest number of outdoor gathering places of all first world nations’. The grid system across most US cities means that ‘we live in boxes in squares’, which segregate people and their lives. Lakeman argues that society is improved when people interact and their lives overlap, encouraging mutual support and democratic processes. This can be facilitated by design which creates space through which interaction and resulting ‘culture’ can be built. In an interview with Mark Lakeman he explains that ‘Design in this country … is about what things look like, and it’s not about really even how it works, or whether or not it facilitates culture building or interaction or participation … culture happens over there, this is just a zone where people are housed, this is not for culture making.’ For the City Repair Project, placemaking is the act of remaking and reclaiming place for community use. This is grounded in an understanding of community as neighbourhood; local and geographically bounded. Place is (re)made to constitute gathering spaces for community interaction, communication, exchange and participation: Placemaking is a multi-layered process within which citizens foster active, engaged relationships to the spaces which they inhabit, the landscapes of their lives, and shape those spaces in a way which create a sense of communal stewardship and lived connection. This is most often accomplished through a creative reclamation of public space … that demonstrates to all who pass through that this is a Place: inhabited, known and loved by its residents.101

These places are collectively cared for and not individually owned; they are places of common ground in a community.102 The process of placemaking is necessarily participatory; local volunteers creatively redefine their own community by physically building a place through art, benches, shelters, tea stations, public gardens and book kiosks on the corners of intersections (Figure 4.7). There is a certain aesthetics to these installations, familiar in their style to other eco-constructions in eco-villages worldwide, which a vocal minority opposed as being ‘offensive’103 and at first City Repair had intended to build more in keeping with the local vernacular. They realised, according to Mark Lakeman, that ‘the whole point of doing this is so that people create

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stuff that reflects who they are, from one neighbourhood to the next’ and that all these houses come from a Sears catalogue, so they’ve never reflected participation – now we’re going to be participating and then we’re going to make the stuff we create together look like the stuff we never participated to create? … why do these structures have to look like something that matches your house when they could instead maybe look like trees … what sustainability will look like is like stuff we have never seen before, because social sustainability and social ecology means way more involvement and way more inclusiveness; much more diverse expressions of everything.

The intention is to increase community interaction and encourage individuals to get involved in their local community life with the resulting environmental, health and social benefits for all. Lakeman argues that the projects have reduced crime, and acted as a ‘stabilisation effect in the neighbourhood – there are more families with kids that are living around here.’ While such projects might result in more socially cohesive places, the City Repair Project also hopes that they trigger broader changes: ‘this is a catalyst … once people have the experience of actually working with other people … it also inspires them to think that other things can be different too.’104 The City Repair Project understands place as a very locally bounded geographical neighbourhood that needs to be reclaimed from those distant others who seek to design and regulate it from afar. Through this process of placemaking, place becomes a shared, cared for, local, connected and active collective space. Place is understood by the City Repair Project as interaction, local, and (re)made – with what was there before being considered illegitimate because it came from a Sears catalogue. The City Repair Project explicitly draws upon Jacob’s concept of placemaking and therefore new urbanism. It seeks to create place that is convivial and improves liveability, understood in relation to lowering crime as well as enhancing community. Place is also explicitly local. In effect, the project suggests that by situating oneself in a place and connecting through place to others geographically nearby, a better community can be built. Place is thus limited, bound and closed. Place is understood as a political and moral process by City Repair. Public place (that space between and beyond our homes) is explicitly constructed as a central gathering place, through which all other social

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4.7 City Repair Project community constructions – T-station at Share-It Square and YHA Pavilion, Portland, Oregon

and ecological improvements can be triggered. While the disjuncture of the aesthetics is acknowledged by Lakeman and claimed as a purposeful action to remake place in better ways, the exclusionary potential of the approach is less well understood. That some people have objected to the aesthetics is considered by the City Repair Project to be due to objectors’ failure to understand how environmental sustainability creates different possibilities. That the designs and aesthetics are, in many ways, similar to structures in eco-communities worldwide and thus less an autonomous outpouring of local creativity and more a replication of a certain vision of an ecotopia, is not recognised. As such, the potential for such places to be exclusionary is not fully considered. Indeed, as with other eco-places, these places are constructed, in part, in an attempt to exclude those who wish to rely on motorised transport or who do not want to participate in community. At the same time, however, great effort is put into trying to create an open sense of place – where place is shared through free tea stations, book share kiosks and open events encouraging all to participate. Through local engagement, the City Repair Project is attempting to construct place as varied and complex, even if ultimately that is not entirely achieved.

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The natural world is acknowledged, but as secondary to people; Mark Lakeman argues that they design places so that people will want ‘to creatively engage with the world and help to heal it through choices and through design. We are doing ecological design all the time but we begin with people.’ Here the quest to ‘heal’ the earth is part of the moral imperative of placemaking. The natural world is somewhat limited to the use of wood, mud, straw and stone in the benches, shelters and tea stations. Gardens and plants have been added into sidewalk planters, but these shape the place far less than the more visually dominant structures and road paintings. The construction of place as local and bounded, and the lack of recognition of the implications of the project’s aesthetics in its remaking, employs a conceptually limited concept of place. While place as a political and moral process is understood and effort is made to construct an open sense of place, a more relational concept of place would potentially enable City Repair to build a more inclusive and less local form of place. Place as utopia in Wales In a very different place in the rural hills of west Wales is the emerging Lammas eco-village called Tir y Gafel. Lammas is an organisation dedicated to promoting Low Impact Development (LID) which is a form of low impact living, a deep green vision where the environmental impact of all aspects of our daily lives is dramatically minimised. It is a radical form of housing and livelihood that seeks to work in harmony with the landscape and natural world around it. Low Impact Developments are environmental in their construction and maintenance, and in the ways in which they are lived in (for example, minimising vehicle use, reducing consumption and purchasing items locally). Many of them are also autonomous – operating with off-grid electricity and their own water supply, and with minimal visual impact. Low Impact Development is a combination of land-based livelihoods, and carbon-neutral homes which blend into the landscape.105 After four years of planning applications and appeals, planning permission was granted in August 2009 for a new settlement of nine eco-smallholdings on mixed pasture and woodland of south-facing land at Pont y Gafel farm, Glandwr, Pembrokeshire (Figure 4.8). The Joint Unitary Development Plan (JUDP), Policy 52 – ‘Low Impact Development’ explicitly allowed low impact development

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4.8 Simon and Jasmine’s unfinished house at Tir y Gafel, Pembrokeshire, Wales

on rural greenfield sites providing a number of conditions were met. Development must be highly sustainable, use local, renewable, recycled and/or natural materials and have low visual impact. Residents must also ensure that land-based activity (be it agriculture, forestry or horticulture) provides 75 per cent of basic household needs. In other words, residents’ livelihoods must be tied directly to the land thus proving a need to be living on the land. The settlement must, in order to comply with their planning stipulations, overall offer positive environmental, social and/or economic contributions with public benefit.106 The plots are on average two hectares (five acres) in size and include access to common forestry and grazing areas. The settlement seeks to provide all its renewable energy, sanitation and water needs, with use of the site’s three springs and extensive rainwater harvesting.107 They have also built a ‘community hub’, which acts as an education centre, cafe, shop and as a space available for local people to use. Residents of the new Tir y Gafel eco-village are seeking to radically alter the place in which they are building. Previously sheep-grazing farmland, the residents have a vision of ecologically rejuvenating the land to increase biodiversity, productivity and the variety of wildlife species and crops108 (for example, Figure 4.9). It is a vision of abundance

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4.9 Cassi and Nigel’s half-completed straw-bale roundhouse at Tir y Gafel, Pembrokeshire, Wales

of nature that is rooted in a deep green and permaculture philosophy that advocates the necessity of healthy complex ecosystems for environmental and human survival. Tir y Gafel illustrates several of the ways in which place was conceived of as a climatic location, as being (re)made, as exclusive and as local. Practical considerations drove the focus to rural land in Pembrokeshire where farmland is relatively cheap, the land was more plentiful and less damaged than in urban locations (increasing the possibility of being able to live off the land), and the new JUDP LID Policy 52 opened up the possibility of planning permission. Few of the new residents were from Wales (or spoke Welsh) and none were from the region. Pont y Gafel farm was identified by Lammas as a place empty of social meaning and with a damaged natural environment. The existing place was only being understood as a static climatic location with physical features of a spring and south-facing slopes. As place was considered as a blank canvas of physical features, it was open to being (re)made. Repopulating farmland with humans and indigenous flora and fauna is, in part, an attempt to recreate a past when smallholders worked and cared for rural land in labour-intensive ways, and in part, a construction of a new environmental anti-capitalist

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rurality.109 Tir y Gafel is a good example of Halfacree’s110 back-to-theland movements that are constructing a particular vision of a rural idyll and an imposed utopia. Indeed, there are long-established links between eco-communities such as Lammas and quests for utopia (explored further in Chapter 9). In this case, Tir y Gafel is imbued with a sense of place as territory, a moral placemaking and as a frontier project. Lammas has always been very explicit in the quest to reclaim farmland and remake it as abundant productive land with ecological benefits. This construction of place relies on a particular vision and use of place and placemaking. The place that was before was delegitimised as poor-quality grazing land devoid of environmental and social value. This radical rurality challenged many people’s conception of a rural space, and in particular their attachment to the rural position of Pont y Gafel farm. Lammas faced significant resistance to their proposals from local councillors, residents of Glandwr and neighbouring farmers. Objections were driven by numerous fears hinging on stereotypes about the new residents being ‘hippies’, the perceived disruption to existing ways of life (through, for example, increased traffic) and the changed visual landscape.111 This opposition was a form of Nimbyism (not in my backyard). Indeed, the founder of Lammas, Paul Wimbush, said, ‘I had a letter from one of the locals in Glandwr saying “why don’t you just go somewhere else and do it.”’112 Objectors did not, on the whole, disagree with the need for more energy-efficient housing, the necessity for renewable energy, new residents (even the English) moving to Wales113 or the idea that people should farm the land.114 They did not, however, want these things in Glandwr. The situation was not helped by Lammas who presented their plans as a fait accompli, and were thus unable (or unwilling) to involve existing residents in the early processes of design. This rather limited form of public engagement, coupled with the original anticipated scale of 25 dwellings, quickly created a division between supporters and objectors. As Devine-Wright has argued, once the concept of local resistance has been articulated it becomes selffulfilling115 and Paul Wimbush conceded that ‘we could have presented it in a lot more digestible form to begin with’.116 The significance of the impact of this Nimby opposition is questionable, as research has shown such objectors rarely sway the final outcome, but rather that institutional factors have most influence on the decision,117 and in the case of Lammas the local County Council

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opposed the new eco-village on numerous grounds. However, such objections certainly made life harder for the prospective new residents, and the County Council planners took into consideration some of the issues raised. Although Lammas sought to appease some local concerns – developing a Welsh language policy, improving the traffic reduction strategy and ensuring that they supported and complemented the fragile local economy – they also sought to bypass them by generating international support and taking the case to the national Welsh Assembly Planning Inspectorate. What was missing in the early stages of Lammas, and I say this conceding my own involvement and failure in this process, was an acknowledgement of local residents’ attachment to the place of Glandwr.118 Instead, Lammas assumed, like many other developers faced with Nimby reactions, that locals simply did not have enough environmental knowledge or green values.119 When angered locals further responded by expressing inaccurate assumptions, stereotypes and myths about Lammas, they were considered to have a surfeit of emotion. Lammas failed to adequately communicate the relationship between their abstract environmental ideals and the particular place of Pont y Gafel farm. While Lammas articulated how their project was fulfilling the national needs of a society (for affordable housing, renewable energy and livelihoods), they did little to communicate how and why those needs related to the particular place of Glandwr, or how Glandwr contributed to the problems which needed solving through this new place. Residents’ understanding of a place was being threatened by newcomers who wanted to remake a place they cherished, and the more it was justified with abstract ideology the less existing residents felt that Lammas understood the meaning of the specific place of Pont y Gafel. Lammas quickly learnt that ‘even in the middle of nowhere there is a rural community that you do need to engage and you do need to interact with.’120 Their biggest mistake was to fail to understand the complex ways in which place was viewed and valued by existing residents. By the time this was realised oppositional views had already become entrenched and highly emotive. Although since construction began Lammas has worked hard to build an open sense of place, this openness remains threatened by myths and misunderstandings: ‘It’s totally normal for there to be overwhelming opposition from local people, and in time that fades … I’m hoping that just by continuing to

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be open, totally open and totally reasonable, and continuing to try and dispel the myths and present what it is that we’re doing, that we will win over some more people in Glandwr.’121 Compounding this opposition was that Tir y Gafel appears to be a place of exodus; a retreat from the unsustainable practices of mainstream society and the creation of an isolated community on a remote Welsh hillside. It reflects attempts to reconnect with nature, or create a place more of nature. As such it was a place of post-capitalist practices, what Carlsson and Manning refer to as ‘nowtopians’,122 which along with the eco-village aesthetics excluded those who were unfamiliar with the style and facilities (such as compost toilets). This sense of place as exclusion is also present in the ways in which Tir y Gafel was trying to disrupt their connection to the mainstream through autonomous housing. Vannini and Taggart123 suggest that living off grid may not be a purposeful choice of exodus that is entirely voluntary, but rather ‘the pull of the remove … an unexplainable attraction toward the idylls of the countryside and wilderness’124 may be the motivation which in itself is perhaps even harder for others to understand. If Tir y Gafel was not entirely motivated by a political ideology or a utopic vision but rather ‘the pull of the remove’, this complexity of motive might further serve to reduce comprehension by outsiders. Finally, place for Lammas was relational; they related the impact of their practices to climate change, international environmental education projects and engaging with the state and distant others. Its goals required reaching far beyond a particular place. Even before they were able to start building, Lammas had needed to get national support from the Welsh Assembly and in so doing became symbolic of Welsh support for environmental sustainability innovation, thereby cementing the importance of national state support for environmental policy.125 Lammas also only ever conceived of Tir y Gafel as the first of many similar projects and have used the Glandwr farmland as a demonstration place, and their Internet presence as a way to share their methods to all. Yet place, for Lammas, was also constructed as local in a bounded and static way. This included the quest to only use local building materials, generate their income from the land, eat locally produced food and support the bio-regional economy. This form of localism was about minimising environmental impact by reducing travel miles. Ultimately Tir y Gafel employed a scaled notion of place as local.

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Conclusions Two case examples identify different ways in which eco-homes projects have related to place. The City Repair Project’s central focus is on processes of placemaking, whereby place becomes a shared, cared for, local, connected and active collective space. Place in this sense is a very locally bounded location. By participating in reclaiming place for community use, Lakeman argues that people will feel empowered to get involved in other political, social and environmental projects. Lammas, specifically at the Tir y Gafel ecovillage, began by understanding place predominantly as a physical landscape. Their encounters with opposition from the existing residents of Glandwr and their efforts to put their vision of environmental sustainability into practice led them to develop a more complex understanding of place as a dynamic cultural and physical entity that interconnected with other places. These two examples are exemplars of the ways in which place was understood across the case studies. For many eco-home projects, place tended to be conceived of as climatic location, being (re)made, as interaction, as exclusion and as local. Place as containing meaning, memories, perceptions and identities, and as dynamic, unfinished and constantly evolving, was rarely acknowledged. Recognising the dynamism and importance of place requires eco-builders to understand existing social relations, meanings and emotional attachments to that place. Understanding place is particularly important in eco-building because ‘buildings can be a point of articulation for complex contestations over the meaning of and access to certain places.’126 Without greater attendance to the particularities of place there is a danger that ecohomes becomes ‘presented as the universal solution to an essentially contextual experienced and created issue’.127 It is therefore important to critique processes of placemaking to ensure that existing place is understood and incorporated into ongoing transformations of place. As such this chapter has explored both how eco-builders (mis)understand place and the need to develop our theoretical conceptualisations of place. Place is a process whereby builders can ‘invest meaning into the landscape’,128 create diversity between and within places,129 and construct progressive forms of place which encourage sharing, compassion, tolerance and an acknowledgement of interdependence with others. This openness was evident in the City Repair Project and Tir y Gafel, but it was also obscured by tendencies to fail to incorporate

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existing residents’ views of place and to consider place as too locally bound. On a very practical level, this local boundedness underestimated the importance of (social and environmental) infrastructures to ecohomes and the limited impact of just disconnecting from existing infrastructures. Understanding place and eco-homes enables an analysis of eco-builders’ intentions. So far, it illustrates a limited conceptualisation of place that, although it values interaction and the natural world, has a tendency to result in exclusions, ignorance of what previously existed and the perception that place equates to being local.

5 | AF F ORD AB I L I T Y

As the sun set I could see the storm approaching from across the mountains to the east. Shards of lightening crackled above Taos and the breeze turned cooler. A resident had mentioned the thunderstorms and celebrated that because the Earthships are autonomous they don’t lose electrical power. The homes were beacons of comfort in a harsh landscape, surrounded by desert and a climate which includes searing summer heat and frozen snowy winters. Earthships, built from reclaimed tyres rammed into solid walls and sunk slightly into the earth, with windows toward the sun, are the invention of Mike Reynolds. His quest to design and build affordable eco-homes led to years of experimentation in the New Mexico desert. Once built, the homes have no running costs, they generate electricity through photovoltaic panels, collect rainwater, reuse water through numerous filtering systems, and are designed to maintain a comfortable internal temperature throughout the year using window vents, shades and passive solar. The Earthships here have tended to be self-built on cheap land in a place with minimal building regulations. They are affordable to those who have the time to build and the flexibility to live in a place remote from many jobs. Of all the presumptions attached to eco-homes, the most pervasive, popular and oft repeated is that eco-homes cost more than conventional housing, and as such they are expensive and unaffordable. This rhetoric frames eco-homes as a luxury for the wealthy, or a choice for the environmentally committed willing to make sacrifices. This perceived cost of eco-homes are one of the biggest, if not the main, rationale used to explain its lack of uptake. This chapter explores how we can (and in many places already do) build more affordable eco-homes worldwide. This requires understanding the interweaving pressures that push up the price of housing per se, from capitalist processes (housing built for profit generation and investment, market-determined prices), state/government processes (planning restrictions increasing land prices, the financial costs of complying with planning and building regulations), to social

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5.1 An Earthship, Greater World Earthship Community, near Taos, New Mexico

processes (opposition to new developments, demand for more spacious and luxurious homes). It also requires identifying those costs that are excluded from current calculations, such as the environmental impacts of housing, and lifetime and maintenance costs. The current ways in which housing is ‘costed’ are limited and limiting, and the processes of why and how we build houses creates unaffordable housing. As such we continue to perpetuate the problem of expensive housing, even before we consider improving design with ecological features. These complex processes need to be understood and unpacked in order to identify better alternatives. In other words, there is no simple cause of (or solution to) high-cost housing; it is not simply a matter of relaxing planning restrictions, increasing supply or increasing state subsidies. Even some eco-homes experiments that have sought

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to develop low-cost approaches have encountered problems where financial costs have risen significantly or residents end up living on the financial margins of society. There are multiple processes at work in the housing market where private construction firms seek solely to make profit at the point of sale (and therefore reject any perceived additional expenditure on ecological features), but also that too often eco-builders rely on using self or volunteer labour (sweat equity) as the main way in which to reduce building costs, ignoring many other financial issues. Defining affordability As the majority of people become poorer in real terms, ever growing numbers are finding housing less and less affordable, even in areas where rents are not rising and where prices are static or even falling.1 Affordability is a measure of the capital (or income) of someone in relation to housing costs – in other words, whether the capital they have available will enable them to afford to purchase or rent a house. Such a definition, however, is immediately complicated by the different ways in which affordability can be calculated, what such calculations are intended to achieve, what is included, assumptions made in such calculations and different interpretations of the causes of the lack of affordability.2 Affordability of housing is calculated in a number of different ways: as the median gross income ratio to housing costs (purchase or rental);3 in relation to residual income after other basic needs have been purchased, such as food and fuel;4 as a combination of traditional affordability ratios and residual income;5 and using the Housing Affordability Index (HAI),6 which calculates affordability across a range of different incomes in one region. A low HAI score suggests greater affordability in an area. In addition to these calculations, there are different concepts of affordability such as purchase affordability (and availability of capital or credit) versus repayment affordability (which is the ability to repay any borrowings).7 Given the financial recession which began in 2007, triggered in part by poor lending practices by banks on sub-prime mortgages, the ability of people to purchase houses is a poor indicator of their ability to repay loans.8 These calculations also include different elements of housing expenditure. Some measures only include the initial house purchase price (or the monthly rental cost). The actual cost of housing also

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includes other bills such as energy and utility bills, insurance and tax (such as council tax in Britain), without which a house cannot be occupied. Including the costs of occupation is likely to improve the affordability of eco-homes precisely because their lifecycle costs are less than conventional houses. Different countries use different definitions of affordability.9 In Britain the government defines affordability as simply being below market rent: ‘affordable housing is social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing, provided to eligible households whose needs are not met by the market.’10 This form of affordable housing is encouraged through the planning system, where new developments must negotiate the amount of affordable housing they will provide under Section 106 agreements.11 In practice this means that ‘Affordable Rent is subject to rent controls that require a rent of no more than 80% of the local market rent (including service charges, where applicable).’12 This approach makes no attempt to relate house prices to available incomes, or to consider residual incomes in relation to other basic needs such as energy bills, food or travel. England used to have significant public affordable housing subsidised by the state that by the 1970s constituted a third of the country’s housing. In the late 1970s, however there was a political shift towards neoliberalism and privatisation of previously state-owned housing that, advocated by the prime minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, resulted in the loss of significant affordable housing.13 The result is very high average house prices in Britain. Using an affordability ratio of median house prices to median gross salaries by district, in 2010, 44 per cent of local authorities had affordability ratios greater than 7.7. In other words, residents in those districts would need to spend over seven times their gross salary to purchase a house, whereas most banks will only offer mortgages up to four times a wouldbe purchaser’s salary.14 In the US, housing affordability is defined far more explicitly as a percentage of gross income: ‘a housing cost that does not exceed 30% of a household’s gross income. Those housing costs include taxes and insurance for owners, and usually include utility costs.’15 The cost of housing and its unaffordability is a pervasive and perpetual problem worldwide. The lack of supply and thus high cost of available housing has long led to informal settlements – handmade shelters built from reclaimed materials on marginal land in cities.16

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There is also a historical precedent to costly housing and cheaper alternatives. As discussed in Chapter 3, there is a long history of vernacular housing, of the poor having to house themselves, and of anarchist housing. The poor in any society have long had to squat land and self-build shelter and in so doing avoid compliance with planning regulations and building regulation. Affordability is used in this chapter to denote the ability to rent or purchase a house, and cover its associated costs, on a median income while having a residual income that covers all other basic needs. There is much merit in the US’s guidance that a house and its associated costs should cost less than 30 per cent of a household’s income. The financial costs of building The cost of building The financial costs of building are a result of the expense of all the elements required to build houses and the way in which houses are considered a reliable form of financial investment. The main factors are summarised in Table 5.1. Building a new house involves numerous costs: land, material, labour and professional fees (Figure 5.2). A new home also relies upon infrastructures: material (or hard) infrastructures (roads, bridges, power lines and water supply networks) and social (or soft) infrastructures (economic and

TABLE 5.1 Sources of financial costs for private house construction Main factors contributing to house costs

Includes

Land

Purchase costs

Planning

Applications, changes and appeals

Infrastructures

Material (or hard) infrastructures (roads, bridges, power lines and water supply networks) and social (or soft) infrastructures (economic and governance systems)

Professional fees

Architects’ and designers’ fees

Compliance fees

Planning and building control fees and tax on materials

Labour

All labour costs

Materials

All material costs

Market

The financial circle through which housing becomes an investment

Occupation

Includes energy running costs, state costs such as council tax

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governance systems). Indeed, Putnam17 has identified the increasing importance of infrastructures – sewers, utility mains, power cables, and telephone lines – as a key transformation of homes since the late nineteenth century. In a contemporary house in England, the two largest areas of expenditure are estimated to be materials (40 per cent) and labour (34 per cent). Eco-builders have sought to reduce these costs through a variety of ways. Material costs have been reduced in case studies such as Landmatters (England), the ReBuild Center and Earthship Biotecture (both in the US) by using reclaimed or recycled components. The Earthships literally use rubbish to build the structural components of the house – car tyres rammed with cans and other waste materials. In other words, although some eco-materials, particularly technologies like photovoltaic panels or other specialist items, might add additional costs to eco-homes, most case studies sought to reduce material costs. Likewise the costs of complying with planning were reduced by many by building in areas where planning regulations were lax (La Ecoaldea Del Michal, southern Spain, an emerging eco-village in the Andalucían hills building wooden zomes), or sought to remain hidden from detection (Green Hills, Scotland, discussed further in Chapter 6). The Low Impact Development movement supports, and has helped develop in Wales, special planning exception for low impact housing and livelihood projects on rural land.18 As a result, Lammas was the

10%

16% Land Materials Labour Professional fees

34% 40%

5.2 Ratio of key costs of house building in England 2010: land, materials, labour and professional fees19

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first eco-village in Britain to be built legally, rather than requiring retrospective planning permission. To reduce labour costs the National Custom & Self Build Association (NaCSBA), has argued that the best way is to encourage self-build.20 The average cost of constructing a brick-and-block house in Britain in 2012 was £1,200 per m2 using a contractor. If self-built, the cost could be reduced by half (excluding cost of site, professional fees, connecting costs or landscaping) (Figure 5.3).21 There are regional variations within this figure, for example building in London is 8 per cent more expensive, but building in Northern Ireland is 30 per cent cheaper than this estimate. The need for external tradespeople to do some certified work, for example on electrics, does have to be taken into account. However, by removing labour costs from the cost equation, houses become more affordable. Many case studies, given they were self-build, relied upon sweat equity in order to reduce costs. Self-building does not, however, actually remove the costs of labour. Labour is both time and skill. Dedicating time to build a house takes time away from other activities, such as earning an income or taking care of children. In other words, self-labour still has a cost. Time is also needed to learn how to build, or if building is learnt through doing, then

Planning restrictions

High cost of renovation and retrofit makes new build financially attractive

Low taxes on houses as an asset

High development land cost

Small densely built conventional houses, sold at high prices

Houses viewed as investment because of continued price rises

Small profit margin for construction firms

Shortage of housing – spatially uneven demand & increasing single occupancy

Location rather than house form determines value. Ecological features unlikely to add value

Opposition to new building developments

HOUSE AS AN INVESTMENT OBJECT. Financial value increases considered good for economy

5.3 Costs of brick-and-block two-storey house construction in Britain, 2012 (excluding cost of site, professional fees, connecting costs, or landscaping)22

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it will take longer. As Evans and colleagues argue,23 a self-builder needs skill, time, determination and money. In other words, self-build actually just hides labour costs without accounting for time and effort spent. Land ownership and permission to build In many countries, there has long been a process of uneven and unequal land ownership. In England, the large house construction companies also operate a system of land banking; that is, they purchase large swathes of land in areas they might build on in future, but ‘bank it’, leaving it undeveloped for many years until they decide to use it. There are plenty, like ‘The Land is Ours’ campaign group, that argue against these forms of land ownership and call for a return to more communal systems, highlighting the way in which land ownership is a form of power: ‘access to land is not simply a threat to landowning elites – it is a threat to the religion of unlimited economic growth and the power structure that depends upon it.’24 In most countries, the state’s planning regulatory system heavily influences how land is financially valued and made available for house construction. Although the value of land is in part determined by demand for it, and thus land in, for example, central London will cost more than equivalent-sized land in rural Wales because of the different level of demand for that land, planning permission is the most significant determinate of land price. In Britain, although we have thousands of acres of agricultural land, forested areas and water systems,25 land with planning permission to build houses is extremely limited and thus very expensive. It is therefore not a case that there is a land shortage in England, rather there is a shortage of land with permission to build houses, and this mechanism for allocating permission to build produces high land prices. Eco-builders worldwide dealt with high land costs in broadly similar ways – by building in places others did not want to live. In the US, the Lama Foundation was built up a dirt track on the side of a mountain overlooking the New Mexico desert (discussed further in Chapters 6 and 9), Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center (a small project in autonomous sustainable living and education centre, also in New Mexico) was built miles from the nearest road, while in Wales, Lammas eco-village was built on farmland in rural Pembrokeshire. Often eco-builders would seek out landscapes for which there was little demand and therefore benefit from cheaper land value. In some countries, such as Argentina, Thailand, the US and Spain, land in these more remote places was less governed by planning restrictions

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and therefore both cheaper and easier to build on. In Britain, all land is subject to planning and the more remote it is the less likely permission to build will be granted. None the less, many eco-homes have been built discreetly in Britain by people hoping that they will not be discovered. Housing as a financial investment It is clear that the process of housing production is not dominated by design decisions, but rather that financial concerns are paramount … The increasing reliance on market pressures as determinants of provision and design … bear witness to the changing status of housing, from being regarded as an engine for social improvement to being a consumer good like any other … housing outcomes are once again a direct reflection of inequalities of market power.26

House ownership is often an attractive financial investment.27 In recent years, the price of housing has increased exponentially, which means that homeowners benefit from house price appreciation while also having somewhere to live. The processes through which housing is understood as an investment are illustrated in Figure 5.4. Self build

Contractor

300

Cost (£ per m2)

250 200 150 100 50

in

w

fs

Ro o

Build process

5.4 Housing as an investment in Britain

cs tri ec El

io ns do Ext w ern tru sa a nd l w ct ur do alls e In or , an te s d rn co al ve w al r in ls gs Ca an rp d en pa try rti tio an incl ns d ud Fi upp ing ni sh er sta in flo irs gs o de (in rs co clu Jo ra di in tio ng er ns ya ) n Pl d um fit tin bi ng gs an d he at in g

un Fo

Pr

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im

in

da t

ar ie

s

0

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A combination of factors leads to high land prices, which are fed into high house sale prices, combined with high demand (mainly through increased single occupancy but also uneven growth); this creates a vicious (or virtuous if you are lucky enough to own a house) circle of ever-increasing prices. The process perpetuates itself and everyone who owns a house has, literally, an invested interest in maintaining the process. For eco-homes, understanding housing as a financial investment undermines attempts to improve the quality of housing. Given that house price is predominantly determined by location and demand, then unless demand increases for eco-homes (which in itself requires a cultural shift), then eco-features are not judged to add to the investment qualities of a house: ‘the market places value on the location, design, affordability, convenience and comfort offered by a property. The environmental impact or operational cost of a home is rarely considered by most consumers.’28 Williams29 argues that rather than explore affordability, the focus needs to be on increasing demand for eco-homes through better marketing and publicity, more available examples and better valuation models. For some case studies, effort was made to ensure that their eco-home would hold the same value as a conventional house. For example, the Columbia eco-village in the US and the Hockerton Housing Project in England were both designed to be good financial investments and to compete within the capitalist housing market. However, the majority of the self-build case studies sought to build housing that suited their needs and gave little thought to resale value. Building in affordability Many eco-homes have been built on small budgets.30 Several roundhouse structures in Wales have been built for a cost of only £3,000 for materials.31 At the same time, there are numerous examples of expensive eco-homes that remain the preserve of the wealthy. Relatively little attention has been given, by architects, eco-homes advocates or academics, to what eco-homes actually cost. Although some costed examples exist (see, for example, Bradshaw et al.),32 few compare diverse forms of eco-homes. Yet ‘energy-efficient buildings are seen by climate change experts as one of the least-cost approaches to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.’33 Case studies identified common components of how they had reduced their costs; these included:

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• building on cheap land (often in remote places); • simple small (open plan) designs and constructions which are easy to maintain and can be extended at a later date (modular approaches); • careful material choice; • hybrid designs (using different materials and approaches) appropriate for the climate and • building collectively, reducing labour costs. Most aimed to reduce land, material and labour costs, and avoid professional fees and compliance costs. This was more possible in countries such as Spain, Thailand and the US. Those who chose this route in England had to do so discreetly, as no land in England is beyond the remit of stringent planning regulations. This section uses three detailed examples – Crestone and Dignity Village, both in the US, and LILAC in England – where affordable eco-homes were built. Given that for many, perhaps especially those on low incomes, the ability to move to remote places and self-build a house is limited or unappealing, these examples are used as ways to see what can be learnt for facilitating affordable eco-homes per se, rather than as models for all to follow. There are aesthetics to some of these approaches that are unlikely to have mainstream appeal. There is also a commitment to voluntary poverty required to endure some of these types of housing, a lifestyle that should be chosen rather than advocated. Crestone Crestone is a small town in rural south Colorado, flanked by hills to the east and long flat plains to the west. It is, at first sight, a nondescript place with a small historic centre and is not on a through route to anywhere else. On closer inspection, the diversity of housing signals its unusual concentration of eco-buildings. There are earthbag dome houses, spiral straw-bale houses, hybrid houses made of a combination of straw bale and cob or adobe, and two-story majestic adobe homes. There are converted static caravans with additional insulation and windows and small cob cottages. Crestone is a hub of eco-building innovation, experimentation and expertise.34 It is home to some of the most radical and unusual eco-buildings amongst all the case studies explored in this book. In an interview with Kelly Hart, of Green Home Building, Crestone, we learn that ‘there is a consciousness

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here of basic better design choices, even in a simple way like ensuring your house is facing the right way.’ It is not an intentional community and was not started by someone with an environmental vision. Rather a confluence of conditions has created a place for radical intervention in eco-building practices and, over time, this in itself attracts other eco-builders keen to try out new ideas. There are many examples here of houses which do not fit existing notions of what a house should look like, feel like, or do (see Figure 5.5). In Crestone, there are no building codes (building regulations), and it is such a small town in a large and sparsely populated state that there are not the funds to enforce compliance, but, Kelly Hart adds, ‘plumbing and electrics have to be to state standards’. What houses get built, and where, is largely determined by a Property Owners

5.5 Eco-houses in Crestone, Colorado

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Association (depending on what plot you have, not all areas are covered by the Association) run by the residents themselves which, according to Kelly, ‘impose some covenants and restrictions which you have to abide by. Any plans have to be agreed with them. It was set up by the folks who created the sub-division to protect the value of the property.’ This autonomy is not unique in the US, and as illustrated in Figure 5.6, there are several areas of the country that do not have building regulations enforced. The costs of building new eco-homes in Crestone are reduced in a number of interrelated ways. This freedom from building code compliance reduces both the legal necessity and costs of professional expertise (such as surveyors and architects) and the financial cost of physically building in state-requested features. The freedom to experiment that this lack of compliance generates also creates a possibility to try out radically low-cost approaches to building. Although a great deal of knowledge already exists about eco-home construction, there remains plenty of room for improvement. There is a continued need to experiment and radically rethink how we build and collect or generate the resources we need to survive (such as energy and water). Spaces such as Crestone provide ‘proof-of-concept’ space, or experimental build zones, which can provide evidence to advocate for changes in building regulations and planning to enable innovative eco-building elsewhere. Rather than sterile

WA MT

ME

ND

MN

UT

OR ID

WI

SD

WY

NV

PA

IA

NE

KS

CA

MD

IL

CO

WV

MO

RI

NJ

OH

IN UT

NH MA CT

NY

MI

DE

VA

KY

AZ

NC

TN OK

NM

SC

AR MS TX

AL

GA

LA FL

5.6 Regions of the US which do not enforce a building code, marked by shaded areas (regulations)35

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testing spaces, however, Crestone enables people to live in and amongst their experimentations. This enables a very interactive and iterative learning process in the climate buildings need to function in, with the materials that are local, and during occupation across the seasons to see if they actually work. According to Kelly Hart, people need to have space to ‘get hands-on experience so that you can make your own evaluation, so that you get to know your limits and the limits of the material … so many architects are not builders, they are not good with their hands and they don’t know the materials actually used.’ Costs of building are further reduced through the cheap availability of land and very low property tax. In September 2013, it was possible to buy a building plot of land (with services installed) of 1.3 acres in Crestone for US$23,000 (UK£13,855),36 which was £2.63 per m2, compared to costs of £237 per m2 in England.37 In terms of labour, many people come to the area precisely because they want to self-build their home, reducing their labour costs, but builders also benefit from the critical mass of like-minded others in the area and the associated expertise sharing and mutual support. As summarized in Table 5.2, building and living costs were reduced in Crestone by changes to all the main factors that contribute to house TABLE 5.2 Summary of changes made by eco-builders in Crestone to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs Main factors contributing Attempted solution to reduce costs to house costs Land

Yes

Remote location

Planning

Yes

No planning application or fees

Infrastructure

Yes

In part provided by Property Owners Association, but also owners developing their own off-grid systems

Professional fees

Yes

No professional fees required

Compliance fees

Yes

No building codes which require compliance

Labour

Yes

Self-build reduces labour costs

Materials

Yes

Use of reclaimed, local or natural materials

Market

Yes

Limited resale value given location and build practices

Occupation

Yes

Eco-construction designed to reduce energy costs, but maintenance costs of natural building can be high

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costs. This is not to say, however, that all eco-homes in the area were unproblematic. There were examples of poor construction, novel experiments that failed and roofs that leak. It would be unwise to use Crestone to suggest that building regulations should be abandoned. Building regulations are important for ensuring that houses are robust enough to withstand climatic or regional conditions, such as earthquakes or heavy rain. Building codes are perhaps most important when housing is being built for other people, that is, when a developer can make a house look robust and fine, but actually it is poorly built. However, that most people have built robust homes without building regulations suggests that it is useful to create experimental zones for innovative building techniques and that some allowable solutions need to be accounted for when building regulations clash with eco-building approaches. This reliance on self-build and experimentation also meant that, at times, existing knowledge was ignored, costly mistakes were made and approaches reinvented. There was, for some, an ignorance of what eco-building techniques had already been developed, although others became experts in cutting-edge methods, such as straw-bale building. Finally, although its remote location facilitated the freedom required for Crestone to become a hub of eco-building, it also restricted its ability to share those innovations. Overall, Crestone illustrates the advantages of building on remote, cheap land, away from state surveillance, and the possibilities offered through self-build. For others, it demonstrates the advantages of creating special exceptions in planning and building regulations for eco-homes and how costs can be reduced by using natural and reclaimed materials. Dignity Village Dignity Village has been built and run by homeless people to provide free housing in the city of Portland, Oregon. In 2000, a protest started in central Portland about the lack of resources available for the homeless; they squatted a downtown area of the city (creating a tent city called ‘Camp Dignity’) and negotiated access to an acre of land (Sunderland Yard, in the north of the city) in return for ending the protest. This access was initially only granted for eight months38 and residents have had to make the case for their continued existence while the space remains under threat from Portland City Council.39 Portland City Council also placed certain criteria on how the land was to be used – dividing the concreted plot into small subdivisions

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of approximately 60 spaces between 9 square metres40 and 11 square metres.41 It is classified as a transitional housing campground and must comply with State of Oregon campground building codes. It was intended that residents would not stay permanently, but rather use the village as a temporary stopgap on their way to finding permanent housing. Over the first five years, it was estimated that eight hundred residents passed through the village.42 In 2012, Portland City Council determined that residents can stay for a maximum of two years.43 The village is self-organised and run as a non-government organisation (NGO) with elected officials. Mark Lakeman of City Repair Project comments that Dignity Village processes are ‘better than if there were some kind of external administration, not only does it cost them nothing to be their own leaders … every single thing about that village helps them to develop as people because they’re all engaged in collaborative processes.’ Yet at the same time, ‘The biggest challenges have always been internal to the organisation … only Dignity could stop Dignity because everybody else was in support. It seems it’s really easier to support something when you’re not directly involved but when you’re directly involved you’re worried about who’s got what say, who has more power.’

5.7 House at Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon

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The community has five rules of behaviour: (1) no violence, (2) no illegal substances or alcohol, (3) no stealing, (4) everyone contributes to the upkeep and welfare of the village and works to become a productive member of the community and (5) no disruptive behaviour of any kind that disturbs the general peace and welfare of the village.44 Dignity Village is formally incorporated as a 501 membership-based nonprofit organisation and is therefore governed through by-laws and has corporate officers. Dignity Village is able to offer its residents a number of (quite basic) services such as sanitary and washing facilities, cooking spaces and access to some communications technologies; there is also a system of distribution for donated food, building materials and other goods.45 There are very few costs involved and residents rely on donations and volunteer help. Residents can live for free at the village (though no children are allowed for safety reasons), but have to contribute time to the running of the community and often self-construct and maintain the houses. The housing structures are small and built from an array of scrap reclaimed materials – wood, straw, adobe, metal. The City Repair Project (see Chapter 4 for more details) ran a training session at Dignity Village to teach natural building methods

5.8 House at Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon

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and collectively built ‘five houses in ten days’, according to Mark Lakeman. City Repair also designed and built a prototype straw-bale building with earthen plaster finishes and passive solar design, which in 2010 was serving as the main office at the entrance to the village46 and, Mark says: we would help them by translating and interpreting the legal aspects. This was an opportunity as I saw it to elevate City Repair’s profile too … but people didn’t understand what City Repair was about back then and they were thinking it was just a feel-good, liberal, mainstream sort of thing. They didn’t see public space or the commons as an issue, so I thought well, strategically, if we start to associate City Repair with getting involved in all those issues, and take on this village design stuff we want to do … it’ll elevate our stature at the same time, and make our work more relevant in a lot of people’s eyes.

But many of the houses are no more than simple wooden structures with tarpaulins to protect from the rain. Facilities are basic and as one resident explained, ‘this is kind of like camping. It is camping.’47 However, Dignity Village has enabled the homeless to build their own homes, as they wish and how they want. It has facilitated a creativity and freedom, rather than forcing people to live a certain way in government-sponsored shelters or social housing. As Jack Tafari, the one-time chairman of the village council, argued: ‘Our village is all about self-help and housing ourselves using green, sustainable technologies. Wait until you see what we can do with a little land, some breathing space and some time!’48 The extent to which the homes at Dignity Village are eco-homes could be challenged. Although built of reclaimed material, few benefit from passive solar or have insulation. The straw-bale structure was not being maintained and was suffering with plaster peeling away on the external walls. Although natural building skills were taught to people in the early years, the high turnover of residents means that these skills are unlikely to be passed on. There are also problems with the site in that it floods, there are fire-safety concerns and without ownership there remains uncertainty about their future.49 As summarised in Table 5.3, the costs of housing were dramatically reduced by, like Crestone, challenging all the factors that contribute to house costs.

140 | FIVE TABLE 5.3 Summary of changes made by residents of Dignity Village to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs Main factors contributing to house costs

Attempted solution to reduce costs

Land

Yes

Provided free by Portland City Council

Planning

Yes

Negotiated with the Council

Infrastructure

Yes

Provided free by Portland City Council

Professional fees

Yes

None, City Repair Project offered training and support

Compliance fees

Yes

Compliance with State of Oregon campground building codes are required

Labour

Yes

Self-build and visiting volunteers

Materials

Yes

Donated, reclaimed and recycled

Market

Yes

Homes are not purchased or sold

However, the houses produced were not robust and although the village gave homeless people much desired autonomy and freedom, they do not benefit from comfortable eco-homes. While residents are often very happy to have a private individual space that is an infinite improvement on sleeping on the streets, as structures, there is significant potential for more substantial construction. But, Lakeman says: There are different ways to measure success but the fact that they are still there and the site looks good is great … Dignity has the advantage of the people having lived in adversity and interdependence in a public space already, that was their space … it was just people coming together in affinity with each other and finding a common vision and having nothing to lose.

Overall, Dignity Village illustrates what is possible if people are given space and just a few resources to create their own home and their own way of living. It required the state to support and concede to homeless people’s demands, but a negotiation allowed some leniency in the way in which building regulations were applied. LILAC The Low Impact Living Affordable Community (LILAC) in Leeds, England, was completed in 2013 (Figure 5.9).50 LILAC residents’ goals are to reduce their environmental impact, provide a range of affordable housing for a diverse set of residents and make a positive contribution to the surrounding community. The houses

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5.9 Straw-bale homes at LILAC, Leeds, England51

are built from a novel form of prefabricated straw-bale panels. These panels are made in a local off-site location where timber-frame panels are filled with straw and then covered in a render. These panels are then taken on site and quickly slotted together. LILAC developed a new home ownership model in an attempt to decommodify the housing market, to ‘develop an alternative based on economic equality among residents, permanent affordability, demarketization, nonspeculation and mutual co-ownership’.52 LILAC set up a Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS),53 with the intention to ensure the houses remained affordable in perpetuity, costs were linked to ability to pay (income) and people would not necessarily lose their homes if their circumstances changed.54 The land and houses are co-operatively owned by the MHOS (staffed by inhabitants of LILAC, ensuring self-governance) (Figure 5.10). The total cost of the project is divided into equity shares and allocated to each dwelling. Crucially, ‘this equity is allocated to households and they are acquired (or paid for) through each member in that household being levied a monthly member charge equivalent to 35% of their net income’,55 a system of differential rents. Thus inhabitants lease (acquire) their house by purchasing equity shares on a monthly basis, and ‘every member, regardless of their income, pays the same proportion, placing the principle of equality at the heart of the model’.56 This money is used to repay a long-term mortgage

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5.10 LILAC’s Mutual Home Ownership Society57

from Triodos (an ethical bank) and service costs. In addition each member has paid a 10 per cent deposit of the equity shares they could afford. There are some parameters to this model. Minimum net income levels were set for different sized houses in the project, in order to ensure that the 35 per cent equity share rate would generate enough income for the MHOS to cover the mortgage repayments. Thus, ‘annual household minimums currently range from £15,000 for a one-bed flat to £49,000 for a four-bed house.’58 There is considerable flexibility in this model, as it enables people to enter the housing market at income rates far lower than would be possible in the open market. High earners can buy more shares, there are systems to leave, and if this is after three years of joining, members will receive some equity benefit. Equity values will not rise significantly because they are tied to average earnings, ensuring continued affordability. Thus LILAC is a form of limited equity housing. This approach is only possible because it is a community project. In effect, the higher earners subsidise those on lower incomes and yet at the same time they do not forfeit their investment – the approach is fair because all inhabitants pay the same percentage of their income.

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Costs were also reduced in other ways: although an architect and building company were hired to design and build the homes, the land was purchased directly from the Council (at full cost, but paid in two instalments) and by using a straw-bale prefabricated wall system, some costs were reduced on materials (Table 5.4). LILAC also successfully bid for a £400,000 grant from the Homes and Communities Agency (a government agency) to support the use of the novel MODCELL technology. The costs of construction were, however, not that different from other methods. A one-bedroom flat of 48 m2 cost £84,000 to build, at a cost of £1,744 per m2, while the average costs in England are £1,200 per m2. Of course the difference is in the quality of the housing and the lifecycle costs that will be considerably lower for residents of LILAC than those in conventional housing.59 Overall, LILAC did not fundamentally challenge as many of the existing factors contributing to house costs as those in Crestone and Dignity Village did, and neither are the homes produced as cheap. However, the houses at LILAC are probably environmentally superior to the other examples, and the ownership structure is exemplary in facilitating a diverse and economically sustainable community. The LILAC model and the accessibility to those who do not wish to, or cannot, self-build and who want to live in a city, provides a replicable and novel approach. TABLE 5.4 Summary of changes made by LILAC to main factors contributing to house construction and occupation costs Main factors contributing to house costs

Attempted solution to reduce costs

Land

Yes

Purchased from the Council in non-sought-after area of the city

Planning

None

Complied with full planning requirements

Infrastructure

None

Is connected to mains services

Professional fees

None

Hired architects White Design Associates

Compliance fees

None

Complied with all building regulations

Labour

None

Hired construction firm to build houses

Materials

Yes

Used straw-bale prefabricated wall system

Market

Yes

Developed innovative Mutual Home Ownership Society model

Occupation

Yes

Will benefit from low energy costs because of straw-bale construction and eco-design

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Rethinking costs in eco-homes Building affordable eco-homes is possible and does not necessarily require more money than conventional construction. For example, back in 1988 in New York, the headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council, designed by Randy Croxton, was recognised as the first building that not only achieved a 30 per cent reduction in energy use but did so with an overall cost only marginally more than a conventional build.60 There is an urgent need, however, for eco-homes advocates to clearly articulate the economic benefits and affordability of eco-homes. Too often, aspirations for ecologically benign futures ignore issues of cost, ownership and social equity.61 For example, peer production and commons-based economies have not really done enough to help us understand how to provide basic housing for all. Our current economic neoliberalist system will only lead to practices of environmental unsustainability, given ‘the foolhardy, absurdity, and utter danger of past and present economic theory and practice’.62 Eco-builders have sought to avoid trying to fit eco-homes into such an economic perspective that is not designed to value the environment. Decisions are made in ecobuilding that might have no economic rationale: ‘even where life cycle paybacks are small, the extra costs are accepted on the grounds of more diffuse environmental values.’63 There are ten approaches that would enable and encourage more affordable eco-homes: 1. Price houses based on construction and lifecycle costs: There is a need to understand the journey of costs through a building’s lifecycle – the total operating costs over the lifetime of the building, rather than just at the moment of ownership exchange.64 These costs would not only include occupancy costs such as energy and water consumption, but also the costs of maintenance, an aspect often forgotten in evaluating the costs of using natural materials, and the costs of flexibility – changing or adapting homes throughout their lifespan. 2. Include all labour costs in construction costs: When calculating labour costs, there is a need to include self and volunteer labour costs, whether that is in time, time away from other projects, lost income or the costs of training. Only by calculating the full costs of building can the financial costs of eco-homes be fully understood and compared.

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3. Develop communal land ownership structures: Owning land communally enables cheaper use of that land. Community Land Trusts act as stewards of land, holding it in common and in perpetuity, therefore reducing its cost and making it available for affordable housing.65 4. Develop stakeholder ownership models: The Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS) developed by Rodgers and used by LILAC offers real potential to ensure eco-homes are initially affordable to a diverse range of people and that they remain affordable in perpetuity. The way in which costs are linked to ability to pay (income) and the purchase of equity shares offers a real opportunity to design affordable eco-homes.66 5. Build quality affordable eco-homes: Some affordable housing approaches create poor-quality houses. Poor design leads to higher running costs, but because these are poorly understood and not declared at time of sale, then it often does not get taken into account by market prices. Affordable eco-homes should not require living on the margins of society or the loss of comfort. 6. Create exemption for eco-homes in planning legislation: Planning regulations, and the ways in which they contribute towards high land prices, are particularly limiting for eco-home developments that might require space for passive solar designs and different building orientations. In order to encourage eco-homes, there is a logic in creating exemption from some planning restrictions. This is the logic of the Low Impact Development movement in England who have advocated for rural sites of exemption for eco-homes and land-based livelihoods. There is therefore a role for planning as ‘an essential part of managing the transition away from unsustainable oil-based agriculture, which will surely require the encouragement of experimental solutions’.67 7. Create allowable solutions for natural building in building regulations: Some eco-building techniques, especially natural building, make it difficult to comply with standard building regulations.68 Building regulations are generic and can include costly features that might not be necessary in, especially self-built, eco-homes.69 As Smith argues, ‘Green building practices can rub against existing regulations – which are designed with the mainstream housing socio-technical regime in mind. The use of reclaimed materials, like structural steel, and natural materials, like straw bale, can worry

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building inspectors since their regulatory framework is unfamiliar with such novelty.’70 8. Allocate land for self-build housing: In an attempt to create housing for local residents some Councils in England have started to allocate land for self-build housing.71 These allocations are explicitly for eco-homes and enable the state to support self-provision of housing. 9. Use different materials and methods: It is important for eco-homes advocates to be explicit about why some eco-construction approaches (particularly the more technological) can be more expensive than conventional methods. This enables builders and consumers to better understand the costs and benefits, and the diversity of approaches, of eco-homes.72 Some eco-design changes, such as orientation for passive solar gain, do not cost a lot.73 If reclaimed materials or prefabricated systems are also used, costs can be significantly reduced. However, current resistance to more use of prefabricated systems is related to ‘social, cultural and technical differences’74 which have yet to be resolved. 10. Build smaller, more densely grouped houses with shared communal space: The quality of an eco-home is more important than its size.75 If communal or public space is available, then it is advantageous to build small individual houses, reducing the costs of construction and occupation. Equally density offers economies-of-scale savings on land, professional fees and energy costs (for example, a terrace house reduces heat loss). This approach, however, only really works where green space and community space are available. Conclusions There are two different sections of main costs. One is the everyday costs, like food and electricity and just what it takes to be able to sustain on a day-to-day basis, and then there’s all the extra like the building costs and the infrastructure … that doesn’t get covered by people just staying here. Our courses end up helping to cover that. After five years of being here, we’ve basically run on an even balance sheet … we basically run even. (Christian, co-founder, Panya Project, Thailand)

The costs of eco-homes are rarely fully calculated or understood. Community projects often rely on volunteers to either physically build

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or to financially contribute. Many projects rely on self or volunteer labour as the main way in which to make eco-building financially viable. This, coupled with building in remote and rural locations, enabled many of the case studies used in this book to exist. Building affordable eco-homes requires a balance between the quest for a radical overhaul of the systems of governance in a country, and pragmatic efforts to build affordable housing within the current systems of capitalism, state and social expectations. The complex pressures involved in contemporary housing from capitalist processes (housing built for profit generation and investment, market-determined prices), and state/government processes (planning restrictions increasing land prices, the financial costs of complying with planning and building regulations), to social processes (opposition to new developments, demand for more spacious and luxurious homes) all require careful consideration in developing affordable ecological alternatives. Indeed the risk adversity of governments and construction companies, the latter particularly concerned about profit margins, serves to hinder adoption of new building approaches. This is particularly the case in countries like England where social landlords are building most eco-homes.76 Housing Associations have understood the need to provide quality housing with low running costs for their customers on low incomes. They are able to make capital investments that will only repay over many years. While this is progress, the rest of the housing market appear unable to value and understand the benefits of eco-homes. Affordable eco-homes should not entail a loss of comfort, a lack of robustness or living in poverty on the margins of society.77 As will be discussed further in Chapter 6, there is a complex relationship between comfort, buildings and affordability. Affordable eco-homes are less about reducing environmental impact and actually about basic rights to secure, safe, healthy and cheap to run shelter.78 Affordable eco-homes are an outcome of social justice. There are identifiable changes that can be made to existing ways in which housing is financially valued, building is permitted and houses financed.79 However, in order to achieve these changes there need to be radical shifts in how houses are understood as being far more than objects for investment, and how quality homes are a basic human right.

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I really need a bath, or at least a shower, though I feel the dirt is caked in and needs soaking off. I have been volunteering at Green Hills for a week: a bit of digging, planting, cooking and watering. It is spring and the nights are cold but the physical work makes me sweat and I am beginning to sense that I smell ripe. Washing without a bathroom, when most residents bucket wash in the communal kitchen, makes me realise my shyness. There is little private space and the logistics of carrying a bucket of warm water up the ladder to a bedroom too complicated. I have enough trouble getting myself up there. The toilet is a rustic compost hole a walk into the woods and through the mud, not a suitable washing space. I begin to crave contemporary facilities and consider sneaking off to find a bed and breakfast just to wash. I realise the limits of my desire to live off the land and how used to comfort and convenience I have become. Deep green sustainable living is often associated with forgoing many elements of contemporary life.1 There is an enduring perception that to be environmentally sustainable requires forgoing elements of comfort, convenience and, to a lesser extent, cleanliness.2 This perception of forgoing is problematic for mobilising broader environmental practices. Comfort is a particularly interesting concept because it is both hard to define and simultaneously perceived as being a crucial element of a home.3 Comfort is neither an attribute of a material nor a universally agreed specific and measurable moment (such as a temperature). Instead it is an ongoing process, a negotiation between different elements (such as climate, materials and bodies) in a particular place.4 Unfortunately there is a tension between comfort and sustainable living. This chapter starts with a puzzle: self-built eco-homes in Britain often lack a bathroom and conventional bathing facilities, yet self-built eco-homes visited in the US, Spain, Thailand and Argentina often prioritised building bathrooms and housed luxuriously decorated facilities. This chapter uses this fieldwork observation as a starting point from which to critically explore the bathing practices of three

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British case studies (Green Hills, Landmatters and Tinkers Bubble). Of course, as discussed below, there are many ways in which comfort can be considered in eco-homes – as temperature, security or size, among others – and bathrooms are used here as a proxy for exploring the broader tensions around comfort. Indeed, the puzzle around bathrooms enables some of these really interesting tensions about comfort to be examined in ways that a focus on temperature (a popular way of understanding comfort in homes) would not have facilitated. Much work has been done on how comfort is conceived conventionally by society (especially by Shove5 and Shove et al.6), but unless we explore how it could be reconceived we miss a vital part of the story. This search for hopeful practices is necessary for two overlapping reasons. First, there is a need to understand what the alternative possibilities actually are, and many of these alternatives are rooted in grassroots innovations in eco-communities.7 These pockets of alternative ways of being often connect and have influence far beyond their apparent remit, however small-scale or marginal they may appear. It can be in the off-grid alternative spaces of eco-communities that these alternatives get tested and the full ramifications of, in the case of Vannini and Taggart’s work,8 the collection, conservation and disposal of water and consequent practices of ‘onerous consumption’ become clear. They are test beds for innovative ideas. Second, these innovations and new practices are rarely unproblematic, engaging in processes of experimentation, learning and making mistakes: processes from which we in turn can learn valuable lessons.9 The challenges that residents encounter in developing these practices, and how they overcome these problems are likely representative of many of the issues which others would also face in implementing more sustainable practices. Some of the institutional and structural barriers to sustainable practices in, for example, eco-homes, are already understood,10 but there is far less work on how to overcome, challenge and negotiate these issues. Bathrooms enable us to explore the complex relationships between personal habits, use of resources and comfort. The function and form of a bathroom has changed considerably over the centuries. The contemporary British bathroom is now conceived of as a space of privacy where multiple activities take place (cleaning, washing, relaxing and preparing the body). This shift towards the bathroom as a place of leisure, pleasure and privacy increases the emphasis on comfort rather than convenience or cleanliness. Moreover, bathrooms are an ideal

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microcosm of social practice, where the prefigurative actions of those advocating an ecotopia clash with the increasingly environmentally damaging practices of society at large. Comfort: a vital component Comfort is a vital component of what we expect a home to provide and is core to the success, or perception, of a house as home.11 As McCloud argues, ‘comfort is the most civilizing aspect of design or architecture’,12 and for Rybczynski, ‘we must rediscover for ourselves the mystery of comfort, for without it, our dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes.’13 But defining what this comfort entails, and how it is to be achieved, is fraught with difficulty.14 This chapter disassociates comfort from femininity, care or home as being implicit and instead explores how comfort is itself created (or not). It is only in recent years that comfort shifted from being a relation (about, for example, consoling someone through bereavement) to being about things (in that materials can give comfort), of which the sense of physical comfort began to predominate.15 As Crowley notes ‘“comfort” increasingly applied to a middle ground between necessity and luxury’,16 and over time has become normalised as an entitlement. As this shift defined comfort as ‘to do with things, conditions and circumstances’,17 it became a state that was considered an attribute of such materiality, rather than something to be achieved, which Shove argues is a more accurate understanding of its form. This is further complicated by the reality that ‘people seem to respond more to their ideas about comfort than to their actual physical experience of it’.18 If comfort is considered an attribute, an entitlement, and separated from what is medically healthy, then this enables the notion of comfort to be shaped by all sorts of people with different vested interests.19 Thus scientists, industry and government all played a part in shaping the idea that thermal comfort in a building was optimal only in a narrow, technologically-controlled temperature range, or ‘comfort zone’.20 In summary, comfort became an attribute defined by those who benefited from selling the ‘things’ necessary to ensure it: it became a commodity, which in turn further shaped people’s expectations of comfort need. These expectations then travelled globally. The result is a burgeoning worldwide industry in heating and cooling technologies, and comfort standards for houses that are hard to achieve without such technology.21

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There is a counter-story to the one above, and it is led by advocates of ecological architecture. Humphreys22 developed an alternative model which persuasively showed that what people deem as a comfortable temperature can vary dramatically with the external climate: people adapt to their local temperature range, and thus comfort is determined through a relationship between climate, bodies and culture. Simply put, the comfort of a building can be determined by its Comfort Temperature (Tc), calculated as the balance between mean outdoor temperature and mean indoor temperature.23 Thus The fundamental function of buildings is to provide safe and healthy shelter. For the fortunate they also provide comfort and delight. In the twentieth century comfort became a ‘product’ produced by machines and run on cheap energy. In a world where fossil fuels are becoming ever scarcer and more expensive, and the climate more extreme, the challenge of designing comfortable buildings today requires a new approach.24

The outcome of such an approach is to accept that comfort is a process not an attribute, and thus we need to build houses that enable people to negotiate comfort through adjustment and adaptation.25 This opens the possibility of ecological architecture producing comfortable homes; not homes with a guaranteed narrow comfort zone, but homes that are flexible to occupy.26 This understanding of comfort, however, does require challenging people’s expectations (now normalised) of what thermal comfort is. In part, this includes encouraging people to enjoy the contrasts and changes in temperature around a house, what Roaf calls ‘thermal delight’; ‘comfort can be seen simply as the absence of discomfort but thermal delight makes people happier.’27 For example, the joy of a fresh breeze through an open window, or the sun heating our toes. This has been developed into the RayMan model that calculates thermal comfort taking account of people’s thermal sensations,28 but it also extends to individual behaviour, such as the need to wear a jumper inside during winter.29 In addition, comfort has increasingly been dominated by a concern with thermal comfort (and the related issues of air flow and ventilation), precluding understanding of its broader meaning and implications.30 In this context, the corporeal experience of comfort remains important. A social practice approach rejects the physiological method of measuring comfort through scientific analysis of human biology alone. Yet the body (and embodiment) remains an important determinate

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of comfort not just in terms of temperature, but in washing, our bodily functions, our health and our senses.31 The embodied relation of comfort, how a body ‘gets comfortable’, but also the sensibility of comfort through the body can be understood as how ‘corporeal comfort is an embodied contingency forged between the body and the proximate environment’.32 Pink33 details the sensory embodied joy of the smell of a clean house; as one of her interviewees argues, ‘you’re much more comfortable in a clean and tidy house’.34 Day also asserts the importance of the senses in how we feel about a house: ‘the senses tell us about what is important in our surroundings; mostly, we experience things through the outer senses; sight, smell, taste, sound, warmth, touch. Architecture in the sense of environmental design is the art of nourishing these senses.’35 Our senses thus inform our feeling of comfort. Rybczynski36 extends this further to include ‘feelings’ of ease and relaxation. Comfort is closely related to feelings of ‘homeyness’ that are shaped by people’s sense of flow in a house, thus ‘flow was both a visual and whole-of-body experience that gave rise to feelings of homeyness through a sense of freedom, mobility and comfort.’37 Thus homeyness is comforting and is created through embodied relations with materialities of the house. These practices of homeyness underpin possibilities of environmental sustainability. Thus the concept of comfort needs to be extended to include bodily comfort, without resorting to the discredited physiological approach, to enable a better examination of the relationship between our bodies, comfort and our environmental practices. In this way, in this chapter, comfort is defined as an ongoing process of negotiation using materials, habits and practices, but which also includes how one feels, senses and delights. Bathrooms as spaces of comfort Like many other aspects of our homes, bathrooms are complicated and specialised spaces. As Hardyment38 has detailed, their function, form and place in a home has evolved dramatically over the centuries.39 It is not a linear progression but rather discourses have emerged as a result of a myriad of influences (or interlocking rationales) (social norms, commercial interest, government regulation) to produce habits that we now consider normal.40 These habits continue to evolve. We use bathrooms to satisfy multiple demands – cleanliness, health, comfort and convenience.41

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At one stage, bathrooms were considered to be an index of civilisation and were a crucial part of the process of social acceptance. At other times, immersing oneself in water was considered highly dangerous and led to the ‘dirty centuries’ in Britain between 1500 and 1750.42 It only returned through a mixture of religious and medical encouragement, but even then cold water washing was perceived as safest. Plumbed-in baths only appeared in the wealthiest of British houses in the 1860s, but many remained without bathrooms into the mid-twentieth century. This was not due to a lack of technology: systems of piping water (through aqueducts, cisterns and reservoirs) and rainwater harvesting had existed in Britain since the medieval era.43 Bathrooms have been shaped far more by cultural practices than technological innovation, for example, the British bathhouses of the 1160s grew in response to returning Crusaders’ stories of enjoyable Turkish public baths.44 Bathing used to be a social affair and baths were communal, public and mixed gender.45 In Britain, they only became privatised and formed their own room in the house in the twentieth century and are now increasingly considered ‘a place for solitude and thought’.46 In other countries (such as Finland and Japan), bathing remains a communal practice. The bathroom is becoming more complex partly because people are demanding more of it: ‘our bathrooms are not primarily used for cleaning the body, but instead take the place of morning exercises, and are used for dressing, styling hair and applying makeup.’47 Shove has categorised these different discourses of bathing into moments of positioning in relation to self and society, body and nature, and pleasure and duty (see Table 6.1). TABLE 6.1 Dimensions and discourses of bathing48 Positioning in Hydrotherapy and terms of gentility

Sanitation and social order

Comfort, convenience and commodification

Self and society

Bathing signals membership of an elite

Bathing signals membership of civilised society

Bathing is about image and appearance

Body and nature

Focus on the curative aspects of immersion in water

Focus on preventative aspects, soap and water required

Focus on curative aspects, especially restoring natural balances

Pleasure and duty

Pleasure, ease of use, the spa in the home

Duty to protect own health and that of others

Bathing and showering embody different aspects of pleasure and duty

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More recently ‘the modern bathroom is depicted as a site of leisure and pleasure as well as efficiency and convenience.’49 With this leisure comes increased resource use as people use showers as a form of relaxation (from stress), and it is only relatively recently that we have begun to wash so frequently or have expectations that showering daily is normal. This change in use has resulted in large increases in the use of water and energy, and the trend of power showers in particular is environmentally worrying,50 though as Berker and Josok Gansmo show,51 increased attention to the aesthetics of bathrooms need not necessarily result in increased consumption of resources, because with careful design, ‘aesthetic fixes’ enable people to follow fashions while reducing consumption. While bathrooms remain spaces of multiple activities and satisfy multiple demands, they are increasingly conceived of as spaces of comfort. For a home space to provide this comfort a bathroom needs to become more than a container for cleaning facilities. In contemporary British bathrooms, renewed attention is being paid to aesthetics, private access (en suite), bigger spaces, individualised sinks and larger multi-jet showers. Simultaneously, the commercial market for soaps, shampoos, shower gels and in-shower products continues to grow. Comfortable eco-homes The debate as to whether eco-homes can be as comfortable, or might be more comfortable, than conventional buildings is complicated by the sheer diversity of eco-home forms. It is, of course, also bound up in the ongoing debates as to what is comfort and comfortable: a standardised homogenous temperature, or the thermal delight of change (for example, the growth of air conditioning is a reflection of the preference for homogeneity, see Miller et al.52). Given the centrality of comfort to people’s conception of a home, however, it is unlikely that eco-home builders would deliberately seek to create discomfort, which in itself would undermine one of the principle purposes of a home. Rather, eco-home builders re-conceive comfort and seek to adjust its meaning. Herein lies the dilemma: many eco-builders believe their houses provide more comfort, and yet according to the expectations of society as identified by Shove,53 many would actually be considered less comfortable than conventional buildings. Eco-builders might well believe that ‘sustainable homes will provide greater comfort … provide healthy

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living environments’,54 or that they are ‘safe, comfortable, healthy and functional buildings’.55 Eco-homes might well have more even internal temperatures through well-balanced passive heating or careful choice of wall materials, or plentiful hot water through solar thermal panels, but this does not mean that others equate this with more comfort. For many, eco-homes continue to be viewed as involving a loss of comfort.56 Williams defines this comfort as ‘a constant, ambient indoor temperature, hot water, fully functioning appliances and lighting … critical to the success of’ eco-homes.57 She goes on to illustrate how ‘the low carbon technical systems themselves may have a negative impact on household comfort’58 using, as examples, the intermittent energy supply of renewable energy, and problems of internal condensation, dampness and mould in highly airtight houses. Indeed, solar thermal panels store heat during the day, making the most plentiful time for hot water in the evenings, not the mornings when many people choose to shower. Moreover, eco-homes often require more maintenance and manual operation (such as wood-stove heating or manual ventilation systems, rather than automated air-conditioning or heating), to the extent that low occupancy can result in houses becoming too cold.59 The manual effort required, especially in the more self-built natural eco-homes, can be quite extensive with even the most ardent supporter finding the daily chores of collecting water and wood difficult.60 Comfort has also become blurred with convenience; for example, it is not enough that a house has an average internal temperature of 21°C,61 but that this should be available instantly and without manual effort. This conflation means that convenient facilities (such as water, bathrooms, heat, refrigeration), become bound up with comfort in new ways. As Kraftl62 has argued, ecotopias are already deeply unsettling for much of mainstream society. Despite often containing a desire and vision of comfort, safety and homeyness, utopias (and the eco-homes envisioned within them) often none the less challenge the societal order. Kraftl urges us to further consider that some utopias might actively seek to discomfort in the process of achieving their vision, thus ‘the mechanism to achieve many political utopias is commonly unsettling, yet the end goal – although it might cause political discomfort – is essentially a compensatory, comforting, stable version of the “good life”.’63 Thus what might appeal to environmentalists (or what Kraftl terms ‘those inside’) as a homely, comforting and earthy way of life, may to the rest of society be deeply unsettling.

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Interpreted in a rather simple way, although the eco-homes as built by British eco-communities might appeal as comforting and homely to residents it does not to ‘those “outside” such communities’.64 This is perhaps best summarised by Kraftl when he argues that ‘often this involves a comforting return to the materiality and imagery of nature, housed in “green buildings” which phenomenologically connect with the earth and the memory in a form of homely, perhaps “originary” dwelling’.65 This conflicting relationship between eco-homes and comfort is indicative of the broader tension between comfort and sustainable living. The extent to which sustainable alternatives (such as ecohomes) should challenge conventional ways of living, or instead seek to make conventional ways simply more efficient, lies at the centre of the environmental dilemma. Conventional expectations of comfort need, to some extent, to be assuaged in order to appeal to mainstream society. However, advocating environmental sustainable practices is in large part about reconceptualising what needs it is desirable to meet, and what needs are too environmentally costly. This involves challenging the social conventions and expectations of comfort. Thus understandings of comfort are central to exploring eco-homes. How eco-builders negotiate the balance of conforming to existing expectations while simultaneously challenging the same perception of comfort provides an insight into this dilemma. Bathrooms and bathing practices The question of what a bathroom is, what bathing practices constitute, and what facilities are required to undertake these practices, is the first step towards understanding how the eco-community residents reconceived the practices of bathing. The arrangement at each of the case studies differs and suggests different solutions to the issues of water supply and energy to heat water. Green Hills Green Hills is a small eco-community in Scotland (its actual location has been protected at the request of the residents), which makes its living from running a Community Supported Agriculture scheme whereby they sell weekly vegetable boxes of home-grown organic food. They have built an oak-framed, straw-bale home in the woods and have recently started building an earth-sheltered house with earth-filled tyres as its back insulating wall. There are also a few other

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structures on the land such as a yurt and a canvas-covered tunnel. Green Hills is completely off-grid, generating all their electricity from photovoltaic panels and a small wind turbine. At Green Hills there is no separate bathroom on site, and over time different systems and spaces have been used to accommodate the functionality of the room. A separate compost toilet is positioned away from the main house, at one time located in a straw-bale hut and at a later stage moved into a tarpaulin-covered bender. There is no mains water supply to the site; they used to bring tap water on site in 25-litre containers for drinking and cooking. They now have a well on site, supplying them with clean drinkable water and rainwater collection systems which residents use for washing up and bathing. As Will, a resident of Green Hill, comments: In our ten years of being here we have never had a bathroom, bath, or shower system. One day maybe. Instead our primary means to wash is simply the bucket wash … This involves using a trug placed on a towel typically in our bedroom. There is an order to which bits you wash! Face first, arse last! … We also dip in the river on a hot day.

There are no on-site bath or shower facilities and their primary means of washing is simply the bucket wash. Rainwater is heated in kettles either on the gas-fed cooker or the wood-burning Aga (depending on the time of the year) (see Figure 6.1). When there is plentiful water (in winter), they have a bath using a trug placed on a towel in a bedroom. Landmatters Landmatters is a 42-acre eco-community in Devon (near Totnes). The land was brought collectively by the Landmatters co-operative and when the residents came together over the purchase of the land, it became clear that the common factor and core principle was permaculture. Thus they have used permaculture to structure how they have built their houses around the edge of a purposefully designed village green, and how they grow their food. Part of their remit is in experimenting in, and proving, what can be done with minimal impact. In terms of housing, all buildings are temporary because that was a condition of the planning permission. They are limited to 50 m2 for each home, and only for the number of dwellings present at the time of planning application. In other words, they cannot constitute ‘operational development’ according to the planning decision. They have a range of benders (some with wooden floors, some with straighter

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6.1 Kitchen at Green Hills

sides using poles into the ground, many with lots of windows), yurts and a wooden roundhouse. The homes are situated at the top of the hill on the site, which means that they are able to benefit from passive solar gain, photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Most dwellings have their own photovoltaic solar panel for electricity generation. There are currently twelve adults and five children living on site. The community is run using collective nonhierarchical decision making: this means they have regular meetings. Everyone has their own garden, but there are communal gardens in the central areas. Most food in the gardens is grown in raised beds built from off-cuts of sawn timber from a local timber yard. Landmatters have spread the functionality of their bathrooms across the site. Unlike conventional homes, the toilet is across a field and the water-supply point is in the other direction: ‘all that you need for our house is not in one place, the compost toilet is down behind us in that field, and our water is over the other side of the field in the other direction’, says Josh, living at Landmatters. Water comes from a 300-ft borehole that provides all the drinking water and is extracted using a donated deep-bore hand pump. Water for everything else comes from rainwater harvesting. There are two particularly nice compost toilet

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6.2 Compost toilets at Landmatters, Devon

blocks on site (Figure 6.2). Purposefully constructed from wood, they are beautifully painted, and outside have a sink with a tap running from a rainwater tank, soap and a storage cupboard. Sewage is collected in big plastic drums that are then winched out and rotated. On the other side of the residential area, a bathhouse has been in construction since 2009. A robust construction of new wooden planks and lined with ply, it has a see-through plastic corrugated roof to help light penetrate. Inside, there are several different rooms – a clothes washing space, and separate shower rooms (Figure 6.3). The bathhouse has been a journey of experimentation for those at Landmatters and they have run into reliability issues with the solar water heater, which has variously worked and then failed. A particularly cold winter burst the pipes; these problems have persisted and the bathhouse remains incomplete. Tinkers Bubble Finally, Tinkers Bubble in Somerset is a long-standing eco-community. Established in 1994 near Little Norton, they manage 40 acres: ‘the aim of the community’s 16 residents is to derive their livelihoods from the sustainable management of the land and its

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6.3 The bathhouse at Landmatters, Devon

resources’66 and goods are moved around site using a horse and cart. They had a long battle for planning permission but are now a legal and established site (though with restrictions as to what they can build). The houses at Tinkers Bubble are at the top of a steep hill, deep in a Douglas Fir woodland. The gardens are at the bottom of the hill – divided up amongst residents – with a communal garden, horse and cow fields and orchard on the other side of the woodland. All energy needs at Tinkers Bubble must be satisfied without using fossil fuels. They have several photovoltaic panels and a wind generator to provide for all their electricity needs. All the houses have electric lighting, and use renewable energy to power stereos and laptop computers. Kitchen facilities are communal and there is an indoor kitchen and an outdoor one. Most of the daily cooking takes place on an outside open fire and washing up in the outdoor sink. Tinkers Bubble does not use fossil fuels or internal combustion engines; there is an abundance of wood on site, and this is used as fuel for space and water heating, and all cooking. All water is sourced from a local spring and is fed into the communal building where it is used in the bathhouse and kitchen. The only water points on site are in the communal kitchen area and residents have to carry what they need to their individual dwellings. Toilets are all compost and their waste is collected below the toilet seats, and water is not required for their functioning. The community has one of the more advanced

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6.4 Bathhouse at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset

communal bathhouses (Figure 6.4): a separate wooden building, it has a bath and a wood-fired stove. Members of the community book in to use the bath (one allowed a day between the whole community) using the blackboard by the door. They then light the stove, wait for the water tank above it to heat up and have a bath. It is reasonably cosily decorated, with curtains, flowers and private space. More than a resource issue The facilities and practices of these three case studies are summarised in Table 6.2. It is illustrative at this point to briefly compare these bathroom facilities with those provided by some of the international examples. Eco-communities visited in Spain, Thailand, Argentina and the US had prioritised the importance of building functioning bathrooms with hot water – using solar power or propane gas. Often the bathroom was the first building to be finished, and many had large (albeit shared) shower areas, basins, baths and drying space. For example, as shown in Figure 6.5, Panya Project (Thailand, see Chapter 7 for further description of the project) had a large shower block (divided by gender) with two showers in each section, a sink, mirror, storage unit and bench. Although open to the elements, it was luxuriously decorated with mosaics and water was

162 | SIX TABLE 6.2 Communal bathroom facilities and practices at Green Hills, Landmatters and Tinkers Bubble Bathroom facilities and practices Water

Heat (energy)

Green Hills

Landmatters

Tinkers Bubble

Local water supply (spring, well or borehole)

*

*

*

Rainwater collection

*

*

*

Mains running water

Solar water heater Wood-fired water heater

* *

*

*

*

*

Propane or gas water heater Fixtures

Separate bathroom Separate toilet room

*

*

Bath Shower ‘Bucket wash’

* *

* *

*

*

*

*

*

Flushing toilet Compost toilet

supplied through rainwater collection. Earthships at Taos all had private bathrooms with showers fed hot water via solar panels, and at El Valle de Sensaciones (Spain) there was a Gaudi-inspired shower and toilet block – a vision of creativity – tall and slender hemp concrete blocks with curved roofs and entire external walls of mosaics. At the Lama Foundation (a spiritual centre on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Taos, New Mexico, with an eclectic mix of eco-homes – a log cabin, a straw-bale house, some yurts for visitors, small vault homes, a hybrid house and many more), the bath was a large mosaic communal space with a ceiling of hanging plants. Key infrastructural components of bathrooms are water supply and a source of energy (mainly for water heating, but also electricity for lights and other electrical appliances). In the overseas examples, a great deal of effort had gone into actively overcoming the limited availability of water and energy. Some brief examples include the development of complex triple re-use water systems in Earthships in the US, and buying water as truck shipments at Panya Project in Thailand. The reliance on spring water systems at Lama Foundation in the US and La

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6.5 Bathrooms at Panya Project (Thailand), Earthship Biotecture (US) and El Valle de Sensaciones (Spain)

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Ecoaldea Del Minchal in Spain meant that rainwater was not harvested, but it still required connecting miles of black water pipe to the nearest spring. Energy supply tended to be solar or propane. In Spain, at the eco-communities, solar panels were the primary source. Most places did not have many panels and although some struggled to get a reliable supply (because they could not afford good batteries), most had power all year. At the Lama Foundation, because their solar capacity was limited they used propane gas to heat water for their showers. These examples illustrate that eco-communities identified creative ways to ensure they had water and energy supply to their bathrooms. Even those with plentiful water encountered other issues such as poor solar capacity, or the ability to afford the necessary technological infrastructure, and others encountered barriers in building regulations. Understanding how other eco-communities built their infrastructure for water and energy enables us to explore potential resource reasons for its absence in British eco-communities. However, given the similarity in resource problems between these nations and the similar availability of water and energy resources, the resource perspective does not in itself explain why British eco-communities actively deprioritised bathrooms. In other words, a lack of plumbing skills, the high cost of heating water and/or a lack of reliable water supply are all issues that other ecocommunities put effort into resolving. They are not insurmountable problems. Challenging bathroom norms In the case studies in Britain, bathrooms were often the last to be built (and often unfinished) and few eco-homes had ready access to hot water or even running water. Bathing at Green Hills and Landmatters was limited to ‘bucket-washes’ in kitchen or bedroom spaces. In Britain, the functionality of a bathroom was also spread, with the toilets often being located far from washing facilities. This challenge to bathroom norms is rooted in a known British historical resistance to bathing facilities and to-be-expected environmental objections. As discussed above, the British have never been renowned for their bathrooms, indeed even the wealthy did not overly embrace their installation. In the 1890s, US visitors were purportedly horrified at the primitive bathing facilities in Britain. It took the British several years to adopt the US-invented shower and over sixty years to follow the US trend for en-suite bathrooms.67

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In terms of the environmental impact of bathing and bathrooms, the rejection of the need for high-flow showers, chemical hair and skin care lotions, and the need to wash daily also fits expected environmental practices. In each case study, electricity was generated through solar and wind renewable systems, but it was not used for bathrooms; instead it was directed to kitchens and living spaces. In other words, the ready adoption of photovoltaic panels undermines any suggestion that a rejection of bathrooms was indicative of a broader rejection of technology. Rather that technology was put to different, seemingly more important, uses. For some, bathrooms were deliberately rejected in favour of discomfort. As Kraftl68 has suggested, some residents in ecocommunities actively seek discomfort in the process of achieving their end goal of an ecotopia: that the very mechanism required to achieve an ecotopia has to be discomforting for both society at large and those inside such communities. It is both about sacrifice for the environment and a way of showing themselves as being sufficiently dedicated to their cause. There were elements of this sacrificial approach at Tinkers Bubble and Landmatters. However, for the majority of interviewees in the case studies, their approach to bathrooms was not a rejection of comfort (and consequent embracement of discomfort), but rather an attempt to reconfigure what a bathroom and comfort were. Returning to the question of ‘what is a bathroom?’, there is a clear disjuncture between what those in the case studies understood a bathroom to be and do, and conventional demands of a bathroom. This re-conceiving of comfort sought to reject the association between comfort and privacy, bathrooms and homogenous temperatures, and instead reconfigure comfort as being about cleanliness, sharing, bodies and thermal delight. This does not reject all understandings of comfort, but instead seeks to re-conceive some of them into more environmentally sustainable practices. Comfort is cleanliness For eco-communities a bathroom was primarily a space (not even a room) where one could wash one’s body. Hence it was not necessary to have a separate dedicated space as long as the ability to wash was possible. This approach challenges the normalised relationship between bathrooms and cleanliness. It is perfectly possible to remain clean by using a bowl of water, and thus a lack of a bathroom does not imply a lack of cleanliness. That said, these eco-communities did challenge the notion that daily full-body washes were necessary by

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washing on average weekly rather than daily. This in itself serves to reconceive bodily comfort as not requiring daily washing. Comfort is collective In the case studies, the bathing facilities were communal not private, and even when conducted in the private home were often practised in the kitchen rather than the bedroom. Bathrooms were thus rarely private spaces, rather they were shared, communal spaces, which while they could be used privately were also used collectively. In other words, one bucket of water would be used for several family members and baths were shared. Bathrooms are used for relatively short periods of time and these case studies illustrate that it is not necessary to each have a private bathroom (especially the current trend for en-suite). Developing a commons for bathrooms, an ethics of sharing, not only critiques the quest for privacy but also criticises the concept that comfort involves privacy, and harks back to the days of communal bathhouses.69 It is also a political act to accept that sharing bathroom space across a whole community (and thus well beyond family) is sustainable and comfortable. Comfort is embodied and sensual This more collective approach to bathing also enables a more sensual approach to comfort. Comfort becomes less about an individual bathing and more about the comfort of washing with others’ bodies and in washing others. Comfort becomes about not just how one’s body feels, but each body in relation to another’s. Bathing also becomes about connecting with nature. The simplicity of these bathing arrangements, the implications in terms of collecting, conserving, heating and disposing of water, and the need to go outside as part of the process (to collect materials or access facilities) connects residents with nature in a way that conventional bathrooms do not.70 This process reminds residents of where they are, the resources they are using and satisfies their connection to that place. Comfort is thermal delight The lack of en-suite bathrooms meant that residents at each case study did not enjoy the homogenous temperatures of a centrally heated (or air conditioned home). Instead, they endured the sharp contrasts of temperature between inside and out, and between cold air and warm water. Residents relished the thermal delight of different temperatures. Indeed, Will at Green Hills spoke of the joy of having a ‘dip in the river on a hot day’.

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In these ways, bathing was still relaxing and pleasurable for many at the case studies. It did not become simply a utilitarian act. For example, the bathhouse at Tinkers Bubble was a relaxation room. However, given the lack of access (in a community of sixteen people plus visitors and volunteers, only one bath was allowed a day) a bath remained a monthly treat. In other words, the comfort was reconfigured temporally and spatially away from the convenience of a privately accessible bathroom. Conclusions This analysis of bathing and the bathrooms of British self-builders provides one insight into environmentally sustainable practices that challenge conventional norms. Examining bathrooms allows us to begin to understand this important interplay between buildings, practice and comfort, and is a useful space in which to explore how collective conventions can be changed and more sustainable practices developed. At first, it is easy to read the British eco-approach to bathrooms as going against the comfort needs of householders, but on a closer reading, the prefigurative nature of their practices can be understood as reconceiving what comfort is and the way in which comfort relates to environmental sustainability. The function, form and place of bathrooms continue to change and evolve, and part of the reason for their de-prioritisation by the self-builders is their current association with luxury and leisure. This reconfiguration of what a bathroom is, and what it should do, helps inform the debate as to the perceived tension between environmental sustainability and comfort. If comfort in bathing practices can be re-conceived as being about cleanliness, sharing, bodies and thermal delight, then this can have implications for other everyday practices. This understanding of comfort transgresses the need for such eco-homes to appeal to society. It is driven instead by an urgency and focus on a prefigurative mechanism of change, rather than a political quest for change through converting others. While such practices may add to the challenge of persuading others that eco-homes are a comfortable and achievable option, and demonstrating the advantages of eco-homes is a key concern, what should be of most interest are the ways in which such practices were changed and the possibilities that such changes offer. Understanding the de-prioritisation of bathrooms in self-build eco-communities enables us to view these eco-homes

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not as failing to appeal to the mainstream, but instead offering a stark critique of current bathing conventions. Examining the absence of bathrooms has raised questions about changing understandings of comfort and how what is considered normal and necessary is developed into collective conventions of bathing. While there are good environmental reasons for reducing bathing, to explain the lack of bathrooms as a purely practical decision belies the complexity of comfort. Rather a diverse set of conditions – climatic, resource, financial, political and cultural – shaped these eco-community practices. This chapter has sought to interrogate and broaden the concept of comfort, especially in relation to those who purport to live an environmentally sustainable life. Comfort was reconceived as not being reliant upon particular facilities, furniture or temperature, as not necessarily individual or private, but as collective and shared, and as being embodied. Our senses and experiences of bodily functions are important when evaluating new forms of living that might extend our interactions with new sensations. The difficulty in ‘pinning down’ such feelings makes them all the more important for understanding new spaces such as eco-homes. The implication of these different approaches to comfort is to illustrate that comfort is not predetermined or fixed; instead it is a process that can be renegotiated. The creative and resourceful measures by which residents at these eco-communities established a sense of comfort suggests the possibility that other forms of comfort (particularly those which are resource-greedy) could also be reconfigured.

7 | GE N D E R

I was on a course learning how to build an Earthship, an eco-house that uses reclaimed car tyres as its main structural element. After a morning of theory, we ventured outside to put our new knowledge into practice; we were going to build a wall. The process involves filling tyres with rubble and rubbish and then compressing it using a sledgehammer, literally pounding the material into the centre of the tyre to make it solid. It is a physically exhausting process that over time destroys your shoulders. The men jumped straight in, apparently eager to prove their strength and agility. After a while, I asked if I could give it a try. The long length of the sledgehammer made co-ordination tricky, and conscious of pelting my foot rather than the rubble I struggled to get enough momentum in the hammer to adequately compress the material. I was fumbling and I knew it, but it was a new skill and I needed practice. A few swings of the hammer later and the male instructor suggested that it might be more efficient if I were to stop and instead spend my time folding cardboard – needed to line the base of the tyres. I felt humiliated and confused, compounded by his follow-up comment that great strength was needed to do the hammer work and women tended not to have it. Never before had it been suggested that I did not have strength; built like a rugby player with giant hands and feet, I had spent my life breaking things by underestimating my own strength. I just needed more time to practise. It was not strength I was lacking, but skill, and skills can be learnt with more practice. I realised then that the instructor was making assumptions based on my gender, disregarding my size, body or that time was needed to practise a new skill. Building a house involves multiple overlapping processes: the design (often formally termed ‘architecture’), the construction or building, the finishing decoration and the occupation. Gender divisions, however, have long marked these processes: ‘Those who build dwell in the world in a different way from those who occupy the structures already built, and from those who preserve what is constructed. If building establishes a world, then it is still very much a man’s world.’1 Historically, men

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have been associated with the structure and women with the interior and decoration of houses, the construction industry has long been a site of gender discrimination, and women remain under-represented in architectural practices.2 This chapter explores whether a focus on bodies, embodiment and the ‘doing’ of building is a productive way to move beyond current gender discrimination in design and building practices. Many eco-communities purport to be politically progressive and to attempt gender-neutral practices.3 As Eräranta and colleagues argue,4 a key driver for women joining ‘eco-communes’ were ‘failures in performing the gender identity that the prevalent cultural narrative of the heterosexual nuclear family prescribes to them’.5 The alternative space of eco-communities offered such women an opportunity to experiment in new gender identities and relations – a new politics of the self. This involved dispensing with certain symbols of femininity such as cosmetics, and building new intimate egalitarian relationships with multiple others. However, there is little explicit analysis of gender identity and gender relations in the literature on eco-communities. Gender has been largely treated as unimportant or uncritically. For example, Litfin makes no comment on the gender-specific annual events she observes at the EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York but is ‘curious about women who do manly things like driving tractors’.6 This lack of attention exists despite the broader context where ecologically sustainable practices have a gendered dimension. As Organo and colleagues point out,7 ‘the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women’, even within environmentally conscious households. As such, eco-building is an important site for exploring the gendered nature of architecture and building because, despite attempts at gender-neutral practices, gender divisions remain. Women have an illustrious history of architectural practice and involvement in building.8 Yet we know, as discussed in Chapter 3, that this history is often hidden and marginalised, instead overshadowed by (hi)stories of male contributions. Women have been constrained to the fringes of formal architecture and often confined to the more vernacular architecture of domestic design.9 Women were limited to architectural practices deemed artistic, such as interior decoration.10 In the 1800s, architecture was considered an amateur pursuit for wealthy women, few received recognition until the nineteenth century, and discrimination and under-representation continues to this day.11

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In the US, a feminist movement of the late nineteenth century sought to design kitchen-less houses, moveable walls and community dining halls as a way to free women from their socially expected roles.12 By removing these chores from women’s singular responsibility, the movement sought to value women’s diverse contributions and remove their domestic burdens. Dolores Hayden’s work illustrates the importance of building design in shaping buildings’ usage and gender practices. In other words, house design structures gender relations.13 Women’s views have been traditionally excluded from design decisions about houses in which they will spend the most time, and architects have ‘denied women’s expertise as homemakers of the house’.14 When women are empowered to design their own houses, they can do so in radically different ways. This is best illustrated through the work of Matrix, a feminist architectural co-operative in London in the 1980s. They designed with women, for women.15 They understood the architects’ role as enablers to participants in creating public and private spaces for people’s (especially women’s) needs.16 Salomon17 has argued for spaces of privacy and solitude for women, building on earlier notions that family members need their own ‘territory’ in a house.18 The feminist approach has also involved a more theoretical critique of architecture as fundamentally based on the male body proportions, and exploring how patriarchal ideology is inscribed into public space.19 Women’s role in construction has been similarly marginalised. Crews20 explored the role of women in the construction of indigenous pueblos (villages) in New Mexico. Prior to the Spanish colonialism of the 1500s, women were in charge of building the houses. Men would provide the timbers and set them in place, but it was women who would erect the walls, plaster them and maintain the physical structure.21 In numerous other worldwide examples of vernacular architecture, it is often women who were the builders.22 In Britain, working-class women were nail and brick makers in the 1800s;23 Livesey24 has documented the histories of women’s involvement as building labourers during the Second World War, most notably in being the main labourers constructing Waterloo Bridge. Matrix were also hands-on in construction projects, learning building skills and working on site.25 Despite women accounting for half the workforce in Britain, they make up only 13 per cent of the construction industry’s workforce; indeed ‘construction continues to be the most male dominated of all the

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major industrial groups.’26 Women are excluded through a multitude of cultural practices including long work hours, conflict, aggression, sexual harassment and informal networks of recruitment.27 The potential for change to these cultural practices is limited partly due to the lack of a critical mass of women in the construction industry.28 Women’s employment status, pay and conditions are still marginalised. Moreover, the women who do work in the sector are often marginalised further by the jobs they do. Of those women working in the construction trades in the US, the majority worked as wallpaper hangers and woodworkers – interior (and often inferior) craft roles.29 Despite class and ethnicity becoming less important in construction industries in recent years, gender stubbornly remains a marker of division.30 This brief history of feminist architectural practice and women’s involvement in manual construction signals numerous causes for gender divisions (such as political and economic structures, and a mind/body dualism) that might (or might not) be less prevalent in alternative spaces. Gender, bodies and embodiment The social constructionist approach to gender and the associated division between sex and gender is challenged and complicated by work on the body.31 A focus on the body acknowledges the importance of ‘corporeographies’32 and requires that gender is understood as embodied, not simply a social construction written upon biological bodies, but a lived experience.33 The way people think, feel and sense, and our relationships to others, tasks and place is intricately shaped by our bodies. As Sharpe and Gorman-Murray argue,34 there remains significant scope in geography to work with embodiment, and to place the body centrally in our analysis of contemporary problems. This chapter uses embodiment as a way to better understand the lived experiences of women designers and eco-builders, and to explore whether this approach creates more spaces of opportunity to overcome gender discrimination. Embodiment is the process of understanding how attributes of our bodies (such as gender, strength, race, etc.) ‘intersect and give meaning to bodies and their interactions with the world around them; and that conditions of embodiment are organised by systematic patterns of domination and subordination’.35 Our bodies are natural and social, political, situated and complicated. There is no either/or, mind/ body, strong/weak dualism. Our bodies are not static, but dynamic, negotiable, moveable and changeable.36

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Judgements about women’s capabilities and capacities are often rooted in the Cartesian dualism between mind and body and the associated assumption that it is possible to be disembodied.37 This division was only ever applied to men – the subsequent bearers of rational and universal knowledge – while women were forever consigned to their bodies, unable to free themselves from their apparent fragility, emotions and irrationality.38 As such, sexism and patriarchy is justified through these essentialist discourses around the capacities of male and female bodies. An embodied approach moves beyond these essentialised notions of gender: ‘embodied difference can be conceptualized in non- or anti-essentialist ways.’39 A focus on the body redefines how capacities can be understood; as Simonsen argues, ‘the practically oriented body continuously weaves meaning throughout the course of its existence, while its own forms and capacities materialize contingently through its interactions with others and with its environment.’40 Thus capacities are fluid and continuously learnt through interaction. As Newbery argues, our bodies are shaped by social constructions and subsequent daily practices: The female body is disciplined to be less physically capable; diet regimes, clunky footwear, and an obsessive focus on surface appearance hardly encourages the development of a strong body. The notion of weakness becomes imprinted on the female body in both discursive and material terms through a kind of performative feedback.41

Exploring embodiment opens up how bodies are inscribed by social forces and structures, how normalising discourses seek to discipline our bodies in certain ways, and how society is not good at ‘integrating the different, or the difficult’.42 Accepting that all our bodies are different, that they are amalgamations of natural and social forces, brings into question any certainty about what bodies are or how they should look; instead there is ambiguity, diversity and fantasy.43 Embodiment is about more than just the ‘body’ but also fluidity and malleability ‘which means that it can take different forms and shapes at different times’.44 Indeed, bodies are fluid amalgamations. Longhurst45 asks geographers to acknowledge the messy materialities of bodies. In doing so, she outlines how our bodies are rarely stable, but rather fluid, permeable, volatile, leaky – bodies are ‘runny, gaseous, flowing, watery’.46 As Grosz suggests, ‘body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed.’47 When this has been acknowledged, however, such leakiness is assigned to women

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typified by their menstruation, lactation and sweat. Thus women’s bodies are cast as messy, out of control, dirty, troublesome, whereas men’s are (assumed to be, but are clearly not) stable, hard and solid.48 Bodies also shape our experience of places and ‘cannot be understood outside of place’.49 Bodies are entwined with places: ‘our bodies are a product of the complex interaction of different discourses, social relations, and practices constituted in relation to wider locations, including other bodies, the home and the workplace.’50 There is thus an important scale to an embodied approach to research that valorises the personal, everyday, fluid, flesh and blood.51 While providing some evidence to support these approaches to the body, this chapter also seeks to further develop the concept of embodiment as a way to overcome gender divisions. Gender divisions and spaces of opportunity Across all the case studies, gender served as a form of division within communities, particularly in relation to architecture and building practices. There was a stereotype prevalent amongst the case studies that ‘men build houses and women make homes’, and consequently the women were constrained to support roles, internal decorating and childcare while the men did the construction. There are multiple assumptions made about women’s bodies which were similar across the case studies – these are summarised in Table 7.1. TABLE 7.1 Assumptions articulated in the case studies about gender and eco-architecture and eco-building Gender is defined through assumptions about

Male builders express assumptions by arguing

Stage of building Implications for selfaffected building

Body

Women are not as strong as men

Practices and process

Mind

Women are Design and not as good at structure scientific skills and knowledge

Building is a scientific and engineering project in which women are less able

Society’s expectations

Women have not historically been builders and their role is in the domestic realm

Women’s work in building is often unacknowledged and undervalued. Instead their contribution is central in ‘making a home’

Occupation

Strength is required for building, so women are less able

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Bodies were evoked, implicated and excluded from building practices in three key ways, each of which will be explored using empirical material below: in assumptions about the necessity for strong bodies for building, in the need for bodies to practise building skills and the ways in which certain bodies are more visible than others. Each of these also creates spaces of opportunity through which eco-building can be challenged and reconceived in less gender-divisive ways. Strong bodies There was an often-expressed assumption that the main reason there were fewer female builders at case-study sites was because women were not as strong as men. Many male interviewees equated building as primarily requiring physical strength: ‘some things do require a lot of strength and a lot of having had practice … when you’re holding a heavy thing and you’ve got to nail it into another thing’, comments Will, at Panya Project, a permaculture project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which built cob and adobe houses. For Christian (also at Panya Project), the act of building made the body stronger: ‘when you build your own house, you’re going to get stronger muscles and have a stronger body.’ Many female interviewees argued that women could be physically strong, that any strength requirements were easily navigated by changing practices and that body strength was rarely the most important attribute for building. Shelley at Panya Project noted that ‘it’s not just males, and it’s not just women that aren’t as strong. There’s a lot of strong women and I mean they’re physically bigger and they’re stronger that come through as well. It’s an attitude thing.’ Changing building practices to reduce the strength required to complete tasks included making smaller bricks – Will argued that they ‘redesigned the bricks to be small enough … it’s adapting things to you – natural building is quite a personalised craft and you can adapt it to what you think is appropriate for your body.’ It was also about altering the way materials were put in place. Amanda Bramble at Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center, New Mexico, describes how she adjusted the process of building an earthbag wall in her house by filling the bags in situ and taking her time to rest between doing the hard work of tamping the bags: You fill the bag on the wall in place, so shovel by shovel. You have a little bag stand it’s like you wrap the top of the bag over it … You bring over a wheelbarrow of moist dirt and you just fill it right in place.

176 | SEVEN You do have to lift some when you’re in a tricky spot and it’s hard on the body. The main thing is tamping because after you’ve done a whole course or as many as you’re going to do, then you have to tamp them really, really hard, and you’re tamping them so that you feel the difference in the earth. You feel it start to be hard and ring … you can tamp a few bags and then stop and breathe for a few minutes.

This process was very embodied: Amanda describes how ‘hard on the body’ it was, and how you needed to ‘feel the difference in the earth’. Nathalia at Casa Tierra, Argentina, described the process of building with her male partner as a mutual understanding of their bodies, rather than a gender division: ‘The only thing that I always ask him to do it is mix with the shovel because now I’m pregnant I cannot do very low ground level work. But … if we need to mix I prefer my mix, or we work it in a wheelbarrow instead. There are things we ask each other to do, I think it’s about your body and your relation with the body.’ Beyond adapting practices to reduce the need for strong bodies, there was also resistance to the suggestion that strength was the most important criteria for successful building. Amanda Bramble at Ampersand observed: The physical aspect of building is to me a small aspect. There’s so much you have to do right. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing, and those details or just making things plumb or level, you really have to think ahead in order to integrate what’s going to come later and later and later with what you’re doing now … It takes so much more than just your brute force, and it’s a lot more important, that thinking stuff.

Amanda begins to suggest not just that there is more to building than strength, but that strength itself is more than just ‘brute force’. Similarly, in Panya Project resident Gregory’s argument that ‘you don’t have to be like super burly and super strong or just like a freak to be able to move stuff to build a natural house. It does take a lot of work but with just a bit of perseverance, anybody can do it’, the practice of perseverance hints at a different way in which strength could be conceived. The assumption that only male bodies are strong, and that only strong bodies can build (reifying the male body), has been challenged

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by, mostly female, eco-builders who have sought to illustrate the complexity of both building and bodies. Assumptions around ‘strong bodies’ have created a space of opportunity for female eco-builders to prove how embodiment is central to understanding building practices. It is not always useful to simply compare strength between bodies; ‘we tend to divide people into strong and weak … rather than understanding all of us as, in some way, strong enough.’52 Illustrating that knowing one’s body, adapting practices for one’s body, and acknowledging the diverse ways in which one might be ‘strong’, both challenges gender assumptions and creates space for all genders to reflect upon and improve their bodily experience of building. Bodies of practices Skills, capabilities, knowledge and competencies are more important in architectural design and building practices than strength, and such skills often require using our bodies. This is especially so in the case studies where construction was self-built and architects were often actively involved in the physical labour of building. Some of the most popular forms of eco-building are natural techniques that can be quite labour intensive (such as straw bale or adobe). The importance of using the body in building was undermined by a myth that women were not as good at science and engineering as men, and this in turn hindered their ability to design and build houses. Sometimes this was expressed as blatant discrimination, as Alix Henry, eco-architect in New Mexico, has encountered: ‘construction and architecture are highly male dominated professions and so to be in it as a woman has its challenges … there’s a huge amount of discrimination against women in the [architecture] profession.’ At other times, it can be subtler. Gregory at Panya Project argued that more artistic approaches to building were more inclusive, especially to women: ‘I feel as if it’s more accessible to more people if it’s not a science but an art, and natural building sometimes feels more of an art to me than a science.’ Likewise, Mark Lakeman at City Repair Project, Portland, Oregon argued that ‘I don’t want to compartmentalise men or women … women do have stronger capacities, they’re more naturally empathetic, they’re more naturally receptive. I think of design at best as being a process of facilitation and that’s something that women do more gracefully and easily by nature than men.’ This inferred deference to women being more creative and artistic was experienced by a fellow female builder in the eco-village, who felt that while artistic contributions were accepted from women,

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they were rarely allowed to be involved in the practical structural designs; it is worth quoting Shelley from Panya Project at some length here: With gender it’s more than just the physicality of it. I don’t think that’s so much of an issue. I might make the bricks smaller but I can still lift them and I will lift them. It’s the communication and it’s the way that the feminine approach interacts with the masculine approach and how to merge those two in a productive way. Finding and exploring the power of each approach and harnessing that, this started to happen towards the end with the toilet project. There was definitely a more feminine presence in the creative aspect, men seemed quite happy to let women somewhat direct the artistic side of things, but when it comes to talking practically they’re a little bit challenged. There needs to be a bit more of men coming in and being creative. There are a lot of creative men that live here and come through here, and there are a lot of practical women who come through too. It is allowing both sides to acknowledge that.

As Shelley articulates, creativity and art are not limited to women and nor should they be perceived as so. Many men are creative, just as many women are good at science and structural design.53 There are three processes at work here. The first assumes that science is not a creative act, whereas much scientific endeavour is highly creative in the ways in which new ideas are tested and understood. The second process is an assertion of the mind/body dualism where men’s minds are deemed more highly valued through their assumed scientific superiority. Finally, the importance of the body for building is undermined through the privileging of mental acts of science, delegating the body’s role to one of simply providing strength. Women and men sought to challenge these processes of gender exclusion by articulating and practising a more embodied approach to eco-building. Rather than seek to directly illustrate an equivalent understanding of science and engineering (which would have compounded the mind/body dualism), interviewees asserted the necessity to know one’s body, that building skills require an embodied practice, and that the capacity to build was reliant upon a holistic set of skills and abilities that all genders needed to learn. Mike Reynolds, the architect of Earthships in New Mexico, described this as a mixture of dexterity, strength, temperament and training:

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People are radically different from each other. Some people should not even attempt to build their own home … they just don’t have the hands for it, they don’t have the strength for it, they don’t have the temperament for it, but then lots of them should and could. It’s a matter of educating people on what is needed to do these buildings, and some will find that they can do it and some will find that they can’t. It’s like some people can handle a four-wheel drive automobile and some should just stay with an automatic little sedan, and some people should have somebody drive them.

Kirsten Jacobson of the Earthship Biotecture, New Mexico, concurs that the work of self-building an Earthship is ‘physically demanding and takes some level of skill and tenaciousness to figure out the details. It’s more than just pounding the tyres. You’ve got to really think about all the systems and how they work together, and you need to know how they’re all going to work together as you’re doing it.’ In Argentina, the Ruizes at Casa Tierra, who were first taught natural building by two women, believed it was necessary for all genders to better understand and know their own bodies and their limitations. As Diego Riuz argued, building required creative judgement, which both genders needed to learn and practice through embodiment: There are many cultures where women were completely in charge of housing and also it’s like you have a preconception that building is not for women because it’s hard work. Alright, many men that I know they think it’s [not masculine] to be carrying straw, but many aspects of the natural building is working with the materials, with the fibres, with the soil, it’s very feminine. Because you need to use your sensitiveness to know if it’s soft enough. Of course there is a lot of hard work, but many women can do it.

Regardless of whether being sensitive is a feminine trait (and this statement might be complicated by its translation from Spanish), Diego identifies the necessity to use one’s body to work with the building materials. This is exemplified further by Gregory from Panya Project, who advocated that students learn about materials through their bodies: Your hands know what it is within minutes … when we’re actually making it, can you feel that this is too dry? It’s crumbling. Can you see it’s too wet? It’s puddling. When you stomp in it you can feel that

180 | SEVEN suction. If you slap it on your hand and it sticks, that’s what you’re looking for. After that thing happens, the body retains this information … I try to really encourage people to listen to the thing and let their body learn.

This form of bodily engagement with eco-building has been encouraged by hands-on training and workshops (for example, with eco-architect Paulina Wojciechowska of Earth Hands and Houses, based in England and Spain, who runs numerous workshops in clays and making natural plasters). It was through these sorts of workshops and training opportunities that women were able to embrace new skills in the bodily practice of building: ‘It’s incredible for women to have the training here and get the strength to have these skills and to have control over that part of housebuilding. We always joke about homemaker, I mean really you are a homemaker’ (eco-architect Alix Henry). Builders such as Shay Salomon in the US and the Mud Girls in Canada encourage women’s participation by leading women-only builds. For example, Salomon led a group of women who built small vault dwellings at the Lama Foundation, a small straw-bale house with a cordwood front (Figure 7.1). That this workshop was for women only created a ‘safe place’, as Chelsea Lord at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico noted:

7.1 A small dwelling at the Lama Foundation, New Mexico

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For a lot of women who came they had never picked up a hammer or a screw gun, and just having a safe place to teach them, to show them how to do it, to let them practice, without judgement or some jerk standing over them … There was a question once of like can the men come watch the women … and the women decided no, because they’re just going to be watching us bend over.

Such a space also prevented men from taking over, as Will at Panya Project observed: ‘it’s very easy for someone, males like carpenters … he could make it look so easy and … when a female who doesn’t really have much experience comes in males are very quick to go alright, don’t worry, I’ll do that.’ Hence the need, as Jones has argued,54 for women to create their own working environments. In Argentina, it was only through women-only workshops that women could be encouraged to build; Diego at Casa Tierra said: ‘If we don’t put that this workshop is for women-only, they don’t come … the main reason is that women don’t feel like that they can do it. Maybe as a woman you just need to see other women doing it. Because they say “hey, she’s doing it!”’ These women-only workshops created a space in which people could practise, make mistakes and gain in confidence. One house at Tinkers Bubble in Somerset was built by a woman – her first self-build, with no money, and just some advice from others. She built a beautiful, cosy small building out of natural materials. She acknowledged that it was not perfect, and she would in hindsight have done some things differently. But having the freedom to learn through doing, to explore her own approaches and methods is as important as ensuring women have the skills and knowledge to build. This emphasis on embodying building skills extends to improving practices of communication, particularly spaces for questioning and listening. Despite having built her own Earthship, Kirsten Jacobson of Earthship Biotecture had experienced being overridden by men: ‘I definitely came up against a lot of dealing with going to the hardware store and knowing what I wanted and having someone tell me that’s not what I want … and being pretty dismissive of me.’ Part of this listening is being open to a diversity of approaches and questions. Likewise Shelley at Panya Project had found her questions ignored: Being a woman I have felt when I’ve made suggestions or asked [questions] … that wasn’t acknowledged. I partly think it was gender but not wholly … healthy questioning isn’t always taken

182 | SEVEN well, especially from a young woman who might not have much on the ground experience of building, but personally I think I’m quite practical.

The myth that women are less scientifically able than men created a space of opportunity to articulate and practise a more embodied approach to building. By identifying how much of eco-building is reliant upon dexterity and skills practised through the body (such as knowing and feeling soil mixtures), building becomes rearticulated as a combination of mental and physical skills and competencies which are less associated with a particular gendered body. In/visible bodies Women’s contributions to eco-building in the case studies often appeared less immediately visible than men’s. A number of different processes conspired to devalue women’s contributions and place them in the home (rather than building it). This invisibility, and subsequent undervaluing of women’s work, is part of a historical trend whereby the work that it was assumed women do (such as childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc.) was located in the less visible spaces of private homes and thus did not constitute real work.55 This attitude extends to eco-building practices where the many roles that women perform (collecting build materials, organising training workshops, etc.) are deemed support roles rather than the ‘main business’ of design and construction. This creates a double bind for female eco-builders that, as Alix Henry describes, simultaneously ignores women’s presence and then when they become visible devalues their efforts: I would be on a site as an architectural intern and people would always assume you’re the home owner or the wife of the person who’s building. For instance I would be carrying a bucket of concrete up to the top of this building, and there was an assumption that it wasn’t hard work. Basically they first assume that you’re not working, and then they assume that it’s easy because a women can do it. And that’s unbelievable because this is extremely labour-intensive work.

The result is that finished buildings that draw attention for their innovation and design are often implicitly attributed to men. It becomes ‘Jim’s house’ for example, excluding all the work that others, especially women, have put into it. This also reinforces a hierarchy of value of roles in an eco-community that affects all genders. Gardening

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in particular tended to be contrasted as of less value than building; Shelley at Panya Project commented that ‘the nature within the community of the power that men have is “this is our focus, this is what we’re doing, we’re building.” Whereas if I turn around and go “I think it’s just as important to plant food”, sometimes it isn’t taken seriously. I think that’s partly a gender thing.’ The processes through which building became masculinised and the reasons why women concentrated on gardening were often not critically reflected upon, as Christian at Panya Project observed: When we host building courses … we’ve got a good mix of women and men. I find with the long-term people that live here, the women tend to move more towards the gardens … whereas the men can just keep cracking at the building, swinging hammers and whatnot, and everyone is invited as much as anyone else in the garden and in the buildings, but it kind of tends to go that way.

This process affects men as much as women. For example, in Green Hills in Scotland, the men had to take over the gardening business for a while as both the women were heavily pregnant. One of the men realised that he loved gardening more than building (which he had taken on by default for many years), and has ever since been far more hands-on in the garden. Making women’s contributions visible has not been easy and there are few spaces of opportunity. Training helps but, as Alix Henry notes, while ‘women need opportunity for hands-on training … there’s a huge amount of discrimination against women in the [architecture] profession and how do you bridge that? … I think seeing women and just being exposed to it is going to normalize women in the profession. But how you get them in there is a problem.’ Women have benefited from the mutual support of other female builders, but as Kirsten Jacobson (Earthship Biotecture) comments, women eco-builders still do not have high public profiles, but rather support each other in small niches: I was lucky enough to do it in the context where my neighbour was a woman building her own house, and there were probably three or four women working on the Earthship construction crews at that time, and so to do that somewhere where that’s not acceptable or the norm I could imagine being even more difficult … We’re just building

184 | SEVEN stuff out of garbage. It’s totally tangible. You see your work. I think that would be especially empowering for women, but how would that translate when they have to go back into a mixed environment. At least they have the chance to gather the knowledge in a place where they’re not being overlooked.

Until women become more visible on eco-building sites, their diverse contributions are likely to remain undervalued. Conclusions This chapter has illustrated a disturbing persistence of gender divisions and, perhaps more importantly, a lack of acknowledgement from many involved that such divisions are even problematic. By drawing upon a broad set of case studies, situated in Britain, Argentina, Spain, Thailand and the US, the commonalities in gender discrimination across cultures and nationalities are even more striking. As such, female designers and eco-builders have illustrated how it is productive to find ways of being dissonant other than accepting the Cartesian divisions of gender.56 By focusing on the bodily practices of building, it has been possible to identify three spaces of opportunity to change gender relations in ecocommunities. First, women designers and eco-builders have challenged the need for, and notion of, ‘strong’ bodies. Second, by focusing on skills, dexterity, learning and practice, building becomes rearticulated as a combination of mental and physical skills and competencies that are less associated with a particular gendered body. Finally, women have illustrated the necessity to make their bodies visible in building. For each of these, women have developed strategies to challenge any gender assumption – be that changing building practices (such as making blocks smaller), or running women-only workshops. Such approaches build upon initiatives used in the construction industry more broadly – such as mentoring schemes, internships and attempts to change the sexist culture.57 These approaches serve to challenge existing assumptions about who has the knowledge and skills to build. A focus on embodiment provides a different starting point from which to examine gender divisions. It enables different questions to be asked as to what it is about women’s bodies that appear to limit their building capacity. Building on existing understandings of the body, this approach suggests that women’s leaky bodies, their messiness and

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sweat might be in part why their inclusion in acts of physical labour is so distasteful.58 Or it might be because women’s bodies are not perceived as ‘hard enough’ (just as early explorers had ‘a “hard body” [which] embodied strength, fortitude and glorified athleticism’59). Yet a focus on bodies also opens up further questions about what bodily capacity women and men have and need for labour-intensive manual eco-building. In an era of climate change, austerity and rhetoric about community resilience, the need to do more physical work to be self-reliant illustrates the need to more closely examine the body, and embodiment, to understand environmental alternatives and their possibilities. Crucially, without an explicit feminist analysis of embodiment of these physical practices, these physical practices could just as easily be used to reinforce existing gender identities. Therefore, while a focus on bodies is important for understanding lived experience and how normalising discourses seek to discipline our bodies, it is also necessary to explore the possibilities of using our bodies in different ways. In other words, it is just as vital to examine how bodily practice can create spaces of opportunity for gender-neutral relations and the anticipated demands upon our bodies in building environmental alternatives. This task requires research on gender and embodiment to start to look forward to the future, and hopefully these examples of eco-architecture and eco-building begin this work.

8 | M OB I LI S A T I O N

The house and studio are hard to miss, towering as they do over the road on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico. Designed and built by Thom Wheeler, the building is a monument to Thom’s work as a sculptor and artist. The two-storey structure is a conglomeration of local indigenous building methods and a Hollywood mansion. Built of adobe bricks from local clay and using beams of local Douglas Fir wood, the house performs well in the regional climate – providing

8.1 Thom Wheeler’s adobe house, Taos, New Mexico

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a cool interior in summer and retaining heat in winter. Yet the 16foot-high ceilings, large building footprint (4,200 square feet) and numerous porches and balconies also reflect a different aesthetic; that of abundance and opulence not found in other adobe houses nearby. Thom’s house is the product of a mixture of influences, knowledges and aesthetics. It is no mere replication; rather it is an adaptation of an ecological building approach to suit Thom’s needs and desires. If eco-homes are such a good idea, with financial, social and environmental benefits, and can be produced cheaply (see Chapter 5), it is perplexing why there are so few of them worldwide.1 This chapter explores why eco-homes are being mobilised in some places and not others. The term ‘mobilisation’ comes from social movement theory as a way of explaining how activists are motivated to join collective action, to become campaigners and change makers.2 But here is it used as a way to suggest that we not only need to take action – that is, encourage people to build more eco-homes – but also make that action mobile.3 We need to understand the geography of self-built eco-homes – where they are,4 but also the processes of innovation, deployment, replication, adaptation and transformation across time and space. As with the rest of the book, this chapter uses examples of self-build ecohomes, and thus cannot be representative of all eco-home building types and approaches. Consequently, this chapter explores why some countries are self-building eco-homes and others are not (in other words, why there is such spatial heterogeneity in eco-homes), rather than determining how to build eco-homes on a mass scale per se (which would require a different set of empirical material and analysis). This requires examining how the knowledges and practices of eco-building travel (or not) around the world. If we understood these processes, it could be possible to further facilitate and speed them up, in turn increasing the number of eco-homes being built. Mobilising and adapting eco-homes Focusing on how knowledges and practices move, rather than just how they are replicated (copied), acknowledges the complexity of new housing ideas. Innovation, evolution and adaptation rarely all happen in one place, or in a linear fashion. Instead the ‘innovation journey’ is often fraught with dead ends, failures and unpredictable outcomes.5 Eco-homes continue to evolve and do so across space as well as

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time. The ideal outcome of mobilising eco-homes is not replication – knowledges and practices simply copied between locations – but the adaptation and evolution of ideas to suit the climate, culture and residents’ requirements in the new place. Simply replicating ideas from one place to another without alteration is often unsuccessful, for example, resulting in uncomfortable internal temperatures.6 As Faulconbridge argues, ‘all knowledges are indelibly marked by the institutional contexts of the spaces they originate in … [so they are] often inappropriate, nonsensical or difficult to implement when imported into the alien institutional space.’7 This challenges the idea that the current designs and practices we are using in eco-homes are necessarily the best for a particular place or residents’ needs. Instead, it acknowledges that building professionals are constantly seeking to improve and do so using numerous international influences.8 This does not mean, unfortunately, that the best (or most suitable) ideas are the ones which are adopted; how knowledges and practices about eco-homes are mobilised (or not) is a complex spatial process which this chapter will critically explore. Mobilisation in this context includes the mobility of knowledges and practices. Although knowledge about innovative building designs is necessary to stimulate adaptation, so too especially in self-building are understandings of how to practically implement and alter these knowledges.9 In other words, mobilisation of eco-homes is a process of sharing and learning a mixture of theoretical and practical processes. Mobilisation in this chapter refers to the learning, adaptation and evolution of knowledges and practices across space and place. It is about situating these knowledges and practices often developed elsewhere into other places. It is only when the technological, administrative and social aspects of an eco-home suit the place it is in (and are embedded) that this mobilisation process leads to building at a greater scale.10 For example, in Britain, although we did have progressive legislation supporting eco-homes development, this has now been abandoned and we continue to be slow to build eco-homes. Faulconbridge’s interviewee summed it up well when referring to this ‘as the North Sea Gap, which is a 10-year gap between something being done in Holland or somewhere with a perfectly similar climate, no different whatsoever, and it being done here’ in Britain.11 We need to speed up these processes of innovation and adaptation.

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Houses are designed and built by a diverse collection of professionals and non-professionals. Williams12 summarises the house-building industry as composed of ‘developers, builders, financial institutions, suppliers, technical consultants and local authorities, who both act together and constrain each others’ actions’, with professionals often acting as barriers to the spread of innovations13 and locking in certain build approaches.14 Beyond the formal construction industry, there are numerous non-professionals involved in the self-build sector who overlap with the above but also complicate it through alternative networks of learning, suppliers (such as salvage yards) and alternative knowledges and building cultures. What is common across all those involved in building, however, is the broad range of knowledges required to successfully build an eco-home in a place where it is not yet the norm, that is, experimental, design, regulatory and building. Barriers and enablers to eco-homes There has been considerable research on what the barriers and enablers are to more eco-homes being built.15 Table 8.1 summarises TABLE 8.1 Barriers and enablers to eco-homes being built in minority world countries16 Dimensions

Barriers

Enablers

Political

Weak regulatory environment – hard to measure compliance, and little impetus to change current practices Geographically uneven application and interpretation influenced by level of knowledge of inspectors and planners Lack of policy support Planning restrictions work against new builds Overly restrictive building regulations which constrain innovation Inconsistent legislation Piecemeal accreditation of technologies, rather than holistic approach to systems

Provision of ‘proof of concept’ spaces where examples are developed and demonstrated Zero carbon and energy efficiency policy targets Stringent but flexible building regulations Long-term regulatory framework Special exceptions in planning being used to allow eco-homes where standard housing would not be permitted

Technological Weak supply chains Lack of training (especially for subcontractors) Poor knowledge about how technologies should be installed and work

Demonstration sites proving how technology works Technological innovation and experimentation A holistic accreditation system

190 | EIGHT TABLE 8.1 Continued Dimensions

Economic

Barriers

Enablers

Lack of feedback and reflection upon failure in building chain Poor installation and quality results in consumer rejection Reliance upon technological solutions rather than structure and fabric innovation Reliance upon one technological solution rather than a holistic combination Lack of testing and reliable evidence that technologies work Concerns about what maintenance might be required

Prefabrication and industrialisation of build process Feedback loops to increase quality of build Post-occupancy evaluation results Working in partnerships with, e.g., an energy company, to build knowledge capacity. Supplier model: supplier of component parts builds houses Training in environmental literacy

Problems in securing finance for novel techniques Expense of new technological solutions Housing viewed as primarily a financial investment Lifetime use costs are not calculated as part of purchase cost – thus eco-homes perceived to have premium costs Lack of stimulus to make changes to existing systems because current approach remains profitable High cost of building land Housing costs already very high

Rising energy costs making consumers aware of benefits Low-cost design examples Simple and accessible financing available Grants and tariffs to support emerging technologies Tax incentives for eco-building Indemnification of the risk of technology failure Cradle-to-cradle pricing mechanisms

Socio-cultural Failure of people to understand resource problems and thus the value and benefits of an eco-home People have positive illusions about their environmental impact Increasing expectations of standardised indoor climate Lack of consumer demand or willingness to pay for eco-features Lack of customer knowledge about environmental issues and eco-features Cultural attachment to certain building materials as exemplifying status Belief that eco-homes are less comfortable and require more manual effort Local objection to innovative build projects Poor communication as to purpose and value of eco-homes Invisibility of many eco-features (such as insulation and better-quality windows)

Some support for entrepreneurs, pioneers and risk takers Opportunities for hands-on teaching and learning Aesthetics of eco-homes mirroring existing housing Triggers to environmental consciousness such as resource crises Acknowledgement of long and significant history of eco-building Participatory planning approach to include local residents Framing eco-homes as positive and desirable and not involving a sacrifice

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the main findings of this work and it includes political, technological, economic and socio-cultural issues. While identifying what hinders and facilitates eco-homes adoption is important, and recognising that alleviation of certain barriers can encourage further building, this focus on barriers and enablers is too simplistic to enable the full complexity of eco-homes mobilisation processes to be understood.17 Although it incorporates the full range of issues likely to impinge on eco-homes – the political through to the socio-cultural – such an approach does not help explain where innovative eco-homes ideas come from, how knowledges and practices evolve and change, how ideas move across space and place or how barriers are ‘geographically heterogeneous’;18 neither does it take account of the diversity of eco-home forms.19 For example, although Gann20 explores the exchange of environmental building techniques across different cultures and different disciplines, and in so doing explicitly incorporates a regional dimension, his findings are that there are structural barriers to the sharing of technical knowledge between professional project teams. Despite the promise of a more spatial understanding of the processes, ultimately only commercial building was studied. Only through understanding how spatial processes work will we be able to really know how to better support and encourage eco-homes to spread. Understanding the processes of mobilisation Science and technology studies (STS) has long sought to outline how innovation happens and how such innovation gets adopted by others.21 STS understands technologies (in their broadest sense, thus including houses) as fluid and malleable, and recognises the importance of context in how a technology works and is understood. Technology is socially constructed. It is designed, built and implemented by us, born of the social, economic and technical relations that are already in place, and it cannot be separated from this social context, just as technology in turn shapes society.22 Socio-technical systems is a concept of STS. Seyfang and Smith use Geels’s23 multi-level transitions perspective to argue that eco-homes innovation begins in a small niche environment. This niche is protected from too much competition and small networks of actors support the evolution of these innovations within the niche.24 Although the simplicity of this niche-to-mainstream transition has since been critically questioned,

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the basic premise that eco-homes ideas are developed in particular places is reflected in a variety of examples. This is not to suggest that it is possible to assume or easily identify what sorts of places will produce eco-homes innovations, or what use they will be to other places. Oliver’s25 work challenged the implicit assumptions prevalent in some development work that suggested that the mobilisation of building techniques was necessarily diffused from the ‘West’ to the rest by tracing the spread of vernacular designs in multiple directions across the globe. Detailing a variety of experiments of the ‘West’ in introducing new technologies and building methods, Oliver illustrates how these interventions were often unsuitable, upset existing social systems, and were resisted by residents who subsequently modified and altered the dwellings. This emphasis on the importance of the cultural context of buildings, their alteration and the need to consider the environmental consequences of, for example, introducing brick kiln systems into India, are all vital lessons for understanding the spatial mobilisation of eco-homes knowledges and practices. Coenen26 incorporated space and geography into socio-technical transitions approaches. The basic concept is that the innovations must seize ‘windows of opportunity’ to break into the dominant culture (the regime which has a momentum which encourages the status quo, inertia and stability) and this is achieved through a particular innovation developing a singular discourse and then aligning with an aspect in the dominant regime.27 Successful innovation then is adopted by elements of the mainstream culture, and the regime is altered.28 Notably, this mainstreaming relates not only to specific technologies, such as water systems, ‘but also to the kinds of social practices and meanings upon which those technologies are predicated, such as active management of water use’.29 Crucially the way in which innovations are adopted is ‘explained not only by interactions between modes of structuration and developments over time, but also by interactions between actors and institutions situated across different levels of spatial scale’.30 In other words, practices and knowledges are shared spatially – between places and across scales.31 Supporters of this approach argue that in order to encourage more niche innovations to be adopted, we need to change the regime to be more open to new ideas and create a critical mass of support for the innovations – in other words, we need to generate demand for these innovations and the related new practices.32 For example, van

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Bueren and Broekhans33 analysed an individual project based on niche innovations but constructed by mainstream actors, which had mixed success. It resulted in a high-quality eco-building, and knowledge was transferred from the niche to the regime, but this knowledge was fragmented and weakened, and ‘a lot of sustainability potential, synergy, and efficiency may be lost.’34 In other words, some of the potential of the original project was lost through the transition to the mainstream. These are social, political and economic processes, which overlap with each other but also have different methods through which ideas are exchanged. For example, for commercially mass-produced houses, political processes of circulation include international policy networks, conferences and workshops. Economic processes include knowledge sharing internally within global firms, or technology manufacturers marketing their products. Social processes are often through Internet dissemination, the media and popular literature. All these processes have particular spatial elements. Diverse house designs will circulate through different spaces and thus mobilise in different ways. Table 8.2 sketches the spaces of circulation and consequent outcomes for three broad types of house design: TABLE 8.2 The different spaces of circulation of eco-housing knowledges and practices by eco-home style35 Type of house design

Spaces of circulation

Vernacular

Material presence encourages replication Local knowledge and practices passed through generations Availability of local skills and tradespeople Availability of relevant and appropriate materials Heritage associations

Architect-designed

Global firms Global professional communities and professional validation Technology manufacturers Media Formal education systems Sharing best-practice examples through professional publications

Commercially mass-produced

Policy support for particular methods Policy makers’ visits to exemplar projects Global firms Global professional communities and professional validation Technology manufacturers Media Industry success stories

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vernacular, architect-designed and commercially mass-produced. Although the spaces of circulation overlap in some cases (for example, between commercially mass-produced and architect-designed), for other designs the circulation processes are almost entirely separate. Missing from current work is any understanding of how self-built knowledge is circulated. According to STS, technology involves the construction of knowledge and organisation surrounding its implementation, therefore ‘the same technology may be used differently by different people in different ways to different effect’.36 Technology becomes appropriated and reinterpreted by its users – not always using it as foreseen by its designers and developers.37 Thus knowledges and practices will mutate, evolve and be adapted for local circumstances into diverse forms. In understanding how and why some technologies are adopted and adapted and others are not, King38 detailed how the bungalow evolved from a hut form in India to become a desirable one-storey house design that now appears on every continent. The globalisation of this architectural form, and the mutations and adaptations to its design, created the first worldwide common house type. This tracing and understanding of a cultural history of the bungalow was explicitly geographical and tied its mobilisation into global processes of colonialism, urbanisation and suburbanisation. Jacobs39 draws upon the work of King to further a cultural geographical understanding of how buildings move. This ‘movement’ refers to how built forms of building technologies travel and are translated between (and constitute) different sites. Jacobs urges academics to move away from discussions of how building ideas are diffused, and instead to explore how replication of the ‘high rise’ form requires different elements to come together in different places. Faulconbridge40 identifies three dimensions through which ecohomes knowledges and practices flow – regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive. The regulative dimension incorporates the rules, standards and regulations of a place. For example, in Britain, that would include the obligations of planning permission. Building regulations, even when designed to encourage eco-homes, may ultimately misdirect efforts by creating a tick-box culture that loses sight of the original intentions.41 The normative dimension reflects the norms of a place and the moral and ethical assumptions which guide social obligations,

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for example, whether people normally expect a house to be centrally heated and have hot water on demand. The cultural-cognitive dimension includes the broad (often invisible) assumptions about how and why things are done a certain way, the ‘takenfor-granted’ beliefs. This includes assumptions about how the economic system operates in a place, for example, that houses are considered financial investments and must therefore increase in value over time. It also reflects the priorities given to certain practices, such as water or energy saving. If there is not a cultural perception of a shortage of water, then water-saving measures are far less likely to be incorporated into a house design. Underlying all these dimensions are different types of capacities. Capacity is when individuals or communities have the power, resources and ability to make changes to the world around them.42 Tracing the journey of two adobe eco-homes Adobe is a good example through which to explore how self-built eco-homes knowledges and practices are mobilised. Using mud as the main structural material to build a house is a traditional vernacular approach to building, indeed ‘one half of the world’s population – approximately three billion people – live or work in buildings created of earth, mud or clay’.43 Adobe is a particular method where blocks are shaped from earth (often a mixture of sand and clay) mixed with water and a fibrous material (such as straw), sundried (but not baked in an oven, as that would produce bricks) and then stacked to form walls. Adobe is ecological in its source material (natural materials often available locally), construction method (limited additional materials required to build), occupation (if constructed appropriately, it provides an ambient internal temperature without much additional cooling or heating technology) and demolition (it is easily returned to the earth). Many contemporary approaches to eco-homes have their roots in traditional vernacular architecture, both in design form and materials used. Adobe is a good example of this. Adobe has its earliest roots in the Middle East, and was imported to Spain by ‘Arabs’.44 The process suited the climate and resources of Spain and was rapidly adopted. The Spanish then continued the process by circulating the method further through their colonisation of South America (including parts of what is now the US) during the 1500s. In the US, in New Mexico, the imported method of adobe mutated with existing practices of using what is now

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8.2 Adobe houses at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico

called ‘puddled adobe’, but which was a process of layering mud over a structure by hand.45 Ultimately the Spanish method became popular in New Mexico, Argentina and Chile (see Figure 8.2).46 This early development of adobe illustrates how building methods are imbued with history, culture and politics, but also a strong spatial process.47 Adobe as an eco-building method has evolved out of this long spatial history. The following two case studies illustrate the complex ways in which the method was adopted and adapted. Casa Tierra, Argentina Casa Tierra, in San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina, is the almost completed home of Nathalia and Diego Ruiz. They have built an adobe house which curves towards the north with a living roof, a separate office and library building (‘Lak’a Uta’, meaning ‘earth house’) and a separate wattle-and-daub bathroom block (Figure 8.3). Nathalia and Diego were taught adobe building by Janell Kapoor of Kleiwerks, a US-based eco-design advocacy organisation, at a workshop in Patagonia. Kleiwerks then came to Nathalia and Diego’s site and ran further workshops with them, starting the construction of their house. As Diego relates: ‘Two months until the Kleiworks workshop and we decided there were many organisation problems … so we were having 40-minutes talk with Janell by phone and she was saying “no, we’re not going to cancel” … and they say you can do

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8.3 Casa Tierra main house, San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina

it, trust yourself, trust in your work, many many times they were so supportive.’ The knowledges and practices of adobe were understood, selected and adapted through the three dimensions of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive. In this example, the regulative dimension influenced Nathalia and Diego to purposefully choose to build in a rural area where land was cheap and building regulations relatively lax. Technically five blocks north of the town, their plot is considered pampa (countryside)

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and thus building regulations are unlikely to ever apply here – ‘we are outside of the town’, says Nathalia. Diego describes how: There are a small bunch of examples of people that were trying to build with mud in Argentina but they weren’t allowed. We know of two or three situations, we know one that the government came and took the building away. But it’s not the normal situation. In many places when a new law or group of laws regarding how to build applies, that will apply without removing the previous buildings or structures.

But regulations are being formulated for the town itself and Nathalia and Diego are keen to ensure that adobe buildings are formally accepted, perhaps even advocated, within these regulations, as Nathalia argues, ‘we want to ensure that natural materials are included, as another option’. So part of their role is to positively influence the emerging legislation before, as in some other regions, adobe housing is excluded from permissible building (one such house has already had to be demolished because of regulations). The normative expectations of what a house should do in Argentina were reflected in Nathalia and Diego’s design of a central room with a large fireplace, and adobe enabled any size or layout to be constructed. Their social expectations that a house should be affordable also guided their choice of materials and methods. The use of adobe for Casa Tierra had a crucial cultural connection (for the cultural-cognitive dimension) to existing build methods in the region. The vernacular architecture of the area was adobe, but it had come to be perceived as only for those on low incomes and its replacement – red bricks – as a sign of wealth and status, emulating ideas imported from Europe by the rich of Buenos Aires many decades ago (Figure 8.4). As Diego explains: Many of them [locals] have in their families or maybe their fathers or their grandfathers have built with mud … [they say] you are building with mud bricks, sí, of course, my grandfather do this, it was great because they made their own bricks and they built their houses … so for them its surprising and at the same time shocking because they say they already have this.

The traditional adobe houses were square, dark buildings which although warm in winter and cool in summer (and thus functional) were not aesthetically inspiring. However, the brick houses are often colder and

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8.4 Brick house in San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina

thus cost more to heat than the vernacular style and Nathalia and Diego articulated the benefits of adobe around lower living costs. At Casa Tierra, adobe satisfied a number of criteria which fitted into these three dimensions which led to its selection: low cost, local availability, minimal skills required and vernacular precedent. They minimised the use of wood because it was expensive and rejected straw, again because it is not easily available. Nathalia and Diego began their build with low cost as their most important criteria, but through the construction process began to understand it as an eco-home which would provide a healthy environment for their family. Thus adobe was initially adopted primarily because it was low cost, not because of its ecological features. Once selected, the method was mutated and adapted to incorporate existing local knowledges and practices and to suit the particular place. Nathalia and Diego wanted to modify the traditional adobe style to let more light in and make the house more aesthetically appealing, so they built a curved (rather than straight) design with a large bay window at one end. This was inspired by some of the dwellings in Patagonia, but was new to San Francisco del Monte de Oro. At the same time, they employed the traditional local technique of adding cows’ blood to the external plaster which acts as a waterproofing and

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protection agent for the harsh winter weather. As there was a lack of local supply of straw, they did not add in much fibrous material to the adobe bricks (changing their composition), as according to Diego, ‘in the area there’s no agriculture and we cannot find cereals or that kind of straw that you will use’. Finally, because it was so cheap, Nathalia and Diego often purchased unfired clay bricks from the local brick factory rather than make their own. As a result the bricks were smaller than if they had been handmade. That they were able to easily adapt elements of the adobe build process without damaging the utility of the method is part of adobe’s appeal and a key reason why it has been adopted worldwide. The result is an eco-home that incorporates both foreign and local knowledges and practices. Nathalia and Diego hope this will further promote and inspire others to adopt and adapt this method, and that local authorities will support adobe in their regional plans. The journey of Casa Tierra illustrates the spatial processes through which knowledge and practices travelled and changed as the adobe method was learnt and used. The self-build nature of Casa Tierra was reflected in the very particular spaces of circulation through which Nathalia and Diego learnt their building skills. But although these ideas appeared to have been imported from the US, Nathalia and Diego connected the method to existing local practices and thereby were better able to make the eco-build project culturally fit at San Francisco del Monte de Oro. What is less clear is whether or how the process continues from Casa Tierra onwards, which in the spatial model is a key part of the circular process. Nathalia and Diego run workshops; Diego notes: When we have our main events, workshops, we communicate to a local community, invite people to join is. We always try that for the local residents is almost free, so you can come and visit and share and learn … we share the ideas and the models. It’s totally practical … it’s all about seeing the examples working and choosing what best suits for you.

Yet, Nathalia, says, they ‘are going to solve our needs and base it on that in the most simple way that we can solve our needs, we can share that after.’ Pun Pun, Thailand Pun Pun is very different to Casa Tierra. Situated on the edge of the small village of Ban Mae Jo in Chiang Mai province,

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Thailand, Pun Pun is a sustainable living centre concerned with seed saving and teaching the broad range of skills needed for environmental sustainability, of which natural building is only a part. The construction at Pun Pun is big – both in the size of some of the buildings and in their number. There are numerous shared buildings (such as the cafe, dining hall, meeting room and kitchen) and several private dwellings (Figure 8.7). Jon Jandai and Peggy Reents founded the project after Jon experienced the adobe buildings of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Yaowadee Chookong of Pun Pun describes how Jon … went on a trip to Taos, New Mexico. There he saw an adobe building and asked the owner how it was built, but the owner did not know. The building had been standing for a long time. Jon was impressed that it had existed so long and found it cooler inside. He thought it would be good in Thailand. He did not know how to build it, but he just thought he would experiment from seeing it. So he tried an experiment of building using mud bricks in the North East [of Thailand].

For Jon, building ‘the first adobe house was easier than I thought it would be’.48 Just as in Argentina, the regulative, normative and culturalcognitive shaped the aspects of the adobe method that were adopted. While the regulative dimension had little influence, the normative and cultural-cognitive have been more difficult for Jon and Peggy to navigate. Their aim is not just to build for themselves, but for Pun Pun to be an educational inspiration to others in Thailand. However, there are opposing normative values locally. In north Thailand, houses have tended to be built from bamboo, grass or wood: ‘dwellings of bamboo can be considered the primary form of the traditional Thai house – the type in which most commoners used to live and the original basis for forms later deployed in the wooden version.’49 Houses were self-built and raised on stilts to encourage airflow under the house (Figure 8.5). For many, the process of building ‘is where you need to nail it down and tie it up to make a house’.50 Building with adobe challenges this process. It also works against the prevailing trend to use concrete to build homes.51 The shortage and high cost of teak wood, the traditional build material of the region and the short lifespan of other natural materials often used for building there – bamboo and thatch – has left concrete and cement a clear favourite. Being able to afford to build with concrete has become

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8.5 A wooden house in the village of Ban Mae Jo, next to Pun Pun in Chiang Mai, Thailand

perceived as a sign of wealth and status. However, in Thailand, foreign techniques are useful because they are respected culturally as a sign of development. Yaowadee Chookong of Pun Pun observes: ‘They respect the foreigner, if a white person is seen doing something … the locals think it must be OK. But the ideas need to be communicated in a way they can understand.’ At Pun Pun, adobe satisfied a number of criteria which led to its selection; it was low cost, resources were available locally, it offered longevity and robustness, and was easy to learn. Jon and Peggy were particularly interested in building methods that worked well for groups. Part of their aim is to rediscover the traditionally collective ways of community living in Thailand, and adobe is a good collective process. Once selected, the adobe method had to be mutated to suit the cultural-cognitive dimension and the wet and hot tropical climate. This required many adaptations to the New Mexico adobe design. Larger roof overhangs were needed to protect the walls from damage during the monsoon rains, as Yaowadee Chookong notes: ‘It has suffered some rain damage … it needed a bigger overhang than it has, it needs a huge overhang.’ They have also had problems with termites damaging the walls and wood: ‘we have had to make adaptations for termites and

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8.6 Jon and Peggy’s house at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand

rains. We have already make mistakes and have learnt from it, we have experimented.’ Reflecting on this failure in the buildings, they have started to build with metal supporting beams, rather than wood (for example, in the meeting hall, Figure 8.7). They have had to use concrete bases for their walls to protect them from termites. While there has been a gradual erosion of the ecological qualities of the design and method, the result is buildings which can withstand the environment in which they are placed. Yaowadee Chookong acknowledges this compromise: ‘If we had no termites we would be more natural in our building.’ Yet the buildings still work to stabilise internal temperatures: ‘although outside

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8.7 The meeting hall at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand

temperature varies between 10 and 38 Celsius, inside the house stays between 24 and 26 Celsius.’52 The roofs have also required alterations. A thatched roof of grasses is suited to the climate, is part of local vernacular design and enables good ventilation. However, Pun Pun buildings have increasingly used concrete aggregate-fibre tiles on their roofs because tiles last considerably longer and have been used on the larger buildings where replacement every few years would be both costly and considerably time consuming. The decreased ventilation has increased the temperature inside the buildings and so some buildings now have roofs raised high above the walls to allow for better air flow (Figure 8.8), as Yaowadee Chookong notes: ‘We have used metal in the two recent constructions because they were such big buildings. Thatch only lasts three to four years, so it has to be replaced often. Thatch is better for the climate, because it enables ventilation. A cement roof [aggregate-fibre] is hotter, but it lasts a lot longer.’ The situation at Pun Pun illustrates the complexity of mobilising knowledges and practices across vast distances and climates. In many ways, the attempt to introduce adobe to northern Thailand has been problematic in how the method has had to be changed so significantly to ensure that it survives in the different climate. In

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8.8 Adobe house with raised roof for ventilation at Pun Pun, Chiang Mai, Thailand

a place where the vernacular design employed bamboo, grass and wood, the introduction of adobe appears a poor fit. The changes required have diluted the ecological features of the buildings and the method has not been replicated in the way Jon and Peggy had intended. Some local residents have been influenced by Pun Pun’s

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building approach, but perhaps not quite in the way Jon and Peggy had been intending. Adobe building has begun in the local village of Ban Mae Jo, but as tourist resorts rather than homes: ‘people struggle to see that you can live in them, that it is not just a guest house, it is a home for all’, says Yaowadee Chookong. The message that appears to have been received by local villagers is that wealthy foreigners like adobe buildings. Crucially it is not always the most suitable, efficient or ecological building processes which get circulated and adopted. Compared to the Argentinian case, Pun Pun has been less successful at incorporating eco-building techniques into existing practices. In other words, the gap between vernacular approaches and adobe methods in form and function appears too great and in some ways the Pun Pun example illustrates some of the potential pitfalls of the mobility of eco-building knowledge and practice. Pun Pun run annual building internships, but they are intended for foreigners, so the knowledge is most likely to circulate back out of Thailand. Yaowadee Chookong notes: We hope that foreigners will pay the full price and that this might subsidise a Thai participant … we charge a lot for them and then we live off that money for a year … we only run the internship in English … so this means we can only accept Thais who speak English … so we have far fewer Thais do the internship. This year we had 20 foreigners and 5 Thais.

However, Jon is hesitant about encouraging too many visitors: ‘we think a lot about whether to use tourism to promote our projects, because it will affect the lives of the villagers there. If a lot of people come to the village, what will happen to their lives in the future? So we hesitate about that.’53 The spatial processes of self-built eco-homes These two brief case-study journeys – of where the ideas and influences for the residents’ adobe eco-homes came from, how they altered them and where and whom they hoped to influence – detail a spatial journey of mobilisation, but one that is quite different from the architect-designed or commercially mass-produced eco-homes examined by Gann54 and Faulconbridge.55 Using these two case-study examples, it is possible to identify three types of space in which ecohomes knowledge and practices are learnt, experimented, practised

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and shared. There are the spaces of innovation, spaces of circulation and spaces of adaptation. Crucially it is in and through these spaces that knowledges and practices move; they are nodes that are part of a circular and continuous, rather than linear, process. This is represented diagrammatically in Figure 8.9.

Innovative eco-build project Country b

Spaces of circulation

Spaces of adaptation

Innovative eco-build project Country c

Innovative eco-build project Country a

social processes

political processes

economic processes

i.e. informal networks and publications, workshops, volunteer training

Policy support for some methods, policy makers visit exemplar projects

Technology manufacturers

REGULATIVE

NORMATIVE

Codes, roles & standards

Social expectations

Existing local knowledges & practices

Priorities & beliefs

Knowledge becomes selected, adapted and mutated to suit the local content

Diverse embedded eco-build projects

Spaces of innovation

CULTURALCOGNITIVE

pro ces s co ntin ue s

Spaces of innovation

Reflection on any failures

8.9 The spatial processes of self-built eco-building innovation, circulation and adaptation56

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The spaces of innovation are spaces and places that enable, encourage or simply do not hinder novel innovation. These opportunities in one place are vital for those seeking to push experimental boundaries elsewhere. In eco-homes, these pockets of experimentation occur in different countries and places. Thus, for example, for Casa Tierra the spaces of innovation were in the US, where North American builders had redeveloped adobe approaches, and the workshop in Patagonia where they had been taught the build methods by Janell Kapoor. These spaces might be linked, or might be operating autonomously and unknown to each other. The spaces of circulation are where the innovative knowledges and practices are then exchanged. Practically, there are the paths, networks and flows through which these knowledges and practices are dispersed, exchanged and travel. For self-build eco-homes, these are primarily informal networks and face-to-face on-site learning by volunteers, but do also include policy support for certain methods and exemplar projects. Economic processes, in the production of particular technologies, also act as spaces of circulation, stimulating the adoption of certain technological solutions. At Pun Pun, for example, information about adobe was collected through the spaces of circulation of informal networks with builders in the US, facilitating Jon Jandai’s initial visit, and publications from which Jandai then taught himself the techniques. Finally, the spaces of adaptation are the sites in which the knowledges and practices are newly applied; in the case-study examples, these spaces are the locations of Casa Tierra and Pun Pun. In these spaces of adaptation, self-builders respond to, and navigate, the three processes that Faulconbridge57 has identified as regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive. These processes of selection and reshaping are the least understood, and are the hardest to map. Identifying spaces of adaptation helps us understand how eco-homes knowledges and practices are incorporated, lived-in, changed, and are changed by, different places and practices. It enables us to understand the importance of place and different cultural contexts for emerging environmental innovations, and challenges homogenous assumptions about the applicability and replication of certain solutions worldwide: Just as with plants in nature, the best construction systems develop organically over time in concert with climate, locally found materials, and the skills of the local builders. When introducing a new technology,

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rather than spend energy trying to reinvent the wheel, start by studying and adapting existing local technologies.58

For example, at Casa Tierra, the adobe-build method they had learnt from the North American builders was adapted to create a more light-filled interior, by adding cows’ blood to the external plaster, and by minimising their use of straw in their adobe mud mix. In any given context, the outcome of these spatial processes is altered yet further by the influence of existing local knowledges and practices, any reflection (or not) upon failures, and the extent to which such adaptation is then further circulated outwards. It is a circular rather than a linear process. For example, Mike Reynolds (the US Earthship designer) has called for ‘forums of failure’ where eco-builders can experiment. He argues that his designs are the product of ‘30 years of failure. You learn by failure. We’re asking politicians to give us situations where we can fail.’59 Whatever the specifics, the outcomes of the mobilisation of eco-homes knowledges and practices are diverse, embedded eco-homes that evolve in fragmented and piecemeal ways. Therefore once adapted, knowledges and practices are mobilised outward through spaces of circulation once more. Existing examinations of how eco-home knowledges and practices are mobilised are dominated with a concern for eco-homes designed and built largely by professionals, who in turn are connected with each other through policy networks and trade conferences. The multi-level transitions perspective, used by Seyfang and Smith to detail how ecohomes ideas are scaled-up into the mainstream, relies on the notion of niches: spaces where innovation begins in small protected environments. The role of professionals in self-built eco-homes can range from integral to marginal to completely absent, and thus the networks through which professionals exchange knowledge and practices might or might not have any influence at all upon self-built eco-homes. Equally, the concept of niches, as spaces of protected innovation, fits less well with selfbuilt homes that perhaps have more ambiguous aims than attempting to change the mainstream. Rather, self-built eco-homes are often primarily built as shelter, and any experimental outcome for others is considered an additional bonus. Thus, self-build eco-homes have more tentative, exploratory and contingent relationships between tenuously linked locations and practices than those eco-homes explored by Gann60 and Faulconbridge.61 Indeed, many self-built eco-homes are in

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remote places, operating beyond institutions, and can be unique. They are not always seeking immediate replication. In order to understand how knowledges and practices of self-building travel and get shared between self-builders, there is a need to consider these three spaces of innovation, circulation and adaptation as being different forms of mobility to other types of eco-building. Beyond being able to identify how innovative self-built projects are adopted or the influences that shape their adaptation, this approach enables us to see where best to intervene to speed up the processes of mobilisation. It also suggests that the more pliable, malleable and flexible a building approach is, the more likely it is to become mobilised as a self-build eco-home approach. In other words, if an eco-home innovation is simple yet adaptable, so that its key functionality is not lost if small changes are made (for example, to materials or technologies used), then it is more likely to be successfully mobilised. As Lerner argues, building practices ‘must be easy to use and fit well with existing local materials, technologies, and skills. Efficacy, not purity, ultimately transfers the technology.’62 Through this process it is also possible to see the ongoing tension between the two different understandings of what an eco-home is: a holistic design which is interdependent and thus only works as a whole, or an amalgamation of separate and discrete components which can be individually adopted. Too often eco-homes are viewed as composed of discrete components and thus only certain elements (often the technologies) are replicated. This misunderstands the complexity of how eco-homes work and thus, while replication of the whole house is not ideal (as it will not necessarily suit the new place), enough of the house (not just some technologies, but replication of elements of the structural design too) needs to be adopted to ensure the concept and material outcome work.63 Those innovations which are rigidly holistic and only work as a whole are less likely to be mobilised, yet those viewed as simply an amalgamation of individual components are likely to lose some of their functionality in translation. The ideal outcome is that the new structure works in the place it is in, for the uses required of it. Successful mobilisation is thus a fine balance between the two mindsets, whereby enough of the structural functionality is retained in the final outcome while the original design is also able to deliver that functionality even after adaptation.

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Conclusions Mobilisation is influenced by socio-cultural, political, economic and technological factors, and the processes of mobilisation are selective – only certain elements of a material object or an idea are likely to be adopted and technologies are likely to be used in unpredictable ways. An innovation will evolve, change and be reshaped by the process of mobilisation and innovation is difficult to mobilise. The mobilisation of eco-homes is also a very spatial process. Understanding how knowledges and practices evolve in certain spaces and are then circulated and adapted explains why self-built eco-homes are rarely simply replicated from place to place. Although the complexity of this process could be conceived of as stalling or slowing down eco-home construction, it is vital that homes are built to suit residents’ needs, climatic variability and available resources. As the spaces of innovation, circulation and adaptation act in dialogue with each other in multi-directional flows (backwards and forwards and backwards again), the knowledges and practices evolve and diversify. Though the process will not always be successful, this diversification is crucial in encouraging more people to engage with the concept of eco-homes. This will only be achieved through housing that makes sense in cultural-cognitive and normative frameworks. Consequently, the mobilisation of eco-homes knowledges and practices worldwide has less to do with whether the build actually worked or its cost, but is influenced by less quantifiable factors such as aesthetics, understanding resource issues, materials availability, other climates, heritage and traditional build approaches, and local triggers for climate change concern. This chapter has specifically explored the mobilisation of self-built eco-homes knowledges and practices, and illustrated the resulting differences in the journeys of ideas for different types of eco-homes. This is important not just for understanding eco-homes, but in recognising the utility and limitations of the different theoretical ways that knowledge mobility is conceptualised. Rather than a reliance on institutions and a presumption that all types of eco-homes are immediately attempting to scale up, this chapter has explored the more tentative, experimental and informal networks that contribute to selfbuilding knowledge and shared practices. The results of these more informal spaces of innovation, circulation and adaptation can be harder to map, and can appear more marginal and much less visible than the networks identified by Faulconbridge. Yet they still exist, and they still

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have global impact, and it is vitally important not to assume that all eco-homes knowledges are only exchanged through professional and institutional networks, especially (as identified in Chapter 3) as many of the most innovative and creative eco-homes ideas began in remote, radical self-build spaces. There will, however, always be a risk that this diversification potentially dilutes the functionality of eco-home design. However, in the cases explored in this chapter, the compromises made in adapting the build process were made carefully and through trial and error. In other words they were necessary changes of adaptation that are likely to result in further mobilisation of eco-homes. The alternative in these cases was for the eco-homes to be proved not to work in their new places and thus any chances of further mobilisation would have been lost. We could speed up these processes of mobilisation. Currently, innovative self-build eco-homes tend to be clustered in certain places. A critical mass of support is crucial for encouraging people to ‘build green’ and have the confidence to try it out. Where this critical mass has not been available locally, builders have relied on international support and many commented they would not have succeeded had it not been for this support network. We could do more to build these networks across space. For example, for self-built housing, we could build better global networks of knowledge sharing. Learning from physically visiting material examples, more could be done to share the details (including the problems and failures) of existing examples.64 Too often this knowledge is celebratory of what has been achieved, rather than honest and reflexive on what, how and why compromises were made. Without better discussion of failures, mistakes are repeated and builders demoralised. More open discussion about failure would facilitate the understanding that building is an ongoing and dynamic learning process and would support those who make mistakes in continuing to build; as Greg at Panya Project noted, ‘people are afraid to make mistakes’. House building requires a broad set of knowledges. Although it is not necessary to build with professionals, eco-homes are reliant upon architects and builders understanding not only basic engineering principles, but also detailed environmental knowledges.65 This includes understanding the climate and seasons of a particular place, what renewable resources are available (such as wind, sun, rain) and

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what environmental threats a house might have to withstand (such as floods, earthquakes, sub-zero temperatures). Some self-builders, or indeed traditionally trained builders, might not fully comprehend how a house functions. Reliance on central systems (such as national grid electricity and water and sewage infrastructure) counters people’s ability to take ownership of the functions of their homes. Thus more holistic training and knowledges are required. For commercially massproduced housing, where developers can be overly cautious about risking new eco-homes ventures, better financial support or guarantees could be offered. Through these continuous processes of mobilisation, eco-homes knowledges and practices continue to evolve, as they must. Chambers66 argues that our focus on housing belies the need to improve the infrastructure between houses and beyond, which environmentally is just as important. In other words, by focusing on individual houses, and their associated technologies, we are missing the broader lessons that could be drawn from replicating nature’s ecosystem design. As such, our approach to eco-homes needs to continually broaden. This move away from simply enabling and exploring the replication of ecohomes technologies to a concern with broader infrastructure and the material structure of the house per se, would also help circumvent commercial power misdirecting the mobility of some knowledges. Faulconbridge67 rightly suggests that power relations could easily act as blocks to the mobilisation of certain knowledges and practices if commercial (or political) self-interest perceived such approaches as competition; the politics of eco-homes mobilisation is largely absent from existing research68 with the notable exception of Greenwood’s69 exploration of the effectiveness of policy in shaping socio-technical transitions. However, successful eco-home design requires a ‘morethan-technology’ approach where structural and layout alterations are perhaps more important than technologies. This broader conceptualisation of eco-homes knowledges and practices is thus both practically useful and more difficult to be captured by those with vested interests. Understanding how eco-home knowledges and practices travel and evolve is a difficult research agenda. The concept of mobilisation offers an important framework through which to understand the inherently geographical and spatial processes of circulation and adaptation. It can be hard to determine influences, traces and implementation

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across transnational spaces and different cultural contexts. However, understanding the spatial processes of innovation, circulation and adaptation enables us to not only understand how we can further encourage self-built eco-homes worldwide, but also how other environmental solutions are designed, advocated and implemented, and how we could facilitate more in the future.

9 | C OM M U N I T Y

Everywhere I look there are different shaped, sized and coloured ecohomes. Three-storey wood-clad structures sit alongside homes made from old whisky barrels, and brightly coloured uniform co-housing units are a few steps away from a rambling straw-bale cottage. Every corner I turn yields another type of house. Amongst these carefully crafted eco-buildings are old static caravans, remnants of the site’s early days as a holiday destination. The eco-homes cluster together, front doors face each other, pathways are shared and gardens overlap. The houses seem to spill out into each other with bikes, children’s toys and plant pots filling the spaces between them. Findhorn is one of the longest running eco-villages in Britain. The different ways in which its eco-homes have come into being (some self-built or collectively built, some built commercially, others constructed by a company owned by the community) and the ways in which they are now owned (privately and by the community) tells a complicated story of community eco-homes.1 Findhorn has been a place of great eco-building experimentation and invention, but also one of housing inequality and shortage. The housing situation has become a major tension within the community, with long-term members living in the poor-quality original caravans or beyond the community itself.2 Others own houses in the community but choose not to participate in many of the communal activities. The community has started exploring cheaper ways to provide eco-homes for its members by building small structures to replace the caravans. A great many eco-homes are built within eco-communities. Such communities are also often sites of innovation and experimentation in eco-home design and function.3 This chapter explores what difference this community setting makes to eco-homes. Extensive research has been conducted into different forms of eco-communities, but most of this has focused on the social processes, community living, emerging economies and family dynamics of the people living in these communities, rather than the physical material structure of the houses.4

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9.1 Eco-homes at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland

By focusing on the buildings themselves, this chapter answers two questions: (a) how does building houses in an eco-community (rather than individually) change the build process (design, construction, cost) and/or the requirements of a home?, and (b) can any lessons from these different ways of building, and living in, homes be of use in understanding eco-homes and their potential? Advocating community living The term ‘community’ can have multiple meanings, but can be understood as ‘dense, multiplex, relatively autonomous networks of social relationships. Community, thus, is not a place or simply a small-scale population aggregate, but a mode of relating.’5 Community shares some ambiguity with the concepts of place and home.6 It can be understood as representing a sense of belonging (or exclusion), as a facet of identity, or a place of sharing. Indeed, Litfin suggests, ‘community is about moving beyond individualism to connection’,7 while Gilman argues eco-communities value and practise ‘sustainable living in human-scale community’.8 For Agyeman,9 sustainable communities illustrate the acceptance that environmental, social and economic principles are interdependent. Therefore ‘a sustainable community is continually adjusting to meet

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the social and economic needs of its residents while preserving the environment’s ability to support it.’10 In order to achieve this balance between protecting and enhancing the environment, meeting social needs and promoting economic equality, Agyeman argues that democracy and accountability are essential. Meanwhile, intentional communities can be defined as:11 A group of people who have chosen to work together in pursuit of a common ideal or vision. Most, though not all, share land or housing. Intentional communities come in all shapes and sizes, and display amazing diversity in their common values, which may be social, economic, spiritual, political and/or ecological. Some are rural, some urban. Some house members in a single residence, some in separate households. Some communities raise children, some don’t. Some are secular, some are spiritually based, and others are both.12

In this book, the term ‘eco-communities’ refers to a concern for social, economic and environmental needs, and to examples of places of collaborative, collective and communal housing and living.13 Key aspirations of an eco-community include (but are not always present): • a culture of self-reliance (which for housing results in self-build approaches and autonomy of provision, for example, generating one’s own energy); • minimal environmental impact and minimal resource use; • low-cost affordable approaches; • extended relations of care for others (beyond the nuclear family); • progressive values (for example, towards gender equality) and • an emphasis on collectivist and communal sharing.14 Therefore living in eco-communities is about acknowledging the interdependency of humans with each other and nature, and practising mutual care. In this context, eco-communities are understood to be part of the wider movement advocating communing – that is, to produce, live off and through the commons.15 There are numerous historical examples of the commons being sustained and shared through local self-organised governance.16 In these ways common resources (such as land, forests, water, etc.) are shared between nearby residents, from which all can benefit. As with earlier periods in history (such as the enclosures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England), there are continuing

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threats to the commons of all kinds, through for example, privatisation of water resources or patenting of indigenous knowledge. Community gardens, open source programming, reclaiming public space and cohousing all remain on the edges of contemporary societal practices. The output from these activities has been termed peer production, which rather than being based on monetary exchange, is valued by contributions, fulfilling needs and based on an ethic of sharing.17 Living in eco-communities can require quite radical changes to lifestyles and economies. Many of the most established eco-communities are located in rural areas because of the space and privacy afforded them (for example, Findhorn eco-village, Scotland); however, there are also long-running urban examples (Christiania in Denmark18) and an increasing focus on new urban experiments (LILAC in England, and Kailash eco-village, Los Angeles eco-village and Peninsula Park Commons, all in the US). The term ‘eco-community’ includes quite broad and diffuse examples, from intentional communities and eco-villages to co-housing (see Table 9.1). There are relatively few large eco-villages (that is, over 500 people); notable examples include Findhorn (Scotland), Damanhur (Italy) and Auroville (India), but most are relatively small.19 Importantly, not all intentional communities or co-housing projects are eco-communities: many have no ecological imperative, and as Sargisson20 suggests, in the US, co-housing may have no relation to

TABLE 9.1 Examples of eco-communities worldwide21 Name

Country

Type

Melliodora

Australia

Rural

Crystal Waters

Rural

Moora Moora Co-operative

Rural

Wolery

Rural

Yarrow Eco-village

Canada

Whole Village

Rural Rural

Atlantida Eco-village

Colombia

Rural

Christiania

Denmark

Urban

Svanholm

Rural

Dysseklide/Torup

Rural

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Tinkers Bubble

England

Rural

Landmatters

Rural

BedZED

Urban

Hockerton Housing Project ZEGG

Rural Germany

Rural

Sieben Linden

Rural

UfaFabrik

Urban

Lebensgarten

Rural

Auroville

India

Rural

Kibbutz Lotan Community

Israel

Rural

Federation of Damanhur

Italy

Rural

Konohana Family

Japan

Rural

Earthsong Eco-neighbourhood

New Zealand

Rural

Tamera

Portugal

Rural

Findhorn Eco-village

Scotland

Rural

Colufifa

Senegal

Rural

Pun Pun

Thailand

Rural

US

Rural

Panya Project Earthhaven

Rural

Dancing Rabbit

Rural

Kailash Eco-village

Urban

Eco-village at Ithaca

Rural

The Farm

Rural

Los Angeles Eco-village

Urban

Sirius

Rural

Twin Oaks

Rural

Lama Foundation Brithdir Mawr

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Rural Wales

Rural

Tir y Gafel

Rural

Centre for Alternative Technology

Rural

communing or intentional community. Thus there are many other forms of collaborative living (such as spiritual communities) that are not included here as they are not primarily concerned with reducing environmental impact.

220 | NINE TABLE 9.2 Different forms of eco-communities22 Type of ecocommunity

Brief description

Co-housing

Co-operative living where people have LILAC, Peninsula Park private homes but share facilities (e.g., Commons, Columbia energy/heat production, waste management, eco-village laundry, gardens, meeting rooms, childcare).

Commune

Co-operative living without any private homes, all spaces are shared

None

Eco-homes project

Housing project focus on high-quality environmental design and building

Hockerton Housing Project, Greater World Earthship Community

Eco-village

A community with shared values around environmental issues as a core focus. Interested in establishing long-term basic services such as housing, food provision, etc.

Findhorn eco-village, Kailash eco-village, Panya Project

Intentional community

Mixed goals but often include becoming more socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. Structured around particular core goals and intentions. Not necessarily interested in environmental issues

Tinkers Bubble, Lama Foundation

Low-impact Low visual impact by blending with development surroundings, built from local, recycled, or natural materials, small-scale and environmentally efficient. Autonomous in the sense that they generate their own energy (through wind, solar and/or water power) and deal with their waste (through recycling and composting), thus not connected to mains supplies

Examples used in this book

Green Hills, Lammas/Tir y Gafel, Landmatters, Hockerton Housing Project

For many proponents, such as Martin Bang,23 Christian,24 Jackson,25 Litfin,26 the Schwarz’s27 and Wimbush,28 to name just a few, eco-communities are the ideal living arrangement. The organisational structure of tightly interwoven social networks and shared spaces and resources creates, in their view, the best possibilities for personal happiness, minimal environmental impact and sustainable livelihoods. Such communities have been the outcome of long-running experiments in creating more sustainable lifestyles: ‘The sustainable housing movement believed radical societal changes were necessary in order to achieve sustainable development, such as governance via small-scale self-sufficient communities.’29 Academics such as Sargisson,30 Chatterton,31 Jarvis,32 Metcalf33 and Williams34 have also sought to critically evaluate whether the alternatives advocated in

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eco-communities enable more sustainable forms of living, with generally positive findings. The positive attributes of eco-community living can be broadly summarised as five overlapping conditions: (a) Reduced environmental impact: Sharing common infrastructures (such as energy generation, sewage systems and water collection) and resources, and minimising land use through dense housing arrangements, all help communities to reduce their environmental impact. As many residents’ needs are met on site (food, work, childcare, social events), the environmental impact of travel is limited. The collective mutual support for sustainable everyday practices also aids individuals’ attempts to minimise their impact.35 (b) Increased efficiency: Living in a community is more efficient. Resources, tasks, skills and knowledge can all be shared.36 For example, common tasks such as childcare, food production, cooking or cleaning can benefit from economies of scale by being divided among people, rather than each person doing a little of everything.37 (c) Socially rewarding: There is often a strong sociality to community and for many, this is more rewarding than living individually.38 Living close to others and engaging in regular social interaction can help people meet their personal and mental needs. It facilitates mutual support and care for each other, and for families, children can grow up with others their own age. (d) Self-governing: Eco-communities are self-organised with often highly democratic or consensus-based systems for decision making. They seek to operate autonomously from the state, often for example providing their own education systems, and being selfreliant in provision of housing, food, energy and waste disposal. (e) Living beyond capitalism: Finally, eco-communities operate beyond capitalist relations. Rather than generating an income by working for someone else (in order to afford a high-consumption lifestyle), eco-communities support simple, often land-based, livelihoods and minimise economic needs (through self-provision). This enables a focus on environmental and social care and creates time for more creative, innovative and rewarding endeavours. Some ecocommunities go as far as sharing all income.39 Eco-communities encounter problems in achieving these conditions and they are forever seeking to evolve and improve. As will be discussed

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in more detail below, they can appear exclusive and closed to diversity, dominated by those privileged through race, wealth and class. Living in a community is also very time consuming. It takes time, effort and compromise to work collectively, and appropriate governance processes that allow people to reach agreement need to be continually developed. For those who choose to make their livelihood from the land, this form of living also entails physically strenuous work.40 Building in eco-communities We are what we live in. When we plan our buildings, we are also planning what kind of society we want to create … we make the buildings and the buildings make us.41

The buildings of eco-communities shape and structure many of their forms and functions. The buildings are some of the most symbolic attributes of eco-communities, and the processes and practices of their construction and occupation signify many of their ecological and ethical principles. In other words, the buildings could be read as representations of the intentions of eco-communities.42 Wines suggests that this should be, in part, the point of eco-buildings, which should ‘function as a visible demonstration of conservationist ideals … and create architecture where both function and image celebrate the environmental message’.43 Litfin44 argues that the physical structures of eco-villages intentionally shape forms of social interaction; they are what she calls ‘architectures of intimacy’. These ‘ecovillage landscapes have a sense of fluidity’,45 illustrated by a lack of fences and the open communal space between houses, but Litfin also asserts that a particular shape – the circle – is most conducive to sharing, equality and communication. This is because it avoids hierarchy, everybody can see each other and it encourages interaction. Thus building using circles, as a house shape, as houses around a communal circular garden, or designing seating in circles, encourages social interaction, and may be identifiable as a particular approach to building in eco-communities. At the same time, some house-building techniques are used explicitly to encourage community building. Seyfang46 argues that approaches like straw-bale house construction can help build community because they are inclusive, using low-cost affordable materials and enabling a broad variety of people to get involved: ‘the hand-building technique using natural materials and little specialised labour lends itself to wider

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participation in building than is the norm when specialist skills and industrial tools and materials are used.’47 As a result, this method enables relationships to be built with other people, as well as with nature through the materials used. Building collectively not only ensures multiple viewpoints are considered and increases a sense of community responsibility but also ‘while working together, residents from varying social and ethnic backgrounds often find new understanding of each other and create new common ground for moving forward as supportive neighbors.’48 The process of building with others helps generate commonality and community. Building homes in an ecocommunity requires different considerations and processes (in terms of how design, funding, construction and workforce are organised) from singular house construction. Consequently, there are benefits and limitations in building collectively (Table 9.3). These will now be explored in detail, with a case-study example given for each, though often examples illustrate many of these benefits and limitations. TABLE 9.3 Benefits and limitations of building eco-homes in eco-communities Benefits

Limitations

Building together is cheaper

Limited diversity of occupants

Construction jobs are easily shared

Eco-building requires time, patience and compromise

Benefit from economies of scale

Lack of privacy

Houses are smaller, but there is more space

Building houses takes time

Home extends beyond the house

Lack of knowledge sharing, poor building practices, lack of acknowledgement of the importance of experts and/or professionals.

Space and support for risk taking Mutual support for eco-practices

Building together is cheaper There are core costs to every build – land, materials and labour. As Eli Spevak of Peninsula Park Commons argued, ‘you could build new affordable co-housing if you built very small units. But really there is nothing fundamentally less expensive about co-housing than market housing. You still need land, materials and labour.’49 As discussed in Chapter 5, there are numerous ways to reduce the costs of construction: building smaller houses, using cheap marginal land, using reclaimed materials or reducing labour costs through self-build. Eco-communities use all these tactics and some have

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managed to build incredibly cheap homes. For example, Tony Wrench built his roundhouse at Birthdr Mawr in Wales for a total cost of £3,000.50 However, eco-communities are also able to benefit from their size to reduce the costs of building further by sharing infrastructure and devising new cost-sharing schemes. All house building requires infrastructure such as sewerage, water supply and energy provision. The cost of this provision is obviously reduced if shared. Co-housing is not necessarily affordable housing. But if you look at the ongoing costs of living in co-housing, people’s living costs are often lower because they are sharing and using fewer resources. But even if the individual homes are smaller than average, this is often balanced out by the shared costs of common interior space.51 As detailed in Chapter 5 ‘Affordability’, the Low Impact Living Affordable Community (LILAC) in Leeds, England, developed a new home-ownership model to ensure the houses remained affordable in perpetuity – costs are linked to ability to pay (income) and people will not necessarily lose their homes if their circumstances change. In practice, residents only pay a housing charge (equivalent to rent, but actually purchasing equity shares) of 35 per cent of their net income. In order to make this cover the cost of the housing (acquired via a community mortgage), minimum net income levels were set for different sized houses. This approach is only possible because it is a community project. In effect, the higher earners subsidise those on lower incomes and yet at the same time they do not forfeit their investment; the approach is fair because all inhabitants pay the same percentage of their income. A job shared is a job halved Labour costs in building are high in minority world countries. It is estimated that they constitute half of the total costs of construction (with a quarter spent on land and a quarter on materials).52 Ecocommunities can provide a ready pool of labour that significantly reduces costs and increases the pace of building. This is not to suggest that such labour is free, as building detracts from making a livelihood, or tending to other self-provision tasks such as growing food. Labour tends to be shared in return for help in other projects, or for residents to build each house in turn, lending labour to others in return for help on one’s own house.

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Clutching the steep hillside of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Taos, New Mexico, the Lama Foundation has been building since 1968. Principally a spiritual centre – following the teachings of Ram Dass and his famous Be Here Now book – the Lama Foundation has an eclectic mixture of eco-homes. There is a large central community dome (Figure 9.2), a log cabin, a straw-bale house, some yurts for visitors, small vault homes, a hybrid house and many more.

9.2 Dancing in the community dome, Lama Foundation, New Mexico

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The community setting encourages the building of small individual houses and the collective use of the large communal space. There are communal bathrooms, a kitchen, library, music room, winter meeting room and an outdoor sheltered eating area. The whole community is off-grid, generating electricity through photovoltaic cells, using compost toilets, wood for heat, and water from an on-site spring (and some rainwater is collected). Water is heated in the main through a propane heater because solar capacity is limited. The way in which the Foundation has been set up limits residents to a maximum stay of seven years. Building here is a collective process and part of a spiritual practice for many; one resident said they ‘build with clay, mud and love’. Another resident noted, ‘building a house is so human and it has been taken away from us … it is so satisfying being able to build a house.’ Some of the ‘special places’, such as the stone hermitage, have been built in silence and others have been built only by women, such as the two vaults. Building at Lama is a process of sharing – sharing tools, skills and roles (if some people spend the day building, others will cook and provide the food), and at crucial parts of the build many people will pitch in and help: Building a building has to be a collective thing … In regular construction it’s all portioned out, you have the person who designs the building … the bulldozer people who come in and level the area … then you have the framers, then you have the insulators, then you have the dry wallers, then you have the painters … everybody is separate … It’s just so un-cohesive and it ends up costing the homeowner so much for all these specialised people to come in with all these really expensive specialised tools. Whereas in natural building, the same crew of people all build together start to finish, and you don’t have to have a bunch of specialised tools and you don’t have to have a bunch of specialised knowledge. If there is someone directing, you don’t have to know how to use a nail gun or a skill saw. So it’s just much more human, and then they’re so beautiful when they’re done, they just feel good.53

Perhaps most importantly, however, building on site is often reliant upon volunteers. However, because the main focus of the site is spirituality rather than eco-building, the co-ordination of building or the skills available is very much dependent on who happens to be around. This

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has created maintenance problems for the core full-time residents who are there all year because of the sheer number of buildings and the use of natural materials that require regular attention and patching. This tension between a lack of time and skills and the focus being primarily elsewhere has led to the use of concrete and stucco in recent buildings which is not very environmental. They have also had at times to make compromises. These compromises have been less about saving money and more about reducing labour requirements. As one resident noted, ‘you should start small and then work your way out, and so we should make sure we can cope with maintaining the buildings we currently have before we build more.’54 Thus the place seems to be in a constant flow of moving forward and correcting earlier mistakes. Benefits of economies of scale The concept of economies of scale – that a certain amount of costs are fixed and if production is increased in scale then costs reduce per unit – applies to the construction of houses and their infrastructure.55 Buying construction materials in bulk often reduces the cost per house (for example, the panel construction at LILAC), and likewise a wind turbine can power several houses simultaneously (for example, at Hockerton Housing Project). To construct just one house would have cost proportionately more at LILAC and one wind turbine would have produced more energy than was needed at Hockerton. In this way, eco-communities benefit from economies of scale in construction. Eco-communities also benefit from scale during occupation by sharing common technologies, such as washing machines, and in the density of housing. At Findhorn eco-village, Kailash eco-village and LILAC, individual houses do not have washing machines. Instead, there is a communal laundry that saves most residents the financial and environmental costs of initial purchase and maintenance. In addition, having only a communal laundry, and the slight inconvenience that introduces, can reduce how often people do their laundry. At Currumbin eco-village in Queensland, Australia, the scale of the development enabled the construction of an autonomous water management system that was not connected to mains water supplies.56 The scale and layout of the housing will influence what other benefits can be harnessed from living in a community. Not all eco-communities have high-density housing. Often the more rural communities, such as Tir y Gafel, Findhorn and Tinkers Bubble, have dispersed individual

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dwellings. However, those which build homes close together, especially with common walls (such as the blocks of flats at LILAC) will have a low area-to-volume ratio and a low energy index. In simple terms, the fewer the external walls around the bigger the internal space, the lower the energy required to heat the space. Thus living closely to others reduces environmental impact in temperate regions. Houses are smaller, but there is more space As discussed in Chapter 1, the size of housing directly affects the resources and energy used in construction and occupation.57 In the main, the smaller they are, the more ecological they are. Most ecocommunities only have small private residences because these homes only need to contain bedroom spaces:58 Build smaller units than normal … the most effective thing you can do is simply build smaller and attached housing. Most of the carbon impact of housing comes from heating it, so if you have a smaller space you do not need as much energy to heat it and if it is attached, side by side with your neighbours, then you also need less heat because the common walls share the heat across the buildings. So one of the things we do is build smaller spaces and then have common spaces to provide a little extra space.59

However, although this approach was adopted in most of the case studies in this book, building smaller homes was resisted in some places. Marchmann and colleagues detail a co-housing project in Denmark which rejected building small compact houses in favour of large detached homes.60 Spaces within eco-communities also often have flexibility in use, transforming over time from halls to workshops to dining spaces.61 In communities such as Panya Project in Thailand, there are large communal spaces for the shared kitchen, gardens, sitting area, office space, laundry, workshops, greenhouses, guest space and bathrooms (Figure 9.3). Panya Project is near Mae Taeng, Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. Established in 2004, the 10-acre site has become a place for experimentation and education in permaculture and natural building. It was set up by a group of young Americans led by Christian Shearer with the aim of creating a permanent community. For a variety of reasons, few of the founding members stayed full-time and it is now more a transient place where people come to learn skills and work the land for a few months and then move on, though several volunteers

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return annually. The advantage of this flux in residents, however, is that it feels quite a vibrant place invigorated by the energy of new arrivals. All the buildings on-site are described as natural buildings and the majority are earthen, built using either sun-dried adobe bricks or wattle and cob, with both techniques using clay and straw or rice husks. Panya tries to be about much more than the buildings, and residents consider the process of building and its completion as enhancing community (all builds are a collective process), part of a broader vision of changes required, an expression of creativity and as a nucleus of ideas they hope people will take with them worldwide. Panya has put into practice the belief that walls and houses can isolate us from nature and each other and that if we re-design them we can better integrate nature into our daily lives. This is best exemplified in the Sala which has few externals walls and is a very open space. It is protected from the elements by a large over-hanging roof, but allows much of nature in. Other buildings have no glass in their windows. Many of the dwellings are also purposely small – one house has just 3 metres by 4½ metres floor space. This reduces both build time and material requirements. The residential houses need only contain space for sleeping and privacy. Most simply contain a bed and some storage space. All cooking, dining and washing is done in communal spaces. These small houses do not need to benefit from close proximity to reduce energy use because the community is in north-west Thailand, which is a tropical region. Instead, the houses are built to enable air flow through them and having some distance between structures aids natural ventilation (Figure 9.4). Even in urban temperate regions eco-communities often have small personal spaces compensated for by large communal areas.62 At Los Angeles eco-village, an eco-retrofit of an old brick apartment block in downtown LA, residents have private apartments with individual kitchens and bathrooms, but they share the gardens, bike storage room, bulk food storage, meeting space (Figure 9.5) and large entrance seating area. Similarly in the Ganas community in Staten Island, New York, when they acquired a number of houses they removed the fences between the houses and created large communal gardens.63 Home extends beyond the house In addition to communal spaces in eco-communities enabling individual homes to be structurally quite small, the physical and

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9.4 A small adobe house at Panya Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand

9.5 The meeting room at Los Angeles eco-village, California

emotional sense of home extends far beyond the house structures. Peninsula Park Commons is a co-housing development created from renovating some existing houses and building some new structures. Developed by Eli Spevak and Jim Labbe in 2003 in Portland, Oregon,

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it was designed to be an affordable urban eco-community. The original 7-unit courtyard apartment block was converted into six homes and a common unit (Figure 9.6). Four more new units were then built on the old driveway: ‘so much of our city is already allocated to cars, so we focus on using some of that space [driveways] for N

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homes and outdoor gathering spaces.’64 The community is ecological in its construction (reuse of building materials, solar thermal panels, use of light tunnels) and design (no car driveway but bike shed and easy bike route into the community, shared guest space, outside drying space). The common area unit is open to all residents and has a kitchen, dining area, living room and bathroom. It is used for watching TV, meetings and as guest space. There is also a communal bike shed. Beyond the buildings are the communal gardens and raised vegetable patches (Figure 9.7). Rather than stop the development at the edge of the plot however, Peninsula Park Commons stretched out into the street and reclaimed the pavement (sidewalk) with planters. Plant beds overflow into the placement and merge the communal garden with the public space. Nature is brought into the homes while the community seeks to link into its neighbourhood. As with other eco-communities, a great deal at Peninsula Park Commons is shared; in their vision statement part of the community’s purpose has been to create ‘an environment in which it is convenient to share such items as motor vehicles, home appliances, books, garden equipment, costumes, games, outdoor gear, construction tools, entertainment systems’.65 There is also a very deliberate approach to existing communities: ‘we want to slip into existing communities.’66 They hold community events like their annual community ice-cream social and garden party. Martin Bang67 also argues that communities who learn building skills can use these in generating an external income and, more importantly, in connecting to neighbours. This is particularly useful when eco-communities might have initially hostile neighbours: ‘actions speak louder than words, and even if you might look freaky, or have weird ideas, if you are seen to be good workers much will be forgiven.’68 Space for risk taking Lammas has built a rural eco-village (called Tir y Gafel) in west Wales (further detailed in Chapter 4, ‘Place’). It is an unusual place in that it is one of the few eco-villages in Britain that was planned and had secured planning permission before building began. Using an innovative planning policy (the Joint Unitary Development Plan

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9.7 Peninsula Park Commons, Portland, Oregon (view from the south)

(JUDP), Policy 52 – ‘Low Impact Development’), Lammas was able to secure permission for nine eco-smallholdings on mixed pasture and woodland of south-facing land in Pembrokeshire. That the project was the result of years of planning appeals and only allowed through a new planning policy meant that Tir y Gafel has very much been considered at the cutting edge of eco-communities. Policy 52

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set high standards for Lammas to meet: buildings were to be highly sustainable, use local, renewable, recycled and/or natural materials and have low visual impact. Residents must also ensure that landbased activities (be they agriculture, forestry or horticulture) provide 75 per cent of basic household needs. Therefore residents had to be innovative and take risks in order to achieve all these conditions on a limited budget. Lammas was taking a risk in pursuing the Tir y Gafel development, the first of its kind and under heavy surveillance from the state. Although residents each have their own allocated land and thus space and freedom in how they use their plot and make their livelihood, they are collectively responsible for meeting the planning targets. One resident described it as ‘more a village than a community’, in that they live side by side but do not predetermine how everyone should live, yet if just one of the households fails to comply to Policy 52, the whole development is at risk of facing demolition. There was also a belief that individually they would struggle to build and live off the land – that without the physical and emotional support of each other it would be a long hard task for survival. There was a strong sense of mutual solidarity, sharing and kindness. For Lammas, it was only through collectively supporting each other, being an eco-community, that they were able to take the risk to build a new eco-village from scratch. The freedom that they have collectively secured created the space for innovative and inventive eco-building. Simon Dale and Jasmine Saville had previously built an eco-home, colloquially called the ‘hobbit house’, but had been unable to secure long-term rights to the land on which it was built. At Tir y Gafel, they have been able to create a larger version as their home and continue to experiment in a variety of natural build techniques (Figure 9.8). As Seyfang and Smith have argued,69 places such as Tir y Gafel provide invaluable spaces for experimentation and grassroots innovations that can develop without competition (in niches). Once completed and tested in this protected environment, these innovations can serve as models for broader-scale sustainable practices. The risk taken by Tir y Gafel residents went beyond establishing a new community on a Welsh hillside to challenging building regulations. Residents took a risk in not complying with standard building regulations, arguing that they were costly and not applicable

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9.8 Simon Dale in his house, Tir y Gafel, Wales70

to their novel eco-constructions. There was a concern that trying to make houses made from natural materials comply with building regulations, such as airtightness tests, would be extremely expensive and cost money the community could not afford. Complying with regulations also meant paying to have structural checks and to get buildings certified by various professionals, a use of expertise rejected by many eco-communities. Unfortunately, the state insisted that all homes on the site did comply with current building regulations. There was a standoff; court cases, criminal proceedings and several homes were threatened with demolition. Many of the features of the houses at Tir y Gafel, such as the use of external compost toilets or the lack of piped water, were deemed inappropriate by the state.71 The result was significant remedial work and increased costs: ‘Our home costs approximately £3,000 to construct. Depending upon the flexibility of

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building control officers, compliance would increase this cost by an estimated 100–1000% which would use up at least all our budget for establishing our land based businesses and quite likely possibly render the project unviable.’72 Tir y Gafel was experimenting in radical eco-home design and build methods, a vital space in which niche ideas can be tested and developed, but unfortunately the state sought to close down such experimentation. Mutual support for eco-practices Learning together can have long-term benefits in that learning in ‘communities of practice’ is more conducive to long-term impact.73 In part this is related to the power of peer group pressure, in that if people see others making changes to their environmental practices, they are more likely to change too. In the case of eco-building, where residents are already committed to altering practices, being surrounded by likeminded individuals and communal infrastructure provides invaluable support for eco-practices.74 As Jones shows, ‘living-with’ eco-homes alongside others living similar lifestyles can have a transformative effect on environmental practices. Neighbours ‘incentivize and motivate one another in the uptake of new sustainable practices, thus demonstrating the contingent and contextual embeddedness of sustainable practises’.75 The value of this support becomes most important during hard times, such as bad weather, when it might become more tempting to neglect some eco-practices: ‘having social connections and meaningful bonds facilitates environmental sustainability at both individual and a community level … [people] can more easily recycle, compost, not drive … and generally consume less if [they] have a network of neighbors, friends and like-minded comrades to help.’76 Kailash is an urban eco-village situated in a 32-unit apartment building in Portland, Oregon (see also Chapter 1). All the units are one-bedroom small apartments and the whole building is being gradually eco-retrofitted. As Maitri, a co-founder of the eco-village, argues, ‘you really have to be the model. You have to be what you want other people to be. So you really need to work on your own self first.’ Infrastructure is also required to encourage change (Figure 9.9):77 ‘We have individual [garden] plots’, says Maitri, ‘so that people can put themselves into that and be creative. I think it’s very

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9.9 The bike rack infrastructure at Kailash eco-village, Portland, Oregon

important that people need to have that opportunity. Like the bike parking – we put those bike-parking racks and oh, we need two more already! You provide a community; people come and have a good time.’ Living with diversity? Lydia Doleman,78 an American self-builder, argues that ‘buildings have the capacity to equalize people or segregate them’. In other words, eco-communities can build places that encourage diversity

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or constrain it. Eco-communities need to design their buildings and shared spaces to accommodate diversity, building for different bodily abilities.79 Eco-communities tend to have a more open sense of what constitutes family, rejecting the heteronormative concept of male and female coupledom that dominates in other parts of society (particularly Europe).80 Moving beyond the nuclear family and singlefamily dwelling as the defining form of social structure has enabled eco-communities to develop new forms of interpersonal relationships and intimacy (a new politics of self).81 This is expressed through a greater acceptance of different sexualities, multiple partners and shared childcare. Gender equality was also aspired to by trying to avoid creating gender-specific roles (such as men doing the building and women the cooking) and by sharing the domestic housework and childcare burden.82 There has been mixed success in achieving this, however, as Metcalf acknowledges that ‘within most intentional communities, however, we find traditional gender roles being followed by women and men’.83 This open sense of family extends to a concept which Critchlow Rodman calls ‘co-care’, a form of neighbourly mutual assistance that is being developed in co-housing designed particularly for seniors and the older generations.84 This approach, being practised at Wolf Willow and Harbourside co-housing in Canada and in the Netherlands, designs houses and builds community around the needs of an ageing population.85 In addition to the structural provision of a carers’ suite on-site and disabled accessible rooms all on one level, a sense of responsibility to look after and care for each other is built into the social elements of the community. Despite a growing recognition of the need to develop intergenerational eco-communities, issues of ageing were largely ignored in the case-study eco-communities.86 There can be high turnover in eco-communities and as Manzella notes, ‘there is little about contemporary intentional communities that encourage future generations to stay’;87 all too often, children leave and communities age without an influx of younger newcomers. Even in those with multiple generations such as Findhorn eco-village, there was concern that there were no pensions or provisions planned for the long-term residents who have been members and worked in the community for decades.

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Other forms of diversity, such as race, disability or class have been even more neglected by eco-communities.88 White middleclass, university-educated professionals have long dominated ecocommunities.89 Some communities have sought to specifically engage with those who have disabilities or special needs. Inspired by Rudolf Steiner, Sólheimar (Iceland) and Kitezh (Russia) eco-communities have sought to create welcoming supportive places for special needs children.90 Camphill communities (Britain and Norway) also seek to provide places for disabled people to live and work. A few communities have also sought to be multiracial. Koinonia Farm (Georgia, in the US), a Christian farm eco-community, explicitly sought to attract black participants, but different emphasis on materialism, social justice and socio-economic conditions meant that ‘it was difficult for blacks who earnt a wage, even a low wage, to give that up and move to a community in which communal sharing was the rule, which would amount to “voluntary poverty”.’91 In the main, however, this approach creates communities for diverse others as separate from other eco-communities, rather than seeking to diversify residents per se. Indeed, there is a significant risk of homogeneity where ‘communities defined in terms of a shared home inevitably produce insiders and outsiders’92 in the ways in which boundaries are created.93 This may give community residents identity and power, but is problematic for others and for diversity. Indeed, ‘the more diverse and powerful individuals are, the more stable and lively the community will become through a network of complex relationships … unity and diversity need each other.’94 While the value of diversity is often acknowledged, the purpose of many eco-communities is, in part, to create boundaries between their community project and mainstream society. These boundaries create space for experimentation and alternative ways of doing and living, and facilitate important feelings of belonging and identity. In this context, Sargisson explores the purposeful estrangement eco-communities create which ‘facilitates critical distance and group coherence’.95 The experience of estrangement, however, is paradoxical for many eco-community members, who both need it to feel part of the community, but who also eventually find it too much to endure. Estrangement in eco-communities acts to create members as a permanent otherness – separate, alienated and distanced from mainstream society. To overcome the possibility of this alienation

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developing into difficult practices (motivated by fear and mistrust), Sargisson argues that ‘the boundaries that surround intentional communities need to be punctured and kept porous’.96 One way to do this is to ensure diversity in participants. Eco-building requires time, patience and compromise We are building houses, that’s the easy bit, but we are also building a community. Anyone can build houses, but it’s really difficult to build communities … we put a lot of effort into that, how we make decisions, how we have fun together.97

Eco-building requires significant negotiation, compromise and careful attention to decision-making structures (governance). Living in eco-communities is not always easy, exemplified by the sometimes high turnover of residents, who find communal life too difficult.98 There is significant diversity in the ways in which eco-communities have sought to make decisions, from highly democratic consensus-based models to decision-making power being concentrated in a few leaders.99 The more democratic and shared the approach, the longer the process takes. The consensus model, in particular, is lengthy because decisions are only reached when there is unanimous agreement (without voting). The process consequently requires extensive discussions, modifications to a proposal and negotiations. This can become problematic if a decision is needed in a set time frame.100 However, once a decision has been agreed, it can be quickly implemented because time has already been taken to negotiate problems. Crucially, practising consensus productively requires training, skill, creativity and the ability to overcome interpersonal issues.101 As noted in the opening quote and confirmed by Cunningham and Wearings’s research, building structures appears to be easier than negotiating self-organisation for the community.102 At Kailash eco-village there are several communal areas offering shared facilities such as the laundry, recycling space, a swap shop for second-hand goods, gardens and the community room: ‘creating the community room. That was the first thing that we did is to renovate that – we have a meeting place,’ as Maitiri notes. Effort was put into building community, as Ole explains: ‘we have a weekly community night … when we moved in the residents didn’t know each other and now everybody knows almost everybody … so it’s created a tremendous sense of community out of basically zero community before.’

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9.10 Sabin Green, Portland, Oregon

Kailash also decided to share the gardens and composting facilities with anyone in the neighbourhood. However, the eco-community decided against the democratic approach in decision making in order to save time and reduce conflict. As Ole, a co-founder and owner of the land and apartments, explained: We’re a hierarchy – we’re basically a benevolent dictatorship here and we take the decisions and we invite a lot of community input but ultimately we are the decision makers. I think for some people that actually is probably preferable because most people don’t want to be involved in a lot of the decisions we do – they just want things to be done and maintenance to be done and there’s no need for them to give any input in that.

The approach was adopted because when they were part of a previous attempt to establish co-housing in Portland, Ole and Maitri had felt that the consensus decision-making approach had paralysed the progress of the build: ‘it just takes forever as there are so many voices … and they agonise over these silly things like that: the colour, the finishes and stuff like that,’ says Ole. This hierarchal approach also enabled Ole and Maitri to adopt some practices in the eco-village

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– such as using soil-less bucket compost toilets – which other residents might have thought too radical. As Ole explains: If the decision-making is streamlined, we can do some radical practices – we can actually model many radical practices to a wider community that we would have difficulty doing in a co-housing community where the decision making is egalitarian and you have maybe 20/30 families deciding. They would potentially say ‘no, we’re not going to allow that, that’s a little bit radical for us.’

Lack of privacy The greatest fear of many people choosing a community is that they won’t have enough privacy.103

Jarvis argues that we are in an age of isolation, of one-person households, ‘a paradox whereby yearning for connectedness coexists with neoliberal policies and cultural norms which promote self-reliance and the accumulation of private property’.104 Many eco-communities deliberately reduce privacy and instead encourage more communal and collective activities, such as eating together and in some cases sleeping together: ‘there is a loose, inverse relationship between the degree of communalism and privacy.’105 For some people, and at some times, this lack of privacy can be problematic. Litfin106 uses the term ‘ratcheting’ to describe the numerous spontaneous interactions of living in close proximity. As people move around and through the eco-community, they have many random encounters with others. People often need a balance between contact and solitude. In terms of housing, there is a need ‘to find ways to meet people’s privacy needs while keeping our home sites compact and not sprawled all over the landscape.’107 The tendency to seek to hide from others to create privacy by building structures that are scattered apart increases environmental destruction and infrastructure costs.108 Metcalf suggests that this lack of privacy is somewhat offset by the provision of quiet prayer or meditation spaces.109 The Lama Foundation and Findhorn eco-villages both had specific quiet spaces, with the Lama Foundation also having a hermitage for silent retreat. However, most of the ecocommunities visited did not have these quiet spaces. Rather, co-housing has to some extent been developed to produce more privacy while not rejecting the benefits of community and communality. Co-housing ‘combines the autonomy of private dwellings with the advantages

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of community living’,110 or, as Sullivan-Catlin argues, co-housing could also be conceived of as ‘a cooperative neighbourhood’.111 The co-housing model is proving so popular because it enables a balance between privacy and sharing.112 Ideally, interaction is encouraged by ensuring front doors face each other while creating privacy for living rooms and careful window placement.113 For example, at Findhorn there was a move away from individual house structures towards cohousing units; however, currently there is little privacy for ground-floor residents (Figure 9.11). Building houses takes time Using volunteer or self-labour to build homes does not mean such labour is free. If communities self-build, they take time and energy away from other tasks – such as food production, childcare or community governance. Some of the build methods communities choose, such as the rejection of using fossil fuel, or powered tools at Tinkers Bubble (Somerset, England) or the choice of using natural materials which might require hand construction, added time to the construction process. Even using external volunteer labour has costs – the time taken to train newcomers, the costs of repairing mistakes or the inefficiency of unskilled labour.

9.11 New co-housing at Findhorn eco-village, Scotland

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As discussed above, the Lama Foundation struggled to maintain the buildings they had because they relied on volunteers to build, and yet natural materials were used which require regular attention and patching. This maintenance was not anticipated or planned for, building was not always co-ordinated and volunteers wanted experience in build skills, rather than maintenance training. As Richard Gomes argued, ‘we are financially OK, but we do not have the staff to maintain the buildings. We need a bigger staff if we are to only have lime plasters, that is why we have started to use some regular plaster – stucco – on external walls.’ This tension between a lack of time and skills and the focus being primarily elsewhere has therefore led to the use of concrete and stucco in recent buildings, which is not very environmentally friendly. These compromises have been less about saving money and more about reducing labour requirements; Gomes insists, ‘We should make sure we can cope with maintaining the buildings we currently have before we build more.’ Similarly at Earthaven eco-village in North Carolina, one of the main builders in the eco-community, Chris Farmer, had moved away from using straw-bale and adobe techniques to using timber frame in order to save labour time.114 He argued that too often the cost of labour time was not fully considered in eco-homes in communities. The cost of labour, whether it is measured in time, efficiency, training requirements or the consequences of using unskilled labour, needs to be understood. Leafe Christian proposes that all eco-communities create a budget for labour needs: ‘If you don’t create a labor budget, you’ll be forever tempted to add new projects and ask the community to allocate labor credit for them, leaving you wondering why you have six half-done construction projects sitting around for years.’115 Re-inventing the wheel? Dawson, back in 2006, argued that it was time for eco-communities to start to accept the need for professional support: ‘as planning regulations have tightened, it has become more difficult for groups to create substantial new settlements without professional assistance.’116 For example, co-housing in Germany was constrained by the complex planning process, but now that municipalities have understood its value and better political support structures have been put in place, co-housing is expanding.117 However, eco-communities are generally quite poor at collaborating with professionals. Woolley identifies a

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lack of understanding of building physics, particularly in England, as a key concern.118 While there are many examples of outstanding high-quality ecobuilding in eco-communities, there are also numerous examples where little reference was made to existing knowledge about ecobuild methods, and people built through experimentation.119 There is in many eco-communities an anti-professionalism, a rejection of the importance of experts, specialists or building professionals such as architects and engineers. For example, Martin Bang argues that ‘we resent the professionalization of building. I often wish myself back to a previous age, where building was not confined by law to a small group of state licensed architects, carpenters, plumbers and electricians’,120 though he does concede that ‘it is important to spend a long time thinking and designing before actually beginning to saw and hammer.’121 The tension between unskilled building and a professional approach is also illustrated by the journey of the Twin Oaks eco-community in central Virginia. Twin Oaks always had the input of professional architects and builders who had given up their jobs and settled in the community. Over time, some of these builders began to get frustrated with the need to work with volunteers and constantly teach others, and eventually a key builder, Will, left. Will believed that only professionals could build buildings, but many in the community disagreed: ‘Amateurism is, I believe, at the core of what Twin Oaks is and is likely to remain for some time. It fits in with our ability to attract young and restless people and with the probability that they will leave after a few years.’122 This rejection of professional knowledge is a result of the anarchistic individualist tendencies of eco-community residents (seeking to escape the strictures of mainstream society), and a lack of money to employ external expertise. For new self-builders, the rejection of expertise can result in learning through doing, as Ben who was part of a team who constructed the Hedgehog co-operative project in Brighton, England, explained: ‘every new job we’ve had, we’ve bodged it up terribly for the first couple of weeks and then we’ve sussed it out, by which time it’s time to do a new job and bodge that up.’123 It also results in problems years later when ‘those techniques proved faulty’.124 As Whitcroft notes, it is also that ‘specialists have qualifications, bestowed on them by the mainstream, that are not necessarily valued

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by communitarians’,125 which in turn appears to give some people authority that a community does not feel has been earned. At Dancing Rabbit eco-community in north-eastern Missouri, Whitcroft, a trained architect, sought to overcome this tension by being a ‘brave specialist’, that is, someone who lived on site and worked with residents: ‘what is needed is not specialists but … brave specialists who can listen, ask the right questions, and design with communities while integrating their expertise.’126 At Dancing Rabbit, this even involved encouraging the community to seek Living Building Challenge certification (see Chapter 10) for their new community building, mainstream recognition for a community eco-build. This compromise approach is perhaps the most productive way forwards in terms of ensuring quality ecohome construction, though ultimately eco-communities must decide whether ‘it is time to shed some of their individualistic tendencies in order to create more communal models that are cheaper, more socially inclusive, lighter in terms of impact and more replicable’.127 Lessons from housing in eco-communities Through their analysis of several US and Canadian-based ecocommunities and their eco-homes projects, Fosket and Mamo128 identify ten ‘C’s of social sustainability: culture, context, citizenship, commitment, collaboration, connectedness, care, contact, commons and continuity. They argue that if these concepts are taken into account when designing and building, then such projects will be more successful in providing ecological, affordable, culturally appropriate and desired housing. Some of these concepts have already been explored elsewhere in this book, such as the importance of acknowledging and understanding socio-cultural heritage (culture), place (context) and connection to nature (contact). However, these concepts are a useful starting point from which to examine lessons from the different ways of building, and living in, homes in eco-communities which could be of use in understanding eco-homes and their potential per se: 1. Commons: Sharing space, objects and equipment works. Building collectively reduces costs and environmental waste.129 Developing systems of reciprocity and sharing enables eco-communities to function and for people to lead comfortable lives using fewer resources. However, the benefits of sharing are likely to be complicated by the need to negotiate and compromise and the most

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2.

3.

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successful systems of sharing can demonstrate clear agreements for how tools, food and space are shared. Small private homes with communal facilities: Living in compact spaces works, if there is communal space available to share, particularly access to shared green spaces. There is a general move towards co-housing which provides privacy for residents in small efficient houses, but still encourages communal activities and sharing.130 Providing some privacy and not expecting people to do everything communally results in greater appeal. Citizenship vs expediency: Eco-communities have long struggled with developing governance systems and decision-making structures that enable residents to participate in decisions that affect them, while also finding ways to reach agreement or consensus. Fosket and Mamo131 argue that citizenship, being involved in the design and construction of eco-homes, is crucial to its success. There are obvious advantages to potential occupiers designing homes for their own needs and for residents to feel that they have a stake in the outcome of housing projects. Yet too much democracy slows down the building process. Whether it is socially advantageous to practice democratic decision making or not, consensus approaches in particular slow down the speed of building and can constrain risk taking. In other words, there are significant advantages to reducing the extensive and slow collective decision-making practices evident in some eco-communities. There will likely long remain a tension between the advantages and disadvantages of participation. Diversity does not occur without effort: Without explicit efforts to encourage diverse types of residents, and self-builders, then ecohomes will likely remain the preserve of the white middle classes. Fosket and Mamo express the importance of this diversity through their use of the concept of collaboration: ‘the involvement of diverse viewpoints and voices are crucial to the development and ongoing maintenance of a sustainable community.’132 This is not just about including diverse residents, but in creating space to listen to, and have dialogue with, others in the region, local professionals (architects, engineers, urban planners) and state representatives. In this way, opposing views can be considered early on, and a more robust plan can be developed. Failing to take the time to learn: Related to the importance of collaboration, the need to learn from the past, from experts and

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professionals, or to seek out knowledge seems to be too often ignored. Although eco-communities often seem involved in a continuous process of learning and experimentation, some of this involves wasted effort (re)discovering methods which are already known. Eco-innovation occurs through connectedness: Residents and selfbuilders rely upon mutual support in building their eco-homes, not just in sharing physical labour when needed but also in emotional support. Connecting with others creates a system of reciprocity and collaboration. Connection is encouraged in many eco-communities through the design of spaces of conviviality and public space where residents would regularly encounter others. Therefore, to encourage more eco-homes, there needs to be recognition of the benefits of building in clusters, alongside others who can understand and support the process. Eco-homes are about more than the environment: Improving human well-being (through better engagement with nature, healthier and happier lifestyles, connectedness with others and an ethic of care) is central to many eco-communities. This was valued in most case studies as being of equal importance to environmental qualities.133 Community eco-homes facilitated an ethic of care where ‘people are able to think beyond their own needs’,134 and support each other through the trials of life. As such, this approach to building signals the potential to value eco-homes for their contributions beyond reducing environmental waste. Mixing old and new: Eco-building does not necessarily require destroying existing structures. Such structures can be renovated and often there is still space in which to add new additional eco-homes. For example, at Sabin Green, in Portland, Oregon, a 701.5 m2 plot with a bungalow was converted into a small community of four houses, with a communal courtyard. This combination of structures also lowers overall costs. ‘People make it green’135 but buildings matter: There is a growing understanding that residents and their practices are crucial to the efficient functioning of eco-buildings and eco-communities.136 Therefore residents’ actions can mitigate the effectiveness of building design. There is certainly a great deal of emphasis within eco-communities on changing residents’ behaviour and practices to reduce environmental impact, and in working to maintain that

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commitment. However, as Woolley argues,137 putting the onus entirely on inhabitants undermines the importance of building physics and constructing houses appropriately. Eco-communities’ focus on social issues, on commitment, building community and on collective governance has sometimes led to the neglect of understanding the physics of how buildings work. 10. Lack of planning for continuity and evaluation: Eco-communities can struggle with a turnover of residents, and although many have robust structures in place to facilitate community reflection, this rarely involves evaluation of the eco-homes. Hockerton Housing Project in Nottinghamshire, England, is unusual in establishing ongoing monitoring of their buildings for energy use, comfort and problems. Building by anticipating future change in occupiers and thinking through how to, for example, maintain affordability, are essential to the success of eco-homes. Robust house evaluation procedures, absent in most eco-communities, would enable valuable lessons to be learnt and approaches improved. 11. Labour is never free: That many eco-communities relied upon volunteers to build (and maintain) their houses had unintended costs. It tended to reflect a general anti-professionalism prevalent in eco-communities, that valued learning-by-doing and experimentation. The result was, unfortunately, inefficient building practices, incomplete projects, failure to consider and plan for maintenance and, sometimes, poor-quality buildings. Conclusions An eco-community is a place in which residents illustrate a concern for the social, economic and environmental needs of each other and nature, and where there is collaborative, collective and communal housing and living. Eco-communities demonstrate an ethical commitment to each other and the environment, or a new ‘land ethic’ ‘about the land, about ourselves in relation to it, and about the ethicality of what we do to the land and thus, directly and indirectly to ourselves’.138 There are five common reasons why people choose to create, build and live in eco-communities: they enable reduced environmental impact, increased efficiency is possible, it can be socially rewarding, they are self-governing and they enable residents to live beyond capitalism. There are an increasing number and variety of ecocommunities worldwide, just a sample of which have been explored in

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this chapter. Eco-communities are best understood as ‘a process, and not a finished product’.139 While many advocate that eco-communities are the best way in which to build a sustainable society, they are also problematic in their homogeneity, in their use of lifestyle strategies as a way in which to change the world,140 and their reliance on consumption of ecological commodities and eco-technologies, which perpetuates (albeit ecological) capitalism.141 This is not to deny the achievements of eco-communities, but to avoid an uncritical assessment. This chapter sought to answer two questions. First, to explore how building houses in an eco-community changes the build process (design, construction, cost) or the requirements of a home. Building in a community is different from building individually or commercially in numerous ways. Eco-communities benefit from a shared (and often volunteer) workforce, shared infrastructure costs and economies of scale; builders benefit from mutual support and a niche space in which to innovate and take risks. The outcome – the eco-homes – tend to be smaller with more shared communal space. However, the costs of building in eco-communities tend to be the time required to make decisions, lack of privacy and a general anti-professionalism that mean ignoring established building approaches. The second question addressed in this chapter is what lessons from these different ways of building, and living in, homes could be of use in understanding eco-homes and their potential. Examining eco-homes in communities suggests that: (a) Sharing space, objects and equipment works. (b) Living in compact space works, if there is communal space available to share. (c) Participatory decision making is ideal, but slows down the process of building. (d) Diversity does not occur without effort. (e) There is a need to learn from existing knowledge and skills, particularly building physics. (f) Eco-homes have positive effects beyond the environment, but also in human well-being. (g) Eco-builders need physical and emotional support from likeminded people. (h) There is a need for robust monitoring and evaluation of eco-homes.

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(i) Eco-building does not necessarily require destroying existing structures. (j) Labour is never free. In many ways, therefore, it is easier and cheaper to build affordable eco-homes in communities, but the results are more variable. By building in a community, effort is focused into communal systems of decision making, living together and processes of sharing. There are numerous social and economic benefits to this, but the houses themselves can suffer as a result. In some cases, eco-communities offer important space for periods of innovative and creative experimentation that go on to influence eco-home design elsewhere. But those who seek to focus on housing can be accused of professionalisation or specialisation and marginalised. For eco-homes per se, there are a great many lessons to be learnt from building in community, and in the possibilities of smaller homes surrounded by communal public space.

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The sun is beginning to set; it is late afternoon on an autumnal day in Scotland. The chickens are heading back into their coop, the kids return from their adventures in the woods and the adults chop firewood. The straw-bale house sits amongst the trees on the hillside, built on a wooden platform jutting into the valley (Figure 10.1). The wood stove is lit ready to cook tea and heat water for bucket baths. The thick straw walls provide a warmth from the creeping cold outside and the electricity collected from the photovoltaic cells during the day powers the lights. The family settles down to a dinner of home-grown vegetables and eggs. Another day of living off the land and in their off-grid home in the woods draws to a close. Few know the real location of this family; the house was built without planning permission by volunteers guided by the only member of the community with any building skills – a carpenter. None had built a house before. Their budget was scraped

10.1 Straw-bale house at Green Hills, Scotland

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together through odd jobs and the profits from their organic garden box scheme. Most materials were reclaimed. Construction methods were gleaned from books and through trial and error. The resulting house is a monument to achieving something from very little. Buildings have material effects on the people who reside inside them, and in turn, people can enhance or serve as barriers to the efficiency, meanings and operation of buildings.1 Eco-homes are a product of the social, economic, geographical and political environments in which they are built. They are shaped by multiple influences and all the different people involved in their design, construction and occupancy. The self-builders in this book have had greater control than many in shaping their homes, but they alone have not determined their house’s form and function. The place, people and politics of its context have affected each house. These influences are not always visible, they interweave and interconnect, to help create diverse, vibrant and challenging eco-building movements. Only a subset of eco-homes has been examined in this book, and the large mass-produced commercial eco-homes projects in countries such as Germany, Sweden and Norway have not been included.2 This focus was in large part because of a desire to explore affordable eco-homes options and to work with those who, despite having little income, had built ecologically benign homes. It was driven by an interest in the choices people make about their own homes and the inventive possibilities opened up through self-building a house. I also wanted to look beyond Europe and beyond the places already recognised for their commitment to ecological construction; how were these trends and ideas spreading and influencing other places? Despite this focus on self-build, lessons can be learnt about the current state of eco-homes worldwide. Eco-building remains a niche, marginalised as a design and approach in all but a few countries. Too many myths persist about eco-homes being more expensive, uncomfortable, inappropriate or too quirky. The commercial construction industries remain too conservative and are resisting new techniques and new practices. Governments, despite many like those in Britain and the US adopting eco-certification systems and targets to encourage higher ecological performance, too often rely on costly technological solutions. The default approach to house building is to ignore environmental concerns, or if the environment is considered, to only apply technological solutions.

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The self-built eco-homes explored in this book are far from perfect. Architects reading this would likely despair at some of the homespun designs and lack of consideration for proportion, aesthetics or interior layouts. Planners might dislike the anti-establishment approach of those who built without planning permission and builders question the sometimes haphazard and learn-as-you-go construction approaches. Geographers are likely familiar with some of the conceptual approaches used. All might despair at the rejection of engaging expert professionals or the ignorance of established knowledge. The purpose was not to use these eco-homes as examples of best practice or suggest that their ecological performance was exemplary. The ways in which form can override function, or function override form, means that compromises are often made in building an eco-home. As Rob Cartwright commented about working on the Newark retrofit project: ‘To be honest, we didn’t give too much thought to aesthetics. It was more function over form. It was really, this is what we need to do to make it perform … we weren’t really striving for aesthetics; we were striving for performance.’ Rather, these examples were employed to illustrate both the diversity of what is actually being built and as a way to understand the different social, geographical and political influences upon them. Key findings for eco-homes The research in this book has identified a number of key findings that need to be taken into account in discussions about, and advocations for, eco-homes: • Eco-homes are diverse and expansive. Although there is some commonality in intended functions there are significant differences in the forms, approaches and outcomes of eco-homes. • The purpose of an eco-house is to reduce waste. An eco-house could and should do more than focus on carbon emission reduction and there is a need to consider the impact on the environment beyond the house itself. • Human agency is central in the functioning of an eco-home. While technological innovation offers new opportunities, their functioning is reliant upon compliant occupants. • There is a difference between what a house needs to do and what people desire from a home. A home is a space of social relations filled with emotions, traditions and politics. It is vital to align eco-home designs with these desires for a home.

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• Eco-homes are not a new phenomenon. Many types of vernacular houses are ecological. Understanding this varied and long history of eco-homes is necessary to challenge the myth that it is novel, niche and untested. • Too often eco-homes are imposed on a place, rather than embedded into it. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, not enough attention is paid to what already exists in place. • Affordable eco-homes are already being built. Eco-homes need to be built for all, not just the wealthy. • Eco-homes can involve reconfiguring some elements of comfort. Comfort is not pre-determined or fixed; it is a process that can be reconceived to be more ecologically benign. • There are gender divisions in eco-building, with women often excluded. A focus on bodies enables a shift towards more gender-neutral building practices. • Knowledges and practices about eco-homes travel across the world through processes of innovation, circulation and adaptation. Understanding these processes of mobilisation enables their further facilitation. • Building eco-homes as part of a community is cheaper, easier and offers more flexible use of space for residents. Key academic contributions This book has used several geographical concepts – place, gender, comfort, mobilisation, affordability, community and home – to understand eco-homes and has used eco-homes to understand the utility of these concepts. A geographical approach to understanding eco-homes offers a fresh perspective and requires the answering of novel research questions. As such this book has: • Offered a new definition of eco-building and eco-architecture that incorporates and acknowledges the extent of diversity and difference in eco-home forms and functions. • Illustrated the potential of overcoming gender divisions and discrimination by focusing on the body and its differentiated capacities. • Demonstrated why a detailed and theoretically robust reading of place and place-making is vital to understanding the success and failure of eco-homes. For example, using the concept of place the opposition to some new eco-homes projects can be understood

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as more than just Nimby (not-in-my-backyard) reactions, but a disjuncture in how place is valued and its meaning between existing and new residents. • Explored how eco-builders have renegotiated comfort, through their approach to bathrooms as cleanliness, sharing, bodies and thermal delight. In other words, comfort was not individual and private, but reconstituted as collective, shared and embodied, and thus less resource intensive. • Questioned the familiar and established narrative of the history of eco-homes, exposing some enduring myths and arguing that how we tell stories of the past shapes the future. • Illustrated how eco-building knowledge and practices are mobilised through a circular continuous process of change and adaptation. Sticking points and unresolved issues Eco-building clearly has a long way to go before it is considered the norm. There are numerous issues hindering a greater understanding, and adoption, of eco-homes methods. Of these issues, there are five that are particularly problematic, difficult to resolve and therefore could be considered sticking points in the future evolution of eco-homes. First, perhaps the main problem for the further advancement of eco-homes is the conservatism and risk adversity of governments, residents and construction companies.3 For example, the housebuilding industry in Britain is dominated by a few large private firms who identify numerous risks to their survival and profitability. These risks include: • • • • • • • • •

Running out of land Cost overruns Failure to assess market demand correctly Failure to assess the future market Generic product failure Uncertain performance of new methods or technologies House price market volatility Problems with securing planning permission Increasing complexity of compliance with stringent environmental performance standards • Low new-build profit margins4

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Indeed, housing is ‘an atypical consumer product: it is durable, expensive and of fixed location’,5 and as a result investors regard ‘housing as relatively high risk because of its inherent unpredictability [which] requires a high premium on its use of capital’.6 Cost remains the main criteria of success in house building.7 The perception of these dangers means house-building companies seek to avoid innovation, or making new investments.8 This risk adversity is not just due to cautious construction companies; rather, the house-building industry is composed of ‘developers, builders, financial institutions, suppliers, technical consultants and local authorities, who both act together and constrain each others’ actions’,9 with professionals often acting as barriers to the spread of innovations10 and locking in certain build approaches.11 In Britain, the power and dominance of the six biggest energy companies, and their resistance to moving away from fossil fuel supplies, further compounds the risk adversity of house builders.12 This uncertainty is particularly problematic for eco-homes, which places the additional risks of new methods, an unclear market and establishing new supply chains on house builders.13 Second, this resistance to risk, and particularly innovation, in eco-building is also compounded by the established and entrenched practices of the building professions. As Janda and Killip argue, ‘making significant changes in the built environment is not a matter of reengineering a technical system on paper, it is about reshaping a socio-technical system by redefining established skills, work practices, and professions on the ground.’14 The knowledge and skills required to build a house are complex, and challenging known processes requires significant engagement within the building sector. It also requires an openness and transparency that can be hard for competing companies to accept – what Gottfried calls ‘coopetition’.15 Changes have already been activated in the way that, for example, architecture students are now increasingly taught about the importance of eco-design,16 and new environmental regulations have necessitated shifts in on-site building practices. Kibert advocates greater emphasis on ‘learning by doing’ across ‘all stakeholders in processes that test different means by which the build environment is produced, sited, deconstructed, and resurrected’.17 More informal learning through activist spaces and residents’ experiences also has an important role to play in challenging established approaches. McFarlane, although talking about urban spaces, illustrates how these informal spaces enable

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unlearning existing dominant arrangements that structure urban learning practices and ideologies … exposing these urban knowledges as neither necessary nor truthful, the task is to present an alternative set of urban knowledges, imaginaries, logics and practices that entail learning a new kind of city … The policy-makers and consultants involved in that learning must be genuinely accountable to different voices and perspectives.18

Opening up spaces of expertise (such as building companies and planning departments) to these more diverse, and informal, forms of knowledge and to a range of opinions beyond trained professionals is difficult. However, the ability to exchange knowledge with others beyond specific industries and indeed to engage in a constructive critique of building and design practices offers potential productive ways forward.19 At the same time as encouraging a more diverse set of knowledges to be incorporated into the building professions, there is a need to acknowledge the importance of understanding basic construction principles and existing knowledges. In the self-build movements encountered in this book, there was a great deal of experimentation and ‘learning-as-you-build’. Many self-build projects are spaces of creativity and innovation. However, there was also a great deal of duplication and ‘re-inventing the wheel’, whereby builders ignored existing knowledges and past practices only to eventually realise the utility of what was already known, or for their approach to fail. This wastes time, effort and money. It appears to occur as a result of a wholesale rejection of all knowledge that might be deemed professional or elitist. Such a rejection is short sighted and relegates eco-building to the margins of society. Rather, there is a need to create bridges between the different silos of expertise and forms of knowledge with the active engagement of those in positions of power and those who might deem such professional knowledge as irrelevant. Mutual knowledge sharing would benefit all those interested in eco-homes.20 Third, there is an enduring worldwide trend for reliance on technological fixes to deliver eco-homes. This increases its cost and underestimates the potential of residents’ behaviour and practices to disrupt how a house performs. A technology-first approach is rarely the most (environmentally or financially) efficient approach. When retrofitting, often the most important task is to increase insulation and reduce draughts, before any technology is needed. In new house

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construction, a fabric-first approach (focusing on the materials and solidity of the walls, floors and roof, and the layout and design) is more efficient than technology alone in reducing energy costs. Technology is useful if it is used appropriately – in the right place, at the right scale. When it is used inappropriately, or without other changes to a house, it is often ineffective. Reliance on technology as the only form of ecological modification to house-building practices is a reduced and narrow understanding of what eco-homes need to be. Until it is more widely acknowledged that technology will not ‘fix’ the waste problems of housing, then there is a danger that the technology-first approach will become the dominant eco-building philosophy. Fourth, the importance of infrastructure to eco-homes is both acknowledged and simultaneously underestimated. Infrastructures are the material and social elements that provide the structure and facilities that enable a society to function. Material (or hard) infrastructures include the physical elements of roads, bridges, power lines and water supply networks. Social (or soft) infrastructures include the economic and governance systems needed to manage, maintain and deliver emergency services, healthcare systems, education and social welfare. The necessity of supplying energy, water and sewerage to a house has long been understood. Autonomous house designs sought to reduce reliance on external material infrastructures through off-grid provision of energy, water collection systems and on-site sewage treatment processes. Community self-build projects, such as Hockerton in England, have built shared systems of facilities provision. However, just disconnecting from existing infrastructures does not remove them or necessarily encourage environmental infrastructures: ‘the question of how the green buildings should relate to the infrastructure networks has been largely ignored.’21 For eco-home projects in urban areas, with established infrastructures, the social infrastructures have been particularly problematic in hindering different approaches to, for example, energy and water provision.22 There is also a need to consider the importance of interconnected infrastructures for dealing with the environmental consequences of housing, such as increased propensity for flooding in areas of non-permeable surfaces, an issue which recent examples of sustainable urbanism have accommodated through sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS).23 Yet this only deals with one aspect of infrastructure and Chambers24 argues that without consideration of the broader infrastructures and the whole

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(eco)system of providing for the needs of a house, then issues such as watershed protection will be neglected and eco-homes will be unsustainable. Eco-home design, then, has to take better account of existing infrastructures, explore compatibilities rather than wholesale rejection and extend the type and scale of what infrastructures are considered as relevant. Finally, occupants’ demands and desires of a home can be hard to reconcile with reducing waste.25 In particular, there are shifting expectations of comfort and convenience that put increased pressure on environmental resources. Examples include the trend in countries such as the US, Canada and Australia for increased house sizes, changing expectations of bathrooms to include more facilities such as power showers or space for relaxation,26 and demands for warmer homes and houses that have uniform internal temperatures. These expectations need to be tempered, as it is unlikely that eco-homes will be able to accommodate these shifting demands. Rather, current expectations of comfort and convenience need to be reconceived and challenged. This tension between comfort and more ecologically benign living is not easy to resolve as it requires shifting understandings of what a home should be and what comfort entails. In addition to these sticking points in terms of encouraging more eco-homes, there are also three issues that have largely been ignored and thus remain unresolved in debates about eco-homes. The first is that of inclusivity: designing for a range of accessibilities, disabilities and needs. This is about more than simply accounting for wheelchairbound occupants, and instead about acknowledging the diverse and different needs of people per se.27 Second, the importance of heritage; cultural heritage in terms of social norms and traditions, and the architectural heritage of existing buildings and housing stock, is only superficially acknowledged. Existing housing stock is often understood as a problem to be solved through retrofitting, while cultural heritage is more or less ignored. Heritage is about understanding existing practices and structures as more than inefficiencies to be corrected. Finally, despite repeated calls from architects, little attention is being paid to the processes of deconstruction.28 There is an urgent need to design and build with deconstruction in mind, so that it becomes easier to demount and recycle the component parts of eco-homes. Indeed, it may be that we need to build and design more temporary dwellings and embrace the ephemeral qualities of home.29

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Productive ways forward Building on Williams’30 identification of basic principles which should underpin further zero carbon homes – appropriateness, simplicity, diversity, demonstrating relative advantage, symbiosis and resilience – there are eight ways in which eco-homes could be encouraged and improved. These approaches will help tackle some of the existing barriers and problems in eco-building and ensure that the eco-homes being built satisfy needs and performance expectations: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Ensure suitability: Eco-homes need to be suitable for the local environmental context and social needs and economic conditions of a place. They also need to be suitable for occupants, both in meeting their desires and being easily useable. Share knowledge and skills: There is a need to build more comprehensive networks of knowledge and skill sharing which enable discussion of failures as much as successful building projects. This knowledge sharing would also enable more builders to rely less on technological solutions and instead understand and experiment with fabric-first approaches. Design inclusivity: Eco-homes need to be accessible to those on low incomes and suitable for those with different bodily capacities or different needs. Inclusive design is about more than enabling disabled access; rather it is about designing for the full diversity of society, liveability and lifelong living. For example, the Lifespan housing approach considers ‘design for aging in place … sensory limitations, security, and the prevention of falls’.31 Ensure buildability: The ease of construction and availability of materials are particularly important in encouraging construction firms to build more ecologically. Buildability is a form of reality check and ‘without it, it is likely to be ignored or subverted on the ground’:32 ‘key elements of the buildability idea are that building work needs to compromise products and methods that must be all of the following: practical, replicable, affordable, reliable, sellable, available, guaranteeable, and profitable.’33 Perceptions of buildability might also be increased if the lineage of some ecobuilding techniques were better understood. In other words, that these techniques are not all novel and untested, and some have evolved from years of vernacular experience.

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Demonstrate advantages: All stakeholders (occupants, builders, planners, architects, insurance companies) need to understand the advantages of eco-homes. Convincing potential residents of the advantages of eco-homes involves providing working examples for people to experience and challenging existing expectations of comfort and convenience. While there is a trend to rely on technological approaches which require only passive occupants, in the long term, active engagement is needed by householders in the environmental implications of their homes and practices. The advantages need to be more than environmental protection, but evidenced as reduced life-cycle costs and a ‘focus on excellence of design and operation, with greenness as a critical component. Focusing exclusively on greenness trivializes it as a marginal movement.’34 Encourage greater financial support: In countries like Britain, it is currently difficult to secure mortgages and loans for ecohomes projects. There is a particular need to establish financial support mechanisms for self-build construction so that people are encouraged to design and build the houses they want, rather than rely on the house-building industry to supply them. Financial support could be encouraged through beneficial tax arrangements, government-backed mortgages or reduced planning fees.35 Pro-active policy support across all scales: This support is required to encourage eco-home construction and to not hinder its expansion.36 In Britain, for example, support is needed nationally to tackle high land costs through enabling eco-building as special exceptions. Performance standards and building regulations are a useful mechanism through which to encourage change, but compliance with building regulations needs to be enforced, which it is often currently not.37 An audit by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) of new British housing developments ‘revealed that almost one in three homes (29 per cent) were so poor that they should not have been given planning permission. It uncovered family housing with no play areas, windows looking out on blank walls, and broad expanses of tarmac.’38 CABE’s research suggested that standards were in part to blame, being applied unevenly and through a confusing process of certification. Even if standards are complied with, they cannot be the only method of change, but rather they need to be part of a broader set of policy initiatives.

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8.

Future-proof housing: Future-proofing is needed so that it will survive ‘the worst that the climate can throw at us’.39 In addition to climate change, future threats include changing energy supply, increasing density of populations, failing ecosystems and new health issues. If houses are not future-proofed, a vicious circle is created as a changing climate triggers greater energy demands in our houses (such as the increased use of air conditioning in southern England), which in turn contributes further to climate change. Building by anticipating future changes, such as increased frequency of flooding, reduces the long-term economic and social costs of remediation. As Pelsmakers details,40 there are numerous house designs that can withstand flooding: a sacrificial basement, building on stilts, floating buildings and wet-proofing buildings. For example, in a low-lying area of North Yorkshire, a straw-bale house was recently built on brick plinths preventing flood damage (Figure 10.2). Moreover, houses need to be built that remain affordable both in purchase cost and in energy use, even as energy insecurity increases.

10.2 Future-proofing a (straw-bale) house by building on raised brick plinths, North Yorkshire, England

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Future directions Understanding some of the potential futures of eco-homes is important in building a vision to aspire to, and in recognising that some outcomes are more likely than others. Here, eight potential future directions of eco-homes, and eco-homes research, have been identified: (a) High-density mass-produced eco-homes: Increasing acknowledgement of the need to widen the accessibility of eco-homes will be likely to result in efforts to build at larger scales, especially in urban locations. The eco-construction of mega-cities in China might also provide stimulus for other places.41 However, these new-build ecocities are problematic, employing as they do particular visions of a technological fix to environmental problems, intensification of inequalities and the exploitation of the labour force mobilised to construct them.42 Building at scale not only demonstrates feasibility but also builds knowledge and establishes supply chains. While there are some excellent prototypes such as LILAC43 (Leeds, England) and BedZED44 (London, England) that demonstrate what is possible and affordable in terms of high-density urban eco-homes, there is a danger that too narrow an interpretation of what constitutes an eco-home will be adopted in order to reduce financial costs, and as a result the environmental value of ecohomes are undermined. (b) High-performance technological eco-homes: The preference for technological approaches to eco-homes is likely to continue. This is encouraged by higher environmental performance standards and building regulations which are most easily achieved through the use of technologies, and perceived occupant preference for passive systems which reduce the need for occupants to actively engage with their house and alter their behaviour. Consequently, design and construction methods – such as Passivhaus45 – which focus on high environmental performance, low energy use and airtight construction, are becoming increasingly popular in countries like Britain. Passivhaus design reduces the need for space heating and cooling by building a highly insulated leak-free house that benefits from passive solar gain and then uses mechanical ventilation and heat recovery systems to provide fresh internal air. It is both a

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simple design concept and a particular energy performance specification. (c) Emphasis on human agency and social meaning: There is increasing acknowledgement not just that occupants’ practices can undermine the efficiency of an eco-home, but that eco-homes are as much a social as a technological challenge.46 This move away from the mechanisation of architecture takes greater account of occupants’ needs, desires and practices. (d) Increased demand for energy-efficient homes: As energy prices continue to rise with increased energy insecurity,47 demand is likely to increase for energy-efficient homes that are cheaper to run. Although increased demand for eco-homes is advantageous, this approach relies on economics as a stimulant for change, rather than environmental awareness or acknowledgment of the impacts of climate change. This could lead to a virtuous circle – the more people live in eco-homes, the more likely such homes are understood and desired. However, reliance on markets alone to encourage more eco-homes is risky, given that markets can be fickle. (e) Diverse, holistic and embedded eco-home designs: The diversity of eco-home forms is likely to increase, as more people understand the basic functionality of eco-building and experiment. There is no blueprint of the ideal eco-home; instead it is likely that the peculiarities of local context and geography will become better understood and eco-homes more embedded and integrated into place.48 These homes would also better reflect the potential future needs of occupants. The concept of passive survivability is being developed in the US to describe homes that would assist people’s survival during disasters – that is, homes that would still function without power or water.49 At the same time, there is a need to pay greater attention to space between homes and the infrastructure beyond in both environmental impact and survivability.50 More holistic notions of eco-homes are also likely to be developed, moving beyond the simplistic focus on carbon reduction alone. An example is the Living Building Challenge developed by the Cascadia Green Building Council in the US and Canada, which incorporates the requirement for the building to provide all required water (net zero water) and is only classified after a year of operation demonstrates that the building has met all criteria (Table 10.1).51

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TABLE 10.1 The Living Building Challenge categories (petals) and imperatives52 Petal Site

Imperatives Limits to Growth Urban Agriculture Habitat Exchange Car Free Living

Water

Net Zero Water Ecological Water Flow

Energy

Net Zero Energy

Health

Civilized Environment Healthy Air Biophilia

Materials

Red List Embodied Carbon Footprint Responsible Industry Appropriate Sourcing Conservation + Reuse

Equity

Human Scale + Human Places Democracy + Social Justice Rights to Nature

Beauty

Beauty + Spirit Inspiration + Education

(f) Greater understanding of the value of vernacular designs: The importance of vernacular approaches to building, and what these designs offer to contemporary eco-homes builders, is likely to increase. The changing climate and need to reduce costs in building is encouraging a re-examination of traditional approaches to construction.53 However, vernacular design alone is unlikely to satisfy current comfort requirements or cope with, for example, the heat generated by communication and workplace technologies. (g) Integrated neighbourhoods and self-built communities: There is increasing recognition that eco-homes must go alongside reconfiguring housing layouts to mixed-used places. Housing needs to be integrated with work and leisure spaces to reduce

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the need for long daily commutes to work, school, or for basic supplies. Equally, space in existing communities needs to be made available for self-build and thus for people to build the types of dwellings and communities that they want. Teignbridge Council in Devon was the first planning authority in England to adopt a policy that explicitly allocated a percentage of all new development as self-build.54 (h) Informed and creative use of materials: While reduction in waste during construction and increased use of recycled material is already being practised, it is likely that even more attention will be paid to materials in the future. The performance of materials and therefore their different uses are being increasingly understood and experimented with. For example, in New Mexico, builders were constructing houses from hybrid materials, part straw bale, part adobe. The trend to de-couple building from manufacturing – module and pre-fabricated or kit housing – is also likely to continue.55 Pre-fabricated housing minimises waste from construction and reduces costs.56 Conclusions Despite the great efforts of many eco-designers, builders and advocates worldwide, and the growth of eco-homes, ‘the percentage change in the world’s overall use of energy, water and materials is minor’.57 For every eco-home built, there are many more energyinefficient, waste-producing, water-guzzling constructions. Encouraging and mobilising more eco-homes remains a difficult task hindered by risk adversity, lack of knowledge and skills, reliance on technological fixes, infrastructure issues and certain expectations of comfort and convenience. Further issues of inclusivity, heritage and deconstruction have yet to be adequately tackled. Yet there are clearly identifiable ways in which to encourage more eco-building. A combination of ensuring suitability (including future-proofed housing), buildability, inclusivity, and financial and policy support, further encouraged by sharing knowledge and skills and demonstrating the advantages, will facilitate more eco-homes being built. The types of eco-homes that will be mobilised by these basic principles, however, have yet to be fully understood. There remains a need to celebrate the diversity of eco-homes rather than allow it to become narrowly and restrictively defined only in the form of, for

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example, zero carbon buildings. Accepting that there is no blueprint, no perfect eco-home, keeps open the future possibilities of what constitutes an eco-home and enables the eco-home to be a flexible evolving concept. This openness is also necessary precisely because all that is apparently ecological is not always ‘good’. Just as Caprotti details in relation to eco-cities in India, China and Korea, eco-building can be used as ‘green excrescences of “industrial capitalism as usual”’.58 Beyond the ‘emerald islands’ of eco-construction, exemplars may still be waste-producing, fossil-fuel-using, extractive and damaging practices. Eco-homes will only work if they are part of broader shifts within society and within households. In other words, it matters who the people are, where the place is and what the politics are, and how these elements are employed, or not, in the processes of eco-home making. While attempting to raise questions about the people, place and politics of eco-homes, it is hoped that some of the findings of this book will encourage a greater engagement with the innovative, inspiring and ingenious eco-homes of the world.

A PP E N D I X : S U M M A R Y O F E M P I R I CA L CAS E S TU D I E S US E D I N T H I S B O O K

Location

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Cerrillos, New Mexico, US

Ban Mae Khong, Pai, Thailand

Brighton, East Sussex, England

San Francisco del Monte de Oro, Argentina

Portland, Oregon, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Colorado, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Taos, New Mexico, US

Case study

Aldea Velatropa

Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center

Amy’s Earth House

Brighton Earthship

Casa Tierra

City Repair Project

Columbia eco-village

Communitecture

Crestone

Dignity Village

Earthship Biotecture

Earthship, car tyres, waste products, earth

Rubbish, wood

Mixed, all types

Retrofit

Retrofit

Mixed, several adobe

Cob and adobe

Earthship, car tyres, waste products, earth

Adobe

Straw bale, cob, adobe, wood

Adobe, wood, rubbish

Type of construction (and materials)

Owner-occupied

Rented

Owner-occupied

N/A

Owner-occupied

N/A

Owner-occupied

Owned by Trust

Owner-occupied

Owner-occupied

Squatted

Tenure Anti-capitalist

Underlying vision

Education

Tourism

Mike Reynolds and owners

Residents and volunteers

Owners

Architect

Architect

Architect, volunteers

Autonomous buildings

Autonomous housing for homeless

Autonomous sustainable living

Democratic placemaking

Co-housing

Democratic placemaking

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable living

Volunteers

Owner and volunteers

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable living

Volunteers

Designed and built by

Central Argentina

Andalucía, Spain

Forres, Scotland

Scotland (location indeterminate to protect participants)

Nottinghamshire, England

Portland, Oregon, US

Andalucía, Spain

Taos, New Mexico, US

Pembrokeshire, Wales

Devon, England

Leeds, England

El Trébol del Monte

El Valle de Sensaciones

Findhorn

Green Hills

Hockerton

Kailash eco-village

La Ecoaldea Del Minchal

Lama Foundation

Lammas eco-village

Landmatters

LILAC

Location

Case study

Straw bale

Yurt, canvas benders, wood

Mixed, wood, cob, straw bale

Straw bale, cob, adobe, wood

Wooden zomes

Retrofit

Earth sheltered, concrete

Straw bale, tyres, earth

Mixed, all types

Adobe, wood

Straw bale

Type of construction (and materials)

Land owned by Trust

Land owned by Trust

Owner-occupied

Land owned by Trust

Land collectively owned

Rented

Owner-occupied

Owner-occupied

Owner-occupied/ mixed

Owner-occupied

Owner-occupied

Tenure Ecological housing

Underlying vision

Raising consciousness

Autonomous urban sustainable living

Autonomous sustainable living

Architect

Affordable, ecological, community housing

Owners and volunteers Low Impact Development

Owners and volunteers Low Impact Development

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable and spiritual living

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable living

Architect

Architect

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable living

Architect, owners, volunteers

Owners and volunteers Autonomous sustainable living

Architect

Designed and built by

California, US

Lincolnshire, England

Chiang Mai province, Thailand

Portland, Oregon, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Chiang Mai province, Thailand

Portland, Oregon, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Portland, Oregon, US

Waddington, Lincolnshire, England

Taos, New Mexico, US

Somerset, England

Los Angeles eco-village

Newark Retrofit

Panya Project

Peninsula Park Commons

People’s Co-operative

Pun Pun

ReBuild Center

Ruth’s Garden Cottage

Sabin Green

Straw-bale house

Thom Wheeler’s adobe house

Tinkers Bubble

Canvas, wood, thatch

Adobe

Straw bale

Retrofit, wood

Wood

Retrofit

Adobe

Adobe

Retrofit, brick, wood

Clay, straw, wood (cob and adobe)

Retrofit, brick

Retrofit, brick

Land collectively owned

Owner-occupied

Council/ rented

Owner-occupied

Owner-occupied

N/A

Land owned by founder

N/A

Owner-occupied

Land owned by founder

Housing Association/ rented

Land owned by Trust/ rented

Affordable ecological housing

Permaculture

Ecological housing

Ecological community housing

Residents and volunteers

Architect

Amazon Nails and North Kesteven District Council

Architect

Architect

Living without fossil fuels

Vernacular architecture

Affordable social housing

Affordable ecological housing

Affordable ecological housing

Owners and volunteers To re-use building materials

Owners and volunteers Seed saving, ecological practices, education

Owners and volunteers Ecological communal structure

Architect

Residents and volunteers

Hockerton Housing Project

Architect

NO TE S

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Governing Technology for Sustainability. London: Earthscan, Chapter 5. 10 Reid, L.A. and Houston, D. (2013) Low carbon housing: A ‘green’ wolf in sheep’s clothing? Housing Studies, 28, 1, 1–19. 11 Kraftl, P. (2006) Ecological architecture as performed art: Nant-yCwm Steiner School, Pembrokeshire, Social and Cultural Geography, 7, 6, 927–47. 12 Lees, L. (2001) Towards a critical geography of architecture: The case of an ersatz colosseum, Ecumene, 8, 1, 51–86, p.51. 13 Guy, S. (2010) Pragmatic ecologies: situating sustainable building, Architectural Science Review, 53, 21–8. 14 Barnett, J. (2007) The geopolitics of climate change, Geography Compass, 1, 6, 1361–75. 15 Rydin, Y. and Turcu, C. (2013) Key trends in policy for low-energy built environments: A 20-year review, Local Environment, 19, 5, 560–66. 16 Climate Change Risk Assessment (2012) Summary of the Key Findings from the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2012. Available at: http://randd.defra.gov. uk/Document.aspx?Document=Summary_ of_Key_Findings.pdf. 17 Head, L. and Gibson, C. (2012) Becoming differently modern: Geographic contributions to a generative climate politics. Progress in Human Geography, 36, 6, 699–714. 18 Anderson, W., White, V. and Finney, A. (2012) Coping with low incomes

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and cold homes, Energy Policy, 49, 40–52; Friedman, D. (2010) Social Impact of Poor Housing. Ecotec, London; Northridge, J., Ramirez, J.O.F., Stingone, J.A. and Claudio, L. (2010) The role of housing type and housing quality in urban children with asthma, Journal of Urban Health, 87, 2, 211–24. 19 Public Health England (2013) Cold Weather Plan for England 2013: Protecting Health and Reducing Harm from Cold Weather. October. Available at: https:// www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/252838/Cold_Weather_Plan_2013_ final.pdf. 20 National Housing Federation (2012) Home Truths 2012. Report available at: http://www.housing.org.uk/ publications/browse/home-truths-2012the-housing-market-in-england. 21 Dorling, D. (2014) All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster. Penguin, London; Griffith, M. (2011) We Must Fix It: Delivering Reform of the Building Sector to Meet the UK’s Housing and Economic Challenges. Institute for Public Policy Research. Available at: http://www. ippr.org/publications/we-must-fix-itdelivering-reform-of-the-building-sectorto-meet-the-uks-housing-and-economicchallenges. 22 Goodier, C. and Pan, W. (2010) The Future of UK Housebuilding, RICS Research Report, available at: http:// www.rics.org/Global/Downloads/ RICS_Research_-_The_Future_of_UK_ Housebuilding.pdf. 23 Hodkinson, S. (2011) Revenge of the repossessed. Red Pepper, June, p.18–21. 24 Maliebe, V. and Malys, N. (2009) High-quality housing – A key issue in delivering sustainable communities, Building and Environment, 44, 426–30. 25 Guy, S. (2010) Pragmatic ecologies: Situating sustainable building. Architectural Science Review, 53, 21–8.

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26 Broome, J. (2008) The Green Self-build Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. 27 NASBA (2008) Selfbuild as a Volume Housing Solution. National Self Build Association, available at: www. nasba.org. 28 Dol, K. and Haffner, M. (2010) Housing Statistics in the European Union 2010. The Hague: Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. 29 Griffith, M. (2011) We Must Fix It: Delivering Reform of the Building Sector to Meet the UK’s Housing and Economic Challenges. Institute for Public Policy Research. Available at: http://www. ippr.org/publications/we-must-fix-itdelivering-reform-of-the-building-sectorto-meet-the-uks-housing-and-economicchallenges; Barlow. J., Jackson, R. and Meikle, J. (2001) Homes to DIY For: The UK’s Self-build Market in the Twentyfirst Century, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Callcutt, J. (2007) Review of Housebuilding Delivery, London: DCLG; Office for Fair Trading (2008) Homebuilding in the UK: A Market Study, London. 30 Broer, S. and Titheridge, H. (2010) Eco-self-build housing communities: Are they feasible and can they lead to sustainable and low carbon lifestyles? Sustainability, 2, 2084–116. 31 Kindon, S., Pain, R. and Kesby, M. (2007) Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. Routledge, London. 32 Newton, J., Franklin, A., Middleton, J. and Marsden, T. (2012) (Re-)negotiating access: The politics of researching skills and knowledge for sustainable communities, Geoforum, 43, 585–94. 33 Jones, P. (2009) Putting architecture in its social place: A cultural political economy of architecture, Urban Studies, 46, 12, 2519–36.

276 | N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N 34 Hinchliffe, S. (1996) Helping the earth begins at home: The social construction of socio-environmental responsibilities, Global Environmental Change, 6, 1, 53–62. 35 Reid, L., Sutton, P. and Hunter, C. (2010) Theorizing the meso level: The household as a crucible of proenvironmental behavior, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 3, 309–27. 36 Saunders, P. and Williams, P. (1988) The constitution of the home: Towards a research agenda, Housing Studies 3, 2, 81–93, p.82. 37 Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. Routledge, London. 38 Farmer, J. (1999) Green Shift: Changing Attitudes in Architecture to the Natural World. Architectural Press, Oxford. 39 Hawkes, D. (2012) Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture 1600–2000. Routledge, London 40 Steele, J. (2005) Ecological Architecture: A Critical History. Thames and Hudson, London. 41 Seyfang, G. (2010) Community action for sustainable housing: Building a low-carbon future. Energy Policy, 38, 7624–33.

1 Eco 1 UK Green Building Council (2014) Waste. Available at: http://www.ukgbc. org/content/waste. 2 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2013) UK Construction: An Economic Analysis of the Sector. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/210060/bis-13-958uk-construction-an-economic-analysis-ofsector.pdf, p.28. 3 Bird, C. (2010) Local Sustainable Homes: How to Make Them Happen in Your Community. Transition Books, Totnes, Devon.

4 Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales, p.6. 5 Contrary to WRAP’s definition of resource efficiency in construction: WRAP (2014) Resource Efficient Built Environment. http://www.wrap.org. uk/resource-efficient-built-environment. 6 Schmitz-Günther, T. (1998) Living Spaces: Sustainable Building and Design. Könemann, Cologne, p.72. 7 Kibert, C.J (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. 3rd edn. 8 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 9 Lovell, H. (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. 10 Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p.175. 11 Met Office (2011) Impacts on Housing. Available at: http://www. metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/ impacts/housing. 12 WRAP (2014) Resource Efficient Built Environment. http://www.wrap.org. uk/resource-efficient-built-environment. 13 Stern, N. (2007) The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Available at: http://webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www. hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index. htm. 14 Hallegatte, S., Henriet, F. and Corfee-Morlot, J. (2011) The economics of climate change impacts and policy benefits at city scale: A conceptual framework, Climatic Change, 104, 1, 51–87. 15 HM Treasury (2015) ‘Fixing the Foundations’: Creating a more prosperous nation: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_

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data/file/443897/Productivity_Plan_print. pdf, p.46. 16 Walker, G. (2015) Scrapping zero-carbon homes is senseless policy vandalism, The Conversation: https:// theconversation.com/scrapping-zerocarbon-homes-is-senseless-policyvandalism-44723. 17 Climate Change Risk Assessment (2012) Summary of the Key Findings from the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2012. Available at: http://randd.defra.gov. uk/Document.aspx?Document=Summary_ of_Key_Findings.pdf. 18 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, pp.339–53. 19 Ibid. 20 WRAP (2014) Resource Efficient Built Environment: http://www.wrap.org. uk/resource-efficient-built-environment. 21 Bergman, N., Whitmarsh, L., Köhler, J., Haxeltine, A. and Schilperoord, M. (2007) Assessing transitions to sustainable housing and communities in the UK, in M. Horner, C. Hardcastle, A. Price and J. Beddington (eds) International Conference on Whole Life Urban Sustainability and Its Assessment. Bebbington, Glasgow. 22 Fuel poverty in Britain used to be defined as when more than 10 per cent of a person’s income is spent on fuel to heat a house. In 2013, the British government changed the definition such that fuel poverty occurs when a household ‘have required fuel costs that are above average (the national median level) and were they to spend that amount they would be left with a residual income below the official poverty line’: https://www.gov. uk/government/collections/fuel-povertystatistics. See Boardman, B. (2010) Fixing Fuel Poverty: Challenges and Solutions. Earthscan, Abingdon.

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23 Adapated from Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales; Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, and Broome, J. (2008) The Green Self-Build Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. 24 Land Registry (2014) House Price Index: http://www.landregistry.gov. uk/public/house-prices-and-sales. 25 Office for National Statistics (2013) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2013 Provisional Results: http:// www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annualsurvey-of-hours-and-earnings/2013provisional-results/stb-ashe-statisticalbulletin-2013.html. 26 Jefferys, P. (2013) At Any Cost? The Case for Stable House Prices in England, Shelter. Available at: http:// england.shelter.org.uk/professional_ resources/policy_and_research/policy_ library/policy_library_folder/briefing_at_ any_cost. 27 National Housing Federation (2012) Home Truths 2012. Report available at: http://www.housing.org.uk/ publications/browse/home-truths-2012the-housing-market-in-england. 28 Goodier, C. and Pan, W. (2010) The Future of UK Housebuilding, RICS Research Report, available at: http:// www.isurv.com/site/scripts/download_ info.aspx?downloadID=128. 29 Reynolds, L. (2005) Full House? How overcrowded housing affects families. Shelter, London: http:// england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0004/39532/Full_house_ overcrowding_effects.pdf. 30 Jenkins, D.P. (2010) The value of retrofitting carbon-savings measures into fuel poor social housing, Energy Policy, 38, 832–39. 31 Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building

278 | N OT E S TO 1 Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales; Ward, C. (2011) Alternatives in architecture, in Wilbert, C. and White, D.F. (eds) Autonomy, Solidarity and Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader. AK Press, Edinburgh. 32 Wines, J. (2000) Green Architecture. Taschen, Köln. 33 Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, p.24. 34 Ibid.; Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales; Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London; Broome, J. (2008) The Green Self-Build Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon; Pelsmakers, S. (2012) The Environmental Design Pocketbook. RIBA Publishing, London; Preimus, H. (2005) How to make housing sustainable? The Dutch experience, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 32, 5–19; McCarthy, D. (2009) Building a zero carbon country, Permaculture Magazine, 62, 18–21; Dunster, B., Simmons, C. and Gilbert, B. (2008) The ZED Book, Taylor and Francis, Abingdon. 35 Guy, S. and Osborn, S. (2001) Contesting environmental design: The hybrid green building, in Guy, S., Marvin, S. and Moss, T. (eds) Urban Infrastructure in Transition: Networks, Buildings, Plans. Earthscan Publications Ltd, London. 36 Broome, J. (2008) The Green SelfBuild Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.18. 37 Whole-life refers to all processes that form part of a buildings life cycle: sourcing raw materials, product manufacture, design, construction, operation, maintenance and refurbishment and at the end of a building’s life. 38 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London, p.336.

39 Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales, p.6, emphasis added. 40 Wines, J. (2000) Green Architecture. Taschen, Köln, p.66. 41 Ibid., p.68. 42 Lombardi, D.R., Porter, L., Barber, A. and Rogers, C.D.F. (2011) Conceptualising sustainability in UK urban regeneration a discursive formation. Urban Studies, 48, 2, 273–96. 43 Borer, P. and Harris, C. (1998) The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials. CAT Publications, Machynlleth, Wales. 44 Schmitz-Günther, T. (1998) Living Spaces: Sustainable Building and Design. Könemann, Cologne, p.72. 45 Adapted from ibid. 46 Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, p.48. 47 Yeang, K. and Woo, L. (2010) Dictionary of Ecodesign. Routledge, London. 48 Kachadorian, J (2006) The Passive Solar House: The Complete Guide to Heating and Cooling Your Home: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home. Chelsea Green Publishing Co; Cotterell, J. and Dadeby, A. (2012) The Passivhaus Handbook: A Practical Guide to Constructing and Retrofitting Buildings for Ultra-low Energy performance. Green Books, Totnes; Yakubu, G.S. (1996) The reality of living in a passive solar house: A user-experience study. Renewable Energy, 8, 4, 177–81. 49 Inspired by Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London; Godfrey Cook, M. (2011) The Zero-Carbon House. The Crowood Press, Wiltshire; van Lengen, J. (2008) The Barefoot Architect: A Handbook for Green Building. Shelter Publications, Bolinas, California; and Yeang, K. and Woo, L. (2010) Dictionary of Ecodesign. Routledge, London.

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5 Johnson, M. (1993) Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 6 Hawkes, D. (2012) Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture 1600–2000. Routledge, London 7 Douglas, I. (2013) Cities: An Environmental History. I.B.Tauris, London. 8 Smith, A. (2007) Governance lessons from green niches: The case of eco-housing, in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. London, UK: Earthscan, p.105. 9 Horning, J. (2009) Simple Shelters: Tents, Tipis, Yurts, Domes and Other Ancient Homes. Walker and Company, New York. 10 May, J. (2010) Handmade Houses and Other Buildings: The World of Vernacular Architecture. Thames and Hudson, London. 11 Farmer, J. (1999) Green Shift: Changing Attitudes in Architecture to the Natural World. Architectural Press, Oxford. 12 Oliver, P. (2003) Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. Phaidon Press, London, p.14. 13 Wiliam, E. (1988) Home-made Homes: Dwellings of the Rural Poor in Wales. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, p.8. 14 Dawson, J. (2006) Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, Devon; Kazimee, B.A. (2008) Learning from vernacular architecture: sustainability and cultural conformity, WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment: Ecoarchitecture II, 113, pp.3–13. 15 Oliver, P. (2003) Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. Phaidon Press, London, p.12. 16 Cidell, J. (2009) Building green: The emerging geography of LEEDcertified buildings and professionals,

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architects in the early 20th century. Report for English Heritage: www.englishheritage.org.uk/content/imported-docs/fg/women-architects-early-20th-century. pdf. 115 Korkmaz, S. and Erten, D. (2009) A review of green building movement timelines in developed and developing countries to build an international adoption framework. Fifth International Conference on Construction in the 21st Century (CITC-V) ‘Collaboration and Integration in Engineering, Management and Technology’ May 20–22, 2009, Istanbul, Turkey: http://www.cedbik.org/ images/kaynak/CITC-V-FinalPaper1.pdf. 116 Wiliam, E. (1988) Home-made Homes: Dwellings of the Rural Poor in Wales. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. p.8. 117 Johnson, M. (1993) Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 118 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 119 Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p.118. 120 Lovell, H. (2004) Framing sustainable housing as a solution to climate change, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 6, 1, 35–55. 121 Fairlie, S. (1996) Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside. Jon Carpenter, Oxfordshire. 122 Pickerill, J. and Maxey, L. (2009) Geographies of sustainability: Low impact developments and radical spaces of innovation, Geography Compass, 3, 4, 1515–39. 123 Wrench, T. (2001) Building a Low-Impact Roundhouse. Permanent Publications, East Meon, Hampshire. 124 Pickerill, J. and Maxey, L. (2007) The Lammas Low Impact Housing

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4 Place 1 Vasudevan, A. (2011) Dramaturgies of dissent: The spatial politics of squatting in Berlin, 1968–, Social and Cultural Geography, 12, 3, 283–303. 2 Easthope, H. (2004) A place called home, Housing, Theory and Society, 21, 128–38; McCloud, K. (2011) Kevin McCloud’s Principles of Homes: Making a Place to Live. Collins, London. 3 Malpas, J. (2014) Thinking Topographically: Place, Space and Geography: http://jeffmalpas. com/downloadable-essays. 4 Hawkes, D. (2012) Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture 1600–2000. Routledge, London. 5 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2009) The regulation of design in global architecture firms: Embedding and emplacing buildings, Urban Studies, 46, 12, 2537–54. 6 Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 7 Malpas, J. (2012) Putting space in place: Philosophical topography and relational geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 226–42. 8 Bambach, C. (2003) Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. 9 Coles, B. (2014) Making the market place: A topography of Borough Market, London, Cultural Geographies, 21, 3, 515–23, p.516. 10 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Empirical issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 107–116, p.107. 11 Kraftl, P. (2010) Geographies of architecture: The multiple lives of

buildings, Geography Compass, 4, 402–15, p.403. 12 Ibid. 13 Jacobs, J. (1961/1993) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, London. 14 Lepofsky, J. and Fraser, J.C. (2003) Building community citizens: Claiming the right to place-making in the city, Urban Studies, 40, 1, 127–42. 15 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographical problematic: Moral issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift, 55, 3, 117–25, p.117. 16 Ibid. 17 Malpas, J. (2014) Thinking Topographically: Place, Space and Geography: http://jeffmalpas.com/ downloadable-essays/, p.4, original emphasis. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Empirical issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 107–16. 21 Larsen, S.C. and Johnson, J.T. (2012) Toward an open sense of place: Phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 3, 632–46, p.639. 22 Malpas goes on to argue that place is not infinitely spatial; rather places exist within regions where places are understood as related to one another. As a result the relationality of place is contingent upon regionality. 23 Tuan, Y. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, New York. 24 Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 25 Building on Tuan, Y. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, New York; Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short

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Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford; Malpas, J.E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Empirical issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 107–16; Manzo, L.C. (2003) Beyond house and haven: Toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 47–61. 26 Larsen, S.C. and Johnson, J.T. (2012) Toward an open sense of place: Phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 3, 632–46. 27 Malpas, J. (2014) Thinking Topographically: Place, Space and Geography: http://jeffmalpas. com/downloadable-essays/. 28 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Moral issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 117–25, p.124, original emphasis. 29 Rose, D. (2004) Report from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, p.168. 30 Power, E.R. (2009) Domestic temporalities: Nature times in the houseas-home, Geoforum, 40, 6, 1024–32. 31 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Moral issues. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 117–25. 32 Larsen, S.C. and Johnson, J.T. (2012) Toward an open sense of place: Phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 3, 632–46. 33 Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: Moral issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 117–25.

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34 Ibid., p.122. 35 Coles, B. (2014) Making the market place: A topography of Borough Market, London, Cultural Geographies, 21, 3, 515–23. 36 Kazimee, B.A. (2008) Learning from vernacular architecture: Sustainability and cultural conformity, WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 113, 3–13. 37 Roaf, S. Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London. 38 In this book, case studies are drawn from tropical rainy climate (A) houses in Thailand, dry climate (B) houses in the central US, and warm temperate rainy climate (C) houses in Britain, Spain and Argentina. 39 Jacobs, J. (2006) A geography of big things, Cultural Geographies, 13, 1–27. 40 Yeang, K. and Woo, L. (2010) Dictionary of Eco-Design. Routledge, London, p.35. 41 In a warm temperate rainy climate, a house might be designed to restrict solar gain in summer (when there is a possibility of a house overheating), while maximising it in winter. This could be achieved using a roof overhang that shaded the house in summer, but in winter when the sun was lower would allow sun to flood the house. 42 Vannini, P and Taggart, J (2013) Making sense of domestic warmth: Affect, involvement, and thermoception in offgrid homes, Body and Society, 1–24. 43 Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, p.107. 44 Ibid., p.106. 45 Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p.34. 46 Day, C (1990) Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. Thorsons, London. 47 Day, C. (2002) Spirit and Place:

296 | N OT E S TO 4 Healing our Environment, Healing Environment. Elsevier, London, p.112. 48 Ibid., p.117. 49 This is in contrast to the findings of Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Do-ityourself or do-it-with? The regenerative life skills of off-grid home builders, Cultural Geographies, 21, 2, 267–85, who suggest that off-grid eco-builders become entangled with place and its histories and resources. 50 Larsen, S.C. (2008) Place making, grassroots organizing, and rural protest: A case study of Anahim Lake, British Columbia, Journal of Rural Studies, 24, 172–81. 51 Martin, D.G. (2003) ‘Placeframing’ as place-making: Constituting a neighbourhood for organizing and activism, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93, 3, 730–50; Pierce, J., Martin, D.G. and Murphy, J.T. (2011) Relational place-making: The networked politics of place, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 1, 54–70. 52 Jones, P. and Evans, J. (2012) Rescue geography: Place making, affect and regeneration, Urban Studies, 49, 11, 2315– 30; Evans, J.P. (2011) Resilience, ecology and adaptation in the experimental city, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 223–37. 53 Brown-Saracino, J. (2009) A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. 54 Manzo, L.C. (2003) Beyond house and haven: Toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 47–61. 55 Smith, A. (2007) Governance lessons from green niches: The case of eco-housing, in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. London, Earthscan, p.96.

56 Kraftl, P. (2009) Living in an artwork: The extraordinary geographies of everyday life at the HundertwasserHaus, Vienna, Cultural Geographies, 16, 111–34. 57 Halfacree, K. (2006) From dropping out to leading on? British counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality. Progress in Human Geography, 30, 3, 309–36, p.313. 58 Fairlie, S. (1996) Low Impact Development. Jon Carpenter, Oxfordshire. 59 Short, J.R. (1991) Imagined Country: Environment, Culture, and Society. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York; Cosgrove, D. (2008) Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. I.B. Taurus, London. 60 Halfacree, K. (2006) From dropping out to leading on? British counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality. Progress in Human Geography, 30, 3, 309–36. 61 Halfcaree, K. (2007) Trial by space for a ‘radical rural’: Introducing alternative localities, representations and lives, Journal of Rural Studies, 23, 125–41. 62 Halfacree, K. (2003) Landscapes of rurality: Rural others/other rurals, in Robertson, I. and Richards, P. (eds) Studying Cultural Landscapes. Arnold, London, pp.141–69. 63 Day, C. (2002) Spirit and Place: Healing Our Environment, Healing Environment. Elsevier, London. 64 Ellis, C. (2002) The new Urbanism: Critiques and rebuttals, Journal of Urban Design, 7, 3, 261–91. 65 Kraftl, P. (2014) Liveability and urban architectures: Mol(ecul)ar biopower and the ‘becoming lively’ of sustainable communities, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 2, 274–92. 66 Katz, P. (1993) The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. McGraw-Hill Professional, New York; Talen, E. (2005) New Urbanism and

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American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures. Routledge, London. 67 Talen, E. (1999) Sense of community and neighbourhood form: An assessment of the social doctrine of new Urbanism, Urban Studies, 36, 8, 1361–79; Power, A. and Houghton, J. (2007) Jigsaw Cities: Big Places, Small Spaces. Policy Press, Bristol. 68 Grant, J. and Perrott, K. (2009) Producing diversity in a new urbanism community, Town Planning Review, 80, 3, 267–89; Cabrera, J.F. and Najarian, J.C. (2013) Can new Urbanism create diverse communities? Journal of Planning Education and Research, 33, 4, 427–41; for an argument that diversity does sometimes occur in new urbanist developments, see Trudeau, D. and Mallor, P. (2011) Suburbs in disguise? Examining the geographies of the new Urbanism, Urban Geography, 32, 3, 424–47. 69 Jarvis, H. and Bonnett, A. (2013) Progressive nostalgia in novel living arrangements: A counterpoint to neotraditional new Urbanism? Urban Studies, 50, 1, 2349–70. 70 Smith, N. (2002) New globalism, new Urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy, Antipode, 34, 3, 427–50; MacLeod, G. (2013) New Urbanism/ smart growth in the Scottish Highlands: Mobile policies and post-politics in local development planning, Urban Studies, 50, 11, 2196–221. 71 Lund, H. (2003) Testing the claims of new Urbanism: Local access, pedestrian travel, and neighboring behaviors, Journal of the American Planning Association, 69, 4, 414–29; Youngentob, K. and Hostetler, M. (2005) Is a new urban development model building greener communities? Environment and Behavior, 37, 6, 731–59. 72 Cole, R.J. (2012) Transitioning from green to regenerative design, Building Research and Information, 40, 1, 39–53.

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298 | N OT E S TO 4 85 Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell, Oxford. 86 Purcell, M. and Brown, J.C. (2005) Against the local trap: Scale and the study of environment and development, Progress in Development Studies, 5, 279–97; Winter, M. (2003) Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensive localism, Journal of Rural Studies, 19, 23–32. 87 Moore, A. (2008) Rethinking scale as a geographical category: From analysis to practice, Progress in Human Geography, 32, 203–25, p.206. 88 Featherstone, D., Ince, A., Mackinnon, D., Strauss, K. and Cumbers, A. (2012) Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 177–82. 89 Mason, K. and Whitehead, M. (2012) Transition Urbanism and the contested politics of ethical place making, Antipode, 44, 2, 493–519. 90 Featherstone, D., Ince, A., Mackinnon, D., Strauss, K. and Cumbers, A. (2012) Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 177–82, p.180. 91 Whitehead, M (2007) Spaces of Sustainability: Geographical Perspectives on the Sustainable Society. Routledge, London. 92 Ibid. 93 Larsen, S.C. and Johnson, J.T. (2012) Toward an open sense of place: Phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 3, 632–46, p.642. 94 Sayre, N.F. (2005) Ecological and geographical scale: Parallels and potential for integration, Progress in Human Geography, 29, 3, 276–90, p.276. 95 Maassen, A. (2012) Heterogeneity of lock-in and the role of strategic technological interventions in urban

infrastructural transformations, European Planning Studies, 20, 3, 441–60; Monahan, J. (2013) Housing and Carbon Reduction: Can Mainstream ‘Eco-housing’ Deliver on Its Low Carbon Promises? PhD thesis, University of East Anglia: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/42363/1/ 2013MonahanJPhD.pdf; Jones, L. (2013) Living-with others, living-with an ‘ecohome’: From frustration to transformation in an eco-development, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 16, 2, 221–40. 96 Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p.35. 97 Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford Press, New York; Davis, M (2006) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso Books, London, 2nd edn. 98 Jacobs, J. (1993) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, New York; Mitchell, D. (1995) The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public, and democracy, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85, 1, 108–33; Macleod, G. and Johnstone, C. (2012) Stretching urban renaissance: Privatizing space, civilizing place, summoning ‘community’, Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36, 1–28. 99 The City Repair Project (2006) Placemaking Guidebook: Creative Community Building in the Public Right of Way, City Repair Project, Portland, Oregon, 2nd edn, p.17. 100 Courtesy of artist Andy Singer (www.andysinger.com). 101 City Repair Project: http://cityrepair.org/about/how-to/ placemaking/. 102 The City Repair Project (2006) Placemaking Guidebook: Creative Community Building in the Public Right of Way. City Repair Project, Portland, Oregon, 2nd edn.

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103 Mark Lakeman interview, City Repair Project, Portland, Oregon, USA, August 2010. 104 Ibid. 105 Fairlie, S. (1996). Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside. Jon Carpenter, Oxford. 106 Pickerill, J. and Maxey, L. (eds). (2009) Low Impact Development: http:// lowimpactdevelopment.wordpress.com. 107 Pickerill, J. and Maxey, L. (2009) Geographies of sustainability: Low impact developments and radical spaces of innovation, Geography Compass, 3, 4, 1515–39. 108 Wimbush, P. (2012) The Birth of an Ecovillage: Adventures in an Alternative World. FeedARead Publishing, London. 109 Halfacree, J. (2003) A place for ‘nature’?: New radicalism’s rural contribution, Innovations in Rural Areas, Rural Geography Research Group/ Commission de Géographie Rurale Innovations on Rural Areas. CERAMAC 22, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, pp.51–65. 110 Halfacree, K. (2006) From dropping out to leading on? British counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality, Progress in Human Geography, 30, 3, 309–36. 111 Jones, K. (2014) Mainstreaming the alternative: The Lammas Ecovillage and the governance of sustainable development in Wales, unpublished PhD, Department of Geography and Earth Science, University of Aberystwyth, Wales. 112 Paul Wimbush interview, Lammas Low Impact Development, August 2006. 113 The Glandwr primary school was threatened with closure due to low enrolment and many in the village supported the need for more families with young children to move to the area. Unfortunately, the school closed before Lammas got planning permission.

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114 I co-organised and participated in public consultation events during the early stages of Lammas when they were considering the Pont y Gafel farm site, and subsequently conducted fieldwork on local businesses in the area to produce a report in support of the Lammas planning application. 115 Devine-Wright, P. (2005) Beyond NIMBYism: Towards an integrated framework for understanding public perceptions of wind energy, Wind Energy, 8: 125–39. 116 Paul Wimbush interview, Lammas Low Impact Development, August 2006. 117 Wolsink, M. (2000) Wind power and the NIMBY-myth: Institutional capacity and the limited significance of public support, Renewable Energy, 21, 1, 49–64. 118 Devine-Wright, P. (2011) Public engagement with large-scale renewable energy technologies: Breaking the cycle of NIMBYism, WIREs Climate Change, 2: 19–26; Van der Horst, D. (2007) NIMBY or not? Exploring the relevance of location and the politics of voiced opinions in renewable energy siting controversies, Energy Policy, 35, 5, 2705–14. 119 Barnett, J., Burningham, K., Walker, G. and Cass, N. (2012) Imagined publics and engagement around renewable energy technologies in the UK, Public Understanding of Science, 21, 1, 36–50. 120 Paul Wimbush interview, Lammas Low Impact Development, August 2006. 121 Ibid. 122 Carlsson, C. and Manning, F. (2010) Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus? Antipode, 42, 4, 924–53. 123 Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Voluntary simplicity, involuntary complexities, and the pull of remove: The radical ruralities of off-grid lifestyles, Environment and Planning A, 45, 295–311.

300 | N OT E S TO 4 124 Ibid., p.308, original emphasis. 125 Featherstone, D., Ince, A., Mackinnon, D., Strauss, K. and Cumbers, A. (2012) Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 177–82, p.180. 126 Kraftl, P. (2010) Geographies of architecture: The multiple lives of buildings, Geography Compass, 4, 402–15, p.404. 127 Maher, S. and McIntosh, J. (2007) In defence of others: Culture and context in sustainable housing typology, Protibesh, 11, 2, 17–25, p.24. 128 Johnson, J.T. and Murton, B. (2007) Re/placing native science: Indigenous voices in contemporary constructions of nature, Geographical Research, 45, 2, 121–9, p.126. 129 Longhurst, N. (2013) The emergence of an alternative milieu: Conceptualising the nature of alternative places, Environment and Planning A, 45, 2100–19.

5 Affordability 1 Dorling, D. (2014) All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster. Allen Lane, London, p.164. 2 Wilcox, S. (2006) The Geography of Affordable and Unaffordable Housing: And the Ability of Younger Working Households to Become Home Owners. Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, York. 3 Mulliner, E., Smallbone, K. and Maliene, V. (2013) An assessment of sustainable housing affordability using a multiple criteria decision making method, Omega: Management Science and Environmental Issues, 41, 2, 270–79. 4 Stone, E. (2006) What is housing affordability? The case for the residual income approach, Housing Policy Debate, 17, 1, 151–81. 5 Bramley, G. (2012) Affordability, poverty and housing need: Triangulating measures and standards, Journal of

Housing and the Built Environment, 27, 2, 133–51. 6 Gan, Q. and Hill, R.J. (2009) Measuring housing affordability: Looking beyond the median, Journal of Housing Economics, 18, 2, 115–25. 7 Ibid. 8 Whitehead, C. and Williams, P. (2011) Causes and consequences? Exploring the shape and direction of the housing system in the UK post the financial crisis, Housing Studies, 26, 7–8, 1157–69. 9 Meen, G. (2011) A long-run model of housing affordability, Housing Studies, 26, 7–8, 1081–103. 10 Department for Communities and Local Government (2012) Definitions of General Housing Terms: https://www.gov. uk/definitions-of-general-housing-terms. 11 Gurran, N. and Whitehead, C. (2011) Planning and affordable housing in Australia and the UK: A comparative perspective, Housing Studies, 26, 7–8, 1193–214. 12 Department for Communities and Local Government (2012) National Planning Policy Framework: https:// www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/6077/2116950.pdf, p.50. 13 Harloe, M. (1995) The People’s Home? Social Rented Housing in Europe and America.Wiley-Blackwell, London 14 Diacon, D., Pattison, B., Strutt, J. and Vine, J. (2011) More Homes and Better Places: Solutions to Address the Scale of Housing Need. Building and Social Housing Foundation, Coalville, UK. 15 Washington State Labor Council (AFL-CIO) (2009). Affordable Housing and Homelessness: http://www.wslc.org/ legis/09-wslc-pospap.pdf. 16 Mitchell, M. and Bevan, A. (1992) Culture, Cash and Housing: Community and Tradition in Low-income Building. VSO/IT Publications, London; Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. Verso, London.

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17 Putnam, T. (1999) ‘Postmodern’ home life, in Cieraad, I (ed.) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, pp.144–52. 18 Fairlie, S. (1996) Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside. Jon Carpenter, Oxfordshire. 19 Data sources: Land price is average valuation of residential building land with outline planning permission England, June 2010: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/…/141389.xls; Materials and labour from Built It (2012) What does it cost to build a new home? Build It, September, 104–7; Professional fees are from Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) calculated as an average of 10 per cent. 20 NaSBA (2008) Selfbuild as a Volume Housing Solution, National Self Build Association. The IPPR has similar suggestions in enabling more self-build as a solution to housing shortage: Griffith, M. (2011) We Must Fix It: Delivering Reform of the Building Sector to Meet the UK’s Housing and Economic Challenges. Institute for Public Policy Research: http://www.ippr.org/publications/wemust-fix-it-delivering-reform-of-thebuilding-sector-to-meet-the-uks-housingand-economic-challenges. 21 Built It (2012) What does it cost to build a new home? Build It, September, 104–7. 22 Ibid. 23 Evans, I., Smith, M.G. and Smiley, L. (2002) The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. 24 The Land Is Ours Manifesto, published in The Land (2009), 7, Summer. 25 Heartfield, J. (2006) Let’s Build: Why We Need Five Million Homes in the Next 10 Years. Audacity, London.

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26 Madigan, R. and Munro, M. (1991) Gender, house and ‘home’: Social meanings and domestic architecture in Britain, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 8, 2, 116–32, p.128. 27 Dorling, D. (2014) All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster. Allen Lane, London. 28 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London, p.186. 29 Ibid. 30 Burnham, R. (1998) Housing Ourselves: Creating Affordable Sustainable Shelter. McGraw-Hill, New York. 31 Dale, S. and Saville, J. (2011) The Compatibility of Building Regulations with Projects under New Low Impact Development and One Planet Development Planning Policies: Critical and Urgent Problems and the Need for a Workable Solution: http://www.simondale.net/ house/Building_Regulations_and_LID. pdf. 32 Bradshaw, W., Connelly, E.F., Fraser Cook, M., Goldstein, J. and Pauly, J. (2005) The Costs and Benefits of Green Affordable Housing, New Ecology and the Green CDCs Initiative, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 33 Brown, M.A. and Southworth, F. (2008) Mitigating climate change through green buildings and smart growth, Environment and Planning A, 40, 653–75. 34 Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change. Palgrave, Macmillan. 35 Adapted from Herb, T. (2010) The 2010 United States Edition of No Building Codes: A Guide to States with No Building Codes: www.nobuildingcodes.com/. 36 Land for sale in the Baca Grande, Crestone, Colorado: http://www. crestonelot.com. 37 Land price is average valuation of residential building land with outline planning permission England, June

302 | N OT E S TO 5 2010: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/…/141389.xls. 38 Busse, P. (2003) Staying put— again: Dignity Village holds out and on to their homes, Portland Mercury, 9 October: http://www.portlandmercury. com/portland/Content?oid=29946&cate gory=22101. 39 Sabatier, J (2006). Laura Brown: Life in Dignity Village through the eyes of one longtime resident. Willamette Week, 11 January, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Dignity_Village#cite_note-Willamette_ Week-8. 40 Ibid. 41 Anon. (2003) Dignity Village builds straw bale housing prototype, New Connexion, May/June: http:// newconnexion.net/articles/index. cfm/2003/05/strawbale.html. 42 Sabatier, J. (2006) Laura Brown: Life in Dignity Village through the eyes of one longtime resident, Willamette Week, 11 January: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Dignity_Village#cite_note-Willamette_ Week-8. 43 Slovic, B. (2012) Portland grants three-year contract to Dignity Village camp, The Oregonian, November 28: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/ index.ssf/2012/11/portland_grants_threeyear_con.html. 44 Campbell, D. (2003) America’s homeless become new small-town pioneers, The Guardian, 23 October: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2003/oct/24/usa.duncancampbell. 45 Fieldwork observations, August 2010. 46 Anon. (2003) Dignity Village builds straw bale housing prototype, New Connexion, May/June: http:// newconnexion.net/articles/index. cfm/2003/05/strawbale.html. 47 Dignity Village resident Laura Brown, quoted in Sabatier, J. (2006). Laura Brown: Life in Dignity Village through the eyes of one longtime resident, Willamette

Week, 11 January: http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Dignity_Village#cite_noteWillamette_Week-8. 48 Jack Tafari, quoted in Anon. (2003) Dignity Village builds straw bale housing prototype, New Connexion, May/June; http://newconnexion.net/articles/index. cfm/2003/05/strawbale.html. 49 Busse, P. (2003) Staying put— again: Dignity Village holds out and on to their homes, Portland Mercury, 9 October: http://www.portlandmercury. com/portland/Content?oid=29946&cate gory=22101. 50 Chatterton, P. (2015) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Routledge, Abingdon. 51 Courtesy of Craig White, White Design Associates. 52 Chatterton, P. (2013) Towards an agenda for post-carbon cities: Lessons from LILAC, the UK’s first ecological, affordable, cohousing community, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 37, 5, 1654–74, p.1662. 53 Rogers, D. (2009) New Foundations: Unlocking the Potential for Affordable Homes. Cooperative Party, London. 54 For more details, see Affordable: A green housing revolution for all, in Chatterton, P. (2015) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Routledge, Abingdon. 55 Chatterton, P. (2013) Towards an agenda for post-carbon cities: Lessons from LILAC, the UK’s first ecological, affordable, cohousing community, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 37, 5, 1654–74, p.1664. 56 Ibid. 57 Courtesy of Paul Chatterton, University of Leeds and the publishers John Wiley and Sons. 58 Chatterton, P. (2013) Towards an agenda for post-carbon cities: Lessons

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from LILAC, the UK’s first ecological, affordable, cohousing community, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 37, 5, 1654–74, p.1664. 59 Chatterton, P. (2015) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Routledge, Abingdon. 60 Kibert, C. (2008) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, London. 61 Arman, M., Zuo, J., Wilson, L., Zillante, G. and Pullen, S. (2009) Challenges of responding to sustainability with implications for affordable housing, Ecological Economics, 68, 12, 3034–41. 62 Pereira, T. (2012) The transition to a sustainable society: A new social contract, Environment, Development Sustainability, 14, 273–81, p.276. 63 Smith, A. (2007) Governance lessons from green niches: The case of eco-housing, in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. Earthscan, London, p.98. 64 Broome, J. (2008) The Green SelfBuild Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. 65 Parvin, A., Saxby, D., Cerulli, C. and Schneider, T. (2011) A Right to Build: The Next Mass-housebuilding Industry. University of Sheffield School of Architecture and 00:: http://issuu. com/alastairparvin/docs/2011_07_06_ arighttobuild. 66 Rogers, D. (2009) New Foundations: Unlocking the Potential for Affordable Homes. Cooperative Party, London. 67 Hannis, M. (2011) Land-use planning and the transitivity of development, International Journal of Green Economics, 5, 3, p.57 68 Dale, S. and Saville, J. (2011) The Compatibility of Building Regulations with Projects under New Low Impact Development and One Planet Development Planning Policies: Critical and Urgent

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Problems and the Need for a Workable Solution: http://www.simondale.net/ house/Building_Regulations_and_LID. pdf. 69 Fischer, J. and Guy, S. (2009) Reinterpreting regulations: Architects as intermediaries for low-carbon buildings, Urban Studies, 46, 12, 2577–94; May, P.J. and Koski, C. (2007) State environmental policies: Analyzing green building mandates, Review of Policy Research, 24, 1, 49–65. 70 Smith, A. (2007) Governance lessons from green niches: The case of eco-housing, in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. Earthscan, London, pp.98 and 100 71 Anon. (2014) Self-build an Eco-home: Self-build Your Own Affordable Eco home in Plymouth. Plymouth City Council: http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/ho usingdeliveryselfbuild?newsid%3D332109 72 Wallbaum, H., Ostermeyer, Y., Salzer, C. and Zea Escamilla, E. (2012) Indicator based sustainability assessment tool for affordable housing construction technologies, Journal of Ecological Indicators, 18, 353–64. 73 Morrissey, J., Moore, T. and Horne, R.E. (2011) Affordable passive solar design in a temperate climate: An experiment in residential building orientation, Renewable Energy, 36, 568–77. 74 Lovell, H. and Smith, S.J. (2010) Agencement in housing markets: The case of the UK construction industry, Geoforum, 41, 457–68. 75 Evans, I., Smith, M.G. and Smiley, L. (2002) The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. 76 Lovell, H. (2005) Supply and demand for low energy housing in the UK: Insights from a science and technology studies approach, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 815–29.

304 | N OT E S TO 5 77 Osborne, H. (2014) Should lowincome families move so bankers can have nice homes? The Guardian, 1 March, p.41. 78 Healy, J.D. (2003) Housing conditions, energy efficiency, affordability and satisfaction with housing: A panEuropean analysis, Housing Studies, 18, 3, 409–24. 79 Aked, J., Michaelson, J. and Steuer, N. (2010) Good Foundations: Towards a Low Carbon, High Well-being Built Environment. New Economics Foundation, London: http://www.neweconomics. org/publications/entry/good-foundations.

6 Comfort 1 Dobson, A. (2007) Green Political Thought, 4th edn. Routledge, London. 2 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 3 Rybczynski, W. (1988) Homes: A Short History of an Idea. Viking Books, New York. 4 Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Domestic lighting and the off-grid quest for visual comfort, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31, 6, 1076–90. 5 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 6 Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes. Sage, London. 7 Seyfang, G., and Smith, A. (2007). Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda, Environmental Politics 16, 4, 584–603. 8 Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Onerous consumption: The alternative hedonism of off-grid domestic water use. Journal of Consumer Culture, DOI: 10.1177/1469540513509642.

9 Gibson-Graham J.K. (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 10 Lovell, H. (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32; Rogers, H. (2010) Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution. Verso, London; Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. 11 Rybczynski, W. (1988) Homes: A Short History of an Idea. Viking Books, New York; Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. Routledge, London. 12 McCloud, K. (2010) Principles of Home: Making a Place to Live. Collins, London, p.119. 13 Rybczynski, W. (1988) Homes: A Short History of an Idea. Viking Books, New York, p.232. 14 Bissell, D. (2008) Comfortable bodies: Sedentary affects, Environment and Planning A, 40, 1697–712. 15 Crowley, J.E. (1999) The sensibility of comfort, The American Historical Review, 104, 3, 749–82. 16 Ibid., p.760. 17 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford, p.24. 18 Cranz, G. (1998) The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design. W.W. Norton, New York, p.113. 19 Brager, G.S. and de Dear, R.J. (2003) Historical and cultural influences on comfort expectations, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.177–201.

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20 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 21 Public Health England (2013) Cold Weather Plan for England 2013: Protecting Health and Reducing Harm from Cold Weather. October: https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/252838/Cold_ Weather_Plan_2013_final.pdf. 22 Humphreys, M. (1978) Field studies of thermal comfort compared and applied, Journal of the Institute of Heat and Ventilation Engineering, 44, 5–27. 23 Ibid.; Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London. 24 Nicol, F., Humphreys, M. and Roaf, S. (2012) Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice. Routledge, London. 25 Cole, R.J., Robinson, J., Brown, Z. and O’Shea, M. (2008) Re-contextualizing the notion of comfort, Building Research and Information, 36, 4, 323–36; Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Domestic lighting and the off-grid quest for visual comfort, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31, 6, 1076–90. 26 Brown, Z. and Cole, R.J. (2009) Influence of occupants’ knowledge on comfort expectations and behaviour, Building Research and Information, 37, 3, 227–45. 27 Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, p.319. 28 Matzarakis, A., Rutz, F. and Mayer, H. (2010) Modelling radiation fluxes in simple and complex environments: Basics of the RayMan model, International Journal of Biometeorology, 54, 131–9. 29 Fordham, M. (2000) Natural ventilation, Renewable Energy, 19, 1–2, 17–37. 30 Cooper, I. (1982) Comfort theory and practice: Barriers to the conservation of energy by building occupants, Applied

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Energy, 11, 4, 243–88; Peeters, L., de Dear, R., Hensen, J. and D’haeseleer, W. (2009) Thermal comfort in residential buildings: Comfort values and scales for building energy simulation, Applied Energy, 86, 5, 772–80; Healy, J.D. and Clinch, J.P. (2002) Fuel poverty, thermal comfort and occupancy: Results of a national household-survey in Ireland, Applied Energy, 73, 3–4, 329–43; Wong, N.H., Feriadi, H., Lim, P.Y., Tham, K.W., Sekhar, C. and Cheong, K.W. (2002) Thermal comfort evaluation of naturally ventilated public housing in Singapore, Building and Environment, 37, 12, 1267–77. 31 Longhurst, R. (2001) Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. Routledge, London; Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2014) Making sense of domestic warmth: Affect, involvement, and thermoception in off-grid homes, Body and Society, 20, 1, 61–84. 32 Bissell, D. (2008) Comfortable bodies: Sedentary affects, Environment and Planning A, 40, 1697–712, p.1703. 33 Ana, quoted by Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Berg, Oxford, p.91. 34 Public Health England (2013) Cold Weather Plan for England 2013: Protecting Health and Reducing Harm from Cold Weather. October: https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/252838/Cold_ Weather_Plan_2013_final.pdf. 35 Day, C. (1990) Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. Thorsons, London, p.49. 36 Rybczynski, W. (1988) Homes: A Short History of an Idea. Viking Books, New York. 37 Dowling, R. and Power, E. (2011) Beyond McMansions and green homes: Thinking household sustainability through materialities of homeyness, in Lane, R. and Gorman-Murray, A. (eds) Material Geographies of Household Sustainability. Ashgate, Farnham, p.83.

306 | N OT E S TO 6 38 Hardyment, C. (1992) Home Comfort: A History of Domestic Arrangements in Association with the National Trust. Viking, London. 39 See also Bushman, R.L. and Bushman, C.L. (1988) The early history of cleanliness in America, Journal of American History, 74, 4, 1213–38; Adams, A. (1992) Waste not, want not: An exhibition review, Winterthur Portfolio, 27, 1, 75–82. 40 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 41 Shove, E. (2009) How People Use and ‘Misuse’ Buildings. ESRC Seminar Series: Mapping the public policy landscape. 42 Worsley, L. (2011) If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. Faber and Faber, London. 43 Hardyment, C. (1992) Home Comfort: A History of Domestic Arrangements in Association with the National Trust. Viking, London. 44 Worsley, L. (2011) If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. Faber and Faber, London. 45 Busch, A. (1999) Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 46 Ibid., p.142. 47 Salomon, S. (2006) Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats and Energy Efficient Possibilities. The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, p.28. 48 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford, p.108. 49 Ibid., p.105. 50 Hand, M., Shove, E. and Southerton, D. (2005) Explaining showering: A discussion of the material, conventional, and temporal dimensions of practice, Sociological Research Online, 10, 4; http://www.socresonline.org.

uk/10/2/hand.html; Shove, E., Chappells, H. and Lutzenhiser, L. (eds) (2009) Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society. Routledge, London; Shove, E. (2009) How People Use and ‘Misuse’ Buildings. ESRC Seminar Series: Mapping the public policy landscape. 51 Berker, T. and Josok Gansmo, H. (2010) Paradoxes of design: Energy and water consumption and the aestheticization of Norwegian bathrooms 1990–2008, Sustainable Development, 18, 135–49. 52 Miller, W., Buys, L. and Bell, J. (2012) Performance evaluation of eight contemporary passive solar homes in subtropical Australia, Building and Environment, 56, 57–68. 53 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 54 Broome, J. (2008) The Green SelfBuild Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.18. 55 AECB (2009) AECB CarbonLite Programme, Delivering buildings with excellent energy and CO2 performance, Volume 5: Steps two and three design guidance, Passivhaus / Gold Standard. Llandysul, Wales. 56 Sibley, J., Hes, D. and Martin, F. (2003) A Triple Helix Approach: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Research into Sustainability in Outer-suburban Housing Estates. Presented at Methodologies in Housing Research Conference, Stockholm: http://www.infra.kth. se/bba/IAPS%20chapters%20pdf/ full%20chapter_016.pdf. 57 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Earthscan, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, p.305. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Laughton, R. (2008) Surviving and Thriving on the Land: How to Use Your Time and Energy to Run a Successful Smallholding. Green Books, Totnes, Devon.

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61 Public Health England (2013) Cold Weather Plan for England 2013: Protecting Health and Reducing Harm from Cold Weather. October: https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/252838/Cold_ Weather_Plan_2013_final.pdf. 62 Kraftl, P. (2007) Utopia, performativity and the unhomely, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 25, 1, 120–43. 63 Ibid., p.122, original emphasis. 64 Ibid., p.123, original emphasis. 65 Ibid., p.123. 66 Laughton, R. (2008) Surviving and Thriving on the Land: How to Use Your Time and Energy to Run a Successful Smallholding. Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.145. 67 Worsley, L. (2011) If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. Faber and Faber, London; Ierley, M. (1999) The Comforts of Home: The American House and the Evolution of Modern Convenience. Three Rivers Press, New York. 68 Kraftl, P. (2007) Utopia, performativity and the unhomely, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 25, 1, 120–43. 69 Jarvis, H. (2011) Saving space, sharing time: integrated infrastructures of daily life in cohousing, Environment and Planning A, 43, 3, 560–77. 70 This finding tallies with Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2014) Making sense of domestic warmth: Affect, involvement, and thermoception in off-grid homes, Body and Society, 20, 1, 61–84.

7 Gender 1 Young, I.M. (1997) House and home: Feminist variations on a theme, in Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp.134–64, p.137. 2 Rendell, J. (2000) Introduction:

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308 | N OT E S TO 7 9 Walker, L (1989) Women and architecture, in Attfield, J. and Kirkham, P. (eds) A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design. The Women’s Press, London, pp.90–105; Kwolek-Folland, A. (1995) Gender as a category of analysis in vernacular architecture studies, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 5, 3–10; Friedman, A.T. (2006) Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, London; Walker, L. (no date) Golden age or false dawn? Women architects in the early 20th century. Report for English Heritage: www.englishheritage.org.uk/content/imported-docs/fg/women-architects-early-20th-century. pdf. 10 Harvey, K. (2010) Men making home: Masculinity and domesticity in eighteenth-century Britain, in Adler, K.H. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Homes and Homecoming: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp.66–86. 11 Scott Brown, D. (1989) Room at the top? Sexism and the star system in architecture, in Perry Berkeley, E. (ed.) Architecture: A Place for Women. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC; Brown, L.A. (2011) Feminist Practices, Ashgate, Farnham; Caven, V. and Diop, M. (2011) Women and equality in architecture: An AngloFrench comparative study, in Egbu, C. and Lou, E.C.W. (eds) Procs 27th Annual ARCOM Conference, 217–26; Ahrentzen, S. (2003) The space between the studs: Feminism and architecture, Signs, 29, 1, 179–206. 12 Hayden, D. (1978) Two utopian feminists and their campaigns for kitchenless houses, Signs, 4, 2, 274–90; Hayden, D. (1981) The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cieraad, I. (2002) ‘Out

of my kitchen!’ Architecture, gender and domestic efficiency, The Journal of Architecture, 7, 3, 263–79. 13 Madigan, R. and Munro, M. (1991) Gender, house and ‘home’: Social meanings and domestic architecture in Britain, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 8, 2, 116–32. 14 Rudolph, N. (2010) ‘Who should be the author of a dwelling?’ Architects versus housewives in 1950s France, in Adler, K.H. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Homes and Homecoming: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp.87–105, p.88. See also Gürel, M.O. (2009) Defining and living out the interior: The ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s, Gender, Place and Culture, 16, 6, 703–22. 15 Bradshaw, F. (1984) Working with women, in Matrix (eds) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Pluto Press, London; Darke, J. (1984) Women, architects and feminism, in Matrix (eds) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Pluto Press, London, pp.11–25. 16 Foo, B. (1984) House and home, in Matrix (eds) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Pluto Press, London, pp.120–36. 17 Salomon, S. (2006) Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats and Energy Efficient Possibilities. The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut. 18 Madigan, R. and Munro, M. (1991) Gender, house and ‘home’: Social meanings and domestic architecture in Britain, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 8, 2, 116–32. 19 Agrest, D. (1993) Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 20 Crews, C. (2010) Clay Culture: Plasters, Paints and Preservation. Gourmet Adobe Press, New Mexico.

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21 Katz, P. (1982) Initiation rites and the status of women at Taos Pueblo, Anthropos, 77, 5/6, 889–91. 22 Oliver, P. (2003) Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. Phaidon Press, London. 23 Walker, L. (1989) Women and architecture, in Attfield, J. and Kirkham, P. (eds) A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design. The Women’s Press, London, pp.90–105. 24 Livesey, K. (2013) The Ladies Bridge, DVD. www.theladiesbridge.co.uk. 25 Bradshaw, F. (1984) Working with women, in Matrix, (eds) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Pluto Press, London. 26 Fielden, S.L., Davidson, M.J., Gale, A.W. and Davey, C.L. (2000) Women in construction: The untapped resource, Construction Management and Economics, 18, 113–21, p.113 27 Jones, B. (2013) Women are full of common sense, Huffington Post: http:// www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/barbaras-jones/women-in-construction_b_ 3378375.html, accessed 8 March 2014; Menches, C.L. and Abraham D. (2007) Women in construction – Tapping the untapped resource to meet future demands, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 133, 9, 701–7; Watts, J.H. (2007) Porn, pride and pessimism: Experiences of women working in professional construction roles, Work, Employment and Society, 21, 2, 299–316; Dainty, A., Bagihole, B., Ansari, K. and Jackson, J. (2004) Creating equality in the construction industry: An agenda for change for women and ethnic minorities, Journal of Construction Research, 5, 1. 28 Greed, C. (2000) Women in construction professions: Achieving critical mass, Gender, Work and Organization, 7, 3, 181–96; Watts, J.H. (2007) Porn, pride and pessimism: Experiences of women working in

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310 | N OT E S TO 7 Routledge, London; Walby, S. (2011) The Future of Feminism. Polity Press, Oxford. 34 Sharpe, S. and Gorman-Murray, A. (2013), Special issue: Bodies in place, bodies displaced, Geographical Research, 51: 115–19. 35 Simonsen, K. (2000) The body as battlefield, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 25, 1, 7–9, p.9. 36 Evans, M, (2002) Real bodies: An introduction, in Evans, M. and Lee, E. (eds) Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Palgrave, Basingstoke; Duffy, M. (2013), The requirement of having a body, Geographical Research, 51: 130–36. 37 Simonsen, K. (2000) The body as battlefield, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 25, 1, 7–9. 38 Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The limits of Geographical Knowledge. Polity Press, Cambridge. 39 Mott, C. and Roberts, S.M. (2014) Not everyone has (the) balls: Urban exploration and the persistence of masculinist geography, Antipode, 46, 1, 229–45, p.234. 40 Simonsen, K. (2012) In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography, Progress in Human Geography, 37, 1, 10–26, p.16. 41 Newbery, L. (2003) Will any/body carry that canoe? A geography of the body, ability and gender, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8, 204–16, p.210. 42 Evans, M. (2002) Real bodies: An introduction, in Evans, M. and Lee, E. (eds) Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Palgrave, Basingstoke, p.5. 43 Colls, R. (2012) Feminism, bodily difference and non-representational geographies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 430–45; Evans, B. (2006) ‘Gluttony or sloth’: Critical geographies of bodies and morality in (anti)obesity policy, Area, 38, 2, 259–67; Longhurst, R. (2005) Fat

bodies: Developing geographical research agenda, Progress in Human Geography, 29, 3, 247–59. 44 McDowell, L. (1999) Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Polity Press, Oxford, p.39. 45 Longhurst, R. (2001) Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. Routledge, London. 46 Ibid., p.23. 47 Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, p.194. 48 Evans, M. (2002) Real bodies: An introduction, in Evans, M. and Lee, E. (eds) Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Palgrave, Basingstoke. 49 Longhurst, R. (2001) Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. Routledge, London, p.23. 50 Valentine, G. (1999) A corporeal geography of consumption, Environment and Planning Diego: Society and Space, 17, 329–51, p.329. See also Nast, H.J. and Pile, S. (1998) Introduction: MakingPlacesBodies, in Nast, H.J. and Pile, S. (eds) Places Through the Body. Routledge, London. 51 Billo, E. and Hiemstra, N. (2013) Mediating messiness: Expanding ideas of flexibility reflexivity, and embodiment in fieldwork, Gender, Place and Culture, 20, 3, 313–28. 52 Newbery, L. (2003) Will any/body carry that canoe? A geography of the body, ability and gender, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8, 204–16, p.212, original emphasis. 53 Lacuone, D. (2005) ‘Real men are tough guys’: Hegemonic masculinity and safety in the construction industry, The Journal of Men’s Studies, 13, 2, 247–66. 54 Jones, B. (2013) Women are full of common sense, Huffington Post, http:// www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/barbara-sjones/women-in-construction_b_3378375. html, accessed 8 March 2014.

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55 Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. Routledge, London. 56 Braidotti, R. (1991) Patterns of Dissonance: Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy, Polity Press, London. 57 Menches, C.L. and Abraham, D. (2007) Women in construction – Tapping the untapped resource to meet future demands, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 133, 9, 701–7; Law, A.S. (1989) ‘Girls can’t be plumbers’ Affirmative action for women in construction: Beyond goals and quotas, Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties, 24. 58 Waitt, G. (2013) Bodies that sweat: The affective responses of young women in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, Gender, Place and Culture, 21, 6. 59 Morin, K. (2008) Charles P. Daly’s gendered geography, 1860–1890, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98, 4, 897–919, p.908.

8 Mobilisation 1 Rogers, H. (2010) Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution. Verso, London. 2 Della Porta, D. and M. Diani (1999). Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers. 3 In this way it also builds on work by economic geographers on how policy knowledge is mobile; McCann, E.J. (2011) Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101, 1, 107–30. 4 Cidell, J. (2009) Building green: The emerging geography of LEEDcertified buildings and professionals, The Professional Geographer, 61, 2, 200–215. 5 Ferlie, E., Fitzgerald, L., Wood, M. and Hawkins, C. (2005) The nonspread of innovations: The mediating role of professionals, Academy of Management Journal, 48, 1, 117–34; Lovell, H. (2008)

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Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. 6 Ip, K. and Miller, A. (2009) Thermal behaviour of an earth-sheltered autonomous building – The Brighton Earthship, Renewable Energy, 34, 9, 2037–4. 7 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53, p. 342. 8 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2010) Global architects: Learning and innovation through communities and constellations in practice, Environment and Planning A, 42, 2842–58. 9 Rydin, Y., Amjad, U. and Whitaker, M. (2007) Environmentally sustainable construction: Knowledge and learning and London planning departments, Planning Theory and Practice, 8, 3, 363–80. 10 Lovell, H. (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. 11 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53, p. 348. 12 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London, p. 188. 13 Ferlie, E., Fitzgerald, L., Wood, M. and Hawkins, C. (2005) The nonspread of innovations: The mediating role of professionals, Academy of Management Journal, 48, 1, 117–34. 14 Bergman, N., Whitmarsh, L. and Köhler, J. (2008) Transition to Sustainable Development in the UK Housing Sector: From Case Study to Model Implementation. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Working Paper 120.

312 | N OT E S TO 8 15 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 16 Based from authors’ fieldwork and Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London; Lovell, H. (2005) Supply and demand for low energy housing in the UK: Insights from a science and technology studies approach, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 815–82; Williams, K. and Dair, C. (2007) What is stopping sustainable building in England? Barriers experienced by stakeholders in delivering sustainable developments, Sustainable Development, 15, 135–47; Crabtree, L. and Hes, D. (2009) Sustainability uptake in housing in metropolitan Australia: An institutional problem, not a technological one, Housing Studies, 24, 2, 203–24; Rydin, Y. and Turcu, C. (2013) Key trends in policy for low-energy built environments: A 20-year review, Local Environment; van Bueren, E.M. and Priemus, H. (2002) Institutional barriers to sustainable construction, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 29, 75–86; Crabtree, L. (2005) Sustainable housing development in urban Australia: exploring obstacles to and opportunities for ecocity efforts, Australian Geographer, 36, 3, 333–50; Hoffman, A.J. and Henn, R. (2008) Overcoming the social and psychological barriers to green building, Organization and Environment, 21, 4, 390– 419; Greenwood, D. (2012) The challenge of policy coordination for sustainable sociotechnical transitions: The case of the zero-carbon homes agenda in England, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 30, 162–79; Lowe, R. and Oreszczyn, T. (2008) Regulatory standards and barriers to improved performance for housing, Energy Policy, 36, 4475–81. 17 Shove, E. (1998) Gaps, barriers and conceptual chasms: Theories of technology transfer and energy in buildings, Energy Policy, 26, 15, 1105–12; Lerner, K. (2004) Down-to-earth

technology transfer, in Kennedy, J.F. (ed.) Building Without Borders; Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, pp.85–97. 18 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–353, p.341. 19 Lerner, K. (2004) Down-to-earth technology transfer, in Kennedy, J.F. (ed.) Building Without Borders; Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, pp.85–97. 20 Gann, D.M. (2003) Trading places – Sharing knowledge about environmental building techniques, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.37–56. 21 Lovell, H. (2005) Supply and demand for low energy housing in the UK: Insights from a science and technology studies approach, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 815–29. 22 Kirsch, S. (1995) The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of space, Environment and Society D: Society and Space, 13, 529–55. 23 Geels, F. and Schot, J. (2007) Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways, Research Policy, 36, 399–417. 24 Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke; Smith, A. (2007) Translating sustainabilities between green niches and socio-technical regimes, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 19, 4, 427–50; Seyfang, G. and Smith, A. (2007) Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda, Environmental Politics, 16, 4, 584–603; Seyfang, G. (2010)

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Grassroots innovations in sustainable housing: Building a low-carbon future, Energy Policy 38, 7624–33; Scrase, I. and Smith, A. (2009) The (non-)politics of managing low carbon socio-technical transitions, Environmental Politics, 18, 5, 707–26; Smith, A. and Stirling, A. (2008) Social-ecological resilience and sociotechnical transitions: Critical issues for sustainability governance. STEPS Working Paper 8, Brighton: STEPS Centre. 25 Oliver, P. (2003) Technology transfer – A vernacular view, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.246–68. 26 Coenen, L., Benneworth, P. and Truffer, B. (2011) Towards a spatial perspective on sustainability transitions, Research Policy, 41, 6, 968–79; Truffer, B. and Coenen, L. (2012) Environmental innovation and sustainability transitions in regional studies, Regional Studies, 46, 1, 1–21. 27 Goodchild, B. and Walshaw, A. (2011) Towards zero carbon homes in England? From inception to partial implementation, Housing Studies, 26, 6, 933–49. 28 van Bueren, E. and Broekhans, B. (2013) Individual projects as portals for mainstreaming niche innovations, in Henn, R.L. and Hoffman, A.J. (eds) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability. MIT Press, London, pp.145–67; O’Neill, K.J. and Gibbs, D.C. (2014) Towards a sustainable economy? Socio-technical transitions in the green building sector, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. 29 Smith, A. (2007) Governance lessons from green niches: the case of eco-housing, in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. Earthscan, London, p.92.

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30 Raven, R., Schot, J. and Berkhout, F. (2012) Space and scale in sociotechnical transitions, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 4, 63–78, p.63. 31 Coenen, L. and Truffer, B. (2012) Places and spaces of sustainability transitions: Geographical contributions to an emerging research and policy field, European Planning Studies, 20, 3, 367–74. 32 Shove, E. and Walker, G. (2010) Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life, Research Policy, 39, 4, 471–6. 33 van Bueren, E. and Broekhans, B. (2013) Individual projects as portals for mainstreaming niche innovations, in Henn, R.L. and Hoffman, A.J. (eds) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability. MIT Press, London, pp.145–67. 34 Ibid., p.163. 35 Based on authors’ fieldwork and Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53, p.341; González, S. (2011) Bilbao and Barcelona ‘in motion’. How urban regeneration ‘models’ travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism, Urban Studies, 48, 7, 1397–418; Oliver, P. (2003) Technology transfer – A vernacular view, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.246–68. 36 Fischer, C.S. (1985). Studying technology and social life, in Castells, M. (ed.) High Technology, Space and Society. London, Sage Publications, pp.284–300, p.294. 37 Street, J. (1992). Politics and Technology. Macmillan, London, pp.8–9. 38 King, A. (1984) The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. Routledge, London.

314 | N OT E S TO 8 39 Jacobs, J. (2006) A geography of big things, Cultural Geographies, 13, 1–27. 40 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. 41 Hoffman, A.J. and Henn, R. (2008) Overcoming the social and psychological barriers to green building, Organization and Environment, 21, 4, 390–419. 42 Middlemiss, L. and Parrish, B.D. (2010) Building capacity for low-carbon communities: The role of grassroots initiatives, Energy Policy, 38, 7559–66. 43 May, J. (2010) Handmade Houses and Other Buildings: The World of Vernacular Architecture. Thames and Hudson, London, p.24. 44 Oliver, P. (2003) Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. Phaidon Press, London. 45 Katz, P. (1982) Initiation rites and the status of women at Taos Pueblo, Anthropos, 77, 5/6, 889–91. 46 Crews, C. (2010) Clay Culture: Plasters, Paints and Preservation. Gourmet Adobe Press, New Mexico. 47 Watson, L. (2000) The past informing the future: British earth building in the new Millennium, in Hurd, J. and Gourley, B. (eds) Terra Britannica: A Celebration of Earthen Structures in Great Britain and Ireland. English Heritage, London. 48 Jandai, J. (2003) quoted in Earth Building in Thailand: https://www. sustainableabc.com/i-thailand.htm. 49 Sthapitanonda, N. and Merterns, B. (2006) Architecture of Thailand: A Guide to Traditional and Contemporary Forms. Thames and Hudson, London. p.36. 50 Interview with Dr Oranratmanee, Department of Architecture, Chiang Mai University, Thailand, 12 July 2010.

51 Salomon, S. (2006) Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats, and Energy Efficient Possibilities.The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut. 52 Ibid., p.247. 53 Jandai, J. (2003) quoted in Earth Building in Thailand: https://www. sustainableabc.com/i-thailand.htm. 54 Gann, D.M. (2003) Trading places – Sharing knowledge about environmental building techniques, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.37–56. 55 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. 56 Designed by author, building on ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Smith, A. (2007) ‘Governance lessons from green niches: The case of eco-housing’ in Murphy, J. (ed.) Governing Technology for Sustainability. Earthscan, London, p.97. 60 Gann, D.M. (2003) Trading places – Sharing knowledge about environmental building techniques, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.37–56. 61 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. 62 Lerner, K. (2004) Down-to-earth technology transfer, in Kennedy, J.F. (ed.) Building Without Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New

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Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, pp.85–97, p.90. 63 Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York; Lovell, H. (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. 64 Ibid. 65 Lerner, K. (2004) Down-to-earth technology transfer, in Kennedy, J.F. (ed.) Building Without Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, pp.85–97. 66 Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. 67 Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. 68 Scrase, I. and Smith, A. (2009) The (non-)politics of managing low carbon socio-technical transitions, Environmental Politics, 18, 5, 707–26; Smith, A. and Stirling, A. (2008) Socialecological Resilience and Socio-technical Transitions: Critical Issues for Sustainability Governance. STEPS Working Paper 8, STEPS Centre, Brighton. 69 Greenwood, D. (2012) The challenge of policy coordination for sustainable sociotechnical transitions: The case of the zero-carbon homes agenda in England, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 30, 162–79.

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65 www.penparkcommons.org/ vision.htm. 66 Interview with Eli Spevak. 67 Martin Bang, J. (2007) Growing Eco-Communities: Practical Ways to Create Sustainability. Floris Books, Edinburgh. 68 Ibid., p.127. 69 Seyfang, G. and Smith, A. (2007) Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda, Environmental Politics, 16, 4, 584–603; Seyfang, G. (2010) Community action for sustainable housing: Building a low-carbon future, Energy Policy, 38, 7624–33. 70 Photograph taken by and courtesy of Amanda Jackson. 71 Dale, S. and Saville, J. (2011) The Compatibility of Building Regulations with Projects under New Low Impact Development and One Planet Development Planning Policies: Critical and Urgent Problems and the Need for a Workable Solution: http://www.simondale.net/ house/Building_Regulations_and_LID. pdf. 72 Ibid., p.11. 73 Bradbury, S. and Middlemiss, L. (2014) The role of learning in sustainable communities of practice, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 20, 7, 796–810; Middlemiss, L. and Parrish, B.D. (2010) Building capacity for low-carbon communities: The role of grassroots initiatives, Energy Policy, 38, 12, 7559–66. 74 Kraatz, M.S. (1998) Learning by association? Interorganizational networks and adaptation to environmental change, Academy of Management Journal, 41, 6, 621–43; Marckmann, B., Gram-Hanssen, K. and Haunstrup Christensen, T. (2012) Sustainable living and co-housing: Evidence from a case study of ecovillages, Built Environment, 38, 3, 413–29. 75 Jones, L. (2014) Living-with others, living-with ‘eco-homes’: From frustration

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320 | N OT E S TO 9 Model for Social Sustainability, presented at ISCA Conference, Findhorn eco-village, Scotland, June. 85 Brenton, M. (2011) Cohousing: Supportive local networks in old age, in Bunker, S., Coates, C., Field, M. and How, J. (eds) Cohousing in Britain. Diggers and Dreamers Publications, London. 86 Bauman Power, M., Krause Eheart, B., Racine, D. and Karnik, N.S. (2007) Aging well in an intentional intergenerational community: Meaningful relationships and purposeful engagement, Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 5, 2, 7–25; Glass, A.P. (2012) Elder co-housing in the United States: Three case studies, Built Environment, 38, 3, 345–63; Brenton, M. (2013) Senior cohousing communities – An alternative approach for the UK?, Joseph Rowntree Programme Paper: http://www.jrf.org. uk/sites/files/jrf/senior-cohousingcommunities-full.pdf. 87 Manzella, J.C. (2010) Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities, Praeger, Oxford, p.171. 88 Chitewere, T. (2006) Constructing a green lifestyle: Consumption and environmentalism in an ecovillage, unpublished PhD thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton; Chitewere, T. and Taylor, D.E. (2010), Sustainable living and community building in Ecovillage at Ithaca: The challenges of incorporating social justice concerns into the practices of an ecological cohousing community, in Taylor, D.E. (ed.) Environment and Social Justice: An International Perspective (Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Volume 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, West Yorkshire, pp.141–76; Van Schyndel Kasper, D. (2008) Redefining community in the ecovillage, Human Ecology Review, 15, 1, 12–24.

89 Pepper, D. (1991) Communes and the Green Vision: Counterculture, Lifestyles and the New Age. The Merlin Press, London; Manzella, J.C. (2010) Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities, Praeger, Oxford. 90 Dawson, J. (2006) Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.56. 91 Manzella, J.C. (2010) Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities, Praeger, Oxford, p.173. 92 Willem Duyvendak, J. (2011) The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p.83. 93 Moss Kanter, R. (1972) Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Harvard University Press, London. 94 Halbach, D. (2005) The rainbow power of community, in Peters, V. and Stengel, M. (eds) Europtopia: Intentional Communities and Ecovillages in Europe, Ökodorf Sieben Linden, p.28. 95 Sargisson, L. (2007) Strange places: Estrangement, utopianism, and intentional communities, Utopian Studies, 18, 3, 393–424, p.393. 96 Ibid., p.417. 97 Paul Chatterton, co-founder of LILAC, quoted in Haines, S. (2013) ‘Strong bond’ of Leeds LILAC co-housing residents, BBC News, 1 January. 98 Garden, M. (2006) Leaving Utopia, International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, 2, 2: http://www. inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol2/ vol2_no2_Garden.htm. 99 Metcalf, W. (2004) The Findhorn Book of Community Living. Findhorn Press, Forres, Scotland. 100 Renz, M.A. (2006) Pacing consensus: Enacting, challenging,

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and revising the consensus process in a cohousing community, Journal of Applied Communication Research, 34, 2, 163–90. 101 Walljasper, J. (2010) All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. The New Press, New York. 102 Cunningham, P.A. and Wearing, S.L. (2013) The politics of consensus: An exploration of the Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 2: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/ index.php/mcs/article/view/3283. 103 Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, p.148. 104 Jarvis, H. (2011) Saving space, sharing time: Integrated infrastructures of daily life in cohousing, Environment and Planning A, 43, 560–77, p.561. 105 Metcalf, W. (2004) The Findhorn Book of Community Living. Findhorn Press, Forres, Scotland, p.102. 106 Litfin, K.T. (2014) Eco-villages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. Polity Press, Cambridge. 107 Chuck Marsh of Earthaven ecocommunity, Asheville, North Carolina, quoted in Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, p.147. 108 Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 109 Metcalf, W. (2004) The Findhorn Book of Community Living. Findhorn Press, Forres, Scotland. 110 Williams, J. (2005) Designing neighbourhoods for social interaction: The case of cohousing, Journal of Urban Design, 10, 2, 195–227, p.200.

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111 Sullivan-Catlin, H. (2004) ‘A good borderland’: Cohousing communities and social change, Communal Societies, 24, 121–41. 112 Lietaert, M. (2010) Cohousing’s relevance to degrowth theories, Journal of Cleaner Production, 18, 576–80. 113 Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 114 Litfin, K.T. (2014) Eco-villages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. Polity Press, Cambridge. 115 Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, p.165. 116 Dawson, J. (2006) Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.82. 117 Ache, P. and Fedrowitz, M. (2012) The development of co-housing initiatives in Germany, Built Environment, 38, 3, 395–412. 118 Woolley, T. (2013) Low Impact Building: Housing using Renewable Materials. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 119 Kinkade, K. (1994) Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community In Its 26th Year. Twin Oaks Publishing, Louisa, Virginia. 120 Martin Bang, J. (2005) Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities. Floris Books, Edinburgh, p.120. 121 Ibid. 122 Kinkade, K. (1994) Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community In Its 26th Year. Twin Oaks Publishing, Louisa, Virginia, p.135. 123 Ben, quoted in Mulholland, H. (1999) All together now … on how a cooperative is building its own homes, The Guardian, Society, 19 May, p.7.

322 | N OT E S TO 9 124 Kinkade, K. (1994) Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community In Its 26th Year. Twin Oaks Publishing, Louisa, Virginia, p.80. 125 Whitcroft, A. (2012) Getting ecovillages noticed, Communities, 156, Fall, 29–33, p.30. 126 Ibid. 127 Dawson, J. (2006) Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, Devon, p.83. 128 Fosket, J. and Mamo, L. (2009) Living Green: Communities That Sustain. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 129 Urban Vestbro, D. (2012) Saving by Sharing – Collective Housing for Sustainable Lifestyles in the Swedish Context, presented at the 3rd International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, Venice, 19–23 September: http:// www.slideshare.net/degrowthconf/ saving-by-sharing-collective-housing-forsustainable-lifestyles. 130 Meltzer, G. (1999) Cohousing: Linking communitarianism and sustainability, Communal Societies, 19, 85–100. 131 Fosket, J. and Mamo, L. (2009) Living Green: Communities That Sustain. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 132 Ibid., p.164. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., p.167. 135 Ibid., p.150. 136 Janda, K.B. (2011) Building don’t use energy, people do, Architectural Science Review, 54, 1, 15–22. 137 Woolley, T. (2013) Low Impact Building: Housing using Renewable Materials. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 138 Van Schyndel Kasper, D (2008) Redefining community in the ecovillage, Human Ecology Review, 15, 1, 12–24, p.22. 139 Ibid., p.20.

140 Fotopoulos, T. (2000) The limitations of life-style strategies: The ecovillage ‘movement’ is NOT the way toward a new democratic society, Democracy and Nature, 6, 2, 287–308. 141 Chitewere, T. (2006) Constructing a green lifestyle: Consumption and environmentalism in an ecovillage, unpublished PhD thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton.

10 Future 1 Fosket, J. and Mamo, L. (2009) Living Green: Communities That Sustain. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, p.172. 2 For an excellent discussion of these types of projects, see Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 3 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 4 Goodier, C. and Pan, W. (2010) The Future of UK Housebuilding. RICS Research Report: http://www.rics.org/ Global/Downloads/RICS_Research_-_The_ Future_of_UK_Housebuilding.pdf. 5 Lovell, H. (2005) Supply and demand for low energy housing in the UK: Insights from a science and technology studies approach, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 815–29, p.817. 6 From Callcutt Review (2007) The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery, Department of Communities and Local Government, London, p.181. 7 Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. 8 Broome, J. (2008) The Green SelfBuild Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. 9 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London, p.188. 10 Ferlie, E., Fitzgerald, L., Wood, M. and Hawkins, C. (2005) The nonspread

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of innovations: The mediating role of professionals, Academy of Management Journal, 48, 1, 117–34. 11 Bergman, N., Whitmarsh, L. and Köhler, J. (2008) Transition to sustainable development in the UK housing sector: From case study to model implementation, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Working Paper 120. 12 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 13 Diacon, D., Pattison, B. and Vine, J. (2009) The Future of Housing: Rethinking the UK Housing System for the Twentyfirst Century, Building and Social Housing Foundation, report. 14 Janda, K.B. and Killip, G. (2013) Building expertise: Renovation as professional innovation, in Henn, R.L. and Hoffman, A.J. (eds) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability. MIT Press, London, p.51. 15 Gottfried, D. (2014) Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the World’s Largest Industry. Morgan James Publishing, New York. 16 Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. 17 Ibid., p.498. 18 McFarlane, C. (2011) The city as a machine for learning, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 360–76, p.374, original emphasis. 19 Sage, D. (2013) ‘Danger building site – keep out!?’: A critical agenda for geographical engagement with contemporary construction industries, Social and Cultural Geography, 14, 2, 168–91. 20 Williams, K. and Dair, C. (2007) What is stopping sustainable building in England? Barriers experienced by stakeholders in delivering sustainable developments, Sustainable Development, 15, 135–47; Crabtree, L. and Hes, D. (2009)

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Sustainability uptake in housing in metropolitan Australia: An institutional problem, not a technological one, Housing Studies, 24, 2, 203–24. 21 Ole Jensen, J. (2001) Green buildings in an infrastructure perspective, in Guy, S., Marvin, S. and Moss, T. (eds) Urban Infrastructure in Transition: Networks, Buildings, Plans. Earthscan, London, p.120. 22 Ibid. 23 Kraftl, P. (2014) Liveability and urban architectures: Mol(ecul)ar biopower and the ‘becoming lively’ of sustainable communities, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32. 24 Chambers, N.B. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. 25 Leaman, A. (2003) User needs and expectations, in Cole, R.J. and Lorch, R. (eds) Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. 26 Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. 27 Imrie, R. (2004) Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home, Housing Studies, 19, 5, 745–63; Imrie, R. (2003) Architects’ conceptions of the human body, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21, 47–65. 28 Cole, R.J., Busby, P., Guenther, R., Briney, L., Blaviesciunaite, A. and Alencar, T. (2012) A regenerative design framework: Setting new aspirations and initiating new discussions, Building Research and Information, 40, 1, 95–11. 29 Papanek, V. (1995) Design for the Real World. Thames and Hudson, London. 30 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 31 Steinfield, E. and White, J. (2010) Inclusive Housing: A Pattern Book. Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access. W.W. Norton and Company, London, p.31.

324 | N OT E S TO 1 0 32 Janda, K.B. and Killip, G. (2013) Building expertise: Renovation as professional innovation, in Henn, R.L. and Hoffman, A.J. (eds) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability. MIT Press, London, p.48. 33 Ibid., p.49. 34 Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn, p.500. 35 Diacon, D., Pattison, B. and Vine, J. (2009) The Future of Housing: Rethinking the UK Housing System for the Twentyfirst Century, Building and Social Housing Foundation, report; Gottfried, D (2014) Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the World’s Largest Industry. Morgan James Publishing, New York. 36 WWF and TCPA (2003) Executive Summary: How to plan and construct new housing for the 21st century, A Sustainable Housing Forum report, WWF-UK and Town and Country Planning Association. 37 Broome, J. (2008) The Green SelfBuild Book. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. 38 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) (2010) Improving the Design of New Housing: What Role for Standards? CABE, London, p.1. 39 Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London, p.5. 40 Pelsmakers, S. (2014) Living with water: Four buildings that will withstand flooding, The Conversation, 25 February: http://theconversation.com/living-withwater-four-buildings-that-will-withstandflooding-23536; Pelsmakers, S. (2012) The Environmental Design Pocketbook. RIBA Publishing, London. 41 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London; Wu, F. (2012) China’s eco-cities, Geoforum, 43, 2, 169–71; Doughlas, I. (2013) Cities: An Environmental History. I.B.Tauris, London.

42 Caprotti, F. (2014) Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city? Antipode, 46, 5, 1285–303; Datta, A. (2012) India’s eco-city? Environment, urbanization, and mobility in the making of Lavasa, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 30, 6, 982–96. 43 Chatterton, P. (2014) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Earthscan, Oxford. 44 Dunster, B., Simmons, C. and Gilbert, B. (2008) The ZED Book: Solutions for a Shrinking World. Taylor and Francis, Abingdon, Oxfordshire. 45 Cotterell, J. and Dadeby, A. (2012) The Passivhaus Handbook: A Practical Guide to Constructing and Retrofitting Buildings for Ultra-low Energy Performance. Green Books, Totnes, Devon; Bere, J. (2013) An Introduction to Passive House, RIBA Publishing, London. 46 Cole, R.J., Brown, Z. and McKay, S. (2010) Building human agency: A timely manifesto. Building Research and Information, 38, 3, 339–50. 47 Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. 48 Ibid. 49 Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. 50 Chambers, N.B. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. 51 Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. 52 Ibid. 53 Oliver, P. (2003) Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. Phaidon Press, London. 54 BBC (2014) Devon’s Teignbridge Council backs self builders, BBC News, 18 June: http://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-27892235.

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55 Goodier, C. and Pan, W. (2010) The Future of UK Housebuilding, RICS Research Report: http://www.rics.org/ Global/Downloads/RICS_Research_-_The_ Future_of_UK_Housebuilding.pdf. 56 Gottfried, D. (2014) Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the

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World’s Largest Industry. Morgan James Publishing, New York. 57 Ibid., p.253. 58 Caprotti, F (2014) Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city? Antipode, 46, 5, 1285–303, p.14.

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Cole, R.J., Brown, Z. and McKay, S. (2010) Building human agency: A timely manifesto, Building Research and Information, 38, 3, 339–50, p.340. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2013) UK Construction: An Economic Analysis of the Sector: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/210060/bis-13958-uk-construction-an-economicanalysis-of-sector.pdf. Gill, Z.M., Tierney, M.J., Pegg, I.M., and Allan, N. (2010) Low-energy dwellings: The contribution of behaviours to actual performance, Building Research and Information, 38, 5, 491–508. Henn, R.L. and Hoffman, A.J. (eds) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability. MIT Press, London. Janda, K. (2011) Buildings don’t use energy: People do, Architectural Science Review, 54, 1, 15–22. Kellner, J. (2011) Housing Reclaimed: Sustainable Homes for Next to Nothing. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. Kelly, M.J. (2009) Retrofitting the existing UK building stock, Building Research and Information, 37, 2, 196–200. Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. Lovell, H. (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: The case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. Osmani, M. and O’Reilly, A. (2009) Feasibility of zero carbon homes in England by 2016: A house builder’s perspective, Building and Environment, 44, 1917–24. Pelsmakers, S. (2012) The Environmental Design Pocketbook. RIBA Publishing, London.

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Power, A. (2008) Does demolition or refurbishment of old and inefficient homes help to increase our environmental, social and economic viability? Energy Policy, 36, 12, 4487–501. Roaf, S., Fuentes, M. and Thomas, S. (2007) Ecohouse: A Design Guide. Architectural Press, London. Salomon, S. (2006) Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats and Energy Efficient Possibilities. The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut. Schmitz-Günther, T. (1998) Living Spaces: Sustainable Building and Design. Könemann, Cologne. Stevenson, F., Carmona-Andreu, I. and Hancock, M. (2013) The usability of control interfaces in low-carbon housing, Architectural Science Review, 56, 1, 70–82. Vale, R. and Vale, B. (2009) Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. Thames and Hudson, London. van Lengen, J. (2008) The Barefoot Architect: A Handbook for Green Building. Shelter Publications, Bolinas, California. Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London.

Home Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. Routledge, London. Brickell, K. (2012) ‘Mapping’ and ‘doing’; critical geographies of home, Progress in Human Geography, 36, 2, 225–44. Brickell, K. (2012) Geopolitics of home, Geography Compass, 6, 10, 575–88. Christie, H., Smith, S.J. and Munro, M. (2008) The emotional economy of housing, Environment and Planning A, 40, 2296–312. Cooper Marcus, C. (2006) House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper

328 | FURTHER READING Meaning of Home. Nicolas-Hays, Lake Worth, Florida. Datta, A. (2008) Building differences: Material geographies of home(s) among Polish builders in London, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33, 518–31. Dolan, J.A. (2006) ‘I’ve always fancied owning me own lion’: Ideological motivations in external house decoration by recent homeowners, in Cieraad, I. (ed.) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, pp.60–72. Dowling, R. and Mee, K. (2007) Home and homemaking in contemporary Australia, Housing Theory and Society, 24, 3, pp.161–5. Duyvendak, J.W. (2011) The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire. Easthope, H. (2004) A place called home, Housing, Theory and Society, 21, 3, 128–38. Imrie, R. (2004) Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home, Housing Studies, 19, 5, 745–63. Jacobs, J., and Smith, S. (2008) Living room: Rematerialising home, Environment and Planning A, 40, 515–19. Jacobs, J.M. and Merriman, P. (2011) Practising architectures, Social and Cultural Geography, 12, 3, 211–22. Jarvis, H. (2011) Saving space, sharing time: Integrated infrastructures of daily life in cohousing. Environment and Planning A, 43, 3, 560–77. — (2013) Against the ‘tyranny’ of singlefamily dwelling: Insights from Christiania at 40, Gender, Place and Culture: Journal of Feminist Geography, 20, 8, 939–59. Johnson, M. (1993) Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English

Landscape. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Kraftl, P. (2006) Ecological architecture as performed art: Nat-y-Cwm Steiner School, Pembrokeshire, Social and Cultural Geography, 7, 6, 927–47. Lovell, H. (2004) Framing sustainable housing as a solution to climate change, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 6, 1, 35–55. Mallett, S. (2004) Understanding home: A critical review of the literature, The Sociological Review, 52, 1, 62–89, p.68. Ozaki, R. (2002) Housing as a reflection of culture: Privatised living and privacy in England and Japan, Housing Studies, 17, 2, 209–27. Procupez, V. (2008) Beyond home: Forging the domestic in shared housing, Home Cultures, 5, 3, 327–48. Reid, L.A. and Houston, D. (2013) Low carbon housing: A ‘green’ wolf in sheep’s clothing? Housing Studies, 28, 1, 1–9, p.4. Rivlin, L.G. and Moore, J. (2001) Homemaking: Supports and barriers to the process of home, Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 10, 4, 323–36. Rybczynski, W. (1988) Homes: A Short History of an Idea. Viking Books. Sage, D. (2013) ‘Danger building sitekeep out!?’: A critical agenda for geographical engagement with contemporary construction industries, Social and Cultural Geography, 14, 2, 168–91, p.185. Shove, E. (2006) Constructing home: A crossroads of choices, in Cieraad, I. (ed.) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, pp.130–43, p.135. Williams, J. (2006) Innovative solutions for averting a potential crisis – the case of one-person households in England, Environment, Development and Sustainability, 9, 325–34.

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Place Brown-Saracino, J. (2009) A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. Cabrera, J.F. and Najarian, J.C. (2013) Can new urbanism create diverse communities? Journal of Planning Education and Research, 33, 4, 427–41. Carlsson, C. and Manning, F. (2010) Nowtopia: Strategic exodus? Antipode, 42, 4, 924–53.

330 | FURTHER READING Cole, R.J. (2012) Transitioning from green to regenerative design, Building Research and Information, 40, 1, 39–53. Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. — (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Day, C. (1990) Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. Thorsons, London. — (2002) Spirit and Place: Healing Our Environment, Healing Environment. Elsevier, London. Fairlie, S. (1996) Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside. Jon Carpenter, Oxford. Halfacree, K. (2006) From dropping out to leading on? British countercultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality, Progress in Human Geography, 30, 3, 309–36. Jacobs, J. (1961 and 1993 edns) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, London. Jarvis, H. and Bonnett, A. (2013) Progressive nostalgia in novel living arrangements: A counterpoint to neo-traditional new Urbanism? Urban Studies, 50, 1, 2349–70. Kraftl, P. (2009) Living in an artwork: The extraordinary geographies of everyday life at the HundertwasserHaus, Vienna, Cultural Geographies, 16, 111–34. — (2010) Geographies of architecture: The multiple lives of buildings, Geography Compass, 4, 402–15, p.403. Larsen, S.C. and Johnson, J.T. (2012) Toward an open sense of place: Phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 3, 632–46, p.639.

Lepofsky, J. and Fraser, J.C. (2003) Building community citizens: Claiming the right to place-making in the city, Urban Studies, 40, 1, 127–42. Longhurst, N. (2013) The emergence of an alternative milieu: Conceptualising the nature of alternative places. Environment and Planning A, 45, 2100–119, p.2110. Malpas, J. (2012) Putting space in place: Philosophical topography and relational geography. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 226–42. — (2014) ‘Thinking topographically: Place, space and geography’: http://jeffmalpas. com/downloadable-essays. Mason, K. and Whitehead, M. (2012) Transition Urbanism and the contested politics of ethical place making, Antipode, 44, 2, 493–519, p.493. Pickerill, J. and Maxey, L. (2009) Geographies of sustainability: Low Impact Developments and radical spaces of innovation, Geography Compass, 3, 4, 1515–39. Purcell, M. and Brown, J.C. (2005) Against the local trap: Scale and the study of environment and development, Progress in Development Studies, 5, 279–97. Sack, R.D. (2001) The geographic problematic: empirical issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 107–16. — (2001) The geographic problematic: moral issues, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 55, 117–25, p.124. Talen, E. (2005) New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures. Routledge, London. The City Repair Project (2006) Placemaking Guidebook: Creative Community Building in the Public

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Right of Way. City Repair Project, Portland, Oregon, 2nd edn. Tuan, Y. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, New York. Vannini, P. and Taggart, J. (2013) Voluntary simplicity, involuntary complexities, and the pull of remove: the radical ruralities of off-grid lifestyles, Environment and Planning A, 45, 295–311. Wimbush, P. (2012) The Birth of an Ecovillage: Adventures in an Alternative World. FeedARead Publishing, London.

Affordability Aked, J., Michaelson, J. and Steuer, N. (2010) Good foundations: Towards a low carbon, high wellbeing built environment, New Economics Foundation : http://www. neweconomics.org/publications/ entry/good-foundations. Bradshaw, W., Connelly, E.F., Fraser Cook, M., Goldstein, J. and Pauly, J. (2005) The Costs and Benefits of Green Affordable Housing. New Ecology and the Green CDCs Initiative. Burnham, R. (1998) Housing Ourselves: Creating Affordable Sustainable Shelter. McGraw-Hill, New York. Chatterton, P. (2015) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Routledge, Abingdon. Dale, S. and Saville, J. (2011) The Compatibility of Building Regulations with Projects under New Low Impact Development and One Planet Development Planning Policies: Critical and Urgent Problems and the Need for a Workable Solution : http://www. simondale.net/house/Building_ Regulations_and_LID.pdf. Diacon, D., Pattison, B., Strutt, J. and Vine, J. (2011) More Homes and Better

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Places: Solutions to Address the Scale of Housing Need. Building and Social Housing Foundation, Coalville. Dorling, D. (2014) All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster. Allen Lane, London. Gan, Q. and Hill, R.J. (2009) Measuring housing affordability: Looking beyond the median. Journal of Housing Economics, 18, 2, 115–25. Gurran, N. and Whitehead, C. (2011) Planning and affordable housing in Australia and the UK: A comparative perspective, Housing Studies, 26, 7–8. Heartfield, J. (2006) Let’s Build: Why We Need Five Million Homes in the Next 10 Years. Audacity, London. Hodkinson, S. (2012) The new urban enclosures, City, 16, 500–18. Munro, M. and Smith, S.J. (2008) Calculated affection? Charting the complex economy of home purchase, Housing Studies, 23, 2, 349–67. Parvin, A., Saxby, D., Cerulli, C. and Schneider, T. (2011) A Right to Build: The Next Mass-housebuilding Industry, University of Sheffield School of Architecture: http://issuu. com/alastairparvin/docs/2011_07_06_ arighttobuild. Rogers, D. (2009) New Foundations: Unlocking the Potential for Affordable Homes. Cooperative Party, London. Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change. Palgrave, Macmillan. Wilcox, S. (2006) The Geography of Affordable and Unaffordable Housing: And the Ability of Younger Working Households to Become Home Owners. Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, York.

Comfort Bushman, R.L. and Bushman, C.L. (1988) The early history of cleanliness in America, Journal of American History, 74, 4, 1213–38.

332 | FURTHER READING Cooper, I. (1982) Comfort theory and practice: Barriers to the conservation of energy by building occupants, Applied Energy, 11, 4, 243–88. Crabtree, L. (2006) Disintegrated houses: Exploring ecofeminist housing and urban design options, Antipode, 38, 4, 711–34. Crowley, J.E. (1999) The sensibility of comfort, American Historical Review, 104, 3, 749–82. Day, C. (1990) Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. Thorsons, London. Dowling, R. and Power, E. (2011) Beyond McMansions and green homes: Thinking household sustainability through materialities of homeyness, in Lane, R. and Gorman-Murray, A. (eds) Material Geographies of Household Sustainability. Ashgate, Farnham. Hardyment, C. (1992) Home Comfort: A History of Domestic Arrangements in Association with the National Trust. Viking, London. Hobson, K. (2006) Bins, bulbs, and shower timers: On the ‘techno-ethics’ of sustainable living, Ethics, Place and Environment, 9, 3, 317–36. Ierley, M. (1999) The Comforts of Home: The American House and the Evolution of Modern Convenience. Three Rivers Press, New York. Jarvis, H. (2011) Saving space, sharing time: Integrated infrastructures of daily life in cohousing, Environment and Planning A, 43, 3, 560–77. — (2013) Against the tyranny of single family dwelling: Learning from Christiania at 40, Gender, Place and Culture, 20, 8, 939–59. Nicol, F., Humphreys, M. and Roaf, S. (2012) Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice. Routledge, London.

Peeters, L., de Dear, R., Hensen, J. and D’haeseleer, W. (2009) Thermal comfort in residential buildings: Comfort values and scales for building energy simulation, Applied Energy, 86, 5, 772–80. Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Berg, Oxford. Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Berg, Oxford. — (2010) Beyond the ABC: Climate change policy and theories of social change, Environment and Planning A, 42, 1273–85. Worsley, L. (2011) If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. Faber and Faber, London.

Gender Adler, K.H. and Hamilton, C. (eds) (2010) Homes and Homecoming: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Evan, M. and Williams, C.H. (eds) (2013) Gender: The Key Concepts. Routledge, London. Hayden, D. (1981) The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Menches, C.L. and Abraham, D.M. (2007) Women in construction – Tapping the untapped resource to meet future demands, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 133, 9, 701–7. Ness, K. (2012) Constructing masculinity in the building trades: ‘Most jobs in the construction industry can be done by women’, Gender, Work and Organization, 19, 6, 654–76. Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Berg, Oxford.

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Rendell, J., Penner, B. and Borden, I. (eds) (2000) Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Routledge, London. Roberts, M. (1991) Living in a Man-made World: Gender Assumptions in Modern Housing Design. Routledge, London.

Mobilisation Chambers, N. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Crabtree, L. and Hes, D. (2009) Sustainability uptake in housing in metropolitan Australia: An institutional problem, not a technological one, Housing Studies, 24, 2, 203–24. Faulconbridge, J.R. (2013) Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: Institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 339–53. Hoffman, A.J. and Henn, R. (2008) Overcoming the social and psychological barriers to green building, Organization and Environment, 21, 4, 390–419. King, A. (1984) The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. Routledge, London. Lovell, H. (2005) Supply and demand for low energy housing in the UK: Insights from a science and technology studies approach. Housing Studies, 20, 5, 815–29. — (2008) Discourse and innovation journeys: the case of low energy housing in the UK, Housing Studies, 20, 5, 613–32. May, J. (2010) Handmade Houses and Other Buildings: The World of Vernacular Architecture. Thames and Hudson, London. Seyfang, G. (2010) Grassroots innovations in sustainable housing: Building a

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Community Agyeman, J. (2005) Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice. New York University Press, London. Birnbaum, J. and Fox, L. (2014) Sustainable [R]evolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California. Chatterton, P. (2015) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Routledge, Abingdon. Dawson, J. (2006) Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability. Schumacher Briefings, Green Books, Totnes, Devon. Fosket, J. and Mamo, L. (2009) Living Green: Communities That Sustain. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. Halbach, D. (2005) The rainbow power of community, in Peters, V. and Stengel, M. (eds) Europtopia: Intentional Communities and Ecovillages in Europe. Ökodorf Sieben Linden, p.28. Hockerton Housing Project (2001) The Sustainable Community: A Practical Guide. Hockerton Housing Project, Nottinghamshire. Jones, L. (2014) Living-with others, living-with an ‘eco-homes’: From frustration to transformation in an eco-development, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 16, 2, 221–40.

334 | FURTHER READING Klinker, S. (2004) Shelter and sustainable development, in Kennedy, J.F. (ed.) Building Without Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada, pp.5–30. Laughton, R. (2008) Surviving and Thriving on the Land: How to Use Your Time and Energy to Run a Successful Smallholding. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. Leafe Christian, D. (2003) Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. Litfin, K.T. (2014) Eco-villages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. Polity Press, Cambridge. Lockyer, J. and Veteto, J. (eds) (2012) Localizing Environmental Anthropology: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillage Design for a Sustainable Future. Berghahn Books, Oxford. Marckmann, B., Gram-Hanssen, K. and Haunstrup Christensen, T. (2012) Sustainable living and co-housing: Evidence from a case study of ecovillages, Built Environment, 38, 3, 413–29. Martin Bang, J. (2005) Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities. Floris Books, Edinburgh. — (2007) Growing Eco-Communities: Practical Ways to Create Sustainability. Floris Books, Edinburgh. Meltzer, G. (2005) Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model. Trafford, Crewe, Cheshire. Metcalf, W. (2004) The Findhorn Book of Community Living. Findhorn Press, Forres, Scotland. Middlemiss, L. and Parrish, B.D. (2010) Building capacity for low-carbon

communities: The role of grassroots initiatives, Energy Policy, 38, 12, 7559–66. Miles, M. (2008) Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements. Routledge, London. Moss Kanter, R. (1972) Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Harvard University Press, London. Sargisson, L. (2012) Second-wave cohousing: A modern utopia?, Utopian Studies, 23, 1, 28–56. — (2007) Strange places: Estrangement, utopianism, and intentional communities, Utopian Studies, 18, 3, 393–424. Schwarz, W. and Schwarz, D. (1998) Living Lightly: Travels in Post-Consumer Society. Jon Carpenter Publishing, Oxfordshire. Seyfang, G. (2010) Community action for sustainable housing: Building a low-carbon future, Energy Policy, 38, 7624–33. Van Schyndel Kasper, D. (2008) Redefining community in the ecovillage, Human Ecology Review, 15, 1, 12–24. Wimbush, P. (2012) The Birth of an Ecovillage: Adventures in an Alternative World. FeedARead Publishing, London. Woolley, T. (2013) Low Impact Building: Housing Using Renewable Materials. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Future Bergman, N., Whitmarsh, L. and Köhler, J. (2008) Transition to sustainable development in the UK housing sector: From case study to model implementation, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Working Paper 120. Chambers, N.B. (2011) Urban Green: Architecture for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

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Chatterton, P. (2014) Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building. Earthscan, Oxford. Cole, R.J., Brown, Z. and McKay, S. (2010) Building human agency: A timely manifesto, Building Research and Information, 38, 3, 339–50. Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) (2010) Improving the Design of New Housing: What Role for Standards? CABE, London. Cotterell, J. and Dadeby, A. (2012) The Passivhaus Handbook: A Practical Guide to Constructing and Retrofitting Buildings for Ultra-low Energy Performance. Green Books, Totnes, Devon. Crabtree, L. and Hes, D. (2009) Sustainability uptake in housing in metropolitan Australia: An institutional problem, not a technological one, Housing Studies, 24, 2, 203–24. Datta, A. (2012) India’s eco-city? Environment, urbanization, and mobility in the making of Lavasa, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 30, 6, 982–96. Diacon, D., Pattison, B. and Vine, J. (2009) The Future of Housing: Rethinking the UK Housing System for the Twenty-first Century. Building and Social Housing Foundation report, Coalville. Dunster, B., Simmons, C. and Gilbert, B. (2008) The ZED Book: Solutions for a Shrinking World. Taylor and Francis, Abingdon.

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Goodier, C. and Pan, W. (2010) The Future of UK Housebuilding. RICS Research Report: http://www. rics.org/Global/Downloads/RICS_ Research_-_The_Future_of_UK_ Housebuilding.pdf. Gottfried, D. (2014) Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the World’s Largest Industry. Morgan James Publishing, New York. Kibert, C.J. (2013) Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 3rd edn. Kraftl, P. (2014) Liveability and urban architectures: mol(ecul)ar biopower and the ‘becoming lively’ of sustainable communities, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 2, 274–92. Sage, D. (2013) ‘Danger building site – keep out!?’: A critical agenda for geographical engagement with contemporary construction industries, Social and Cultural Geography, 14, 2, 168–91. Williams, J. (2012) Zero Carbon Homes: A Road Map. Routledge, London. Williams, K. and Dair, C. (2007) What is stopping sustainable building in England? Barriers experienced by stakeholders in delivering sustainable developments, Sustainable Development, 15, 135–47. WWF and TCPA (2003) Executive Summary: How to Plan and Construct New Housing for the 21st Century. A Sustainable Housing Forum report, WWF-UK and Town and Country Planning Association.

IN D E X

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures/illustrations and those in bold to tables. adaptation, to local conditions, 199–200, 202–6, 207, 208–9 adobe eco-homes: benefits, 198–200; Casa Tierra, Argentina, 196–200, 197; geographical spread, 195–6; methods, 195–6; Pun Pun (Chiang Mai), 101–3, 102, 200–206, 203, 204, 205; Taos Pueblo, 186–7, 186, 196 aesthetics, 24, 47, 58, 59, 101–3, 102, 255 affordability, 122–47; calculations, 124; and choice of home, 57–8, 58; and comfort, 147; definitions, 124–5; and lifecycle costs, 144; and maintenance costs, 144; and quality, 139–40, 145; recommendations, 144–6; rent, 125 Agyeman, J., 216–17 Alexander, Christopher, 74 Alternative/Appropriate Technology movement, 74–6, 76, 77 Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center (New Mexico), 129, 175–6 anarchism, 72–3 architecture: community architecture, 69–74; continuum of space, 55; and deconstruction, 261; and eco-design, 258; Modernist, 78–86, 101; Pattern Language, 73–4; vernacular designs, 63–4, 65–9, 171, 267; visible demonstration of conservationist ideals, 222; and women, 85–6, 170–71 Australia: and climate change, 19; custom building, 6; house sizes, 29, 30 ‘Autarkic House’, 75 back-to-the-land movements, 103, 117 Badran, Rasem, 81 Bang, Martin, 220, 233, 246 bathing/bathrooms: bucket washes, 157, 164; and cleanliness, 165–6; and comfort, 154, 164–8; communal facilities, 153, 166; Green Hills, 157; health and image, 153; historical evolution, 152–4, 164;

Landmatters, 158–9, 160; overseas prioritisation, 148, 161–4; place of leisure and privacy, 149, 153–4, 153; Tinkers Bubble, 161, 161; water supply, 162–4, 162 Bauersfield, Walter, 82 Beck, R.J., 51–2 Becquerel, Edmund, 78 BedZED (London), 62, 76, 77, 265 behaviour, 43–7, 138 Belgium, self-build, 6 Berker, T., 154 Bermann, K., 58–9 biomass boilers, 34 Blunt, A., 52 Boardman, B., 42 body, the, 172–4 Bone, K., 78–9 Bookchin, Murray, 73 Borer, P., 17, 24 Brand, S., 47 Britain: age of housing stock, 38; ecohousing checklist, 47–8; empty homes, 43; Green Deal, 42; house prices, 125; house sizes, 29–30, 30, 61; housing affordability, 125; low eco-home building, 188; self-build, 6; zero carbon homes policy, 18, 24, 87 Broekhans, B., 193 Broer, S., 6, 57 Brown-Saracino, J., 100 Buckminster Fuller, Richard, 81–2, 82, 83, 85 Bueren, E. van, 193 buildability, 262 building: benefits and limitations of collective building, 223; physics of, 249–50; shared process at Lama Foundation, 226; visible demonstration of conservationist ideals, 222 building costs: affordable eco-homes, 131–2; economies of scale, 227–8; and infrastructure, 224; key costs, 126–9, 126, 127; processes, 130; reduction solutions,

INDEX 135, 140, 142–3, 143, 223–4; two-storey house, 128, 128; see also labour costs building design: cultural considerations, 54–5, 261; exclusion of social aspects, 60; and gender, 177–8; and heat loss and gain, 25–6, 26; inflexibility of current houses, 20–21; learning by failure, 209; limited choice, 55–6; nostalgia for the past, 61–2; women’s role, 171; see also architecture building industry: carbon emissions, 4, 18; Earthships, 169, 179; and gender, 178–82; ‘human scale’, 107; land banking, 129; range of knowledges, 189; risk-averse nature, 55–6, 147, 257–8; waste, 17; women’s marginalisation, 171–2 building materials: adaptation to local conditions, 199–200, 209; and bodily engagement, 179–80; case study summary, 271–3; concrete, 85; costs, 127, 127; embodied energy, 27–8; experimentation, 85, 268; natural materials, 66, 67, 114; and planning regulations, 145–6; recycled materials, 39, 76–7, 138–9; see also adobe ecohomes; straw-bale methods building regulations, 56, 134, 136, 236–7, 263 building skills, for income, 233 bungalows, 26, 194 Canada, house size and embodied energy, 30 capitalism, 147 Caprotti, F., 269 carbon emissions, 4, 18–19, 24, 39, 40, 87 Carlsson, C., 119 Cartright, Rob, 40–42, 44, 47, 255 Casa Tierra (Argentina), 176, 179, 196–200, 197 case studies: geographical spread, 8; participatory action research (PAR) approach, 8–11; selection criteria, 7, 9; summary, 271–3 Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales), 69, 71, 76 Chambers, N., 48, 99, 213, 260–61 Charlotte’s house, 32, 181 Chatterton, P., 220–21 Chookong, Yaowadee, 201, 202–6 circulation of knowledge, 193–4, 193, 207, 208; see also mobilisation

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City Repair Project (Portland, Oregon), 109–114, 110, 113, 120, 138–9, 176 cleanliness, 165–6 climate: and energy requirements, 26, 34–5; and flooding, 67, 260, 264, 264; Middle Eastern houses, 79–80; and place, 95–9; pre-Columbian Cuban houses, 67; rainy climates, 97; regions, 96; and thermal comfort, 151 climate change, 18–19, 264 co-housing, 61, 220, 224, 243–4, 248; see also eco-communities co-operative living, 76 cob construction, 25, 67–8 Coenen, L., 192 Cole, R.J., 44, 48 Coles, B., 90 Colombia Eco-Village (Oregon), 97, 131, 176 Combined heat and power (CHP), 34 comfort, 148–68; and affordability, 147; and bathing/bathrooms, 154, 164–8; and cleanliness, 154, 165–6; collective and shared, 257; corporeal comfort, 152; current expectations, 261; and ecohomes, 154–6; and the home, 58; and manual effort, 155; perceptions of, 148–9, 150–52, 168; and sustainable living, 157; and temperature, 154–5; thermal comfort, 150–51, 166; versus ecological impact, 17 commons, 217–18, 247–8 communal facilities: bathing, 153, 166; Dignity Village, 138; economies of scale, 227, 230, 231, 248; Peninsula Park Commons, 232, 233 communal space, 146 communes, 220 community: multiple meanings, 216–17; see also eco-communities community architecture, 69–74 connectedness, 249 construction industry see building industry construction materials see building materials convenience, 58 Cooper, J., 67 Crestone (South Colorado), 132–6, 133, 176 Crowley, J.E., 150 Crystal Palace, 78 Cuba, pre-Columbian houses, 67 cultural heritage, 261

338 | INDEX culture, and the home, 52, 54–5 Currumbin, Australia, 227 Dale, Simon, 235, 236 Dancing Rabbit (Missouri), 247 Dawson, J., 245 Day, Christopher, 69, 99–100, 103–4, 107, 152 decision-making, 221, 241–3, 248 deconstruction, 261 deep green movement, 74–6, 76, 77, 86–7 demolition, vs retrofitting, 42–3 diaspora, 52, 53 Diego’s house (Argentina), 196–200 Dignity Village (Portland, Oregon), 136–40, 137, 138, 176 disasters, passive survivability, 266 diversity, 238–41, 248, 261, 262 Doleman, Lydia, 238–9 Doshi, Balkrishna, 83, 84, 85 Dowling, R., 52 Dunster, Bill, 76, 77 durability, 58 Duyvendak, J.W., 51 Dymaxion Deployment Unit, 81, 83 Dymaxion House, 81, 82 Earthaven eco-village (North Carolina), 245 Earthships, 23; bathrooms, 162; building experience, 169, 179; longevity, 25; New Mexico desert, 75; no running costs, 122; Taos (New Mexico), 123; woman selfbuilder, 181 ‘eco-bling’, 35 eco-cities, 265 eco-communities, 215–52; aspirations, 217, 250; diversity and inclusivity, 238–41, 248, 261, 262; economies of scale, 227; lessons for the future, 247–52; mutual support, 237–8; positive attributes, 221; problems, 221–2, 251; purposeful estrangement, 240–41; types, 220; worldwide listing, 218–19 eco-homes: barriers and enablers, 189–91, 189–90; diversity, 47, 266, 267; forms and functions, 5, 21–5, 22, 23; future directions, 265–8; key findings, 255–6; measures to encourage, 262–4; and neighbourhood integration, 267–8; problems, 61, 255; purpose, 17, 255 eco-minimalism, 36–7, 48

eco-villages, 218, 220 La Ecoaldea Del Michal (Spain), 127, 164 economic significance, of housing, 52 ecotopias, 155, 165 El Valle de Sensaciones (Spain), 23, 101–3, 102, 162, 163 elderly people, 239, 262 electrical appliances, reduction in use, 37 embodied energy, 27–8, 30, 30 embodiment, 172–4, 184–5 emotions: and the home, 52, 55, 57, 58; and place, 91–2, 92, 101 empty homes, 43 energy: embodied energy, 27–8, 30, 30; offgrid technologies, 34; and waste, 17 energy consumption: and housing size, 30–33; and human behaviour, 43–7 energy efficiency: and design, 25–6, 26; and house size, 29–33, 30, 31, 33; increased demand, 266 energy sources: Green Hills, 157; Landmatters, 158; limited technology used for bathing, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164–5; Tinkers Bubble, 160 England, self-build, 6 environmental issues, 45–8, 50, 221 Eräranta, K., 170 Evans, Ianto, 68, 129 exclusion, and place, 100, 106–7, 113 Farmer, J., 78–9 Fathy, Hassan, 79–81, 85 Faulconbridge, J.R., 188, 194–5, 208–9, 213 Featherstone, D., 108 finance: barriers and enablers for ecohomes, 190; benefits of eco-homes, 1; house as financial investment, 130–31; maintenance and lifecycle costs, 144; support mechanisms, 263; see also affordability; building costs; labour costs; land, purchase costs Findhorn Eco Village (Scotland): co-operative living, 76; communal laundry, 227; ecohomes, 77, 216; housing inequality, 215; privacy vs sharing, 243–4, 244 flooding, 67, 260, 264, 264 Fosket, J., 247, 248 France: age of housing stock, 38; self-build, 6 Friedman, A.T., 86 Fuller, Richard Buckminster, 81–2, 82, 83, 85

INDEX Galleria Vittorio Emaneule II (Milan), 78 Ganas Community, New York, 230 gardening, 183 Geels, F., 191 gender, 169–85; assumptions, 174; and building, 178–82; and eco-communities, 170; and embodiment, 172–4; and gardening, 183; in/visibility of women’s contributions, 182–4; opportunities for change, 184–5, 239; stereotypes, 169–70; and strength, 175–7; see also women geodesic domes, 82 Germany: age of housing stock, 38; co-housing, 245 Gilman, R., 216 Gomes, Richard, 245 Gorman-Murray, A., 172 Gottfried, D., 258 governance, 221, 241–3, 248 Green Deal, 42 Green Hills (Scotland), 253–4, 253; background, 156–7; bathing arrangements, 157; communal washing, 148; gender and gardening, 183; hidden from detection, 127 green movement, deep green movement, 74–6, 76, 77, 86–7 green space, desire for, 58 Greenwood, D., 213 Grosz, E., 173 Guy, S., 22 Halfacree, K., 103, 117 Hardyment, C., 152 Harris, C., 17, 24 Hart, Kelly, 132–4 Hawkes, D., 78–9, 85 health, and bathing, 153 heat pumps, 34 Heathcote, E., 61 heating, 19–20, 20, 25–6, 26, 34, 99 Hedgehog Housing Project (Brighton), 69, 71, 72, 246 Henry, Alix, 21, 177, 183 high rise buildings, 84 historical site, home as, 52 Hockerton Housing Project (Nottinghamshire), 76, 131, 227, 250; see also Newark retrofit home, 49–62; demands and desires, 57–62,

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58; multidimensional concept, 51–4, 52; and the senses, 152; vs houses, 12, 51–2, 54–5 homeless people, Dignity Village, 136–40 house prices, 20; Britain, 125 housing: as financial investment, 130–31; heat leakage, 19–20, 20; traditional English cottages, 49–50, 49; vs homes, 12, 51–2, 54–5; zero carbon homes policy, 18, 24, 87 Housing Affordability Index (HAI), 124 Housing Associations, 147 human behaviour, 43–7, 138 Humphreys, M., 151 Hundertwasser-Haus, 101 hydro-electric power, 34 identity, and place, 89 inclusivity, 261, 262 India: Ahmedabad University, 83, 84; Monol system, 79 infrastructures, 126–7, 224, 260–61 innovation, 207, 208 internships, 206 Italy, age of housing stock, 38 Jackson, H., 220 Jacobs, J., 54, 90, 100, 194 Jacobson, Kirsten, 179, 181, 183–4 Janda, K.B., 258 Jandai, Jon, 201, 202–3, 203, 206 Japan: eco-building, 57; family-centred privacy, 59 Jarvis, H., 220–21, 243 Jasok Gansmo, H., 154 Jenkins, D.P., 42 Johnson, J.T., 91, 93, 94 Johnson, M., 64 Jones, Barbara, 76 Jones, L., 237 Kailash eco-village (Portland, Oregon): bike parking, 238; communal laundry, 227; community spirit, 241; converted apartments, 26–7, 27; decision-making, 242–3; energy efficiency, 27 Kapoor, Janell, 196 Kibert, C.J., 258 Killip, G., 258 King, A., 194

340 | INDEX Kitezh, Russia, 240 Kleiwerks, 196 knowledge: circulation of knowledge, 193–4, 193, 207, 208; professional knowledge, 189, 245–7, 258–9; shared networks, 262; see also mobilisation Koinonia Farm, Georgia, 240 Kraftl, P., 90, 101, 155–6, 165 Kropotkin, Peter, 73 La Ecoaldea Del Michal (Spain), 127, 164 Labbe, Jim, 232 labour costs, 127, 128–9, 144, 224–7, 244, 250 Lakeman, Mark, 111–12, 114, 120, 137, 139, 140, 177 Lama Foundation (New Mexico): bath, 162, 163; eclectic mix of eco-homes, 23, 162; location and land value, 129; maintenance problems, 227, 245; propane gas, 164; quiet space, 243; spiritual centre, 225–6, 225; and womenonly building, 180–81, 181 Lammas Eco Village (Wales): collective responsibility, 235; houses, 115, 116, 236; local opposition, 117–18; low impact development, 114–15; planning permission, 233–5; problems with building regulations, 236–7; reclaimed farmland, 116–17; residents’ vision, 115–16; and value of place, 118–20 land: communal ownership, 145; land banking, 129; purchase costs, 127, 129–30; for self-build, 146 The Land is Ours, 129 land price, and planning permission, 129 Landmatters (Devon): background, 157–8; bathhouse, 159, 160; compost toilets, 158, 159; kitchen, 158; Rooh’s house, 32–3, 33 Larsen, S.C., 91, 93, 94, 100 Las Alpujarras, Spain, 63–4, 63 Le Corbusier, 79, 83 Leafe Christian, D., 220, 245 Liddell, H., 35, 37, 48 lifecycle costs, 144 light, desire for, 58 LILAC (Low Impact Living Affordable Community) (Leeds): communal laundry, 227; cost reductions, 142–3,

143; interaction with others, 104–5, 105; mutual co-ownership, 141–2, 142, 224; straw-bale homes, 141; urban location, 62, 265 Lim, Jimmy, 84, 85 Litfin, K.T., 170, 216, 220, 222, 243 Livesey, K., 171 Living Building Challenge, 266, 267 localism, 107–8, 111–12 location: and choice of home, 57, 58, 62; see also place Longhurst, N., 107 Longhurst, R., 173 Los Angeles eco-village, 230, 231 Low Impact Development movement, 220; Lammas project, 114–20, 115, 116; and planning regulations, 127, 145; principles, 87, 114 McCloud, K., 150 McFarlane, C., 258–9 McHarg, Ian, 82–3 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 79 maintenance: costs, 144; labour requirements, 227, 245 Malpas, J., 91, 93 Mamo, L., 247, 248 Manning, F., 119 Manzella, J.C., 239 Marres, N., 51 Martin, B., 86 Matavenero, Spain, 106–7 materials see building materials Matrix (co-operative ), 171 memory, 52, 92, 94 Metcalf, W., 220–21, 239, 243 mobilisation, 186–214; adaptation to local conditions, 199–200, 202–6, 207, 208–9; adobe eco-homes, 195–6; barriers and enablers, 189–91, 189–90; Casa Tierra, Argentina, 196–200; learning from the past, 248–9; meaning of term, 187–8; potential pitfalls, 206; processes, 191–5; Pun Pun (Chiang Mai), 101–3, 200–206; spaces of circulation, 193–4, 193, 207, 208; and support networks, 212 Modernist movement, 78–86, 101 Mohammadpourkarbasi, H., 42 Monol system, 79

INDEX Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS), 141–2, 142, 145 Nathalia’s house (Argentina), 196–200 National Custom & Self Build Association (NaCSBA), 128 Natural Resources Defense Council, 144 neoliberalism, 144 Netherlands, age of housing stock, 38 new urbanism, 104–6 New Zealand, house size and embodied energy, 30 Newark retrofit, 40, 41, 46, 255; see also Cartright, Rob Newbery, L., 173 nostalgia, 61–2, 92, 103 old people, 239, 262 Oliver, P., 65–6, 192 open plan living, 59 Organo, V., 45, 170 Ornetzeder, M., 44 Osborn, S., 22 Panya Project (Chiang Mai): and building materials, 179–80; communal living, 230; creativity, 25; and gender, 181–2; housing, 230, 231; layout, 229; rainy climate, 97; shower block, 161, 163; strength needed for building, 175–6; transient place, 228–30 Papanek, V., 75 Passivhaus, 28, 28, 40, 44, 265–6 Pattern Language, 73–4 Pelsmakers, S., 42, 263 Peninsula Park Commons (Portland, Oregon), 231–3, 232, 234 People’s Co-Operative (Portland, Oregon), 68 Peros, M., 67 photovoltaic panels, 34, 35, 35, 78 Pink, S., 152 place, 88–121; and climate, 95–9; concepts, 90–95; and exclusion, 100, 106–7, 113; feelings and emotions, 91–2, 92, 101; importance for eco-building, 88–9, 120, 256–7; as interaction, 103–6; localism, 107–8, 111–12; and natural world, 92–4; and openness, 94; rainy climates, 97; and remaking, 99–103, 118–19

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placemaking, 90–91, 100, 111–12, 120 planning applications, 117–19, 121 planning permission, 127, 129, 157–8, 233–5, 253–4 planning regulations, 125, 127–8, 145, 145–6, 189, 198 ‘plotlands’, 72 political site, home as, 52 Portland, Oregon: cob vernacular tradition, 68; see also City Repair Project; Dignity Village; Kailash eco-village; Peninsula Park Commons; Rebuild Center; Sabin Green prefabricated systems, 141, 143, 146 privacy: and bathrooms, 149, 166; and the home, 52, 58–9, 58; provision for, 243–4 professional fees, 127 professional knowledge, 189, 245–7, 258–9 Pun Pun (Chiang Mai), 101–3, 102, 200–206, 203, 204, 205 Putnam, T., 127 quality, and affordability, 139–40, 145 RayMan model, 151 ReBuild Center (Portland, Oregon), 68, 127 recycled materials, 39, 76–7, 138–9 Reents, Peggy, 201, 202–3, 203 rent: affordability, 125; security of tenure, 53 retrofitting and renovation, 38–43; and carbon emissions, 39, 40; case studies, 7–8; costs, 40–43; diversity of processes, 38–9; and economies of scale, 40–42; inadequate, 42; with new build, 43; and regenerative design, 39; social housing, 40; vernacular tradition, 68; vs demolition, 42–3 Reynolds, Mike, 66, 75, 122, 178–9, 209 Roaf, S., 47, 99, 151 Rodman, Critchlow, 239 Rohracher, H., 44 Rooh’s house, 32–3, 33 Rose, D., 93 Rybczynski, W., 150, 152 Sabin Green (Portland, Oregon), 242, 249 Sack, R.D., 90, 91, 93 Salomon, S., 171 Sargisson, L., 218, 220–21, 240–41 Saville, Jasmine, 235

342 | INDEX Schwarz, W. and D., 220 security, and the home, 58 Segal, Walter, 69–72, 71 self-build: back-to-the-land movements, 103; building costs, 130; definitions, 6; in Europe, 6; hidden cost of labour, 128–9, 144, 224, 244, 250; land allocated for, 146; Lewisham Self-Build Housing Association, 70; United States, 76–7; vernacular architecture, 66; within new developments, 268 Seyfang, G., 191, 222, 235 sharing, 61 Sharpe, S., 172 Sharples, S., 42 Shelley (Panya Project), 175, 178, 181–2 Shove, E., 55, 150, 153, 154 showering, 154, 161, 163 Simonsen, K., 173 single-occupancy dwellings, 20 size: and communal space, 146; and energy use, 30–33; housing trends, 29–30, 30, 61 small house movement, 31–3 Smiley, Linda, 68 Smith, A., 60, 74–5, 191, 235 Smith, S., 54 social housing, 40 social sustainability, 247–50 socio-cultural aspects, of eco-communities, 190, 221 solar energy, 34, 78, 96–9, 98; passive solar energy, 21, 28, 28 Sólheimar (Iceland), 240 Spain: age of housing stock, 38; Matavenero, 106–7 Sparke, P., 86 Spevak, Eli, 43, 223 Steele, J., 78–9, 85 straw-bale methods, 76, 116, 139, 141, 180, 222–3, 253, 264 Sullivan-Catlin, H., 244 Sweden, self-build, 6 Taggart, J., 39, 99, 119, 149 Taos (New Mexico), 123, 186–7, 186, 196 technologies: adoption barriers and enablers, 189–90; appropriate use of, 33–8; control interfaces, 45, 46; demands on occupants, 60–61; limitations,

2–3; preference for, 259–60, 265; reinterpretation, 194 temperature: adobe homes, 203–4; comfort in eco-homes, 154–5; homogeneity, 154; thermal comfort, 150–51, 166 tenure, security of, 53 termites, 203 thermal comfort, 150–51, 166 Thom Wheeler’s house, 186–7, 186 Thoreau, Henry David, 73 timber frame buildings, 69–70, 71 Tinkers Bubble (Somerset): background, 159– 60; bathhouse, 161, 161, 167; Charlotte’s house, 32, 181; communal kitchen, 160; size and energy efficiency, 32, 32–3 tiny homes movement, 31–3 Tir y Gafel see Lammas Eco Village (Wales) Titheridge, H., 6, 57 toilets, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162 training, 138–9, 169, 180–81 Twin Oaks (Virginia), 246 United Nations, Local Agenda 21 programme, 107 United States: age of housing stock, 38; building regulations, 134; Dymaxion Deployment Unit, 81, 83; empty homes, 43; house sizes, 29, 30; housing affordability, 125, 126; self-builds from reclaimed materials, 76–7; solar power and the military, 78 urban areas, 62, 265; new urbanism, 104–6; and shared public spaces, 109–114, 110, 113 El Valle de Sensaciones (Spain), 23, 101–3, 102, 162, 163 Vannini, P., 39, 99, 119, 149 ventilation, 204, 205 vernacular architecture, 63–4, 65–9, 171, 267 El Wakil, Abdel Wahed, 81 Wales: vernacular traditional buildings, 67; see also Centre for Alternative Technology; Lammas Eco Village Walker, L., 86 Ward, Colin, 72–3 waste, sources of, 17 water resources: for bathing, 162–4, 162; conservation, 19, 45; Green Hills, 157;

INDEX Landmatters, 158–9; net zero water, 266, 267; springwater, 164; Tinkers Bubble, 160 well-being, 249 Wheeler, Thom, 186–7, 186 Whitcroft, A., 125 Williams, J., 2, 131, 155, 189, 220–21, 262 Wimbush, Paul, 117, 220 wind energy, 34, 34, 37, 40, 227; malqaf (wind catchers), 80, 80 window opening, 44 Wines, J., 24, 222 women: and architecture, 85–6, 170–71;

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and building design, 171; construction industry marginalisation, 171–2; as homemaker, 52–3, 174; household tasks, 45, 73; in/visibility of contributions, 182–4; leakiness, 173–4; and strength, 169, 175–7; training and workshops, 180–81 Wood, D., 51–2 Woolley, T., 245–6, 250 workshops, 180–81, 196–7, 200 Wrench, Tony, 224 zero carbon housing, 18, 24, 87