Living in an active home: household dynamics and unintended consequences

Shirani, Fiona, O’Sullivan, Kate, Henwood, Karen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4631-5468, Hale, Rachel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4248-0391 and Pidgeon, Nick ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8991-0398 2022. Living in an active home: household dynamics and unintended consequences. Buildings and Cities 3 (1) , 589–604. 10.5334/bc.216

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Abstract

To meet UK decarbonisation and climate change targets, significant changes to existing and future housing stock will be required. The development of Active Buildings has the potential to contribute to meeting these targets. Active Homes, as a particular type of Active Building, alter how energy is produced, distributed and consumed, as well as how homes are designed, constructed and then lived in. Before occupation, Active Homes are designed and developed around imaginary users, yet residents do not always live in the homes in ways envisaged by developers. This paper draws on data from a qualitative longitudinal study involving in-depth interviews with Active Home inhabitants and developers across five UK case sites. Interviews elucidate how developers envisage future residents and their assumptions about how people will live. As the household is a particularly gendered sphere of society, three qualitative longitudinal case studies are then presented to explore the way gender interweaves with women’s experiences of Active Home residence. Expert visions do not always fully encompass the gendered household dynamics of everyday life. Implications are drawn from how these Active Homes are experienced and lived in: what considerations developers can give to the design, controls and information that are more tailored to residents’ needs.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) Psychology
Additional Information:	This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
ISSN:	2632-6655
Funders:	EPSRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 August 2022
Date of Acceptance:	2 July 2022
Last Modified:	26 May 2023 18:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/151905

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