Shrinking Housing’s Environmental Footprint

Identifying and promoting practical measures that all building stock owners (cooperatives, institutional owners, private owners etc.), public authorities and tenants can implement to reduce the use of primary resources for housing.

Housing plays a significant role in the transition towards a more sustainable economy. Improvements in its material and associated environmental footprint can be achieved in several areas: (i) the amount of floor space used per person (space efficiency); (ii) the resource efficiency and recycling potential of the building stock itself (building efficiency), and (iii) the lifecycle resource efficiency of the appliances used (equipment efficiency).

The main goal of the project is to identify and promote practical measures that all building stock owners (cooperatives, institutional owners, private owners, etc.), public authorities and tenants can implement to reduce the use of primary resources for housing – in other words, shrinking housing’s environmental footprint (SHEF). These SHEF measures cover the construction, use, and refurbishment phases of buildings. They must be effective while preserving the social and economic qualities of housing: livability, affordability, full cost coverage or return on investment. 

To fulfill this goal, we combine methodologies from the natural and social sciences. A major feature is the inclusion of two housing cooperative associations – ABZ, Zurich and SCHL, Lausanne – and the insurer and asset manager Swiss Mobiliar as project partners, whose housing stock (approx. 10,000 apartments) are studied in depth.

More specifically, we proceed as follows:

• We perform a detailed survey of the current status of the building and occupant inventories and their respective historical evolution of our three project partners. In line with this analysis, we quantify resource requirements and their environmental impact using a dynamic material flow analysis.
• We investigate the determinants of the decision of tenants to move (why? how often?) and for the choice of a new accommodation (where? how large?), and explore the factors playing a role in owner’s decision to rebuild or demolish (why? how often?).
• Based on these data we will (i) develop an agent-based model (ABM) coupling tenants’ decisions with those of the owners, (ii) develop measures to improve resource efficiency with our partners and their tenants, and (iii) simulate a range of development and resource-efficient paths using dynamic modelling.
• Results will therefore be in terms of potential paths for sustainable living, based on effective and consensus-based recommendations, whose impacts on comfort, costs, returns and resource consumption are modelled and made transparent.

I contributed to this research with my doctoral project –Towards sustainability through the housing function: The decision-making system of tenants in Switzerland–.