ECO-Homes

It is widely understood that good affordable eco-housing needs to be at the heart of any attempts to mitigate or adapt to climate change. This is the first book to comprehensively explore eco-housing from a social and political perspective. It starts from the premise that we already know how to build good eco-houses and we already have the technology to retrofit existing housing. Yet relatively few eco-houses are being built. Featuring over thirty case studies of eco-housing in Britain, Spain, Thailand, Argentina and the USA, this book conceives (eco-)housing as significantly more than the physical structure alone and explores the ongoing dynamic relationships between people and their homes. By taking this novel social approach The Politics and Sociology of Eco-Homes examines the ways in which radical change to our houses (such as potentially making them more temporary, using natural materials, or relying on manual heating and ventilation systems) requires social changes in how we live.As such it argues that it is not technology, or even politics, which is holding us back in mitigating or adapting to climate change, it is deep rooted cultural and social understandings of how we live and what we expect houses to do for us.