The Sustainable Housing Challenge

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter explores historic, current, and future challenges that are contributing to holding back a sustainable housing transition. In doing this, we highlight a range of challenges across different domains (e.g., technical, financial, knowledge, practice). The intent of this chapter is to present some of the common challenges to help us develop an understanding of the types of things we need to address in order to scale up the provision of sustainable housing. Some of these challenges are deeply complex and play out differently at different scales. We discuss the various challenges around the scales where decisions are typically made: the dwelling scale, the neighbourhood and city scale, and the state, national and international scale. We follow this with a discussion of the wider residential market and the unwillingness to change and the complexity of housing.