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This open access book explores the environmental, social, and financial challenges of housing provision, and the urgent need for a sustainable housing transition. The authors explore how market failures have impacted the scaling up of sustainable housing and the various policy attempts to address this. Going beyond an environmental focus, the book explores a range of housing-related challenges including social justice and equity issues. Sustainability transitions theory is presented as a framework to help facilitate a sustainable housing transition and a range of contemporary case studies are explored on issues including high performing housing, small housing, shared housing, neighbourhood-scale housing, circular housing, and innovative financing for housing. It is an important new resource that challenges policy makers, planners, housing construction industry stakeholders, and researchers to rethink what housing is, how we design and construct it, and how we can better integrate impacts on households to wider policy development.
While politicians talk about sustainable housing, thousands of individuals, groups and organisations are busy putting ideas into practice now pushing the boundaries to cut carbon emissions far beyond government targets. Where are the examples we can all learn from, and how are they bringing sustainable housing closer to reality in our communities? What are the obstacles to making low-carbon housing the norm rather than the rare exception? Which housing associations are building Passivhaus homes for the elderly? Which councils are leading the way? Local Sustainable Homes covers everythin
US cities are faced with the joint challenge of our climate crisis and the lack of housing that is affordable and healthy. Our housing stock contributes significantly to the changing climate, with residential buildings accounting for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. US housing is not only unhealthy for the planet, it is putting the physical and financial health of residents at risk. Our housing system means that a renter working 40 hours a week and earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any US county. In Gray to Green Communities, green affordable housing expert Dana Bourland argues that we need to move away from a gray housing model to a green model, which considers the health and well-being of residents, their communities, and the planet. She demonstrates that we do not have to choose between protecting our planet and providing housing affordable to all. Bourland draws from her experience leading the Green Communities Program at Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development intermediary. Her work resulted in the first standard for green affordable housing which was designed to deliver measurable health, economic, and environmental benefits. The book opens with the potential of green affordable housing, followed by the problems that it is helping to solve, challenges in the approach that need to be overcome, and recommendations for the future of green affordable housing. Gray to Green Communities brings together the stories of those who benefit from living in green affordable housing and examples of Green Communities’ developments from across the country. Bourland posits that over the next decade we can deliver on the human right to housing while reaching a level of carbon emissions reductions agreed upon by scientists and demanded by youth. Gray to Green Communities will empower and inspire anyone interested in the future of housing and our planet.
This volume analyzes sustainability-related innovations in the building sector and discusses how regional contexts articulate transition trajectories toward green building. It presents ‘biographies’ of drivers and processes of green building innovation in four case studies: Brisbane (AUS), Freiburg (GER), Luxembourg (LU), and Vancouver (CA). Two of them are relatively well known for their initiatives to mitigate climate change – particularly in the building sector, whereas the other two have only recently become more active in promoting green building. The volume places emphasis on development paths, learning processes, and innovations. The focus of the case studies is not restricted to purely technological aspects but also integrates regulatory, procedural, institutional, and other processes and routines and their influence on the variations of the building sector. The diversity of the selected case studies offers the reader the opportunity to gain a thorough understanding of how sustainability developments have unfolded in different city regions. Case study-specific catalogues of transition paths provide insights to inform policy debates and planning processes. The catalogues identify crucial innovations (technological, regulatory, etc.) and explain the factors and circumstances that have led to their success and broader acceptance in Freiburg, Vancouver, Luxembourg, and Brisbane. With the help of a number of micro case studies within each of the four city regions, the case studies also offer ground for comparison and identification of differences. The book represents the outcome of the GreenRegio project, which stands for ‘Green building in regional strategies for sustainability: multi-actor governance and innovative building technologies in Europe, Australia, and Canada.’ GreenRegio was a 3-year CORE-INTER research project funded by the National Research Fund Luxembourg (FNR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
With transitions to more sustainable ways of living already underway, this book examines how we understand the underlying dynamics of the transitions that are unfolding. Without this understanding, we enter the future in a state of informed bewilderment. Every day we are bombarded by reports about ecosystem breakdown, social conflict, economic stagnation and a crisis of identity. There is mounting evidence that deeper transitions are underway that suggest we may be entering another period of great transformation equal in significance to the agricultural revolution some 13,000 years ago or the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This book helps readers make sense of our global crisis and the dynamics of transition that could result in a shift from the industrial epoch that we live in now to a more sustainable and equitable age. The global renewable energy transition that is already underway holds the key to the wider just transition. However, the evolutionary potential of the present also manifests in the mushrooming of ecocultures, new urban visions, sustainability-oriented developmental states and new ways of learning and researching. Shedding light on the highly complex challenge of a sustainable and just transition, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned with establishing a more sustainable and equitable world. Ultimately, this is a book about hope but without easy answers.
This edited collection broadens the definition of sustainable real estate based on industry trends, research, and the Paris Climate Agreements. Discussions encompass existing and new buildings throughout their life cycle, the financing of their development and operations, and their impact on the surrounding environments and communities. This broader perspective provides a better understanding of the interconnected nature of the environmental, societal, communal, political, and financial issues affecting sustainable real estate, revealing the wide-ranging impact of practitioners' decisions on the sustainable real estate system. Bringing together carefully selected articles from leading global academic and practitioner experts from urban planning, design, construction, and finance, this collection brings to light new opportunities and innovative transdisciplinary solutions to as-yet unresolved problems.
This open access book explores the environmental, social, and financial challenges of housing provision, and the urgent need for a sustainable housing transition. The authors explore how market failures have impacted the scaling up of sustainable housing and the various policy attempts to address this. Going beyond an environmental focus, the book explores a range of housing-related challenges including social justice and equity issues. Sustainability transitions theory is presented as a framework to help facilitate a sustainable housing transition and a range of contemporary case studies are explored on issues including high performing housing, small housing, shared housing, neighbourhood-scale housing, circular housing, and innovative financing for housing. It is an important new resource that challenges policy makers, planners, housing construction industry stakeholders, and researchers to rethink what housing is, how we design and construct it, and how we can better integrate impacts on households to wider policy development.
Transition Engineering: Building a Sustainable Future examines new strategies emerging in response to the mega-issues of global climate change, decline in world oil supply, scarcity of key industrial minerals, and local environmental constraints. These issues pose challenges for organizations, businesses, and communities, and engineers will need to begin developing ideas and projects to implement the transition of engineered systems. This work presents a methodology for shifting away from unsustainable activities. Teaching the Transition Engineering approach and methodology is the focus of the text, and the concept is presented in a way that engineers can begin applying it in their work.
In a world of dwindling natural resources and mounting environmental crisis, who is devising ways of living that will work for the long haul? And how can we, as individuals, make a difference? To answer these fundamental questions, Professor Karen Litfin embarked upon a journey to many of the world’s ecovillagesÑintentional communities at the cutting-edge of sustainable living. From rural to urban, high tech to low tech, spiritual to secular, she discovered an under-the-radar global movement making positive and radical changes from the ground up. In this inspiring and insightful book, Karen Litfin shares her unique experience of these experiments in sustainable living through four broad windows - ecology, economics, community, and consciousness - or E2C2. Whether we live in an ecovillage or a city, she contends, we must incorporate these four key elements if we wish to harmonize our lives with our home planet. Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over. These micro-societies, however, are small and time is short. Fortunately - as Litfin persuasively argues - their successes can be applied to existing social structures, from the local to the global scale, providing sustainable ways of living for generations to come. You can learn more about Karen's experiences on the Ecovillages website: http://ecovillagebook.org/