ABSTRACT
Policy settings on housing sustainability and affordability are seemingly obdurate, anchored to long-disproven notions that it is up to consumers to choose their housing and to set their own preferred carbon consumption. Housing sustainability in low carbon cities inevitably depends upon the realignment of interests and the emergence of a new policy consensus. This chapter discusses three broad scales – the household/local scale, the city/urban scale, and the national/global scale – with examples of key shifts that would indicate a policy consensus at each scale. Conceptual links between housing and political theory, between building science and cultural studies of home and consumption, and between climate justice and economics are all fertile ground for advancing the theory and practice of housing and households in low carbon cities. Housing governance cannot be separated out from either broader cultural and social processes of consumption or the distribution, and in particular the production, of carbon.
