Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CLIMATEJUSTHOME (Climate just housing: Towards more sustainable urban environments for all)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-01-15 bis 2025-01-14
Climate change is profoundly impacting cities and their inhabitants, leading to increased infrastructure failure, food and resource shortages and death. Existing research has shown that vulnerable households are not only the most exposed to these effects, but also experience displacement when cities implement green, climate-adaptive interventions that change housing markets and their affordability. When more specifically considering housing in Europe, new funding programmes and directives related to the European Green Deal are starting to trigger unprecedented transformations that might further negatively impact vulnerable households, especially considering that buildings account for 40% of European energy consumption and are a key target for climate action. Yet we still don’t know enough about the specific interplay between climate adaptation and housing justice, and more research is necessary to understand how housing access can be ensured for all residents in green, climate adapted cities. Filling this gap is of crucial importance to enable a just transition towards meeting the EU’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal.
In this context, the CLIMATEJUSTHOME project sought to understand how the experience of vulnerable urban residents can help cities tackle climate change in a more just and equitable way. Research objectives focused on improving the understanding of the urban justice implications of EU climate policy and generating empirical and theoretical knowledge about vulnerable urban households’ experiences of housing and climate injustice through a case study of a neighbourhood undergoing large-scale housing renovation in Spain’s Green Leaf city Cornellà de Llobregat. Due to carrying out only one year of the MSCA Fellowship rather that two years, in 2024 and 2025 the outcomes of this research will be translated into theoretical and practical knowledge. The former will help improve understanding of these questions and inform future research, while the latter aims to inform policy-making and practice related to housing energy efficiency in cities across Catalonia, Spain and beyond, with the aim to help build more just, green housing and urban environments for all.
In this context, the CLIMATEJUSTHOME project sought to understand how the experience of vulnerable urban residents can help cities tackle climate change in a more just and equitable way. Research objectives focused on improving the understanding of the urban justice implications of EU climate policy and generating empirical and theoretical knowledge about vulnerable urban households’ experiences of housing and climate injustice through a case study of a neighbourhood undergoing large-scale housing renovation in Spain’s Green Leaf city Cornellà de Llobregat. Due to carrying out only one year of the MSCA Fellowship rather that two years, in 2024 and 2025 the outcomes of this research will be translated into theoretical and practical knowledge. The former will help improve understanding of these questions and inform future research, while the latter aims to inform policy-making and practice related to housing energy efficiency in cities across Catalonia, Spain and beyond, with the aim to help build more just, green housing and urban environments for all.
The work performed in 2023 focused on scientific training and research, as only one year of the two-year MSCA project was carried out due to starting a tenure-track position at Lund University in January 2024. While completing training at my host institution in the first months of the fellowship, my research activities focused on two dimensions. First, mapping the 2.4 billion euros in NextGeneration funding for housing renovations coming from Europe into the Spanish state, and specifically Catalonia, in order to understand who is receiving what funding, the actors involved and ultimately how household vulnerability is (or is not) being considered. And second, the everyday lived dimension of housing rehabilitation for vulnerable households through ethnographic research. During seven months of fieldwork, I undertook 25 interviews with key informants from the public, private and community sector, made over a dozen observation and learning visits to Cornellà de Llobregat, attended over a dozen community and professional meetings, held a focus group and visited Santa Coloma and Zaragoza to learn about pioneering housing renovation projects. A research assistant assisted me by undertaking a comprehensive literature review and spatial mapping of socio-economic data and green infrastructures in Cornellà de Llobregat.
The research papers and broader policy communication of my results beyond the state of the art are currently under development. So far, I have presented my preliminary findings at two international conferences, and I am starting to write two papers that aim to elaborate the novel concept of climate just housing through my evidence-based research that advances the interdisciplinary field of urban political ecology, relevant for researchers in geography, urban planning and anthropology. I will present these papers at Uppsala University in March, in Malmö University in May and at the international POLLEN political ecology conference in June 2024. Due to the fact that housing renovation is currently a very topical and urgent issue in the European policy sphere, I think my results will indicate important future research paths on the social and lived dimensions of housing renovations as well as why such considerations are critical in policy making when considering just transitions.