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Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society

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Summary: Comfort in a lower carbon society Elizabeth Shove, Heather Chappells and Loren Lutzenhiser have edited a special issue of Building Research and Information on Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society - published in August 2008, v36, No 4. ISSN 0961-3218, www.rbri.co.uk This special issue on comfort in a lower carbon society has three main ambitions: To draw attention to the importance of indoor and outdoor 'comfort' as a critical environmental issue and to address fundamental questions about what comfort might mean in a low carbon society. To develop and consolidate debate about the culture, history and future of comfort as an idea, as a set of conditions and as an always changing complex of social-technical practices. To illustrate the relevance and potential contribution of an unusually wide range of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, geography, history, cultural studies, building science, engineering), and to explore and celebrate differences of method, theory and approach.

Project Description

Elizabeth Shove, Heatther Chappells and Loren Lutzenhiser are editing a special issue of Building Research and Information on Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society - published August 2008, v36, No 4.

Maintaining standardised 'comfort' conditions in buildings and in outdoor environments around the world represents one of the single most important uses of energy today. There is widespread agreement about the environmental costs this entails and about the absolute need to imagine and realise alternative concepts, models and strategies of comfort.

While the use of established and novel technologies is set to be important, the meaning and provision of comfort in a lower carbon society is not only and certainly not simply a matter of adopting more efficient methods of heating and cooling. Instead, what is at stake - and what is unquestionably required - is a more radical re-thinking of comfort itself. A first step in this direction is to recognise the cultural and historical anchoring of this concept and the extent to which its many meanings have evolved and changed. Whatever else, this suggests that future understandings of comfort are unlikely to be the same as those that are taken-for-granted today. A second step is to appreciate the extent of contemporary variation, adaptation and deviation. Despite the standardising forces of codes, regulations, design methods and related technological 'solutions', the built environment remains an immensely complex place. Likewise, and despite assorted tendencies toward globalisation, cultural conventions, routines and climate-related habits remain impressively diverse. What can be learned from this everyday heterogeneity?

This special issue on comfort in a lower carbon society has three main ambitions:

To draw attention to the importance of indoor and outdoor 'comfort' as a critical environmental issue and to address fundamental questions about what comfort might mean in a low carbon society.To develop and consolidate debate about the culture, history and future of comfort as an idea, as a set of conditions and as an always changing complex of social-technical practices.

To illustrate the relevance and potential contribution of an unusually wide range of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, geography, history, cultural studies, building science, engineering), and to explore and celebrate differences of method, theory and approach.The papers collected together in the special issue take these themes and ambitions forward in different ways, some more conceptual and theoretical, some dealing with specific sites, cases and situations. We expect to include examples and experiences from different countries (cross cultural analyses); critical reviews of existing literature; papers dealing with the past and/or the future; and discussions variously focusing on relations between institutions, technologies, bodies and practices. Though related to comfort in the built environment, contributors are free to address matters like those of clothing, temporal rhythms, the 'conditioning' of norms and conventions and the business and politics of the indoor environment and to do so with reference to any number of social settings - homes, but also work places, institutional environments, sites of fun and leisure, etc. Seasons, sleeping, siestas, sensations and senses are all possible topics of enquiry, as are processes of resistance, diffusion and routinisation.

Purpose of Research

Academic Research - Other

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