Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society

Elizabeth Shove, Heather Chappells, Loren Lutzenhiser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317988793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Current expectations and standards of comfort are almost certainly unsustainable and new methods and ideas will be required if there is to be any prospect of a significantly lower carbon society. This collection reassesses relationships between people and the multitude of environments they inhabit in the context of increasing carbon intensities of everyday life. In this bold and unconventional volume historians, sociologists, environmentalists, geographers, and cultural theorists provoke and stimulate debate about the future of comfort in a lower carbon society. These contributions are then subject to critical commentary from a range of academic and policy perspectives. The result is a book that promotes academic and policy discussion of the environmental consequences of indoor climate change around the world, and that offers new perspectives and strategies for moving towards a lower carbon future.

This book was published as a special issue of Building Research & Information.

Comfort in a lower carbon society

Elizabeth Shove, Heather Chappells, Loren Lutzenhiser and Bruce Hackett

Introduction

This book focuses on the relation between indoor and outdoor climate change. In global terms, the energy cost of maintaining standardised ‘comfort’ conditions in buildings and in outdoor environments around the world is ultimately unsustainable. This is one extremely good reason for thinking anew about the relation between people and the environments they inhabit. Another is that the indoors–the place in which most of us spend most of our lives – is set to be a crucial site in which efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change play out (Chappells and Shove, 2005). The expectation and the reality of hotter, more extreme, or more extremely varied outdoor climates is already significant for the definition and provision of comfort in what will also have to be a lower carbon society.

Existing and emergent technological strategies – from natural ventilation to high-tech control – are sure to be important in this equation, but there is already widespread agreement that adopting more efficient methods of heating and cooling buildings to current ‘standards’ is unlikely to be enough. The chapters in this volume have in common the view that a lower carbon society supposes and requires significantly new ways of conceptualising and realising conditions of comfort.

As such this book represents but one moment in a series of longer term movements; movements in climate change and in environmental policy; movements of thought - away from a passive and toward an active model of the person; away from purely physical or physiological paradigms toward those which emphasise meanings and social settings, and away from universalising codes and standards (e.g. ASHRAE and Fanger, 1970) toward more flexible and more explicitly adaptive strategies in engineering and design (e.g. Nicol and Roaf 2005; Nicol, 2007).

In taking comfort beyond the comfort zone of engineering, the empirical and theoretical studies included in this collection add to this growing momentum. They do so by identifying ways of capturing and conceptualising the dynamics of indoor climate change and means of intervening in them. The result is an unusually interdisciplinary attempt to show how technological infrastructures (existing and new); policy assumptions (about the status quo and the future); conventions of body and self, real time interaction with ‘the weather’ and everyday environments intersect in the production of comfort. Realisation of the historical, cultural and situated character of these processes opens the way for more radical approaches in policy and design.

First, and most obviously, it suggests that meanings and definitions of comfort are not set in stone. Expectations may change in ways that exacerbate or reduce problems of climate change, but the crucial point is they will change and that neither direction is a foregone conclusion. Second, it points to the many locations, not to mention countries and cultures, in which conditions and concepts of comfort are reproduced. Historical differences in the meaning, framing and material management of offices, homes, churches, cars, gardens and hospitals result in a plethora of distinctly different opportunities for intervention, including a range of adaptive strategies associated with hybrid formulations like the home-office, the car-as-living-room, or the patio as dining area. Third, it reminds us that ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ are intimately connected and that the future of the indoor environment is in no small measure bound up with the ambitions, discourses and problem-definitions of powerful providers. The key point here is that manufacturers, designers, scientists and policy makers are the sometimes unwitting (sometimes deliberate) purveyors of ideas and images as well as standards, regulations and technologies of indoor climate control. Again the practical implication of this insight is clear: since all these actors and more are actively involved in making and shaping the future of comfort, all represent possible, variously effective points of influence.

The first two chapters in the collection, those by Healy (chapter 2) and Cole et al., (chapter 3) begin by exploring two contrasting tendencies, one favouring indoor climatic convergence (sustained by homogenising standards, equations and codes); the other promoting divergence and variety (associated with a positive interpretation of diversity, thermal delight and adaptive opportunity). This exercise raises important questions about how such discursive and practical orientations emerge and disappear, and about how, and by whom, they are nurtured and stifled. In Healy’s account it is hard to deny the role of engineers in sanctioning certain ideas of thermal comfort and in shaping lifestyles, dress codes, bodily dispositions and the content of the built environment. Yet, in keeping with his Foucauldian analysis of the situation, this does not imply the simple coercive imposition of a particular model but a dynamic equilibrium between institutionalised imperatives and the always indeterminate ways that individuals respond. Healy concludes that the central challenge (in the context of more unforgiving climates) is one of discursively embedding more environmentally forgiving definitions of comfort in which thermal variety is valued. Cole et al. take a slightly different approach to much the same problem. They emphasise the emergence of a new context for comfort as designers aim for more sustainable structures and systems based on ideals of adaptation and resilience rather than automation, uniformity and predictability. Such approaches suppose relationships between inhabitants and building systems to be interactive and multi-directional, not linear or predictable as is implied by conventional design strategies. Although they too point to the stabilising politics of incumbent technology and the grip of professional conservatism, they identify new chinks and opportunities associated with the increasingly contested relation between building and user. Will building control become a key site of consumer ‘resistance’? Will designers reconceptualise use as a relational process of ongoing interaction? Will they be forced to abandon solutions over which occupants have little or no control? The outcome is not clear, but from these two papers, there is no avoiding the contested and essentially political nature of this debate. As Cole et al. conclude, realisation of sustainable contexts for comfort will require communication, dialogue and negotiation between all those involved in the building system at all stages, resulting in an ongoing process of ‘interactive adaptivity’.

Nicol and Humphreys (chapter 9) outline a practical way forward, suggesting that new standards are required for comfort and energy use in buildings. In essence, they argue that standards that take comfort to be a ‘product’ should be replaced by those which ensure occupants are provided with the means to avoid discomfort. This conceptual reorientation opens the way for a much more forgiving but nonetheless systematic approach to building design. It also provides a compelling reminder of the extent to which standards embody and reproduce specific interpretations of the relation between indoor environments and their occupants.

The contributions by Harris (chapter 4) and by Parkhurst and Parnaby (chapter 5), take the discussion further by bringing the relation between consumption and production sharply into view. Both challenge simplistic models of consumer choice as ‘the’ driving force of indoor climate change, Harris doing so by documenting also vital networks of cast iron stove production and distribution (these at first limiting and then permitting a sweeping transformation of the American indoor climate); and Parkhurst and Parnaby by describing the extraordinarily rapid channelling of air-conditioning through contemporary conduits of global car production. As Harris suggests, there is much to be gained by thinking ahead and by thinking about the systems of provision, and the patterns of distribution and production implied in any comparable transition in future demand.

The story of the cast iron stove and of air conditioning on the move demonstrate the importance of developing careful and subtle accounts of what we might think of as systems not only of production but also of consumption. The mechanisms and processes involved in promoting the global diffusion of air-conditioning in cars are not quite and in many respects not at all the same as those at stake in selecting, procuring, installing and using an early cast iron stove in a freezing church. There is no denying the fact that there has been an impressive convergence of indoor climates around the world and between one building type and another, but that fact should not obscure the substantially and in some cases significantly different trajectories involved, or the variety and everyday diversity of the social and organisational routes and pathways through which this has been achieved. As Harris suggests, purveyors of substitutes for carbon-intensive heating (or indeed cooling) systems confront similar challenges in transforming relations of supply, and in understanding how new technologies might be positioned with respect to current ways of life and to what people value not only in terms of cost but also in terms of versatility or convenience. With respect to the private motor car, issues of resale value and safety help to explain individual motivations for air-conditioning, but relatively little is known about why people value comfort on the move especially in the context of changing mobilities (e.g. increased congestion, longer-commuting distances, the automobile as mobile office).

This far the discussion has largely revolved around the politics of technology and design – concentrating on how the infrastructures of the indoor climate come to be as they are and how they might change in the future. The chapters by Brown and Walker and by Cooper take us into new territory by emphasising the everyday negotiability of such systems and the extent to which ideas and realities of comfort are made by and through our day to day engagement with them and with a host of other devices, including cardigans, trees, cups of tea and even our own bodies. In combination, these papers show that adaptation goes on in even the most rigidly controlled environments and that the nature of what this involves is deeply rooted in what are nonetheless dynamic understandings not only of thermal comfort but of well being much more broadly defined.

Some populations are more at risk from climate change than others and there is evidence that the elderly, and especially those in care homes, are particularly vulnerable in periods of extremely hot weather. In their investigation of how such vulnerability is ‘produced’ – both socially and by the buildings they inhabit – Brown and Walker (chapter 6) uncover the sheer complexity of peoples’ relation to their immediate environment. As they show, the achievement of comfort (or failure to achieve it) in care homes is criss-crossed by dozens of other considerations: the need to prop the door open for visitors; the arrival (or not) of tea-time; the availability, or not, of a cardigan and changes in shifts of staff. How these moments and ‘adaptive opportunities’ are actually handled depends on a further raft of personal and collective considerations that have to do with notions of dignity, decorum and social order. Understanding heat related vulnerability in total institutions (Goffman, 1961) is important in its own right – but in the context of the book as a whole, this chapter raises a range of generic questions about the relation between notions and injunctions of propriety: what one should wear, and do and how one should behave when indoors or out? Such chapters also set the scene for a broader discussion of how different private and public settings (workplaces, institutions, homes, cars) structure individual and collective opportunities for interaction and adaptation.

Cooper’s discussion (chapter 7) of the boundary between home and garden and between indoors and out – a boundary that is perhaps especially fragile in the Californian cases she considers – provides a way of thinking further about how comfort conventions are established and how they change. Cooper takes the theme of adaptation outdoors far enough to problematise the material margin of the home itself with the creation of half-indoor and half-outdoor spaces. Landscaping, or as we might think of it here, ‘thermoscaping’, evidently affords a range of ecologically benign opportunities (for shade, cool breezes, etc.), but at the same time, conceptually demolishing the indoor-outdoor boundary introduces new and potentially demanding pressures. What is one to make of trends in outdoor lighting and in patio heating? Do they point to versions of living well which entail yet more resource consumption as indoor ideals or standards are exported outdoors? Do they indicate willingness to experience and enjoy climatic variation? How do idealised models of daily life translate in different climates (e.g. are heated conservatories valued as a type of indoor-outdoor space for cooler climes)? Extending this debate to encompass a range of transitory indoor-outdoor boundaries in the public as well as private sphere has further merit when thinking about the future mix of comfort strategies associated with revaluing urban outdoor space as a place for entertainment, work and leisure (Wilson et al., 2008).

These comments hint at a surprising measure of elasticity in how, where, and by what means comfortable environments and normal practices are reproduced. Strengers’ contribution ties the social negotiability of demand back into a discussion of the design and management of heavy duty infrastructures required to meet the energy ‘demands’ of heating and cooling. Her argument, which is consistent with much of what has gone before, is that the carbon intensity of indoor environmental control is bound up with the temporal ordering and organisation of everyday life – the details of which are still surprisingly little known. As Strengers’ case studies suggest (chapter 8), opportunities to actively engage users in the social negotiation of both comfort and demand are often foregone in favour of strategies which aim for direct load control by providers and which are designed to meet rather than engage with assumed conventions of normal service.

The second part of the book consists of a series of commentaries from invited experts.¹ These reviewers add new insights and angles, highlighting areas of commonality and identifying gaps and omissions within and between the main substantive chapters.

Ian Cooper (chapter 11) starts by noticing that many of the issues addressed have a history. He is surely right: this is not the first time that critics have sought to challenge engineering paradigms that generate and sustain standardised and homogenised indoor environments. It is one thing to demonstrate and argue for the benefits of a more adaptive approach to thermal comfort but quite another to ‘uproot the bedrock of engineering traditions’. As this comment reminds us, there are powerful interests at stake and it is perhaps no accident that some representations of comfort (and attendant forms of science) endure and that others are marginalised.

Skea (chapter 13) also reflects on the emergence and persistence of dominant discourses, not in the engineering of comfort but in the way that questions of consumption and demand are framed in energy policy. In this context the conventions and methods of economics focus attention on rational response, cost and choice in ways that actively obscure more important transitions in the definition and meaning of comfort itself.

Moezzi (chapter 12) draws attention to another hidden dimension of ‘normal’ interpretations of efficiency and choice. Climate change policy makers routinely focus on the need to modify human behaviour, a move that puts the spotlight on consumer ‘choice’. This emphasis draws attention away from many of the issues addressed in this book: it overlooks the extent to which people are locked into infrastructural arrangements, it sidesteps issues of institutional responsibility, and it fails to recognise that meanings of comfort and associated patterns of consumption are embedded in existing systems of provision. This point is driven home by Wilhite (chapter 10) who comments on the irony that people who have become dependant on air-conditioning (e.g. in Japan, US and Australia) may have to shut it off just when they need it most because of the strain these new forms of demand are placing on electricity supply systems.

While these commentators concentrate on the politics of energy demand and the design of the indoor climate, Hitchings (chapter 14) crosses the threshold, going beyond the comfort zone of conventional and adaptive building science and of economics and climate change policy in order to explore the dynamic relation between indoors and out. Driving gloves, rooms for cloaks and other marks of material culture remind us both of the fluidity of this boundary and of the full range of human thermal experience. For Hitchings, appreciating the multiple social histories and overlapping cultural geographies of the indoor-outdoor relation is crucial for understanding the nuts and bolts of how ‘comfort’ might be reconstructed to suit the needs of a lower carbon society.

These few introductory comments do not do justice to the variety of theoretical and methodological resources – from history, geography, sociology and science and technology studies – that are developed and deployed in the contributions to this book. As readers will see, the indoor climate is variously approached as an outcome of disciplinary structures in the Foucauldian sense; as a topic of daily negotiation and as a complex socio-technical configuration. Other perspectives are missing. There is, for example, scope for a more directly political/economic discussion of the possibility that developments like air-conditioning, patio living and cast-iron stoves push the up-front costs of good architecture (passive, climatically adapted structures) on to the costs of operation, thereby requiring, over time, some shift in the notion of what constitutes comfort. Similarly, there is scope to examine the relation between manufacturing and science. Comfort vendors (broadly defined), are profit making enterprises with an immediate interest in creating need and demand. Less obvious, but still deserving of cultural analysis, is the extent to which the routine accomplishment of comfort science (again broadly defined) is an also normative enterprise. Questions about how the sciences of comfort are configured and the kinds of assumptions they reproduce are just as usefully addressed to policy. In this respect it is important to notice that the UK ‘lower carbon agenda’ has a role in sustaining current standards and expec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society
• 2. Air-conditioning and the ‘homogenization’ of people and built environments
• 3. Re-contextualizing the notion of comfort
• 4. Conquering winter: US consumers and the cast iron stove
• 5. Growth in mobile air-conditioning: a socio-technical research agenda
• 6. Understanding heat wave vulnerability in nursing and residential homes
• 7. Escaping the house: comfort and the California garden
• 8. Comfort expectations: the impact of demand-management strategies in Australia
• 9. New standards for comfort and energy use in buildings
• 10. The conditioning of comfort
• 11. Comfort in a brave new world
• 12. Are Comfort expectations of building occupants too high?
• 13. Cold comfort in a high carbon society?
• 14. Studying thermal comfort in context
• Index