Summary: Planned (non)-interventions in housing practices at Trinity Close

This chapter has adopted a distinct approach whereby technologies and behaviours have been understood as intertwined and embedded in social practice. This contrasts with dominant, but reductive, research approaches used to study low-energy housing, which either examine the design decisions lying behind particular energy-efficient materials and technologies, or interrogate the values and choices underpinning individuals’

energy-consuming behaviours. Instead, introducing the key actors at Trinity Close, their everyday contextual positioning, and their expectations and assumptions for the housing intervention, has produced more nuanced insights into the diverse everyday doings occurring at the Rackheath CSH level six site. These activities, built up over many years, and made up of constituent meanings, assumptions and understandings, particular skills and abilities, and materials, tools, and physical infrastructures, combined to represent the practices of the six principal actors involved with Trinity Close.

The professional practitioners’ vision of change broadly coalesced around a techno-rational paradigm whereby it was agreed that installation of energy-efficient materials and renewable technologies would reduce the overall energy demand of the Trinity Close housing development. Further the TCSG relied on models and assessments conducted by DJH, and WHA that predicted that the selected design measures would deliver carbon-neutrality across the twelve housing units. This revised design and construction was intended to deliver required energy reductions predominantly without the active involvement of tenants; a view to which many of the residents also subscribed. To the extent that residents were considered, it was anticipated that particularly motivated individuals could be encouraged to monitor feedback on their domestic electricity usage, and would be incentivised to revise their consumption levels by reduced utility bills.

At the same time, each of the six emblematic actors put forward subtly different aims and objectives for the Trinity Close initiative. For instance, the Minister for Housing and Local Government wanted to demonstrate the economic, social and environmental benefits of building to CSH level six. Roger from BDC sought to

determine a sustainable growth strategy for Broadland district, whilst Dave from WHA aimed to determine a suitable design for affordable housing that was cost-effective, easy to maintain and would deliver comfort for residents. Tom from DJH saw involvement in Trinity Close as an opportunity to set the housing construction company apart from their peers. Brian from Adapt sought to trial highly energy-efficient design and construction methods alongside engaging household residents in electricity demand management using monitoring and feedback techniques.

Prospective residents to Trinity Close hoped that their move would not disrupt their daily routines, and would ensure comfortable and affordable living.

As such, rather than Trinity Close being a project in which all involved parties were unified, and where there was consensus on the implementation approach, the initiative was contested from its outset. Although some extended rationality approaches to understanding domestic energy consumption do give space to context (see Chapter 2), this finding supports the understanding that techno-rational approaches are not neutral or context independent as is often claimed. Rather, the aims, ambitions and objectives of the initiative were conditioned by the dominant practices in which the Trinity Close principal stakeholders engaged. That the involved actors' activities underpinning the Trinity Close initiative were not abstract, but determined by real life contexts, supports the need to employ a SPT-based methodological approach. It also raises the question of what these contextualised understandings and particular ways of doing mean for re-establishing housing practices in less energy-intensive directions.

In practice terms, the aim of implementing CSH level six at Trinity Close was to enhance the environmental sustainability of social housing infrastructure by inserting low-energy technologies and energy-efficient building materials into the everyday practices of housing professionals. As such, the practitioners researched, installed, operated and maintained new building fabric and equipment intended to deliver codified energy-efficient homes. These practitioners required new ‘competences’

delivered through training courses or learnt ‘on the job’. They also had to embrace new

‘meanings’ around housing, such as recognition that the respective developments were built to achieve carbon neutrality, rather than economic profitability.

Whilst the CSH and Trinity Close initiative sought to intervene in the professional practices of housing construction, simultaneously the development sought to keep

household practices largely intact (i.e. non-intervention in household practice) (Macrorie et al., 2014). It was assumed that only particularly motivated householders would reflect on the energy implications of their daily domestic routines, and that residents’ everyday practices would proceed as normal around the newly installed technologies. In addition, Trinity Close was designed to look as ‘normal’ as possible so as not to challenge cultural expectations around domestic living and energy.

Applying a SPT framework through this introductory empirical analysis has revealed the techno-rational approach of the initiative as too narrow, given that it primarily relied on technical-fixes, and if considered at all, individuals’ actions were assumed to be rational and malleable by information and/ or incentives. This understanding of change fails to attend to how housing practices are mediated through societal culture, formal institutions, politics, economic structures, as well as by materials and infrastructures. Even at this early stage of planning the Trinity Close initiative, it is possible to suggest that SPT therefore recasts the intervention (and the CSH standard informing the initiative) as radical in some (material) parts, but not in others (e.g.

failing to challenge expectations around what energy is used for in daily domestic life).

This SPT based analysis also raises questions of whether it is possible to intervene in certain elements of practice (e.g. technical/ building changes), without disrupting the practice as a whole.

This chapter has demonstrated how a wide spectrum of different sets of actors – ranging from national government, to local housing associations, to private

consultancies, technology manufacturers and social housing tenants – were involved in shaping the emergence and maintenance of low-energy housing-related practices at Trinity Close. The assumptions, approaches and existing routines of the TCSG, in particular, have been shown as crucial in determining the design and implementation of the Trinity Close scheme. SPT has thus far predominantly focused on practices within the home and their consequences for resource demand (see Chapter 2), however this chapter has highlighted that these practices cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the other diverse practices with which they are entwined.

This shifts the analytical focus to include policy, public sector and commercial housing practices, which are just as crucial, if not more important, than understanding how energy is embroiled in domestic routines (Macrorie et al., 2014a).

Finally, the TCSG believed that the CSH standard and their governing decisions and actions, were ‘outside of ’ and acted upon professional and domestic housing practices (even if attempting to maintain the status quo). These professional practitioners envisioned that implementing codified housing design would straightforwardly lead to carbon-neutral behaviours and outcomes, thereby creating a carbon-neutral development. In contrast, SPT suggests that actors and their practices cannot be isolated, and that practitioners cannot be separated from the context within which they operate because context emerges from practice. This raises the question of whether (as often assumed in policy documents and much academic work) it is possible to govern practices from an external position, without invariably becoming implicated in those practices.

These claims and questions will be further explored in the following two empirical chapters of this thesis.

Chapter 5. Appraising low-energy interventions in