Market-based low-carbon retrofit in social housing: Insights from Greater Manchester

ABSTRACT

In recent years, social housing providers in the UK have become influential actors in realizing the national government’s decarborization agenda. However, when decarbonization is considered in light of austerity measures and the privatization of public housing, a number of contradictions arise. From interviews and a workshop with policymakers and registered providers in the city-region of Greater Manchester, three tensions are highlighted. First, since the 1980s, the housing stock condition has been used as a political pawn in successive reforms to demunicipalize social housing. Second, local authorities continue to harness the collectivities that remain in the social housing sector to realize their decarbonization goals. Third, the retrofit practices of social landlords are only superficially aiming for carbon control; instead, they focus on the social aims that are seen as important to the ethos and business model of the landlord. The article concludes that there are unavoidable conflicts between the interests of different actors whose low-carbon economy is conceived at different spatial scales and with different underlying objectives. As social landlords are foregrounded in subregional low-carbon policy, they are effectively co-opted into market-based retrofit, resulting in unintended consequences for the social housing sector.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Manchester.

Notes on contributors

Jenni Cauvain

Jenni Cauvain is a Research Fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. Her main research interests centre on social scientific and interdisciplinary enquiry into questions of urban sustainability and public policy. Jenni has published in leading urban journals on topics such as smart cities and neighborhoods, energy vulnerability, and low-carbon retrofit.

Andrew Karvonen

Andrew Karvonen is an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He combines ideas from urban studies and science technology studies to examine sustainability and urban infrastructure networks. His 2011 book, Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City, was honored with the 2014 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning John Friedmann Book Award.

Saska Petrova

Saska Petrova is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Environment, Education and Development and Director of the MSc in Environmental Governance at the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on how local people are rendered vulnerable and governable via different regimes of environmental governance and low-carbon urban transformation. Saska has published extensively on issues of energy poverty and environmental governance, including a monograph on Communities in Transition (Routledge, 2014) as well as a number of articles in leading scientific journals. She has an extensive professional background as a public advocate and consultant for a range of government institutions and think tanks.