Home swapping as a degrowth strategy for housing

ABSTRACT

This contribution critically reflects upon the recent debate on housing for degrowth. The construction of housing is responsible for a huge share of global energy and resource consumption, and its overall contribution is only likely to increase due to the intensifying pace of urbanization. Recent arguments about housing for degrowth focus primarily on the advantages of community-based and grassroots housing provision, but overlook the systemic role of public and private sector actors in producing and exchanging housing under a degrowth scenario. This contribution to the debate about housing for degrowth makes the case for integrating research on home swapping, which means a permanent exchange of housing units between two households without house-hunting. Home swapping addresses many of the ecological, economic, and social goals inherent to the debate and at the same time stimulates a more systemic research agenda by going beyond stand-alone micro-scale projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Degrowth
• housing
• home swapping
• housing provision
• reallocation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).