Reconsidering Housing Sustainability Through Systems Approaches

According to UN-Habitat, the sustainable future of cities “will [...] strongly depend on facing and tackling the housing problems.” However, providing sustainable housing is a complex endeavor. The residential sector is responsible for 25% of total energy consumption and CO₂ emissions worldwide. At the same time, housing is a fundamental requirement, a right, and a determinant of health and wellbeing. Within this setting, conflicts between the interpretations, implications, and prioritizations of targets for housing sustainability can arise (e.g., between its environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions). Fragmented understandings can give rise to unintended consequences (e.g., environmental gentrification, residents’ dissatisfaction, obsolescence), and consequently to the failure of policies and design efforts. System-based approaches allow the consideration of housing sustainability beyond a narrower environmental definition to encompass the multidimensional and interdisciplinary interrelationships between humans and the broader environment. These can manifest themselves through interacting issues in areas such as wellbeing and health, material footprint, inequalities, and injustice.

The application of systems approaches to conceptualize, investigate, and design housing systems and their sustainability is not yet widely diffused. However, systems-based theoretical and empirical research, encompassing system dynamics, actor-network theory, systemic design, agent-based modelling, material flow analysis, and urban metabolism, can offer precious insights on the holistic mitigation of the challenges ahead.

The aim of this Research Topic is to gather recent and novel research addressing housing sustainability using systems approaches. Theoretical papers that propose new frameworks to conceptualize or design housing system sustainability as well as empirical explorations of its multiscale and multidimensional interrelationships are welcome.

Topics and methods to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
- Systemic conceptualizations of housing sustainability
- Just and equal housing
- Healthy housing
- Affordable housing
- Resilient and net zero housing
- Urban systems and housing
- Urban metabolism (e.g., material flow analysis, residential mobility)
- Complex socio-technical-ecological systems
- Housing system dynamics, agent-based modelling, and other methodological
approaches to housing
- Systemic design
- Co-benefits and unintended consequences of housing policies and design
- Transdisciplinary and integrated approaches to housing sustainability, e.g., bridging
between architecture and modelling, housing studies and housing engineering

We welcome the submission of abstracts as a non-binding expression of interest in the call; abstracts will allow authors to receive preliminary feedback, and the editorial team to identify relevant reviewers for the full article.

Keywords: Sustainability, Sustainable Housing, Systems approaches, sustainable architecture and modelling, housing engineering, systematic design, urbanization, net zero, resilience

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.