Urban political ecologies of housing decarbonisation: Towards radical housing repair

Abstract

Housing has a rich and decades-long body of scholarship, yet geographers have only recently begun to dissect environmental and power relations in/through the home, an urgent task due to growing carbon reduction and energy efficiency targets at the heart of climate-related housing action. This paper elaborates four interconnected conceptual pathways to unpack the uneven socionatural power relations unfolding through nature’s urbanisation in housing decarbonisation. I bring these pathways together to articulate political ecologies of radical housing repair, a proposal that takes seriously situated lived realities within structurally embedded housing inequalities towards more just housing decarbonisation in theory, policy and practice.

I Introduction

Within the vast, rich and decades-long body of scholarship on housing, through a range of theoretical and empirical approaches (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Brickell, 2012), only in the past decade have geographers concertedly turned to dissect environmental and power relations in/through the home (Ajibade and McBean, 2014; Edwards and Bulkeley, 2017; Knuth, 2019; Mee et al., 2014; Rice et al., 2020; Taylor and Knuth, 2025; Wagner et al., 2025). Recent studies considering housing in connection to urban climate adaptation and mitigation actions underline how some urban populations are protected, with the ability to live in ‘greener’ housing connected to income, education and/or race and often tenure status, while the vulnerability of low-income, racialised and/or migrant urban residents is often exacerbated through their exclusion (Anguelovski et al., 2019a, 2019b; Benson and Bereitschaft, 2020; Blok, 2020; Bouzarovski et al., 2018; Edwards and Buckeley, 2017; Hettiarachchi et al., 2019; Rice et al., 2020; Wagner et al., 2025). Broader urban dynamics of green gentrification (Anguelovski et al., 2019c; Gould and Lewis, 2017) or climate gentrification (Shokry et al., 2020; Taylor and Aalbers, 2022; Thompson et al., 2023) detail how inequalities are deepened and risk produced for marginalised groups while others benefit (Heynen et al., 2006), all in the name of creating more sustainable and/or climate-resilient urban environments. While urban environmental inequalities and larger political economic dynamics have been in the spotlight in this work, less attention has been placed on conceptualising socionatural relations within, through and beyond the home in the context of carbon reduction and energy efficiency logics at the heart of climate change plans and targets.

This paper builds from this broader literature to centre focus onto nature’s urbanisation through housing considering the growing political priority of housing decarbonisation globally. I understand housing decarbonisation as interventions that seek to mitigate climate change impacts and/or build resilience in adapting to future climate conditions by increasing the energy efficiency of the existing building stock or developing new-build low-carbon housing, or both. Beyond dominant techno-managerial approaches, I approach housing as inherently political (Lancione, 2020, 2023; Madden and Marcuse, 2016) and housing decarbonisation as a process, constituted by political economic interests (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Moreno Zacarés, 2024), relational and infrastructural realities (Bergan and Power, 2024; Easthope et al., 2020) and everyday life (Brickell et al., 2017; García-Lamarca, 2022; Lancione, 2019, 2020; Simone, 2020). From this standpoint I ask: How can understanding housing decarbonisation through urban political ecologies aid to better diagnose the current situation and act for more ecological and just dwellings for all? I posit this question to help unpack crucial issues such as who decarbonised housing is for (Delclós and Vidal, 2021; Rice et al., 2020), whose decarbonisation knowledge is valid and what housing ‘counts’. Using (urban) political ecology as a framework to dissect the uneven socionatural relations underlying and driving housing decarbonisation combined with a critical approach to housing can help deepen analysis and illuminate new perspectives towards reducing (green) housing inequalities and enacting decarbonisation without displacement (Gourevitch, 2024).

In dialogue with emerging critical literature on housing decarbonisation and climate change (Edwards and Buckeley, 2017; Knuth, 2019; Rice et al., 2020; Wagner et al., 2025; Wainwright and Demirel, 2023), I propose and elaborate four interconnected pathways to deepen research and practice on housing decarbonisation that addresses socionatural inequalities. First, the emergence of housing-energy efficiency as a new and growing resource frontier is increasingly being made ‘legible’ for capital accumulation in the low-carbon economy. Second, the contradictory everyday decarbonisation housing realities and knowledges are not included nor often even acknowledged in official carbon reduction plans and policies. Third, the interplay between environmental privilege and the circulation of elite sustainability desires in enclaves of (supposedly) low-carbon and sustainable housing often envisioned as the solution to climate change. And fourth, the shift from approaching housing decarbonisation as a techno-managerial object to an infrastructural, relational and multi-scalar process towards socionatural transformation. Bringing these pathways together to deepen understandings of housing decarbonisation, I articulate political ecologies of radical housing repair. This is a modest theoretical and political proposal that takes seriously situated lived realities within structurally embedded housing inequalities to consider emergent vantage points for more just housing decarbonisation. Before moving forward with these tasks, I first turn to more comprehensively frame the inquiry, its importance and the contribution I seek to make.

II Housing decarbonisation and urban political ecologies: Why a joint interrogation?

Many interventions unfolding through multi-scalar climate change governance strategies (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Castán Broto and Westman, 2020; While et al., 2010) increasingly include housing decarbonisation as a path towards climate change mitigation and adaptation (Eduards and Bulkeley, 2017; Knuth, 2019). More specifically, in state-driven plans to meet carbon emission reduction commitments and future regulatory obligations, building new low-carbon, climate-adapted buildings and undertaking energy efficiency retrofits of the existing housing stock are growing priorities. This is largely driven by the proportional importance of carbon emissions from buildings: the World Green Building Council (2019) estimates that 39% of global carbon emissions originate from real estate, with 11% as embodied carbon from the production of building materials and 28% as operational carbon released through building energy use.

Housing decarbonisation ambitions have been expanding globally and at multiple scales, from the government of Colombia’s 2022 national roadmap for net zero carbon buildings to the 2021 net zero strategy of Toronto, Canada to advance the decarbonisation of all homes and buildings in the city. In the European Union, the Renovation Wave aims to double annual energy renovation rates to retrofit 35 million homes between 2020 and 2030, and the recast Energy Performance Buildings Directive pushes for a fully decarbonised European building stock by 2050. While a plethora of literature on housing decarbonisation exists from engineering and technical standpoints (Ascione et al., 2022; Calama-González et al., 2022; Hurst and O’Donovan, 2019; Jiménez Torres et al., 2023), few engage with broader political and socionatural readings of ‘green’ decarbonised housing (some exceptions include Gaur et al., 2021; Sovacool and Martiskanien, 2020, discussed later). Deeper thinking about housing as a socionatural process is key when considering housing as inherently political. For example, with public subsidies increasingly being deployed to implement housing decarbonisation plans, unpacking both the inequality-reinforcing as well as emancipatory possibilities of public finance (August et al., 2022) and how to best allocate it is urgent. Similarly, subverting ‘real property supremacy’ (Wagner et al., 2025; also Kear et al., 2023), referring to the privileging of certain property forms like homeownership in mainstream climate finance and housing decarbonisation strategies, is crucial for just climate futures.

At the same time, geographers, urban studies and housing scholars have articulated an ongoing housing crisis due to deepening dynamics of commodification and financialisation (Beswick et al., 2016; García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016; Madden and Marcuse, 2016; Potts, 2020; Rolnik, 2013, 2018; Wetzstein, 2017; Wu, 2015; Fields, 2018), which is having a massive impact on inequality, everyday life and indeed survival (Arundel et al., 2024; Fields and Raymond, 2021; Roy, 2019). The right to housing, listed in countless nations’ constitutions and penned into prominent international declarations, in most cases, to be blunt, is not worth the paper on which it is written. A significant body of literature in critical housing studies, political economy and geography has unpacked the ways in which housing insecurity and injustices have been generated through state-facilitated political economic interventions facilitating financialisation, eviction and dispossession, as well as social and literal death (Aalbers, 2011; After Echo Park Lake research collective, 2022; AlShehabi and Suroor, 2016; Bonds, 2019; Kusiak, 2019; Rolnik, 2018; Roy, 2019; Soederberg, 2018; Çelik, 2023). Coming from ethnographic, grounded approaches, the lived dimensions of housing injustices have also been theorised (Brickell et al., 2017; García-Lamarca, 2022; Lancione, 2019), with recognition that gender, race, class and other forms of difference deeply shape and impact housing access. It also recognises experience of people living on the margins, where the temporariness (of jobs, housing) characterising urban life unsettles the very meaning of inhabitation (Lancione, 2020; Simone, 2020). Unpacking the way socio-environmental relations unfold within and through these dynamics has begun (Castriota, 2024; Edwards and Bulkeley, 2017; Knuth, 2019; Mee et al., 2014; Rademacher, 2009; Rice et al., 2020) but requires deeper interrogation and collective work to which this paper seeks to contribute.

These two dynamics – an emergent policy focus on housing decarbonisation and an ongoing housing crisis – contextualise my thinking through the uneven socionatural power relations unfolding through nature’s urbanisation in housing decarbonisation. I identify pathways and develop the concept of radical housing repair inspired by a growing body of critical geography research related to housing and climate change, which I strive to put in dialogue with adjacent disciplines. Some of this research deploys an explicit urban political ecology perspective, including energy efficiency as a resource in green buildings and the place of retrofitting and repair in logics of urban de/revaluation (Knuth 2016, 2019), and retrofitted housing both as an experiment to reshape sociotechnical climate change processes (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013) and as infrastructure that fundamentally transforms circulations of the city (Edward and Bulkeley, 2017). Urban political ecology has also been used to explore tenants’ resources for adaptation (Mee et al., 2014) and, using comprehensive mixed methods, climate change vulnerability in slum housing (Ajibade and McBean, 2014). Others take a political economy approach to understand housing financialisation and finance dynamics in relation to climate change, unpacking emerging accumulation strategies and investment logics (Thoyre, 2021a; Wainwright and Demirel, 2023), ‘climate-proofing’ housing through old and new financial strategies (Taylor and Knuth, 2025; Knuth et al., 2025) and how the structuring and distribution of low-carbon financial tools privileges certain types of property (Wagner et al., 2025). Several broader framing texts articulate how low-carbon housing can lead to exclusion and displacement (Bouzarovski et al., 2018; Rice et al., 2020) or how renovation can occur without eviction (Busà, 2024), and policy-oriented reports exploring how to ensure the latter (GIZ et al., 2025; Gough et al., 2024, Gouravitch, 2024). Finally, I write this from my positionality as a critical human geographer who has been engaged in housing struggles in the Spanish (Catalan) context for over a decade, most recently investigating EU funded housing renovation programmes in the Barcelona metropolitan area (García-Lamarca, 2024).

I believe urban political ecology perspectives provide valuable entry points to help rethink social, political economic and environmental relations of/through housing in an integrated manner, to provide a more nuanced and multi-faceted view of housing decarbonisation and paths for action. Considering the vast historiography of urban political ecology (Gandy, 2022), I refer to urban political ecologies in plural (Heynen, 2018) following the spirit of Tzaninis et al.’s (2021: 242) proposition of a ‘situated more-than-urban political ecology’. This plural reading of urban political ecology means understanding the urbanisation of nature in three intersecting ways. First, how urban and the natural foundationally configure and produce one another through social, economic and physical flows and transformations (Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014). Second, how embodied and situated everyday practices shape and are shaped by resource flows, dictating access to resources and the functioning of urbanisation and the city itself (Lawhon et al., 2014; Loftus, 2012; Truelove, 2011). And third, how multi-scalar relationalities and infrastructures operate in the flow/fixity dialectic within and beyond the urban (Arboleda, 2016, 2020). These perspectives provide entry points to consider socionatural structures, flows, circulations and their intertwining with everyday life and power relations, and can help deepen diagnosis and action. In terms of diagnosis, this approach provides a critical analytical framework to unravel social, ecological, political and economic relations, circulations and flows taking place in/through housing decarbonisation at multiple scales. Action is enabled through the transformational vision at the heart of political ecology(ies) that aids in reflecting beyond status quo structures, systems and subjects to achieve low-carbon, sustainable housing (and beyond) that is truly accessible and affordable. Thus, by thinking housing decarbonisation through urban political ecologies, I seek to both deepen critique of current approaches and articulate demands for the apparent chimera of sustainable, climate-resilient cities for all urban residents.

The four conceptual pathways I elaborate in this paper (Table 1) are important because they articulate 1) political economy approaches unpacking how nature and housing become intertwined in low-carbon capital accumulation strategies; 2) situated approaches broadening understandings of what housing decarbonisation is and whose knowledge and housing counts; 3) elite approaches tacking environmental privilege, excess and the production of natures in purportedly low-carbon housing often used to exemplify sustainability and 4) infrastructural, relational and beyond the urban approaches unravelling housing decarbonisation as an extended process. The pathways complement each other by addressing structural, situated, elite, relational and multi-scalar dynamics of socionatures in housing, and thus help dissect different realities and inequalities in housing decarbonisation as well as identify paths forward for research, practice and policy.

Table 1.

Four pathways to unpack housing decarbonisation through urban political ecologies.

Pathways
1: Housing as an expanding resource frontier in the low-carbon transition
2: Contradictory everyday decarbonised housing realities on the margins
3: ‘Sustainable’ housing as enclaves of (low carbon?) environmental privilege
4: Decarbonising home as a gateway to/for socionatural transformation

I now turn to build from and with emerging geography, political ecology and political economy scholarship to articulate these conceptual pathways to read decarbonised housing through urban political ecologies.

III Pathway 1: Housing as an expanding resource frontier in the low-carbon transition

Real estate leaders should revalue assets, decarbonise and create new business opportunities (Boland et al., 2022: n.p.).

While ample political ecology and critical geography research has dissected how ‘nature’ is made into sources of capital accumulation (Büscher and Fletcher, 2015; Castree, 2008; Castree and Christophers, 2015; Katz, 1998; Ouma et al., 2018; Smith, 2007), in the past decade the possibilities of low-carbon profit-making are extending these processes into and through housing (Knuth, 2019; Taylor and Knuth, 2025; Thoyre, 2021a, 2021b; Wainwright and Demirel, 2023). Energy efficiency is the main element being made ‘legible’ for capital accumulation, which has been framed by industry and by the state as a resource and as value that can be mined or cultivated from existing buildings (Knuth, 2016, 2019). Profiting from saved energy in residential housing through so-called ‘white certificates’ has been underway in Brazil, Denmark, Flanders, France, Italy and the United Kingdom for over a decade (Lees, 2010), where certificates create a commodity establishing property rights over additional energy savings (Bertoldi et al., 2010). European building emissions trading schemes, including residential housing, are being advanced as part of the Fit for 55 package in the European Green Deal to incentivise energy efficiency investments (European Parliament, 2023). Thoyre (2021b) explains how saved energy has been made into a lucrative source of profits as a tradeable commodity for electric investor-owned utility companies under American state-level policy, where saved energy is framed as a mining concession to grant electricity companies an enhanced spatial monopoly.

Parallel to this, different types of energy-related housing certifications – such as the increasingly obligatory assignation of Energy Performance Certificates rating home energy consumption on a scale from A to G – as well as investor logics have growing impacts on the generation of green value and rents and thus who benefits from housing decarbonisation (Andreucci et al., 2017; García-Lamarca et al., 2022; Knuth, 2016). As per Energy Performance Certificates, a scoping review focused on Europe found positive price premiums for more efficient home energy consumption in both rental and owned residential properties (Ou et al., 2025). In terms of investors, Wainwright and Demirel (2023) underline the increasing rule of what they term ‘carbon logic’ in build-to-rent construction activities due to the growing importance of net zero carbon strategies to institutional investors, especially for environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment funds. The role of financial risk and possible devaluation is key in both situations (Christophers, 2018; Knuth, 2019), as the risk of not having low-carbon performing housing can mean foregone increases in asset values for future property owners. The global head of sustainability services at JLL, a real estate and investment management company, notes that sound business logic wins over the current ESG-related political debate magnified during Trump’s second term, as decarbonisation is about ‘managing risk, cutting operational costs and creating and protecting long-term value’ (Grainger, 2025). Nonetheless, a pulse should be kept on how low-carbon and net zero housing logics in real estate development and broader ESG investing will evolve through the Trump administration’s war on ‘woke investing’ and attempts to dismantle ESG (Winters, 2025). More research is furthermore needed to critically unravel financial-carbon logics (Bridge et al., 2020) and certification systems related to the politics and practice of housing decarbonisation, to better understand material, discursive and power realities in relation to different tenures – to understand who is impacted how – as well as in relation to the conflicts, struggles and contradictions inherent in housing relations under capitalism. Research dissecting emergent technologies (e.g. machine learning and artificial intelligence) deployed by real estate investors to decarbonise their asset portfolios is also important, as these technologies promise to financially optimise action by gathering extensive data on buildings ‘without ever stepping foot inside’ (Boland et al., 2023: n.p.).

To conceptually dig deeper into housing decarbonisation in the low-carbon transition, a productive dialogue can emerge through bringing together what Moreno Zacarés (2024) terms residential accumulation and Huff and Brock’s (2023) untangling of processes of accumulation by restoration. The former considers residential accumulation as a process tying together processes of production, exchange, finance and reproduction, with a dialectical understanding of these dynamics through rent extraction and capitalist production. Echoing the concepts of reparative accumulation (Cohen et al., 2022) or accumulation by decarbonisation (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008), Huff and Brock (2023) illustrate how restoration has emerged thorough a shift from conservationist paradigms embedded in neoliberal approaches to environmental governance – for example, conserving and protecting nature – towards the growth economy of repair. The latter highlights another avenue for capital to seize value through restoration or rehabilitation practices, legitimised by the discourse that a uniform, planetary Nature that is being ‘ruined’ by a homogenous humanity can be repaired or ‘fixed’ by supposedly sustainable interventions. Restoration and rehabilitation are integrated into business-as-usual in practice. This ecological modernist repair discourse clings to a depoliticised view of the Anthropocene that ties together a collective humanity that fundamentally changed earth systems with deepened techno-capitalist development as the solution (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018). The growth economy of repair thus unfolds through a variety of forms of enclosure that entail material dispossession via expropriation, green grabbing and rent seeking (Andreucci et al., 2017). Productive synergies can emerge through more critically dissecting this notion of resource frontiers and repair in housing decarbonisation (following Knuth, 2019) to further unpack how decarbonisation is enmeshed in processes of housing production, exchange, finance and reproduction – as well as how grounded, radical and care-oriented approaches to repair can disrupt said accumulation processes (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021; Scheba and Millington, 2023), discussed later in this paper.

This pathway thus proposes a critical interrogation at the intersection of the political economy and political ecology of housing decarbonisation, which can help unpack financial-carbon logics and the growth economy of repair underlying notions of resource frontiers (e.g. saved energy and Energy Performance Certificates) and ESG investments. A framework considering processes of residential accumulation and accumulation by restoration can also provide a valuable approach to analyse the emerging role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in housing decarbonisation practice.

IV Pathway 2: Contradictory everyday decarbonised housing realities on the margins

Regrettably, millions of buildings in the UK are not cost-effective [in terms of interventions] to treat their solid walls or improve glazing as [the] majority of…residents are in [a] low-income category or buildings are in poor conditions (Alabid et al., 2022: 1).

The connections between poor housing conditions and increased climate change vulnerability have been broadly recognised, yet little planning and especially investment is moving towards improved (let alone decarbonised) housing for the urban poor (Ajibade and McBean, 2014). As reflected in the quote from Alabid et al. (2022), this reflects centuries-long classed, racialised and gendered logics of populations and groups deemed worthy of investment or even just inhabiting a place, and those who are not (Fields and Raymond, 2021; Kear et al., 2025; Kish and Leroy, 2015; Mitchell, 2010; Roy, 2019). In some specific historical geographical moments the ‘risk underclass’ (Blok, 2020: 2813) can be a good investment, as occurred with racialised sub-prime mortgage holders during the US or Spanish housing booms (García-Lamarca, 2022; Wyly et al., 2006). As Carlos Tornel (2023) thinks through how ontological and epistemological injustices are embedded in energy systems, I build from this to ask similar questions about housing systems: What housing ‘counts’ as either ‘worth’ being decarbonised, or that is already actually decarbonised in slums, squatted homes and/or other forms of dwelling absent from official plans? In turn, what populations count and in what housing built/dwelled in by whom?

Situated urban political ecology approaches (Lawhon et al., 2014; Loftus, 2012; Truelove, 2011) can help provide insights into contradictory everyday decarbonisation housing realities on the margins. In using the term ‘margins’, I follow a relational and decolonial approach to grasp the marginalisation of people and places, where the margins points to a politics of life and of being that inhabits places conventionally seen as uninhabitable and/or incompatible with the capitalist mainstream (Lancione 2016, 2019). Everyday housing decarbonisation is contradictory here in two senses. First, such housing is already low carbon yet outside official carbon reduction strategies due to housing type and tenure and the people inhabiting it. Second, due to the temporality, small-scale and/or informal nature of most of this housing, as well as the often-precarious realities underlying its inhabitation, it is difficult (some might say impossible) to envision it as a mass solution to climate change (Huber, 2022). Notwithstanding these contradictions, informal settlements are the main form of urbanisation in many countries, and non-expert housing knowledge and experimentation with housing-related climate change mitigation and adaptation is abundant (GIZ et al., 2025). Similar to Kear et al.’s (2025) argument that everyday climate finance is generated in places currently unrecognised by policy elites, this pathway proposes that thinking with and through housing realities on the margins can help open the possibilities for acting on housing decarbonisation and for broader structural changes in housing systems.

Situated political ecologies of housing decarbonisation suggest at least three moments of recognition. First, that many homes across the Global South are built incrementally and simultaneously upon unclear land rights (Bhan, 2019), underlining the need to think of housing as a process and a verb (Turner, 1972). This points to the importance of housing decarbonisation strategies in the Global South and Global North to acknowledge different situated realities of home and the uneven distribution of socio-material ‘resources for adaptation’ (Mee et al., 2014: 366) across class, tenure, race, gender and other realities that generate housing and deeper socioeconomic inequalities. Second, the need to critically unpack the concepts of energy and energy efficiency, the root of how carbon is made legible in most housing decarbonisation strategies (Bouzarovski, 2022; Lutzenhiser, 2014). For example, as Elisabeth Shove (2018) masterfully articulates, a situated approach can unpack how ‘modern’ conceptualisations of nature-culture shape ‘legitimate objects of efficiency’ (p. 783) – indicators like fixed indoor air temperature rather than energy used to keep people warm – and how ‘efficiency obscures the politics of the present’ (p. 786). Third and finally, a situated urban political ecology opens the door to question who decides what housing-energy metrics matter, and to consider what measurements can more effectively guide practice and policy. This proposal is also substantiated by empirical research: in Sweden, per capita energy use metrics indicate energy inefficient buildings in high-income city centres as the problem, while area-normalised energy use points to low-income suburbs that have been the target of decarbonisation initiatives (Von Platten et al., 2020).

This pathway to think political ecologies through housing decarbonisation proposes that alongside – or even instead of – the predominant approach to build the ‘resilience’ of housing systems through cost-benefit investment logics (Moench et al., 2017), to start from a recognition of vulnerability and exposure as socially and politically constructed (Blaikie et al., 2004; Cutter, 1996). For example, Rademacher’s (2009) rich ethnographic work in Kathmandu, Nepal, illustrates how the violent eviction of riparian-zone migrant squatters followed by their re-placement in a self-denominated ecofriendly resettlement in the peripheries transformed them from slum dwellers into the lauded sustainability vanguard. But what if we ask, instead, how vulnerability can transform the existing housing system? Following Swyngedouw’s (2023: 49) reflections in relation to apocalyptic imaginaries vs radical political perspectives of the Anthropocene, recognising the already existing climate apocalypse for hundreds of millions of people ‘opens a wide range of new ways of grappling with socioecological realities and a vast terrain of different political and sociotechnical interventions other than the presently dominant ones’. While it is critical to rupture and transform the political economic context that generates foundational socioeconomic and spatial inequalities which force marginalised groups to be ‘resilient’ in the first place (Kaika, 2017) the proposal I make here is to consider what ‘staying with the breakdown’ (Thieme, 2021) can teach us about already existing housing decarbonisation at the margins that can provide insights to practice and policy across geographies.

Grounded examples from squats, informal settlements and cooperatives abound, throwing a wrench into tenures and populations through which housing decarbonisation is supposed to take place. Housing movements in São Paulo are creating democratic grey ecologies through squatting centrally located empty housing and thus enacting low-carbon cities inclusive of the urban poor (Cohen, 2017; Moretti et al., 2024). In Korali, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Huq and Safique (2023) show how – both despite and because of the government’s discursive partitioning of climate-impacted dwellers – residents’ subaltern knowledges and connected learning networks such as the use of more resistant building material were mobilised to create more resilient homes. Examples come from the Global North as well, sometimes bringing larger questions of accessibility due to class, race and forms of privilege, and thus require critical scrutiny. The housing cooperative La Borda in Barcelona that emerged from neighbourhood grassroots struggle (Larsen, 2019) went beyond integrating passive design standards to also include modular flats that can grow and shrink according to household size, where questions of sufficiency and individual-communal needs are debated in assemblies (Lacol, 2019). While it is key to acknowledge the complexities, conflicts and struggles of many of these realities and to avoid romanticising them (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2024), generative thinking can emerge from delving deeper into the possibilities and challenges of situated socionatural and political relations when dwelling on the margins. These experiences have the potential to provide novel insights into housing decarbonisation writ large.

V Pathway 3: ‘Sustainable’ housing as enclaves of (low carbon?) environmental privilege

Sustainable luxury living: The Oasis exemplifies the high environmental standards that discerning buyers have come to expect, meticulously weaving together pioneering technology, innovative design and sustainable practices to deliver one of Dubai’s most eco-conscious communities (Emaar, 2024: 18).

Imagine a reality where merely by investing and consuming ‘better’, including dwelling in a certified sustainable, low-carbon home, the world can be ‘saved’, indeed even improved towards some past fantastical pure state of ‘Nature’. Such imaginaries are facilitated by the environmentalism of the rich (Dauvergne, 2016) and environmental privilege (Argüelles, 2021; Park and Pellow, 2011), where the environment is a thing or object to be enjoyed devoid of the material social and ecological relations that enable elite lifestyles. As noted in the introduction, new low-carbon developments have been found to advance gentrification and segregation due to the privilege of those able to dwell in areas more secure from climate hazards (Anguelovski et al., 2019a, 2019b; Long and Rice, 2019; Rice et al., 2020; Shokry et al., 2020). Furthermore, even if living in housing labelled as ‘sustainable’ or ‘low carbon’, the rich have significantly higher carbon footprints because of their affluent lifestyles (Barros and Wilk, 2021; Blok, 2020; Cohen, 2016; Holgersen and Hult, 2021; Holgersen and Malm, 2015; Rice et al., 2020), the sheer space their dwelling occupies (Gough et al., 2024) and their overall position in relation to the means of production (Huber, 2021). While it is thus definitely questionable whether such housing is actually decarbonised or sustainable, the imaginary that capitalist (urban) development can solve its own contradictions by merely adding ‘green’ and ‘low-carbon’ considerations into business-as-usual approaches dominates (Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Vela Almeida et al., 2023), in many cases facilitated by the state through (de)regulation, planning permissions and other sanctioning techniques. Thus, as the flip side to housing decarbonisation on the margins, what does it mean to think through the circulation of elite sustainability desires and environmental privilege in relation to self-denominated sustainable and low-carbon housing?

On the one hand, densification has become a synonym for sustainability (Owen, 2009) and has become standard in low-carbon urban planning strategies. Yet it is often decontextualised and depoliticised in its implementation (Knuth et al., 2020), and its complexity often sidelined. Density can lead to vertical segregation as Maloutas and Botton (2023) have shown in Athens, while new-build densification is increasingly carried out through ‘luxury ecologies’ (Cohen, 2017) including low-carbon housing. The elevated cost of such housing contributes to the luxification of urban skies which dramatically deepens urban inequalities (Graham, 2015). Indeed, many of the long-heralded sustainable cities like Vancouver and Seattle are prime examples of the class-based nature of sustainable and low-carbon densification (Quastel et al., 2012; Rice et al., 2020). On the other hand, returning to the quote at the start of this section, uber-elite-oriented sustainable housing outside or in some cases in parallel to densification combines a language of sustainability with the normalisation of excess (Koot, 2021) and the apparent non-existence of limits (Kallis, 2019). The Dubai ‘eco-conscious community’ offers ‘a place to choose your space, your pace and how you live your days’ in properties starting at 4.3 million USD and 950 square metres.

Both approaches to density and ‘sustainable’ housing incarnate environmental privilege, emerging from elites’ exercise of different forms of power that enables them exclusive (and apparently limitless) access to private and public environmental amenities, in some cases enclosing and appropriating the latter through green grabbing strategies (García-Lamarca et al., 2022; Park and Pellow, 2011). They also reflect an absolute disconnect between the way of life in a place and the socio-environmental relationships enabling these lifestyles (Park and Pellow, 2011). As the flip side of environmental racism and injustice, environmental privilege has received significantly less empirical attention despite its value in helping unpack unequal human-nature relations (Argüelles, 2021). More research is needed on the relationships between environmental privilege, density, excess and limits in relation to housing decarbonisation visions and realities.

Exclusive sustainable housing developments in some cases purport green living as saving and even improving elite (and often white) visions of nature. In South Africa, for example, gated eco-estates are sold as providing sustainable, paradise-like living, enmeshed in the celebration of indigenous vegetation thanks to a frontier-living lifestyle that apparently preserves some ‘nature’ that existed before human (read Black) settlement (Ballard and Jones, 2011). Yet as Thakholi and Büscher (2024: 99) state, ‘notions of a historical pristine nature (…) are a fallacy conjured up to maintain white ownership over land’, a foundation enabling a socioecological fix for intertwined nature conservation and property development interests. Wildlife estates near Kruger National Park in Hoedspruit, which are a specific type of gated eco-estate existing since around the 2000s where residential housing is surrounded by wildlife, are enacted through class and racial enclosures for mainly wealthy white classes and often active real estate sector opposition to affordable low-income housing for Black workers, thus furthering a form of ‘green apartheid’ (Koot et al., 2024). With the minimum and maximum median house prices for an eco-estate home, respectively, 4–17 times higher than the average price paid by first-time South African home buyers in 2020, eco-housing credentials are solely for middle to upper classes (Mistry and Spocter, 2022). Considering that this ‘sustainable’ green living is enabled by carbon-based mobility through extensive road infrastructures, airports and even private airstrips, the reality of any truly low-carbon living is, once again, another story (Büscher et al., 2024).

The way that new elite ecological enclaves (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Waldman and Ghertner, 2023) increasingly emerging in the name of low or decarbonised urban and housing development circulate discursively and materially, and shape access to and the ‘creation’ of natures across different geographies requires deeper interrogation. This can contribute to understanding how environmental privilege operates not only as exclusionary privileged access to or consumption of natural environments (Park and Pellow, 2011) but also as the production of these environments: eco-estates as bastions of white privilege that purportedly restore wildlife and indigenous vegetation in South Africa (Ballard and Jones, 2011) or housing developments purifying air for certain castes and classes in Delhi (Waldman and Ghertner, 2023). Disassembling elite housing enclaves in relation to decarbonisation realities, including questions of excess and limits, can aid in dismantling the dominant imaginary of these sites as exemplary interventions towards a future decarbonised housing stock and world.

VI Pathway 4: Decarbonising home as a gateway to/for socionatural transformation

An extensive body of literature particularly from building engineering and energy studies focuses on the technical dimensions of housing decarbonisation, from case-based examples to large-scale modelling (Ascione et al., 2022; Berrill et al., 2022; Calama-González et al., 2022; Hurst and O’Donovan, 2019; Jiménez Torres et al., 2023). Much of this literature approaches housing as an object, where techno-managerial interventions are deployed to reduce a building’s energy impact with little (and often no) consideration of the sociopolitical relations where interventions take place. Exceptions do exist, for example, analyses of the broader context, possibilities and sociopolitical barriers of heat pump technology adoption (Gaur et al., 2021) or the polycentric governance dynamics of rapid, deep and large-scale household heating transitions (Sovacool and Martiskanien, 2020). Quantitative and large-scale studies considering energy and related infrastructure systems from a transformative perspective are indeed important. Yet I argue that we also need to transform broader systems of residential accumulation (Moreno Zacarés, 2024) if decarbonised homes are to be gateways for broader socionatural transformations. In this respect, especially in most engineering and technical housing decarbonisation approaches lacking a broader sociopolitical and socionatural analysis, there is a risk of foreclosing the possibilities of thinking broader energy and housing transformations with, through and beyond the home. Following Stefan Bouzarovski’s (2022) provocation, how can we consider shared and non-capitalist energy efficiency interventions beyond the domain of private homes and households? In other words, what happens when we think housing decarbonisation infrastructurally, relationally and beyond the urban?

Infrastructure and socionatural transformation has long been considered in urban political ecology literature through explorations of how infrastructures shape socionatural power relations through reconfigured socio-material flows (Gandy, 2004; Kaika, 2004; Keil, 2003; Loftus, 2009; Silver, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2006). Infrastructure here operates as a conduit and site where processes of socionatural transformation circulate (Heynen et al., 2006). Deploying this perspective to housing decarbonisation, Edwards and Bulkeley (2017) posit retrofitted housing as infrastructure that transforms circulations of the city. Based on the Philadelphia ‘coolest block’ case, the authors propose that circulations shift who is governing housing (state-capital relation), how it is governed in terms of citizen mobilisation and subjectification and who can access benefits of retrofits. Castán Broto and Bulkeley (2013) consider low-carbon housing experiments in India and Mexico as urban infrastructure interventions that attempt to reshape sociotechnical climate change processes. They show how these experiments for professionals (India) and working classes (Mexico) elucidate the important roles of repair management and metabolic adjustment. Advancing work on housing decarbonisation through urban political ecology infrastructural approaches can benefit from thinking in two related directions. First in relation to power relations in/through water or energy infrastructure repair and adaptation (Baptista, 2019; Barnes, 2017), for example, Alejandro De Coss-Corzo’s (2021) proposal of patchwork as adaptive repair practice in the context of Mexico City’s hydraulic austerity-affected infrastructure. And second, recent work in housing studies on housing as infrastructure (Lawson et al., 2024; Power and Mee, 2020), for example, Bergan and Power’s (2024) proposal of three intersecting epistemological vantage points (affordances, politics and inhabitation). These approaches could help unpack practices, ways of living and lived dimensions of housing decarbonisation (ibid.) in relation to circulation, metabolism, socionatural flows, repair and adaptation.

Profound socionatural transformation also requires changing how we view and act on a range of relational processes to open the ‘black box of housing’ (Easthope et al., 2020) and connected flows. Recent work considers the relational constitution of home through grounded experiences like women’s mobility on the fringes of Khulna city, Bangladesh which stretches home through socioecological structures (Alam et al., 2020) or the eviction of ‘homeless hotspots’ occurring in intimate connection to gentrification and housing financialisation in New York City (Goldfischer, 2020). Broader framings considering relationality in housing includes smart home assemblage (Maalsen, 2020) or housing tenure and wealth inequality through time (Christophers, 2021). Recent research that unpacks relational dynamics in housing retrofits led by homeowners in the UK uncovered several ways to improve the design of policies to better capture household practices and social relations (Brown et al., 2025). Bringing these approaches together, thinking housing decarbonisation relationally through political ecology means considering a range of socioecological relations in the home and beyond into surrounding spaces, through time and at different scales. In the latter, for example, Bouzarovski and Haarstad (2019) take a relational understanding of scale to analyse low-carbon urban transformations across southeastern Europe. They argue that this requires the politicisation of broader socioeconomic systems, the enrolment of actors at multiple levels into processes of change and the recognition of how human and non-human agencies are hybridised in technical energy infrastructures.

Finally, connected to infrastructures and relationality, housing decarbonisation can be thought through planetary urbanisation flows and processes (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Brenner, 2013), more specifically considering its geographies of extraction resulting from the planetary mine (Arboleda, 2016, 2020). This means engaging with but moving beyond whole life carbon estimates of residential building stocks (Hegarty and Kinnane, 2023) towards Castriota’s (2024) work to unravel labour and resource flows in relation to extractivism and extensions, as well as broader work thinking about inhabiting the extensions (Simone et al., 2023). Examples of what this looks like include how construction materials for decarbonisation are sourced and processed, where and how energy used in housing is generated, the flow of financial configurations and tools, as well as who governs, labours and lives in and through these processes extended across geographies. While Green New Deal-type visions in the Global North strive for nationally bounded carbon neutrality, this is only made possible through extractive material, energy and sociopolitical relations across the Global South (Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Vela Almeida et al., 2023). Unpacking how extractions and extensions relate to existing state- and market-led housing decarbonisation strategies, as well as who has access to ‘resources for adaptation’ (Mee et al., 2014: 366) and why, can help elucidate uneven development dynamics and how they are inhabited.

VII Towards political ecologies of radical housing repair

The growth economy of repair (Huff and Brock, 2023) appears increasingly connected to mainstream housing decarbonisation approaches, exemplified, for example, by its intertwining with gentrification processes (Bouzarovski et al., 2018) or saved energy becoming a tradeable commodity (Knuth 2016, 2019; Thoyre, 2021b). My proposal of political ecologies of radical housing repair begins by questioning who benefits from this growth economy of repair and underlines the deeply political nature of how planetary boundaries are defined (Sultana, 2023). Radical housing repair is about rupturing logics of elite-oriented economic growth that occurs through concentrated private asset production, ownership and financialisation and its resulting upward flows of capital accumulation and rent. This requires overturning the economic and political ideas of certain housing, groups or people being investment- and inhabitation-worthy, thus opening possibilities for grounded learning and action. In this line, following Ponder (2023), rather than repairing or maintaining existing housing systems which can often be defined as ‘violent infrastructure’ that deepen structural inequalities, we need to reimagine housing. Taking a multi-scalar approach to housing decarbonisation as a political and socionatural process, radical housing repair is inspired by Lawhon and McCreary’s (2023) modest approach with ‘enough for all’ as its sociopolitical vision. Beyond sometimes overly simplified debates around less (degrowth) or more (ecomodernism), the idea of ‘enough’ serves as a political ecological question (ibid.) about the kind of decarbonised housing futures we need where there is enough for all.

A starting point in framing political ecologies of radical housing repair is ‘broken-world thinking’, a concept from Jackson’s (2014: 221) seminal writings on rethinking repair from science and technology studies. Jackson (ibid.) proposes starting from ‘erosion, breakdown and decay, rather than novelty, growth and progress’. This means recognising the point of departure as a broken and crisis-ridden housing system inextricably embedded in socionatural relations, where property ownership, wealth and rent reinforce class, racial, gender and other inequalities. Radical housing repair underlines the politics of repair, grounded in the idea that repair has emancipatory potential (Graham and Thrift, 2007) and that repair is an adaptive practice embedded in social and political relations (De Coss-Corzo, 2021). Moving towards an egalitarian and expanded approach to housing decarbonisation that thinks beyond established boundaries (Bouzarovski, 2022) requires grounded, radical and care-oriented approaches to repair. For example, in the case of the occupied Cissie Gool House in Cape Town, material housing repair practices create home and enact staying put through the appropriation of space, of prefiguring desired future social relations, of defiant/hopeful endurance and the politics of refusal underlined by community-building and sustaining (Scheba and Millington, 2023). As Ethemcan Turhan (2021: 5) notes, ‘embracing and elaborating on the praxis of radical uncertainty, radical care and radical adaptation could provide another way out’, in this case towards different perspectives on and strategies for housing decarbonisation.

In proposing radical housing repair as a political practice, I take inspiration from the multi-pronged strategy of the Spanish housing movement over the past decade and a half. Acknowledging the need for broader systemic change, movements have directly engaged with the state at multiple scales to push for structural and legal changes related to mortgages, tenancy relations and home energy access – and as the state negates, is non-responsive or too slow, movements enact change themselves through blocking evictions, occupying bank owned housing, staying put and organising rent strikes amidst other tactics (Emperador Badimon and Ancelovici, 2025; García-Lamarca, 2017; Gil and Palomera, 2024; Guzmán, 2024; Ill-Raga, 2024). Occupations from Cape Town, South Africa and Bogotá, Colombia also highlight direct co-design, aspirational co-design and anticipatory counter-design as modalities occupiers use to engage state logics towards the regularisation and stability of home (Scheba et al., 2024). While I fully recognise that housing decarbonisation is now nowhere near being a popular site for mobilisation, my proposal seeks to think strategically about how popular efforts can both push for broader systemic change and enact egalitarian approaches in current and future struggles over low-carbon housing.

Critical engagement with the state from below is crucial because despite the fact that the state and public finance often seek to produce and maintain property and tenure hierarchies (Wagner et al., 2025), to actually transform these requires action beyond the exclusively local. Such engagement is exemplified by Cohen and co-authors’ (2021) proposal of a Green New Deal for public housing in the US: deploying massive state funding to retrofit and build millions of public, zero-carbon homes. Political ecologies of radical housing repair can be advanced by precisely these types of transformative policy proposals that unite climate and housing justice, with lessons to be learned, for example, from large-scale state-driven rapid household heating transitions (Sovacool and Martiskainen, 2020). Embedding housing decarbonisation in democratic ecologies (Cohen, 2017) also requires broader urban development and rent controls towards ensuring that housing decarbonisation does not displace (Gourevitch, 2024). It furthermore politicises property relations (Blomley, 2005) including the question of vacancy (O’Callaghan, 2024) within decarbonisation strategies, towards increasing the expansion and accessibility of collective and common housing ownership structures. Policies supporting weatherisation programmes (Knuth, 2019; Reames, 2016) are another example that can provide a starting point towards more accessible, affordable and large-scale housing decarbonisation. In Portland, Oregon’s Cully neighbourhood, community-based coalitions and initiatives also developed weatherisation programmes in the face of the long waitlist for the city of Portland’s home repair programme (Triguero-Mas et al., 2022).

This last point highlights how radical housing repair can be read in already existing practices and illustrates the other prong of the strategy I propose, that is, to enact and name egalitarian decarbonised housing on the ground. This is illustrated by housing movements in São Paulo who squatted empty housing in city centre to create multi-racial, multi-class affordable housing anchored neighbourhoods that are low carbon, towards building a poor people’s compact city (Cohen, 2017). The type of reproductive commons often generated in squats (Ruiz Cayuela and García-Lamarca, 2023), while inherently complex, frequently conflictive and not to be romanticised (see Wilhelm-Solomon, 2024), can give insights into broader neighbourhood and city-wide circulations that can facilitate radical housing repair. Such circulations expand Edwards and Buckeley’s (2017) reading of the role of the state, capital and governance dynamics in low-carbon housing, helping us think about the kind of housing decarbonisation knowledges that count and in what housing retrofitted or built for whom. Subaltern knowledges and connected learning networks produced through dwelling, for example, the use of better building material to create more resilient homes in Korali, Dhaka’s largest informal settlement, become visible despite and because of the government’s discursive partitioning of climate-impacted dwellers (Huq and Safique, 2023). Further examples can also be seen in active resistance against elitist exclusionary decarbonised enclaves (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Waldman and Ghertner, 2023) often envisioned as sustainable solutions by the state and/or private developers, but also through the ways that urban majorities secure housing at the intersection of informality and marginality (Castriota, 2024). These political housing repair practices can result in ‘precarious institutionalisation’ (Ferreri, 2024) as housing movements struggle for the formalisation of building occupations that previously stood vacant, whose use is often more ecological and low carbon than proposals to demolish and rebuild (Moretti et al., 2024).

In the political proposal I outline here, radical housing repair in terms of policy and practice means acting towards the big picture for large-scale housing transformations while working from/with housing realities on the margins, recognising ‘different modes of enhancing, securing and scaling repair as an already existing mode of housing practice’ (Bhan, 2019: 647 emphasis added). Unpacking the particularities of such grounded contexts through mapping, tracing and reframing (Kear et al., 2025) can enable the identification of legal loopholes to ‘hack’ existing housing regulation systems towards recognising marginalised people whose already existing low-carbon homes are often excluded due to ‘informal’ or other precarious tenure/migration status. An example of this comes again from São Paulo where after an occupied building burned and collapsed in 2018, technicians mobilised by the municipal housing secretariat worked with social movement members to focus on maintenance and measures to reduce vulnerabilities rather than defining risk in buildings, as the latter would have likely led to evictions (Moretti et al., 2024). Public finance can move towards reparative climate infrastructures that take a transformative approach to socioecological repair (Webber et al., 2022), considering elements like collectivised ownership structures and situated knowledges in housing decarbonisation investments.

Shove’s (2018: 786) statement that ‘efficiency measures obscure the politics of the present’ underlines how a singular focus on housing-energy efficiency abstracted from everyday lived dimensions and broader systemic processes, all variables ‘beyond’ quantification and control, serves to maintain existing housing and energy (and more broadly material-human) development patterns rather than moving towards any transformative practice or process. Radical housing repair acknowledges that we are already in the overshoot or what Swyngedouw (2023) calls the climate apocalypse and thus requires a shift in policy and practice from efficiency to sufficiency (Barber, 2024). The latter directly tackles questions of environmental privilege and housing inequalities by placing critical emphasis on questions such as housing excess and what is enough (Gough et al., 2024). Implementing such thorny perspectives undoubtedly have little mainstream political (and even social) traction, as they fundamentally challenge status quo imaginaries, ‘rights’ and realities particularly around centuries long standing norms and laws on property ownership in capitalist societies, but to truly address questions of just housing decarbonisation transitions they require more research and debate.

VIII Conclusions

This paper sought to read housing decarbonisation through (urban) political ecologies, synthesising four pathways to articulate the modest theoretical and political proposal of radical housing repair. I view this concept as a provocation to help (re)imagine and advance how housing decarbonisation is conceptualised and enacted, towards more egalitarian and transformative theory, policy and practice. The concept does this in four ways. First, through being attentive to foundational inequalities that exist in and are recreated through housing systems, it proposes identifying and fostering non-speculative carbon reduction practices that are enmeshed in broader housing and development control frameworks. Second, by learning from and with housing decarbonisation experiences on the margins and unpacking the politics of energy efficiency, among others, situated experience can expand our understanding of accessible and affordable approaches to decarbonise housing. Third, in untangling environmental privilege and its related production of housing-natures, critical questions related to excess, limits and sufficiency can be analysed in more detail and brought into public debate. And finally, extending thinking from housing as a bounded object to consider infrastructural, relational and beyond the urban ways to think through socionatures of housing can shed light on circulations, flows and spatial dynamics that expand our understanding of what decarbonised housing can look like.

In signalling radical housing repair as a modest proposal, I recognise that much more collective thinking as well as qualitative and quantitative research is necessary to understand its component parts in more depth and across different geographies, as well as how it can be operationalised politically. The first pathway pointed to the need for more knowledge on financial-carbon logics, regulatory systems and emergent technologies related to housing decarbonisation as well as bridging broader political economy and political ecology readings of low-carbon accumulation to deepen understandings of housing decarbonisation. The second pathway underscored the value of situated knowledges that can emerge from realities of urban majorities on the margins who live in already decarbonised housing. While acknowledging their contradictory and complex nature, more work is needed to both understand these grounded housing decarbonisation knowledges and practices and to think through the insights they can provide for transformative policy and practice. The third pathway underlined the need to research environmental privilege, density, excess and limits in relation to housing decarbonisation discourses and realities, and how the discursive nature and materiality of ecological enclaves intersect with the production of natures across different geographies. Finally, the fourth pathway highlighted fruitful ways forward for investigation that brings research on infrastructure repair and adaptation and housing as infrastructure into dialogue with housing decarbonisation; relating housing decarbonisation to a range of socioecological relations in the home and beyond, through time and at different scales; and unpacking labour, resource and financial flows to better understand the geographies of extraction and the lived and spatial extensions of housing decarbonisation.

The two-pronged strategy I propose to push radical housing repair forward through both engaging critically with the state and enacting decarbonised housing on the margins stands in contradistinction to predominant techno-managerial and depoliticised approaches to housing decarbonisation. However, I acknowledge the limitations and challenges such a strategy faces, perhaps the main one being the absence of popular engagement with the issue of housing decarbonisation itself, as many movements are primarily concerned with eviction and struggles for mere survival. Growing conservative anti-environmental social governance (ESG) sentiments that seek to dismantle zero carbon targets, coupled with a push towards rearmament shifting capital towards defence, further reveal an uncertain terrain for popular struggles over decarbonisation, opening or closing possibilities at different scales of action. Yet there is potential in uniting existing struggles against housing speculation with groups thinking and enacting situated decarbonised housing experiences and those questioning environmental privilege, excess and limits. As a modest proposal, political ecologies of radical housing repair acts as an invitation for more collective thinking, research and acting to realise its potential.