From Housing Inequalities to an Unjust Energy Transition : Data-driven analyses of socio-technical links in the Swedish multifamily building stock

Abstract: Improving energy performance in the Swedish multifamily building stock is an important undertaking in order to reach national and international targets for energy efficiency. However, growing economic inequalities in Sweden, manifested in the multifamily building stock as housing inequalities that entail segregation, overcrowding, and differences in standard of living, have led to low-income households being overrepresented in buildings with low energy performance. In order to ensure that inequalities are not reproduced in the energy transition of the Swedish multifamily building stock, there is a need for increased recognition of socio-technical challenges and their implications for a just transition. The aim of this licentiate dissertation is to improve the socio-technical understanding of the energy transition in the Swedish multifamily building stock and to explore its implications for distributive justice of benefits and burdens among residents. To do this, a national database including both technical and social data was assembled to enable a data-driven approach to study challenges in this transition.The results from the studies included in this dissertation improve the socio-technical understanding of this transition in primarily three ways. First, it was shown that low-income households have carried the greatest share of the past decade’s energy savings in the multifamily building stock. Second, it was shown that low-income households were disproportionally affected by a policy aiming at reducing households’ energy use due to their overrepresentation in energy inefficient housing. Finally, it was shown that by analysing per capita energy use instead of area-normalised energy use in buildings, the opposite correlation between income and energy performance was found; per capita energy use was the lowest among low-income households, and the highest among high-income households. The reason for this opposite correlation is the higher residential density that is found in low-income households.These findings have implications for the understanding of distributive justice in the energy transition, as it can be considered an injustice that residents with the lowest per capita energy use are met with the highest demands for energy savings. Above all, these results suggest that one way to promote a socially just and sustainable energy transition of the housing stock could be through an increased recognition of efficient building utilisation as an alternative to high energy performance. This would create a more socioeconomically inclusive definition of sustainable living.