Disintegrated Houses: Exploring Ecofeminist Housing and Urban Design Options

Abstract

Sherilyn MacGregor astutely highlights possible points of tension between the socioeconomic agendas, processes and outcomes of ecocity and feminist urban visions. MacGregor also claims ecofeminism may benefit from utilising the language of citizenship to move beyond essentialised gender and spatial associations of care to address such possible tensions between ecological and feminist agendas. Responding to MacGregor's reflections on options for taking care into the public realm, and the need in this to question the public–private divide, this paper asks whether the traits highlighted by Chantal Mouffe's citizen can be applied to the socioeconomic aspirations of the ecocity, addressing possible tensions between ecocity and feminist aspirations on the basis of a de‐essentialised ethic of care.

Sustainability Uptake in Housing in Metropolitan Australia: An Institutional Problem, Not a Technological One

“…The doctoral research into the sustainability and affordability of housing combined site visits with in-depth interviews to assess interpretations of sustainability and barriers to this, as perceived by community-based housing developers, and a range of governmental and industry stakeholders (see Crabtree, 2005Crabtree, , 2006aCrabtree, , 2006b. Recent literature has emerged positing impediments to sustainability as social, economic and political phenomena rather than shortcomings of technological or practical knowledge (e.g.…”

“…It collates data from two simultaneous research projects; RMIT's EcoHome project in Victoria, and a doctoral project exploring stakeholder perceptions of barriers to sustainable design in the house-building industry in New South Wales (NSW) (see Crabtree, 2005Crabtree, , 2006aCrabtree, , 2006b. The EcoHome project undertaken by RMIT University, Melbourne, utilized surveys to identify how innovation-here sustainable technology-is disseminated throughout the housing industry.…”

Microclimates of Urban Reproduction: The Limits of Automating Environmental Control

“…In a rare piece of synthesis of work on the indoors as active political ecological spaces, Day Biehler and Simon draw attention to these spaces as “vital sites for the production and reproduction of nature, scale, and environmental citizens” (2011:174). They review work which shines light on the uneven production of indoor environments (Buzar ; Crabtree ), and how they become sites of embodiment of broader ideologies and processes (Murphy ; Van Wagner ). They also highlight literature focusing on the co‐constitution of indoor space by specific socio‐technological‐ecological assemblages, through which technologies and natures are animated and generate different effects and affects (Hitchings and Lee ; Shove ), and studies examining how indoor environments are made (but frequently contested) spaces of surveillance, control and subject formation (Luke ; Weber ).…”

Infrastructures of Care: Opening up “Home” as Commons in a Hot City

“…(Berlant, 2016, p. 395) Increased urban heat is now troubling, and while one response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of thermal comfort, the price we pay is to still our bodies and close ourselves off from one another. Upon reviewing how technical cooling infrastructures have produced home as an enclosed and private space with a strong boundary that demarcates cool livability, we turn now to explore infrastructures that instate home as a space of flow and encounter across porous boundaries (Crabtree, 2006;Power, 2009), and that enact a commons that is continually in the making (Linebaugh, 2008). The commons referred to include cooling knowledge, practices, shared spaces, and built environments that are widely accessible for use in achieving thermal comfort, which also require care to be maintained and that produce benefit for a wide community (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013).…”