The housing sector in Sweden, as elsewhere, faces major transitions to meet far-reaching sustainability targets. Eco-efficiency has tended to dominate the sustainability discourse, with a reliance on incremental improvements. This paper explores what is needed to reach a system-level framing of sustainability transformations in housing and home-related structures and practices. Based on previous research and empirical insights from workshops with diverse actors in the Swedish housing sector, we explore different narratives of what needs to change and perspectives on agency and collective action. Shifting the narrative from efficiency to sufficiency, and from a focus on technology and behaviour to complex interactions between actors and systems, offers opportunities as well as tensions in the sector. While the current paradigm offers limited space for action, the emergence of perspectives, policies, and practices concerning, for example, living smaller, simpler, and sharing posits the housing sector as an arena for socio-ecological transformations.

In this article, we explore the transition discourses and values expressed and foregrounded in Swedish national policy documents on sustainable consumption. Values, as material-discursive practices, shape the pace and direction of transitions, and for deep, system-wide sustainability transformations, it is critical to strengthen intrinsic, sustainability-aligned values. Public policy is especially well-positioned in this regard since policy shapes the discourse as well as the space for action. Our findings, however, reveal how market connotations frame Swedish sustainable consumption policy within a growth logic, where the public is to facilitate the market by removing barriers for the consumer while encouraging business innovation. As such, the Swedish policy discourse essentially reproduces a so-called improve discourse on sustainable consumption and reinforces extrinsic values of power and achievement. The scope of sustainable consumption is occasionally expanded, particularly in alignment with a shift discourse that emphasizes the move toward a circular economy. However, despite elements of benevolence and universalism in the overarching framing of the Generational Goal, these efforts remain overshadowed and co-opted by the extrinsically focused dominant market framing. Thus, we find limited potential for the policy discourse to help foreground more diverse values essential for deep transformations. Acknowledging the challenges of disentangling values in written policy documents, we call for future research to explore value tensions in practical policy-implementation contexts.

The complexities of contemporary planning, the urgent need for affordable housing and increasing demands for sustainable development are pushing current housing provision practices to their limits. In response, more collaborative housing approaches have (re)gained prominence in recent decades, offering diverse sustainability potentials. This paper explores the framing of sustainability within European and US literature on collaborative housing while contrasting the perceived sustainability potential with practical implementation challenges. Approached through a systematic sample of selected literature, the socio-economic and environmental sustainability claims associated with collaborative housing are explored. This analysis outlines identified knowledge gaps, financial hurdles, and political challenges, offering insights into the emerging discourse on structural support for collaborative housing models. The findings indicate an absence of substantiated support for the sustainability claims made, emphasising a reliance on individual case studies. Furthermore, a disparity emerges between the potential of sustainable collaborative housing and the current policy environment’s capacity to facilitate their realisation. This research underscores the urgency of strengthening empirical foundations and aligning policies and instruments to bridge the gap between sustainability aspirations and the realities of the housing sector.

In this paper, we explore narratives of sustainability in housing and everyday life, positing the home as an ‘opportunity space’ for sustainability transitions. Case studies of three Swedish housing associations provide empirical insights on how sustainability is understood and practiced among residents. Addressing aspects of power and problem framing in sustainability transitions, we analyse how sustainability engagements in the associations are shaped by intersecting discourses, power relations and norms relating to age, gender, class and ethnicity. The analysis suggests that reflexivity on sustainability in the associations on one hand links to different sustainability approaches, which relate to assumptions regarding who can become engaged and the organisation of the associations’ work. On the other hand, narratives and practices of ‘doing sustainability’ are made sense of in different ways, where issues of for whom, the type of knowledge that is premiered, and the ‘upscaling’ of initiatives pose challenges for a more inclusive and transformative approach to sustainability in housing associations. Taken together, this creates different conditions for sustainability transitions in housing and everyday life, shaped both by norms of who and what is seen as sustainable, and by structures that outline the space for action for the associations and their residents. 

Sustainability discourse offers a plethora of perspectives on the type of change needed to ensure a just development within planetary boundaries, and how that change could come about. Calls for radical transformations nonetheless underline the need to examine prevalent discursive structures in society, including challenging the 'ideology of growth', in order to formulate new and transformative policy approaches. Based on empirical insights as to how different actors - including grassroots, planners, officials and politicians - in Sweden perceive the transformations needed to reach sustainability goals, this paper explores how narratives of change reproduce, make use of or show cracks in the eco-modern sustainability paradigm.

Sustainability discourse offers a plethora of perspectives on the type of change needed to ensure a just development within planetary boundaries, and how that change could come about. Calls for radical transformations nonetheless underline the need for examining prevalent discursive structures in society, including challenging the ‘ideology of growth’, in order to formulate new and transformative policy approaches. Based in empirical insights on how different actors – including grassroots, planners, officials and politicians – in Sweden perceive the transformations needed to reach sustainability goals, this paper explores how narratives of change reproduce, make use of or offer cracks in the eco-modern sustainability paradigm.

Co-housing has been framed as an answer to demands on reducing the ecological impact from the built environment and on modern ecological friendly lifestyles, with a growing group of socially and environmentally conscious residents pursuing alternative housing solutions. Yet claims of sustainability in co-housing must also be understood in relation to a prevalent ‘ecological modernisation’ logic in contemporary urban governance. This chapter explores whether co-housing can be seen as part of a more fundamental transition to a sustainable society within planetary boundaries, or whether it rather might serve as an example of incremental, yet insufficient change within current systems. Utilising the analytical framework of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ sustainability, and the dichotomy between collective action and individual responsibilisation, the chapter discusses in what way co-housing can be understood as a sustainable way of living. While co-housing could be dismissed as merely offering a slightly ‘greener’ middle-class lifestyle choice, it might also pose a more radical socio-ecological alternative, based in principles of anti-consumerist, collaborative, and low-impact everyday practices, where the meso-level of collective action of the co-housing community might be an important arena for pursuing far-reaching sustainability transitions.

Co-housing is often lauded as an alternative housing form offering a more socially, ecologically and economically sustainable way of living. This book takes its departure in the need for a critical exploration of co-housing in the context of sustainable urban development, beyond the normative approach that often characterizes co-housing research. Based on a four-year research project involving in-depth studies of co-housing in and around major cities in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Spain, the empirical and theoretical contributions presented in the book explore how co-housing developments can be understood and contextualized in urban sustainability discourses and policies in Europe today. The introductory chapter outlines the analytical and contextual framework of the book. After a brief description of the definitions used and the research approach taken, the chapter introduces a discussion on the discourse of sustainable development, to frame the ‘sustainability problems’ that co-housing is perceived to solve. Analytically, it is found relevant to distinguish between two contextual dimensions of co-housing: (1) urban civil society; and (2) urban governance. These contextual dimensions, in turn, are argued to relate to two key facets of co-housing, as recurring themes throughout the book: revolving around forms of community, and forms of autonomy.

This book investigates co-housing as an alternative housing form in relation to sustainable urban development. Co-housing is often lauded as a more sustainable way of living. The primary aim of this book is to critically explore co-housing in the context of wider social, economic, political and environmental developments. This volume fills a gap in the literature by contextualising co-housing and related housing forms. With focus on Denmark, Sweden, Hamburg and Barcelona, the book presents general analyses of co-housing in these contexts and provides specific discussions of co-housing in relation to local government, urban activism, family life, spatial logics and socio-ecology. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a broad range of social-scientific fields concerned with housing, urban development and sustainability, as well as to planners, decision-makers and activists.

This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern socio-technical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.