Exploring Transformative Housing Futures Within Planetary Boundaries

The built environment is a major driver of global environmental pressures, including harmful emissions, material extraction, land-use change and waste generation. At the same time, housing systems are deeply entangled with pressing social challenges such as affordability, financialisation, indebtedness and wealth inequality, all resulting in unequal access to adequate living conditions. Despite this dual (or perhaps poly) crisis, most sustainability strategies in the built environment remain incremental, often focused on technological optimisation, cost efficiency and supply-side measures, while leaving underlying structures of affordability, ownership, investment and consumption largely unchanged. Recent housing policy debates highlight the tensions between market-driven approaches — which centre on increasing supply, deregulation and investment incentives — and calls for more structural interventions (by state actors) addressing affordability, distribution and long-term public value. This challenge is compounded by the regionally specific context of housing, and diversity of obstacles (lack of supply vs. vacancy, urbanisation vs. rural decline etc.). Meanwhile, financialisation has emerged as a central and yet contested driver of housing markets, influencing prices, tenure structures and access, yet remains difficult to address in the contemporary political economy. “Sustainable housing” is therefore not a neutral concept. Competing definitions, interests and forms of expertise shape what is considered sustainable, for whom, and at what cost. In many contexts, sustainability interventions risk reinforcing existing inequalities or serving speculative and investment-driven logics, even where they achieve technical improvements in environmental performance. Meanwhile, diverse and often overlooked practices, particularly in the Global South and in marginalised contexts, already demonstrate alternative (often communal) ways of building, maintaining and inhabiting housing with lower resource intensity, often through vernacular and locally-tailored methods. These tensions highlight the need for broader interdisciplinary engagement, including stronger contributions from the social sciences and political philosophy, to interrogate how housing futures are imagined, contested and enacted under conditions of ecological, economic and political constraint.This Research Topic seeks to explore transformative and imaginative futures for housing that operate within planetary boundaries while advancing socially and ecologically just societies. Rather than attempting to predict likely trajectories, the aim of the collection is to expand the space of possible scenarios by encouraging contributions that challenge dominant assumptions about housing provision, ownership, consumption and everyday dwelling practices. Housing systems sit at the intersection of material resource flows and social relations. They shape how large proportions of land, energy and materials are used, while also structuring wealth inequality, access to amenities and utilities, and defining everyday lived experience for human societies. Addressing housing within planetary boundaries therefore requires not only technical innovation, but also critical engagement with the political, economic and cultural conditions that drive demand, distribution and use, including the increasing role of financial actors and investment logics in shaping housing systems. Recent debates on de/post-growth, limitarianism and regenerative approaches, as well as more techno-optimisitic visions (such as Klein & Thompson’s abundance agenda) point toward alternative ways of organising housing systems as part of the wider political economy, beyond incremental efficiency gains. This Research Topic aims to convene contributions that interrogate these (among other) possibilities, explore their implications, and articulate pathways toward housing futures that prioritise sufficiency, equity and collective wellbeing within ecological limits.We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological and design-oriented contributions that explore transformative approaches to housing futures within planetary boundaries. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes: • Housing as dwelling and practice: everyday life, household structures, care, shared living, and alternative forms of community and inhabitation. • Political and economic dimensions of housing: ownership models including right-of-occupancy, financialisation, governance, and struggles over access, rights and distribution. • Material and resource perspectives: reducing resource consumption, sufficiency-oriented design, regenerative approaches, circular material flows, and impacts related to water, land, air pollution and construction materials. • Alternative housing forms and spatial futures: including cohousing, ecovillages, mixed-use developments, adaptive reuse, rural revitalisation, and post-industrial or de-urbanising contexts. • Innovative delivery and organisational models: such as cooperative and community-led housing, self-build, risk-sharing contracts such as IPD and PPPs, and new forms of stewardship or buildings-as-a-service. • Cross-sectoral and supply-chain integration: linking housing with energy, infrastructure or agriculture by-products and other material and resource streams. • Futures thinking and exploratory methodologies: including scenario development, speculative design, back-casting, visioning and other approaches that expand the space of possible futures. Topic editors: Conor Shaw, Aoife Houlihan Wiberg, Mustapha Munir, Matti Kuronen, Barbara Schönig Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84803/exploring-transformative-housing-futures-within-planetary-boundaries