Research Aims

HEaTR’s animating principle is that scientific approaches to sustainable household energy use must be inspired by the values, needs, and practices of householders themselves. Sustainable energy strategies will only be effective if there is a clear understanding of how people who live in the places most vulnerable to extreme heat and cold interact with energy systems, thermal technologies, and housing itself. An analytical focus on housing will permit us to build a bottom-up approach to climate change and to the technologies that work to protect individuals and communities.

The need for such a bottom-up approach is clear. While poor and marginalized people spend a greater proportion of income on household energy, those same people have developed creative and potentially scalable solutions to energy challenges, from low-cost cooling and insulation using locally-sourced materials, to heat and cold action plans that leverage social networks to protect the most vulnerable. We aim to design a center focused on how households use energy, how community-driven home building and repair practices can save energy, and how regional and global energy and housing market dynamics enable or impede net-zero living.

In collaboration with community stakeholders, HEaTR will engage the tools of social science, spatial data science, architecture, and data science to analyze the social dynamics of household energy use. While energy use is sometimes understood as the result of individual consumer choices, it is structured by social and economic factors that transcend individual behavior. As energy spending goes up as a proportion of income, climate insecurity and economic insecurity compound one another. Aging housing stock, under-investment in basic maintenance, and the continued prevalence of low-efficiency housing in poor neighborhoods (not to mention the dominance of consumer-driven energy transition plans that privilege those with the means to purchase zero-carbon technology) only deepen the paradox that inefficient energy use often coincides with low income.

Working across analytical scales, from individual homes to neighborhoods to cities and regions, the Global Center will develop transferable, mobile models of sustainable and equitable behaviors that can foster household-level climate resilience. We will develop comparative, qualitative methods for analyzing the social forces that shape how people use energy to heat and cool their homes, as well as for understanding how household energy use is situated in systems of kinship, gendered divisions of labor, and vernacular architectural and climate control practices. We will integrate this qualitative approach with quantitative and spatial research on the distribution of housing and climate risk. In this way, HEaTR’s research will lead to understandings of how the process of constructing and maintaining sustainable housing, from individual practices to community action to long-range urban planning, might contribute to climate justice. Once it is operational, HEaTR will empower household and community associations by creating a platform for accessing information on best practices for addressing heating and cooling challenges, featuring effective low-cost and community-based energy use practices as well as data on grid-level energy costs and investments.