Browsing by Subject "housing"

A systemic change in the current modes of production and consumption, a so-called sustainability transition, is required to overcome large-scale society-transforming phenomena such as the climate change. This in turn demands changes in socio-technical systems, i.e., the networks of actors, institutions, technologies, material artefacts, and knowledge creation. In this thesis, the Finnish construction and housing sector is used as a case study, and an example of one socio-technical system. By focusing on the socio aspect of the socio-technical, I analyse how actors who are involved in the current system may inhibit or enable a sustainability transition. I seek to answer the following questions: what the relevant definitions of and foci for climate-wise action are among stakeholders in the sector in Finland; how actor-related barriers manifest themselves; and which actors could enable or speed up the transition. This thesis builds on sustainability transition theories, especially multi-level perspective and strategic niche management, to better understand actor roles and relationships. Based on a literature review, I define three actor-related barriers to transition (misaligned vision and focus, small network, and pro-regime actor resistance) and one potential enabler (intermediaries). These are then applied to the Finnish context. In this thesis, I employed stakeholder analysis as the methodology, interviewing a pre-defined set of 21 stakeholders. The results were analysed using content and social network analyses. The results suggest that although the understanding of climate-wise construction and housing is gaining a more holistic perspective, the three barriers all still manifest in the sector in Finland: all the stakeholders are engaged in energy-related topics, but hold differing foci on household choices, low-carbon materials and circularity; the network amongst actors seems relatively dense and inclusive, but improvement points emerge with closer examination; although results suggest that development has happened in the recent years, industries and incumbents are still considered too slow-moving. The importance of intermediation is also recognised by many but defining and picking potential intermediaries out of the crowd is a complex task. Overall, the sector may be moving forward in the transition, but the stakeholders create and uphold both barriers and opportunities in the process.

In this study ecoefficiency of residential buildings is estimated with MIPSmethod. MIPSmethod focuses on the natural resource (so. material) use. Apart from the material efficiency also required energy and carbon dioxide emissions during the construction period and maintenance were also counted in this study. Under the maintenanceperiod only the energy flowed through the building cover was taken into account. The maintenance period was 50 years. The study covered 14 different buildings from which nine where single family houses and five blocks of flats. MIPSindicator is based on material flows. It uses them as criteria of ecoefficiency. The aim is to calculate the hidden material flows caused during the manufacturing of products. MIPSvalues can be calculated with MIfactors published by Wuppertalinstitute. MIPS is rough and simplifying method but on the other hand its advantage is a ability to illustrate one of the important areas of ecoefficiency. Most of the natural resources used by the residential building are related to foundations of buildings. For example more than half of natural resources use caused by wooden houses are related to foundations. Also the maintenance consumes natural resources across the energy use. With maintenance it takes decades to reach the level of construction period. When calculating the carbon dioxide emissions the maintenance is more significant. It takes only around ten years to reach the level of emissions caused by construction period. Wood as a construction material is the most ecoefficient choice. Block of flats is more ecoefficient than single family house with any indicator. According to this study, the wooden blocks of flats are the most ecoefficient choice.

This thesis aimed to systematically map and review built environment low carbon and/or social justice experiments in Finland and understand how municipalities engage in experimentation and what challenges municipalities face when engaging in it. To find what forms of experiments for socially just low carbon buildings and housing can be found in Finland, 1 386 objects in 15 databases were systematically mapped. 204 unique built environment low carbon and/or social justice experiments were recognized and further reviewed. Municipality engagements and challenges in experimentation were approached through a case study of four Finnish municipalities Helsinki, Joensuu, Turku, and Vantaa. 14 case city officials and other persons working with experimentation were interviewed, and 1 839 pages of case-city-related documents were gathered. Triangulation was used to analyze the interview transcripts and additional documents in an abductive manner to find what kind of policy engagements for experimentation municipalities participated in and what kind of challenges the municipality representatives identified when doing so. This thesis discovered that there is a large focus on building and nurturing niches and testing technologies with a lack of focus on profound social justice and the behavioral side of the sustainability transitions. The sustainability experimentation in the built environment was technology-focused and lacked profound social justice aspects. Even though there were some overlaps between low carbon and social justice in the experiments, the experiments did not seek to increase social justice but rather to do low carbon in a socially just way. Municipalities strongly focused on building and nurturing niches and experimentation as a process. Municipalities did not do much experimentation in their operations and focused on the experimentation process rather than the subject matter. Also, the municipality experimentation engagements were characterized by a lack of novelty, flexibility, and uncertainty. This thesis also reveals that the links between sustainability experimentation and sustainability transitions may not be as straightforward as the scientific models and frameworks present. Though this thesis made several findings about sustainability experimentation, there remains a particularly urgent need to develop and conduct additional studies. They are needed to understand better the phenomena in the socially just low carbon experimentation in the built environment to enable just transition to low carbon buildings and housing.

Housing prices in many countries have experienced large run-ups and downturns which indicates that the housing market is not working efficiently. Understanding the factors affecting the house price movement is important to be able to prevent radical price changes and maintain economic stability. One cause for the inefficiency in the housing market has been proposed to be the money illusion. Money illusionary agents make inflation adjustment errors by discounting the future real payoffs with nominal rather than real interest rate. This irrational behavior of agents has been shown to cause pricing errors especially at the times when inflation is exceptionally high or low. The money illusion hypothesis has widely been studied in the context of the financial and housing market. This thesis contributes to the existing literature by studying if there is evidence of the money illusion in the Finnish housing market. Many of the studies have focused on the major economic markets like the UK and the US, so there are not many studies from the perspective of a national market with different institutional setting and market features. The empirical framework is based on the decomposition of the price-rent ratio. The intention is to differentiate the fundamentals of the housing market to study how different unobservable factors affect housing. Housing is considered as a dividend paying asset as in the financial market approach. The study shows that there is a link between inflation and price-rent ratio. Inflation can affect prices through the rational component, risk premia or pricing errors. Money illusion suggests that inflation affect prices through the pricing error. In the model, the agents are allowed to have subjective expectations in order to be able to obtain the pricing error which is the difference between the rational agents objective expectations and irrational agents subjective expectations. The results from the Finnish housing market differ from other studies documenting strong evidence in favor of the money illusion. There is no strong evidence to the hypothesis that inflation and nominal interest rate would explain the movements in the pricing error. However, the rational component and the risk premia of the housing are highly correlated with inflation and nominal interest rates. The results of this study show more support for the rational channels than to the irrational channels for explaining the detected link between housing prices and inflation. The study also shows that part of the correlation between inflation and price-rent ratio can be explained by business cycle fluctuations. Thus, the study does not find strong evidence of money illusion having an effect on the Finnish housing market.

This thesis studies the case of waqf land in the Islamic tradition, investigating waqf land use in Bangkok. This thesis takes the form of a case study involving the Islamic charitable practice known as waqf and its influence on the social issues around land and access to affordable housing in Bangkok, Thailand. The point is to find out how the waqf land use on housing address the urban housing question. Waqf is a permanent dedication of ones property for any charitable purposes. It is a form of charity that generally applies to non-perishable properties such as land and buildings. These properties held in trust are meant to serve the public good as well as the social welfare and the empowerment of the local community. Rent theory is the theoretical framework of this thesis. Fundamentally, rent theory is understood as the social relation between the landlord and the tenant. The main feature of rent theory is that private landownership becomes much more detrimental compared to land ownership in rural land. Simply a title of that land on an urban setting gives the landowner the power and ability to extract extreme rents from the residents who make their lives on the land. This means that rent plays a coordinating role in the development of the built environment. Private land ownership privileges power for landowners in validating and determining land use that would benefit them solely, often at the expense of users. Empirical data is collected by semi-structured interviews with mosque committee members who administer and manage donated waqf lands in four separate cases. The main findings are as follows: waqf lands are being used in four ways: mosque, school, cemetery and housing. Among these, waqf lands are most reserved for the use of housing allocated for the poor community. When a land is endowed, it is to be used for the public benefit of the community under the management of the mosque committee as the trustee. The mosque committee considers and evaluates the best possible use of the land to serve the community. The residents are evaluated and selected based on the urgency of their housing need, prioritizing the homeless, disabled and the orphaned. The mosque committee collects little to no rents from the residents. The rents are well below market rates and the money is used to cover utilities or pooled back in to the community functions. The waqf land cases that are investigated in this thesis prove the importance of social relations and communal values.