SHEF Shrinking Housing's Environmental Footprint

In the short video here above, PhD student Rhythima Shinde gives a brief overview on the project (if the video is not available in your region, please use external page this link).

Housing plays a significant role in the transition towards a more sustainable economy. Improvements in its material and associated environmental footprint can be achieved in several areas: (i) the amount of floor space used per person (space efficiency); (ii) the resource efficiency and recycling potential of the building stock itself (building efficiency) and (iii) the lifecycle resource efficiency of the appliances used (equipment efficiency).
The main goal of the project is to identify and promote practical measures that all building stock owners (cooperatives, institutional owners, private owners, etc.), public authorities and tenants can implement to reduce the use of primary resources for housing - in other words, shrinking housing’s environmental footprint (SHEF). These SHEF measures cover the construction, use, and refurbishment phases of buildings. They must be effective while preserving the social and economic qualities of housing: livability, affordability, full cost coverage or return on investment, wishing to reduce their environmental footprint
To fulfill this goal, we combine methodologies from the natural and social sciences. A major feature is the inclusion of two housing cooperative associations – ABZ, Zurich and SCHL, Lausanne – and the insurer and asset manager Swiss Mobiliar, whose housing stock (approx. 10,000 apartments) are studied in depth. More specifically, we proceed as follows:

• We perform a detailed survey of the current status of the building and occupant inventories and their respective historical evolution of our three project partners: two cooperative housing associations (ABZ, Zurich and SCHL, Lausanne) and the insurer Swiss Mobiliar. In line with this analysis, we quantify resource requirements and their environmental impact using a dynamic material flow analysis.
• We investigate the determinants of the decision of tenants to move (why? how often?) and for the choice of a new accommodation (where? how large?), and explore the factors playing a role in owner’s decision to rebuild or demolish (why and how often?).
  

Based on these data we will (1) develop an agent-based model (ABM) coupling tenants’ decisions with those of the owners, (2) develop measures to improve resource efficiency with our partners and their tenants, and (3) simulate a range of development and resource-efficient paths using dynamic modeling.
Results will, therefore, be in terms of potential paths for sustainable living, based on effective and consensus-based recommendations, whose impacts on comfort, costs, returns and resource consumption are modeled and made transparent.

Rhythima Shinde from ESD is part of the project, her thesis is about:

Dynamics in the housing resource-use of Switzerland: A hybrid agent-based model and life cycle assessment approach

1. Research Questions
   How can we model and reduce the environmental footprints associated directly to the dynamics of the residential buildings, and associated with their occupants and building owners, in Switzerland?
   How can we model and reduce the environmental footprints of buildings
   • associated with their occupants’ consumptions and their dynamic properties or decisions?
   • associated directly to buildings with its different compositions and properties?
   • associated with owners of the building and their dynamic decisions and preferences in building processes, finally affecting the occupants and their dynamics?
2. Goals
   
   • Help identify environmental improvement potentials with regard to optimized space, building and resource-use efficiency in Switzerland.
   • Help in developing policy and technical measures, to reduce building environmental impacts, with a clear understanding of uncertainty and sensitivity to future scenarios associated with buildings, their owners and occupants
3. Methods
   • Data mining and pattern recognition (ML) methods
   • Data analysis (Statistical and mathematical modeling)
   • Life Cycle Assessment
   • Dynamic Material Flow Analysis
   • Agent-Based Modeling
     

external page http://www.nrp73.ch/en/projects/building-construction/ecological-footprint-in-the-housing-sector

Collaboration

• Prof. Dr. Philippe Thalmann, Institut d’architecture et de la ville, EPF Lausanne
• Prof. Claudia R. Binder, Institut d'ingénierie de l'environnement, EPF Lausanne