工口影院

In Scotland, the intersecting crises of climate change, energy, and cost of living are exacerbating pressures across individual households, neighbourhoods, and communities. Lofty international commitments to reducing green-house gas emissions and a national agenda towards Net Zero are often far-removed from the immediacies of financial and social precarity, particularly for economically marginalised households, migrant households, and young adults. And yet, these households still ‘make do’ in innovative and incremental ways.

Located in the city of Stirling, this project will focus on tactics of making do, specifically in the context of achieving and maintaining thermal comfort at home. Shifting the conversation away from large-scale strategies such as thermal retrofitting and infrastructure upgradation, this project will instead look at incremental and often informal practices of comfort that respond to the constraints of living in traditional buildings. Bringing together Stirling based organisations, including Stirling City Heritage Trust, Creative Stirling and Transition Stirling and building on connections with local institutions and governance, this project will identify a larger programme of research and engagement and avenues for funding. It will include a brief demographic study of renters, students, letting agencies and landlords, and an identification of listed heritage, traditional and post-war housing in the city. It will also include a brief survey to identify potential participants and stakeholders and document their perspectives on thermal comfort, comparing it with standardised ideas of indoor conditions of temperature and humidity.

This work is based on the premise of understanding at a fine-grained level, the tactics of comfort in traditional buildings. By focusing on households that inhabit traditional buildings for short periods of time, without the agency of ownership, or the financial capacity for large-scale interventions, this project will leverage the everyday practices that respond to concerns of climate change and sustainability.