There are many approaches to achieving sustainable living within Australia’s cities. These need to be balance as discussed by Forster 2009, p.p. 168 – 169, who suggests that taking a ‘deep green’ approach can not only mitigate the undesirable outputs but also the ‘good’ outputs that attract people to city living.
Two key areas out lined by Forster, that determine the environmental sustainability of housing are the physical environment focusing on the density of housing stock, along with its form and then the human side including education, demographics and economics all of which influence social, cultural and behavioral change.
In order to determine where improvements in sustainability can be made to the physical environment or the form of housing stocks, we can break this down further into another two categories as described by Holloway 2006 p 118, these are ‘Operation Energy’ and ‘Embodied Energy’.
Operation energy includes energy use related to the physical attributes, function and spatial distribution of dwellings. This includes how much heating and cooling is required to maintain a comfortable environment, dwelling size will also determine the level of occupancy and in turn determine how many rooms may require heating and cooling. The availability of renewable energy, determines whether or not the dwelling can take advantage of solar and wind for energy production. The surrounding environment and location can determine automobile dependence, availability of utilities and adverse effects such as urban heat islands and the availability of vegetation to provide passive heating (Figure 1.).
Embodied energy looks at the energy sunken into the materials and construction of the building. This includes excavation, transport of building materials which can be intrinsically linked to spatial distribution of dwellings, manufacturing process used to produce building materials. Embodied energy as defined by Holloway, 2006, p. 116 is also extended to include the installation of infrastructure which includes roads, pipelines, wiring and public facilities. When taking this into account, embodied energy is some cases can be as much as 40% of annual enrgy consumption of a home.
All of these areas have a direct influence on the environmental sustainability of the home and as such several different methods of intervention are necessary to encourage or implement change These methods include education, market mechanisms and compulsory regulation.
