Assessing energy demand in self-managed clustered housing

Abstract

Co-housing is the overall term for groups of households creating and managing their own living environment. From recent research on co-housing in EU member states it becomes clear that cohousing initiatives consider themselves as pioneers for energy-transition. Nevertheless, the value and contribution of co-housing initiatives to housing provision and sustainable urban development, both quantitative and qualitatively, have hardly been assessed. Fitting the design features of cohousing buildings into energy performance calculation models already poses some problems. In addition, everyday practices such as sharing domestic services make energy-demand in co-housing (potentially) different from single-household residence. This paper first presents an inventory of keyelements illustrated by Dutch co-housing projects. On this basis it proposes a model for energy performance assessment that goes beyond the building-related normatised EP-models.