Living on Less

Abstract

The urgent need for a just transition in housing in Germany, to reduce the global environmental impacts and mitigate the risks of green colonialism, requires the development of policies that enable sufficiency. In the housing sector, this primarily involves reducing floor area per person to significantly decrease energy demand. Research in this field has focused on core principles needed for a sufficiency transition, taking a universalistic and global approach. Sufficiency modelling has been limited by a restricted understanding of sufficiency implementation and feasibility. Furthermore, scholars have neglected the need for differentiation between households living in very unequally distributed living spaces. Research investigating country-specific political and policy environments that allowed for the emergence of high floor area per person households is lacking for almost all regions. Thus, academic policy proposals are often too general, not tailored to households with the largest floor areas, and do not consider regional historical policy contexts. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap, using a mixed-method approach to comprehensively understand
the German housing context for meaningful policy recommendations. With an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm, I identify households with the highest floor area per capita, characterized as single, without children, older, living outside large cities, residing in (detached) single-family houses, owning their homes, having low incomes, and located in West Germany. The historical driver analysis reveals the influence of capitalist, market-oriented policies, which promoted home ownership as retirement security to decrease provisioning by the state. These policies included subsidies favouring ownership and single-family houses, as well as large-scale privatization and financialization, shifting the housing sector’s focus to (international) investor profits rather than providing affordable and sufficient living space for all. Current policies miss the opportunity to redistribute floor area and hinder the flexible matching of housing supply and demand. Taking into account the identified target households and the historical context, a final critical reflection on existing policy proposals enriches the future design of sufficiency-enabling policies for the German housing sector and allows for a more accurate quantification of the impact reduction potential. This social science perspective allows sufficiency and industrial ecology scholars to situate their research in the German context and gain a deeper understanding of the historical drivers and enablers for sufficiency application.