Choreographing low energy cooperative homes in Sweden: space-time activities and constraints

This paper presents a case study conducted in the neighborhood Vallastaden in Linköping, Sweden, where developers built low energy cooperative housing intended to meet the passive house standards. Previous research highlights the need for integrated approaches to understand residents’ thermal comfort and energy use, as some low energy house concepts fail to meet energy performance requirements. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the understanding of cooperative housing and residents’ experiences of thermal comfort in newly built homes in Sweden. Through a detailed case study that included activity diaries, visualizations based on diary data and workshops with residents, we explored residents’ actions to achieve thermal comfort. With concepts from time-geography, we discuss insights regarding residents’ experiences and strategies. Results show that cooperative housing in Vallastaden, while being comfortably warm during winter, suffers from poor design and engineering to protect residents from overheating during hot summer days. Residents choreographed their space-time activities to adjust for the constraints of the designs by elaborate schedules for airing, remodeling their homes or sometimes staying away from the home. Exploring this everyday experience together with visualizations of thermal comfort brings forward new insight into the thermal comfort concerns of residents in cooperative housing.