Abstract
This chapter analyses how various domestic spaces are caught up in some of the most significant societal transformations observed in France. The authors explore households’ inhabitance practices and underline the importance of two movements that interweave: firstly, a renewed multi-functionality in flexible domestic spaces and, secondly, the individuation of activities within these spaces. Both go hand in hand with a new composition of individual and collective daily temporalities and result in increased de-synchronised and spatio-temporal context-free activities served by ubiquitous access to services and nomadic tools. This complexity and the breaking or blurring of conventional boundaries imply that to track the dynamics of domestic energy use requires renewed units of analysis that would better capture the daily continuum of change as well as emergent patterns.
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Notes
- 1.
French households spend 22 % of their gross income on housing running costs, twice as much as they spend on food and travel (INSEE 2014).
- 2.
Among the most significant transformations we note those linked with socio-demographic trends (ageing of the population, middle classes’ pauperisation); those linked with labour market evolution (unemployment, increase of part-time work and double jobs); those linked with new modes of access to leisure or training (games played across networks, streaming carried by ICTs) and those linked with the growing complexity of life cycles (increase in the number of single-person and of one-parent families, not a linear succession of single life, life in a couple, divorce and blended family).
- 3.
Greater Paris region is the most populated in France (almost 20 % of French population) and is constituted of extremely varied territories: very urban (Paris), industrial suburbs and quite rural areas.
- 4.
These were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide which explored people’s day-to-day relationships with energy, examining their energy sufficiency in general and energy-saving practices in particular. Primary source was the ENERGYHAB project—“Energy Consumption, from home to city—social, technical and economic aspects”. This four-year project was conducted in partnership with the LAVUE (Architecture, City, Urbanism and Environment Lab) and the CSTB (Scientific and Technical Centre of Building). It was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
- 5.
Star and Griesemer (1989) introduced the notion of “boundary object ” in an ethnographic study of the coordination mechanism of scientific work. Since then, this notion has been greatly enhanced and used in various research fields in order to qualify conceptual or material spaces at the interface of different social words; Trompette and Vinck (2009).
- 6.
It is interesting to note that certain pieces of equipment which are specifically designed to control such circulation in order to increase the energy efficiency of homes , and were to a significant extent in evidence in the homes of our interviewees, are far from fully replacing (as a techno-centred stance might lead one to believe) the orchestrations of opening and closing to the outside. This is particularly the case with cooker hoods and the artificial ventilation provided by centralised mechanical ventilation systems.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been carried out within the framework of the DEMAND: Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand Research Centre funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of the RCUK Energy Programme and by EDF as part of the R&D ECLEER Programme. The French case study was supported by the French National Research Agency. The authors also want to express their gratitude to the reviewers and in particular Allison Hui and Gordon Walker for their careful readings, relevant remarks and support.
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Beillan, V., Douzou, S. (2018). Being at Home Today: Inhabitance Practices and the Transformation and Blurring of French Domestic Living Spaces. In: Hui, A., Day, R., Walker, G. (eds) Demanding Energy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61991-0_6
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