Managing comfort in low energy housing: the role of gardens, balconies, allotments and greenhouses

This paper examines management of thermal comfort in a low energy housing development in England drawing on residents', designers' and housing managers' views. Thermal comfort studies have tended to mainly focus on measurement techniques and comfort criteria. There has been little attention devoted to how designers as well as residents account for thermal comfort in the design and management of indoor and or outdoor space. Findings suggest designers and housing managers play a critical role in the conception of interstitial spaces between an individual home, street, garden and collective community landscaping. It was found that whilst equipped with advanced technologies to heat and cool their homes, residents' adaptation strategies to manage discomfort evolved primarily around escaping to a range of individual, ad hoc collective and dedicated community spaces. The importance of outdoor spaces as traditional regimes of cooling is well researched, however an extended understanding of an outdoor environment's spatial and social role for designers and residents in planning and managing comfort is largely unexamined. The analysis also provides a novel method in the studies of thermal comfort - a timely contribution in light of recent questioning of the nature of human interaction with thermal comfort (Nicol and Roaf 2017).