Managing at Home in Times of Crisis: How Climate, COVID-19 and Cost of Living Crises Intersect in Everyday Life and What We Can Do About It

In recent years, households in the UK have been rocked by external shocks to our already delicate social system: the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis and COVID-19. These shocks have directly shaped the everyday lives of households: creating financial hardship, ill health and social isolation. They have also exposed our housing infrastructure as inadequate to withstand high temperatures, to reduce disease spread, to provide good indoor air quality, and to shelter people against the heat and cold in the context of high energy prices.

People spend a substantial amount of their time in the home environment: up to 2/3 of their life, and as such its effect on health and wellbeing is critical.

We find that the ways in which households respond to these crises can have unintended or contradictory consequences for their environment and/or their health. For example, some strategies to mitigate high energy costs can create poor indoor environments with long lasting health effects. Despite the focus on outdoor air quality, it is increasingly clear that indoor air pollution has been largely ignored until recently.

Indoor air quality includes damp and mould both of which are significant issues in less affluent and underheated homes.

This PhD project takes an interdisciplinary whole systems approach to addressing these problems, drawing on the combined expertise of the supervisory team, and supporting the student to think across disciplinary boundaries. The home and everyday life is at the centre of the project, and we expect the candidate to use this as a space in which to explore how these intersecting crises are managed and experienced.

The empirical focus will be on diverse range of low-income households in the UK, with an emphasis on understanding the engineering design of homes, how people manage their home environment in different ways, and what knock-on effects technologies, practices and regulations have on their health and wellbeing.

We will encourage the candidate to identify exacerbating effects (e.g. mould growth as a result of lack of ventilation due to attempts to keep warm) and virtuous circles (e.g. access to cool temperatures in hot weather and their impact on health). They will develop an understanding of the outcomes of different kinds of household management, and the socio-demographic patterns with which these occur.

For instance, we know that practices associated with cooking have an impact on internal air quality, and that different households cook very differently, according to lifestage, ethnicity and other factors. Alongside these social aspects, the project will look at the physical environment characteristics including the building design, heating and ventilation systems and how this affects both energy use and indoor air quality parameters.

We expect to draw on a range of primary and secondary data in this study. This will include data on building types, construction and engineering systems; indoor air quality over time in specific buildings; external air quality in the urban domain under study; qualitative data on lived experience of Fuel Poverty; and quantitative demographic data on specific neighbourhoods (available through the census, and index of multiple deprivation).

As an impact-driven outcome to the project, we will expect the candidate to draft policy recommendations for guidance on effectively managing a range of home environments for health and wellbeing. We also can offer the opportunity to work more closely with a range of stakeholders interested in the outcomes of the project throughout, including Leeds City Council, housing associations and UKHSA.

Finally, our international partners at the Danish Building Research Institute, Aalborg University, which includes a leading group of interdisciplinary academics working on buildings and resident practices, are keen to host an institutional visit for the candidate.