Sustainability designed with(out) people? Understanding for what energy is (over-)consumed by tenants in an energy efficient public housing in Milan

Techno-centric approaches to sustainability and energy optimization are not sufficient to achieve the international targets for CO2 emissions reduction. This applies to our case study, engaging 500+ tenants of a public housing in Milan, deeply renovated in 2014. The 14mln euros invested in technical implementations risk to be vanished by tenant’s ways of living which are not consistent with expected or optimal uses of the building infrastructure and devices. This study frames changes towards more sustainable patterns of energy use by analysing how people carry on conventional practices and for which energy is required. The study is based on a multi-disciplinary methodology pairing quantitative data from energy monitoring with qualitative understandings of tenants’ practices through ethnographic and participatory methods. This paper presents interim findings drawn from a first set of semi-structured interviews to tenants in order to unpack people’s understandings of technical implementations, ways of doing for reaching thermal comfort and personal satisfaction, leverage of personal skills and aspirations to implement change in practice.