This study examines how a comprehensive retrofit of a social housing unit affects the tenants’ practices in the dwelling and their notion of the dwelling as a home.
The study is based on qualitative interviews with tenants living in a social housing unit, both before and after their homes were retrofitted. The empirical work is analyzed and discussed through a practice theoretical framework and through theoretical perspectives on the meaning of home.
A central theme in the study is how the renovated dwelling as a whole represents something new and luxurious and how this affects a number of practices.
The study suggests that how the tenants’ understand the dwelling as a home both constitutes and is constituted by the tenants’ practices. It also illustrates how the tenants’ experiences in their dwellings prior to the retrofitting are crucial to their practices and their notions of the dwelling as home.
The study focuses on the tenants’ practices in relation to the under floor heating system and the heat recovery ventilation system in the dwelling. These new technologies affect a number of practices in the dwelling and the notion of the dwelling as a home. The study also looks at and expounds upon other practices in the dwelling as outcomes of the renewed material structure.
The study’s conclusions suggest that when dwellings are retrofitted to become low energy housing, the new material structure of the dwelling changes the notion and concept of home on a societal level