**2. Housing and neighborhood functions**

Housing functions are diverse and assessed differently by people and social milieus of varied socio-economic and socio-demographic status. Housing functions' appraisal depends, on the one hand, on individual needs, expectations and aspirations, which, in turn, are influenced by biographical and cultural circumstances as well as economic conditions. Housing biographies change in phases of commencing work or study, growing or shrinking households, new job or family opportunities, or after retirement. These phases often affect residential movements, along with shifting expectations towards housing needs. Also, changing earning capacities (growing or falling) affect a household's autonomy concerning the housing situation. The housing culture shapes different imaginations of how people live – in a detached house or an apartment in a multi-story housing block – and thus how housing contributes to the production of personal identity.

Beyond individual needs, housing functions' appraisal is subjected to social and cultural aspects. Until today, prevailing housing architecture is designed for the traditional two-generational family, represented in separated housing units without or few commonly shared spaces. Moreover, an increase of single-person households, both younger (voluntarily intended) and older (involuntarily accepted) persons, is to be considered. Alternative forms of housing such as social co-housing [2], or housing associations that include jointly used spaces (e.g., kitchen, gym,

#### *The Impact of Contemporary Housing Functions on Its Social Sustainability DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99277*

library, co-working spaces), are growing but still marginal compared to mainstream architecture. While standard housing architecture designs rooms to be used more or less mono-functionally, co-housing concepts promote ideas of rooms that allow to integrate different functions in one room or to provide spaces that are used by multiple households (e.g., a room for taking care of children or a kitchen that is used by several families). Social housing functions are also influenced by a transformation of how living spaces are utilized. The change of (global) labor markets and the digitization of almost every aspect of our lives contributes to a spatio-temporal intersection and decentralization of activities of work, provision, education and recreation at home, which manifests in a functional mix of living spaces (e.g., working in the kitchen).

Historically, the spatial interference of domestic work had been the norm; farming, handcraft, and trade had been tied locally to the home [3]. The system of the estates of the realm, political sovereignty of aristocracy and the church inhibited social mobility by and large. Industrialization provoked an increasing spatial separation of productive and reproductive labor, which led to an extensive functional fragmentation and spatial specialization of activities to date. Today, we face spatialfunctional re-unification processes, which results in a complex amalgamation of housing needs. Ongoing COVID-19 pandemic measures (homeschooling, home office, online delivery services) boost and exacerbate this development, affecting the home and the neighborhood. It is assumed that this development will become a sustainable housing trend, not least due to requirements to mitigate climate change effects [4]. However, not all households will be able to cope with these housing functions' transformations.

The neighborhood with its opportunities for social interaction is likewise relevant to satisfy the requirements of accommodation. Public spaces provide chances to establish and strengthen mutual recognition to enhance social inclusion opportunities to both new and long-established residents [5]. A well-functioning neighborhood also promotes social integration of all residents but mostly of minorities and marginalized groups like migrants, income-poor, or single-parent households. In addition, local communities can serve as a source for local social and political engagement. Even though all these social functions cannot be reduced to the neighborhood alone, it remains an essential promoter to residents being embedded into social networks and able to generate social capital. The next section will refer to this topic in more detail.

Social integration and inclusion do not rest upon a general and external natural law. Still, they are the temporary results of negotiation processes within and between social collectives whose participants are equipped with different amounts of social power, which, in turn, result in uneven social relations, local knowledge and social positions. Housing and neighborhood functions are therefore linked to issues of social inequality social (in)justice, which must be raised in the context of the prevailing economic model of neoliberal capitalism. This model places an individual's liberty and autonomy and self-reliance at the core of economic and societal action. All types of equal opportunities, which, among other things, affects access to housing, are to be valued and criticized against a neoliberal understanding of the equal opportunity. An alternative approach to the concepts of equal opportunity is given with Rosanvallon's [6] equity of relationships, delineated in the next section.

Housing space is geographically not evenly distributed nor available but depends on market regimes influenced by numerous factors, such as economic development, local and regional labor markets, infrastructure, return expectation of real estate markets, and local and regional planning. Housing preferences reflect these factors with spatio-temporal variations. Urban agglomerations are characterized by periods of urbanization, suburbanization and re-urbanization, while rural regions

are affected by out- and in-migration, depending on location and infrastructural facilities. The last three or so decades represent periods of novel forms of residential segregation such as gentrification or gated communities [7]. They represent a growing social fragmentation whose spatial mechanisms of exclusion reveal different aspirations of housing [8].

Transnational and seasonal labor migration, forced migration due to civil war or changing climate conditions, lifestyles of multi-locality or long-distance commuting are some manifestations of globally mobile societies which affect the individual and social assessment of housing functions too. An example of the highly dynamic residential mobility processes at the local scale is given with statistical data of the twenty largest cities in Germany, illustrating residential movement of households: on average, 8.5 percent of households move each year, with a range of six to eleven percent [9]. Mobile households compete with the needs of the long-established population with regard to needed shops and infrastructures, cultural and sports facilities or the availability of outsourcing housing services (cleaning, food provision).

Individual and social functions of housing and neighborhood compete with economic functions of the home in several ways. With the advent of neoliberal market principles in the 1980s, the commodification of the house became an essential strategy of capital accumulation [10]. In fact, housing commodification has turned out to be the predominant investment strategy to date since many alternative investments yield lower rates of profit. Besides expectations on return of capital investment, it represents additional income during one's old age (because pensions are expected to decline). In this case, the residence is not always intended to be used by the buyer but serves as a second or touristic home (Airbnb) for others. These housing units are then divested of the regular housing market. Social housing strategies – represented by public housing, housing associations, or private housing assemblies – are seen as an attempt to mitigate sky-rocketing housing prices due to housing commodification. Housing policies dedicated to all types of settlements (urban, suburban, rural) are confronted with a fundamental dilemma. On the one hand, (attractive) new construction is meant to be a measure to grow demographically (and by tax revenues). On the other hand, competing with other cities or municipalities on residents is prone to risks of vacant housing stocks, which, in turn, impacts ecological sustainability and endamages a city's image.

Three overall domains can be extracted from the discussion of a multi-layered, interdependent and competitive amalgamation of housing functions, which are inevitably relevant to sustainable housing and correspond with the three dimensions of sustainability. The first domain represents the home as part of the social infrastructure, which is one precondition for residents being embedded into social networks (social sustainability). The second domain emphasizes the preservation of the building. Investment of capital is seen as a strategy to maintain the building substance without pursuing the goal of maximizing profit (economic sustainability). The third domain accounts for the fact that land and construction materials are finite resources. New building is neither excluded nor ranked first (ecological sustainability). The next section delineates theories of social capital and equity of relationships to make a plea for the social sustainability of housing, followed by a critical discussion of the capitalistic commodification of housing to shed some light on the problems of economic sustainability. Both sections result in reflections on measures taken to ultimately strengthen *local* political power in order to promote ecological, social, and economic sustainability as a function of political- and social-ecological transformation [11]. This kind of promotion aims to take a particular perspective on the social sustainability of housing that carries further the idea of transformation as a bottom-up process. **Figure 1** illustrates the functional

#### *The Impact of Contemporary Housing Functions on Its Social Sustainability DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99277*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Overview of interdependencies of housing functions.*

interdependencies of housing (arrows do not represent exclusive relations, as there are many more relationships between the mentioned objectives; all the other connections are excluded deliberately to keep the illustration clear).
