Housing In the Energy Transition: Decarbonisation, (Just) Transitions and the (Built) Environment

Housing and the built environment lie at the heart of the climate question, with the construction and use of buildings consuming around 32% of global energy and contributing 34% of global CO₂ emissions (UNEP/GlobalABC, 2025). Yet decarbonisation and adaptation are never only technical: they redistribute costs and risks. In this context, this session asks how sociology can study and accompany the climate transition of housing and the built environment while remaining close to policy and practice, and welcomes papers exploring questions such as: how do rising energy and housing costs reshape tenure, rents and displacement? Who is left in energy poverty or exposed to heat and flooding, and along which lines of class, age, gender and migration? In regions losing their carbon economy, who stays, who leaves, and who is cut off from services as places shrink? These questions are increasingly pressing in places where governments are investing in climate transition. In Germany, for example, the coal phase-out has been accompanied by a commitment of €40 billion to its lignite regions under the 2020 Structural Strengthening Act. Here, publicly funded research is expected not only to analyse transformation but also to help shape it. This dual position invites reflexive scrutiny: what are the pitfalls, the good practices, and the instructive examples when researchers become agents in their own regions. Finally, the session is deliberately network-oriented: aiming at building a connected and durable international community of applied sociological research on housing and the built environment in the climate change transition.