Understanding the footprint of human needs: housing functions as the missing link

To respond to the need for a drastic reduction in the environmental footprint of housing, the residential sector must meet a wide range of requirements. The opportunities for architecture are innumerable but cannot be grasped by the discipline alone. Housing is a complex system comprising a material and a human subsystem which, depending on the system’s function, manifest themselves in different housing forms and residential preferences, respectively. The former have often been privileged over the latter, leading to a gap between environmentally sustainable housing and its acceptance or desirability. Whether preferences are ‘priority needs’ is a matter of debate; however, neglecting the vital needs that housing must satisfy can be detrimental and therefore unsustainable. This article aims to foster a better understanding of the interaction between housing’s human and material subsystems in order to propose strategies that reduce housing’s footprint while accounting for human needs. By means of transdisciplinary approach, we link nine housing functions identified by previous work to Maslow's (1943) basic needs. We empirically explore these links using the results of group discussions and a survey of Swiss residents (N= 878). Based on these associations, we identify the trade-offs between meeting human needs and shrinking the housing’s footprint. The results of our analyses indicate that, for the majority of respondents, the ideal dwelling must first and foremost satisfy functions related to basic human needs. However, depending on the tenancy type, we observe an increased desire for the functions ‘self-representation’ and ‘property’, i.e., a greater need for self-actualization, whose fulfilment currently poses several challenges to practitioners. We conclude that assessing the fulfilment of a desired housing function can provide information about whether human needs are being met; furthermore, this function can inform decision-makers about how resistant households are to sustainability measures. By crossing the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, this understanding provides a basis for rethinking and designing environmentally and socio-culturally sustainable housing.