Abstract

Worldwide, there is an urgent imperative to provide a housing supply that is environmentally sustainable as well as acceptable and desirable for its users. A holistic and integrative understanding of the relationship between households’ residential preferences and dwellings is needed to achieve this goal. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualizing and operationalizing housing as a system whose human and material behaviours are determined by its function. Following a qualitative literature review to identify what housing functions are and investigate their effects on the housing system, we explore the applicability of such functions in Swiss tenants’ residential mobility. Results show that multiple functions co-exist in the housing realm, each of which determines various human (i.e. residential preferences) and material (i.e. dwelling forms) behaviours that vary according to given societal and environmental structural elements (e.g. geography, culture). We also observe that housing functions potentially provide the missing link between the determinants of tenants’ residential mobility.

摘要

在世界范围内，迫切需要提供环境可持续且用户可接受和满意的住房供应。要实现这一目标，需要对家庭的居住偏好和住宅之间的关系有一个整体和综合的理解。本文通过将住房概念化和操作化为一个系统来解决这一差距，该系统的人类和物质行为由其功能决定. 通过定性文献回顾以确定什么是住房功能并研究它们对住房系统的影响，我们探讨了这些功能在瑞士租户居住流动性中的适用性。结果表明，多种功能在住宅领域共存，每一种功能都决定了不同的人类（即居住偏好）和物质（即居住形式）行为，这些行为根据给定的社会和环境结构因素（如地理、文化）而变化。我们还观察到，住房功能可能提供了租户居住流动性决定因素之间缺失的联系。