Inhabitants’ and Architects’ Perspectives on High Energy Performance Buildings

The “energy performance of buildings” is now a primary focus of environmental policies. The Brussels-Capital Region has been held as an example after adopting building standards close to “passive construction” standards. Because of their ambitious targets, the regulations sparked fierce controversies, forcing the ministry in charge to devise various strategies to justify the choice of passive construction standards as an “obvious” one. The resulting narrative idealized the benefits of passive construction standards and minimized their technical character as well as their impact on professionals and inhabitants. Ten years later, the regulations have been enforced and tested in practice. In fact, the application of the regulation has proved to be less easy than planned. Various dynamics of mutual adjustments have been developing in order to adapt the regulations to the diverse and complex realities of the building sector, in terms of public action as well as inhabitant and professional practices. This chapter draws from the perspective of Science & Technology Studies and explores some of the socio-techical configurations resulting from these processes of adjustment, which sometimes have followed in the direction given by public authorities, sometimes have deviated from it. It focuses on inhabitants and architects and shows that around high energy performance buildings compromises have been established, and strategies devised either to adapt to or to work around the new rules. Those processes have been quite diversified as actors with very different interests, goals and capacities have been involved, making it sometimes difficult to reconcile the plurality of logics at work.