2025/10/02 by Sarah Robertson, Bhavna Middha, Ralph Horne +2 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Collaborative and Sustainable Housing Initiatives #Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
paper · doi:10.1080/00049182.2025.2590221
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/12/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Improved thermal performance of housing can achieve decarbonisation, climate mitigation and adaptation, and improved health and wellbeing outcomes. Yet, in Australia, despite the urgent need to improve the existing housing stock, low carbon retrofit has not become widespread. Support programs have been limited and policy links between climate and care outcomes have been few. The relations between care practices of homemaking and retrofit and the material and immaterial infrastructures that underpin these remain underexplored. This paper uses an infrastructures of care lens to draw out the less discussed barriers to practices of home improvement aimed at achieving a thermally performing dwelling; or a warm, cool and affordable home. We draw on in-depth qualitative research with households in Victoria, Australia, to make visible the infrastructures of care that pattern practices of energy and thermally-focused home maintenance and improvement. These, we find, are the multiple responsibilities of caring for others, the role of attentiveness and misaligned care work and the navigation of risk through competences. We argue that making careful housing retrofit infrastructures visible in policy and practice, situates retrofit logics beyond the neoliberalised techno-rational paradigm and helps centre improved dwelling performance as critical infrastructure of climate and energy-just homemaking and improvement.