Looking back to move forward: a social and cultural history of heating (JUSTHEAT)

What is the project about?

Project Director: Professor Aimee Ambrose
Project Duration: 2022-2025

Home heating is a major source of greenhouse gases, therefore reducing the carbon footprint of our heating systems is a priority in the context of the climate emergency. This will be achieved through the introduction of low carbon heating systems to our homes, controlled through ‘smart’ systems which are technologically complex and need much less input from us. Home heating transitions are deeply personal and significantly affect the way people use energy, triggering deeper changes to our societies, economies and cultures. Heating transitions affect our everyday lives in many different ways such as changing our routines, the way we divide labour between genders, the rooms we use in the home, how we relate to each other within families and the kinds of jobs we do. This will not be the first major change to home heating that many of us have experienced. Many will remember the shift from burning coal or wood to central or district heating but efforts to learn lessons from those transitions to ensure that future heating transitions can be fairer and smoother have been very limited. Within this project, we aim to understand how major changes to home heating and heating technology over the last 70 years have been designed, managed and experienced, how they have impacted our lives and what lessons we might learn for the current transition to low carbon systems. We do this through oral history interviews where members of the public in case study locations around the UK, Sweden, Finland and Romania tell us in detail about their memories of keeping warm at home throughout their lives and the ways their lives have been affected by changes to home heating systems and routines. Artists appointed in each country will build exhibitions to show how heating has affected our lives in different ways over time and to start public conversations about a fair and progressive low carbon future for heating. We will work with communities leading, resisting and excluded from heating transitions to assemble a lasting archive of multi-media accounts of lived experiences of heating transitions, illustrating how they impact unevenly yet deeply on our everyday lives. These lived experiences will help put policy makers designing low carbon heating transitions in touch with their consequences for our everyday lives, helping to create a fairer future for home heating where the negative impacts of technological and digital innovation are understood and addressed.

Who are we working with?

Wider research team members

• Professor Aimee Ambrose (Sheffield Hallam University)
• Dr Becky Shaw (Sheffield Hallam University)
• Dr Kathy Davies (The British Library)
• Dr Sally Shahzad (University of Leeds)
• Professor Jenny Palm (Lund University)
• Dr Jenny von Platten (Lund University)
• Dr George Jiglau (Babes Bolyai University)
• Dr Andreea Vornicu (Babes Bolyai University)
• Dr Anca Sinea (Babes Bolyai University)
• Maria Olariu(Babes Bolyai University)
• Dr Sofie Pelsmakers (Tampere University)
• Dr Sarah Kilpelainen (Tampere University)
• Dr Raul Castano Rosa (Tampere University)
• Denise Labont (Artist)
• Henna Aho (Artist)
• Ram Krishna (Artist)
• Miles Umney (Film)

Cooperation partners

• Skane Energy Agency
• Solar Region Skane
• Association for Nearly Zero Carbon Buildings
• Romanian Society of Energy Auditors and Energy Managers
• Ministry of the Environment
• Green Parliamentary Group
• Eco Fellows Ltd
• Finnish Environment Institute
• The International Energy Agency Technology Collaboration Programme
• The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK Government
• National Energy Action (Charity)

Outputs

Ambrose, A., & Davies, K. (2024). Was the Past More Sustainable? Keeping Warm.

Ambrose, A., Palm, J., Parkes, S., & Speake, B. (2024). Oral histories of domestic heating transitions in England and Sweden: lessons on how heating transitions play out across place and time. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2024.2350135

Ambrose, A., Palm, J., Parkes, S., & Speake, B. (2024). Histories of heating: looking back, moving forwards. In Horne, R., Ambrose, A., Walker, G., & Nelson, A. (Eds.) Post Carbon Inclusion: transitions built on justice. (pp. 36-52). Bristol: Bristol University Press: https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529229479.ch003

Ambrose, A. (2023) Our changing heating systems: getting to the hearth of the matter. UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence.

Goodchild, B., Ambrose, A., Berry, S., Maye-Banbury, A., Moore, T. and Sherriff, G. (2019) Modernity, Materiality and Domestic Technology: A Case Study of Cooling and Heating from South Australia. Housing, Theory and Society, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2019.1600577

Palm, J (2025), Sociotechnical configurations of home heating: Insights from Swedish oral histories. In Grundel, I, Magnusson, D. & Trygg, K (Eds.). Stories of Transforming Cities. Stories from the Bike – A Festschrift for Harald Rohracher, Linköping: Linköpings universitet. pp 123-138. Open access: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1988512/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Palm, J. & von Platten, J. (2025). Home heating cultures in transition: exploring material participation, norms and practices in Swedish households. Energy, Sustainability and Society 15, 38. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-025-00539-7

Sherriff, G., Moore, T., Berry, S., Ambrose, A., Goodchild, B. and Maye-Banbury, A. (2019) Coping with extremes, creating comfort: user experiences of ‘low-energy’ homes in Australia. Energy Research and Social Science, 51, 44-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.12.008

von Platten, J. (2025). When past meets present: A mixed-methods study of heating practices in Sweden during the energy crisis. Energy Research & Social Science, 122, 104013.

von Platten, J., Davies, K., Kilpelainen, S., Vornicu, A., Ambrose, A., & Palm, J. (2025). From warming bodies to heating spaces: Using feminist energy justice and oral histories to unpack home heating transitions in Europe, 1945-present. ScienceDirect, Vol 121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2025.103974

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