In the middle of a terrace of redbrick houses, shadowed by the remnants of an old coal- fired power station and a coal gasification works that is now evi-denced only by a derelict gas storage container, and near the appropriately named “energy street,” stands the Manchester City Council Eco House.1 Opposite the row of houses is a “green,” a large expanse of grass, cheered by a few flowers. The shape of the green mirrors the footprint of another former terrace of houses, recalling a time when the area was densely popu-lated with industrial workers. The terraced houses that now look onto the green are decorated with window boxes planted with colorful geraniums that brighten up what would otherwise appear to be a desolate postindus-trial landscape. In the distance solar panels glint from a few of the roofs.
From the outside, the house looks the same as the others on the street, save for a laminated sheet of paper stuck to the window that reads, “Man-chester City Council Man“Man-chester Eco House.” Inside, however, two of the terraces have been knocked together to transform the interior from a do-mestic space into a hybrid home, museum, and instructional facility. The house is a treasure trove of ecological technologies, information leaflets,
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mock- ups of domestic interiors, and cutaways of the kinds of walls and win-dows that are typical in the construction of terraced homes like this one.
The Manchester Eco House is just one of several ecological show homes that have appeared in Manchester, and the United Kingdom more broadly, since the mid- 2000s (see map 6.1). Oriented toward the aim of educating people about climate change and providing advice to individuals, com-munities, and businesses about the technologies available to help people reduce carbon emissions, these houses have appeared as key devices of political participation and sites of climate action (Marres 2008). Their ap-pearance cuts across institutional settings — some, like the Manchester Eco House, were created by local authorities, some by consultancies, some by ecological charities, some by housing associations, and some by individ-ual homeowners. Such houses were regularly open to the public, as part of the UK- wide superhomes network’s open days, through an annual bus tour of Manchester’s ecohomes organized by an energy co- op called the Carbon Co- op, and in individual events organized by institutions like housing as-sociations to show off the work they had done.
Such show homes appeared, then, to be key material enactments of cli-mate concern in Manchester. As such, they constitute our first example of a
MaP 6.1 Ecological show homes in Manchester.
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form of climate engagement that operates in the gap between strategy and action that I explored in the previous chapter. Experimental or test houses thus provide us with a way into exploring the creation of forms of social practice that offer an adequate response to the challenges of thinking like a climate and that do not get caught up in the linear cause and effect of plan-ning and action. Attending to these objects — their form, their creation, and their diverse ambitions — allows us to begin to explore an alternative material politics of climate being, attuning us to the way in which such ob-jects reinscribe contours of social differentiation and hinting at their impli-cations for other emerging forms of political subjectivity.
Show Homes
Instructional show homes are in themselves not a new phenomenon, partic-ularly in the context of public discussions about energy use. In the United Kingdom, instructional show homes were a feature of early attempts to encourage people to use electricity as the main source of energy in their homes in the 1920s and 1930s. From the late 1800s, coal- fired electricity- generating power stations had begun to be built, and with them came the question of how to ensure not only supply but also demand for this new power source (see figure 6.1). The construction of these early power sta-tions was accompanied by the laying of local networks of wires that con-nected the power stations to public buildings, factories, and affluent neigh-borhoods. This infrastructure development came initially in response to requests for electrical power and later in anticipation of increased local de-mand. From 1928 to 1933, the United Kingdom embarked on a huge project to build a national grid connecting up the most efficient power stations and regional grids with high- voltage cables (Luckin 1990). For the investment in this national grid to be viable, the government needed people to give up a reliance on gas and move over to electricity. At both a local and a national scale, there emerged an active campaign to encourage people to overcome their fears about electricity and use it in their homes (Frost 1993).
Instructional show homes offered one way of doing this. By 1928, in Manchester, an all- electric house had been built in the residential district of Levenshulme with the aim of educating middle- class women as to the benefits of electricity in the home (Frost 1993). More famously, in 1936 an all- electric demonstration house was built in Bristol by the Electrical As-sociation for Women to demonstrate the virtues of electrical housecraft
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(Pursell 1999); and at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, the Electrical Development Association demonstrated a full- size all- electric home for visitors to explore.2 These all- electric homes demon-strated that electricity was clean and instantaneous and could help women avoid the stresses and strains of domestic staff. All- electric demonstration homes were a combination of educational resource and consumer mar-keting, reiterating the same messages conveyed both by public awareness campaigns and by technology companies selling emerging electrical tech-nologies such as vacuum cleaners, electric ranges, and electric radios to consumers: that electricity was cheap, would save time and energy, and was the answer to modern women’s needs.
In this chapter I consider what the return of the energy show home in the 2010s can tell us about the revisions in political relations underway in response to climate change. All- electric show homes at the beginning of the twentieth century focused on the normalization of electricity and its use as a consumer product. They participated in the creation of electrical consumers and arguably the making of early infrastructural publics
(Col-FIgure 6.1 Entrance to Manchester’s Dickinson Street Electric Light Station, early 1930s.
Source: Mike Taylor, Electricity North West.
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lier, Mizes, and Schnitzler 2016). Ecological show homes at the beginning of the twenty- first century reproduce aspects of this consumerism, but I suggest they also have the effect of inculcating and enacting a form of po-litical action that offers an alternative response to the climate thinking I have outlined in part I of the book. This is a form of action that enacts something more akin to what Jennifer Gabrys (2014) and Arun Agrawal (2005) have separately (albeit with slightly different inflections) termed en-vironmentality, rather than individualism or consumerism. What is crucial here is the interplay between material processes and forms of thought that make thinking place and objects environmental. By looking at a variety of ecological show homes that appeared in Manchester in response to the challenge of reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change, I sug-gest that climate thinking calls forth demonstration houses as technologies that are adequate to the thermodynamic properties revealed as particu-larly relevant by climate change. Here we find climate thinking shaping an attention to homes as sites that are replete with unexpected material and thermodynamic properties. As people attempt to relate to climate through engagement with the thermodynamic properties of houses, we see, I sug-gest, the making of a new climatological politics. I outline three dimen-sions of this material politics — a reinscription and reengagement with the contours of social and political distinction, an emerging climato- political subject that I term the “vernacular engineer,” and “the trial” as a climato- political event.
The Demonstration Home
Entering the Manchester Eco House, I am met by Elaine from the city council. She welcomes me in and shows me a noticeboard in the hallway that is pinned with newspaper cuttings about the house. To the right is what would be a sitting room but has been repurposed as a cinema. Elaine leads me into this room, and we sit on fabric- covered meeting chairs to watch a video narrated by an anonymous Mancunian voice. Images flash up of cars, factories, and airplanes emitting color- enhanced fumes set against a soundtrack of a pulsing piano and aural screeches; meanwhile, the narrator tells us, if only we could see pollution and the effects it is having, we would be able to do something about it.
There is no ambivalence here about the intention of the video or indeed the house. Funded by the Energy Saving Trust, the house is explicitly a tool
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that aims to limit global climate change by encouraging people to change the way they live. Here in the Manchester Eco House is a situated enact-ment of a global climatic image formatted through a collection of ecologi-cal artifacts, information, and instruction — a collection of objects, images, and information that aims to encourage Manchester citizens, and others who are responsible for the houses that Manchester residents live in, to change both their houses and the way they live in these houses.
The first lesson we are asked to take from the introductory video is that we need to learn to see differently in order to act differently. Right from the beginning of the tour of the house, the injunction to think, see, and feel via the form of the climate is emphasized. This lesson continues through-out the tour and is enacted through different kinds of displays around the house. In the kitchen there is a wastebin with a cutaway side that tells a story of the time it will take for different kinds of rubbish to decompose.
Yogurt tubs are transformed from innocuous containers into a destruc-tive legacy for future generations. Upstairs there is a room showing ther-mographic images of the walls of the house before and after changes have been made: the red- rimmed doorframes and stark white glowing blobs of windows signal an energetic alarm cast further into relief by the cool blue- black of the tree branches that crisscross in front of the heat- emitting win-dows of the house.
Seeing through the form of the climate is not, however, easily or simply conveyed by visual cues alone. The visual forms provided within the house make sense only by their arrangement vis- à- vis one another and because of their textual narration. The images of shimmering landscapes and people on beaches shown in the video are accompanied by the words, “If you could see the effect we are having on our planet, you’d do something about it.”
Similarly, displays of technological objects are accompanied by informa-tional nuggets about the problems of past technologies and the improve-ments rendered by newer ones. A display downstairs, for example, lines up a series of light bulbs and underneath explains the relationship between the wattage of different kinds of light bulbs, their cost, and the amount they can save you (in terms of money) and the planet (in terms of carbon emissions).
Given the instructional intention of these artifacts, images, and bits of information, one way of understanding the aims of the Eco House would be to see it as an exercise in science communication and behavior change.
The information provided about climate change and energy- saving tech-nologies was certainly presented with the hope that it would educate
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ple and provide them with facts on which they could act. Seeing the house in these terms invites a critical assessment of its capacity to achieve these educational ends.
The limits of an informational approach to behavior change have been widely noted by social scientists, who have been concerned about compli-cating a simplistic information- deficit model of behavior change. The En-ergy Saving Trust, which funded the Eco House, certainly at times worked with the idea that information had the power to transform behavior. A tele-phone advice service operated by the trust was evaluated according to the reduction in carbon emissions that each piece of advice was estimated to have achieved, allowing for a quantitative calculation of the impact of bits of information on people’s behavior, and of that behavior on carbon emis-sions reductions. This kind of quantitative equivalence making cries out for the kind of critique provided by scholars like Elizabeth Shove who ar-gue that information- deficit models of behavior change fail to take account of the praxis of actual patterns and practices of energy use and the rea-sons these exist, both historically and culturally (Shove and Walker 2007;
Pink 2011).3 Martin Hand, Elizabeth Shove, and Dale Southerton (2005), for example, argue that approaches to public engagement that use infor-mation as a mode of political persuasion are destined to fail on their own terms owing to their presuppositions about people and energy use. Many behavior- change approaches use techniques derived from a combination of the physical sciences, psychology, and economics, which assume that indi-viduals are universal rational actors with tendencies and proclivities that determine how they use energy. Such approaches are critiqued for failing to recognize the sociomaterial arrangements (from food infrastructures, to employment patterns, to normative ideas about cleanliness, freshness, or comfort) that structure actually existing energy relations in particular places and particular times (Shove and Walker 2007).
If we were to see the ecohome’s ambition to educate through visuals and information as the only way in which it was expected to have an effect, then it would be appropriate to subject it to such a critique. The house could be seen as a neoliberal technology of discipline and control and a technique that ultimately reduces the human subject to a rational choice- making con-sumer. However, walking around the house with Elaine, I gained the dis-tinct impression that the designers of the house had already anticipated this critique in its design. While the house did have some ambition to transform behavior through information and instruction, it also invited participants to engage the house in importantly different ways.