Problems, Practices, and Perceptions Regarding Energy Consumption in Housing. Part B: Qualitative Research in Apartment Buildings in Athens

The discussion around energy issues is almost inevitably framed at a large scale. But what happens on a smaller scale, at the level of households and residences? How do households experience the current energy crisis and the rise in energy prices? How do they manage the problems that arise, and how do they reshape their daily lives at home?

Questions like these are often sidelined in public discourse and even in scientific research. To highlight the multifaceted nature of the problems in the current context, interdisciplinary approaches are needed—ones that combine economic and technical parameters with social, political, spatial, and cultural dimensions. Only in this way can the challenges households face with energy be understood as more than just a matter of "indicators and graphs."

This research seeks to contribute precisely to this effort. Our aim is to document a range of experiences related to household energy consumption, identify the spectrum of impacts from insufficient energy access, and explore the diverse practices households adopt to address the challenges they face.

We aim to bring to light the invisible aspects of daily life and the survival strategies of households against the backdrop of successive crises. Additionally, we seek to shed light on dimensions of their practices that are often overshadowed by the hard data of large-scale quantitative studies.