(2020). Does the COVID-19 outbreak mark the onset of a sustainable consumption transition? Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

Housing plays a significant role in impelling demand for natural resources and driving economic growth in high-income countries. Public policies, commercial prerogatives, and other inducements have encouraged construction and occupancy of ever-larger homes and this pattern has persisted in the face of decreasing household size, declining fertility, ageing populations, and increasing complexity of domestic relationships. This situation has created a perverse mismatch between available housing stocks and residential requirements. Additionally, imperatives to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions and to hasten progress on the United Nations 2030 Agenda demand new planning priorities. Building on the sufficiency turn in the field of sustainable consumption, this paper first formulates parameters for estimating an environmentally tenable and globally equitable amount of per person living area. It then highlights five emblematic cases of “space-efficient” housing. While acknowledging that prevalent spatial norms are evolving, the conclusion discusses the profound challenges of achieving a successful sustainable consumption transition.

Automobile society has been triumphant for a century. While this success is often ascribed to entrepreneurial tenacity and indefatigable demand, it is more correctly credited to auspicious political, economic and cultural trends. The macro-scale factors responsible for the entrenchment of automobility in developed countries are now moving in reverse direction. A socio-technical transitions perspective emphasises how declining industrial influence, stagnating wages, growing income inequality, increasing vehicle operating costs and changing sociodemographics are now undermining the foundations of automobile society. Three expressions of this process are considered: claims that transport planners are engaged in a ‘war’ against the automobile, emergent evidence that vehicle use is reaching saturation (the so-called ‘peak car’ phenomenon) and apparent disinclination of youth to embrace automobile-oriented lifestyles. Although these developments suggest some instability in the socio-technical system, the lock-in of key features and the paucity of practicable alternatives suggest that declarations of a pending transition are premature.