Shrinking Housing's Size: Using Agent-Based Modelling to Explore Measures for a Reduction of Floor Area Per Capita

To shrink the environmental footprint of housing, reducing dwellings' size is key. There is agreement among scholars on the measures that should be taken to achieve this goal, however their effectiveness and effects have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we explore and compare the outcomes of measures for reducing housing size. We use ReMoTe-S, an empirical agent-based model that simulates the residential mobility of Swiss tenants. Results show that an increase in floor area per capita is predominantly the consequence of a discrepancy between housing demand and supply. On the demand-side, findings indicate that enabling the formation of multigenerational households is the most successful measure, while helping relocating tenants to more easily find groups to join is the least effective. On the supply-side, we observe that increasing the diversity of dwellings' sizes leads to an important reduction in sqm/tenant where rules restrict the minimum number of occupants per dwelling the most. With regard to these rules, findings display a moderate reduction of individual space consumption when preventing households whose children have moved out from under-occupying their dwelling. We conclude that efforts from both the housing demand- and supply-side are needed to achieve a reduction in housing size.