When homes become prisons

Survey: Energy poverty in Macedonia


The last quarter of the 20th century has seen a momentous transformation of the roots,make-up and consequences of urban poverty. Networked energy, water, and information infrastructures are being regulated and constructed to the disadvantage of low-income groups, whose access to essential utility services has been undermined. The lived experiences of energy consumption among disadvantaged households offer a useful empirical basis for investigating these issues, because inadequately-heated homes lie at the nexus of a wider array of social, economic and spatial dynamics.

While an increasing number of geographers, planners, and social theorists have been taking up the challenge of “thinking relationally” about wide-ranging issues such as identity, planning, employment, regulation, and deprivation most mainstream poverty assessments across the world continue to be dominated by the instrumentalised language of prices and incomes.

Research definitions and methods

Energy poverty is a form of deprivation from the socially-and materially necessitated level of domestic warmth, while creating a separate theoretical space for the concept of “social exclusion”, which signifies the broader economic, social and political dimensions that precipitate the emergence of marginalisation.

Aside from official national statistics, this study is based on quantitative and qualitative investigations, carried out on-site in two Macedonian urban districts, within the capital Skopje (with a total population of 467,000) in the north of the country, and .tip (45,000 pop.) in the east-central region.

In addition to investigating the households the surveys also compiled data about the size and type of the dwellings, as well as the size of the families’ annual energy expenditure quantifying the mean amount of funds necessary to heat a square metre in the home.

The survey was supplemented by an in-depth qualitative investigation of the housing consumption patterns among individual households, focussing on the lived experiences of energy poverty, economic hardship, and daily mobility.

Infrastructure networks have played a key role in the emergence of spatial differentiation among and within cities, because they have been “involved in sustaining sociotechnical geometries of power and social or geographical biases in very real—but often very complex—ways”. Studies show that housing and energy infrastructures are implicated in the rise of specific types of poverty and social exclusion.

“The collapse of the modern infrastructural ideal” during the last quarter of the 20th century (Graham and Marvin, 2001) embodies the infrastructural contingencies of social exclusion. In the 1950s and 1960s, households were “remade, both materially and conceptually, to accommodate changing social and technological formations”

The modern home was seen as a machine for living accompanied by the uniform
extension of integrated housing, utility and transport across urban landscapes, in order to provide the territorial fuel for economic growth, while shifting consumption politics to the domestic domain. However, the mass-production of infrastructure networks has been destabilised by the emergence of new patterns of political-economic organisation, and trends of social individualisation and fragmentation.

The “geographies of everyday life”lie at the intersection between infrastructural
transformations and social deprivation, among other relations. study of low-income households show many of the respondents came to regard their homes as ‘prisons’ from which they could not escape…they viewed their houses as the root cause of their financial difficulties, trapping them into ever deepening indebtedness.

The poverty literature has operated with relational definitions of deprivation and
marginality for a considerable time, as a result of the mainstream acceptance of
relative understandings of poverty (for a further discussion, see Townsend, 1993) and the conceptualisation of social exclusion in terms of “distributional and relational aspects”, which are mutually interrelated, irrespective of the stage of economic development of a country. In the more recent years, the notion of “relational poverty” has gained increasing prominence in the literature, as a number of international NGOs and development experts have used it as an explanatory tool for the interactions between participatory practices, institutional structures, and social deprivation in the developing world.

However, there is still a need for developing a geographical application of the
relational approach towards poverty and social-exclusion. Despite their diverse
theoretical and empirical orientations, the human geography, planning, and poverty
literatures nevertheless contain a number of common strands that can be synthesised to form a space-based relational approach to the study of poverty and deprivation. One of the most promising directions in this respect is offered by the idea of the home as an arena for different social dynamics and spatial structures, as evidenced by the collapse of the machinic domestic ideal.


In order to fully understand and appreciate the complexity of energy poverty, it is necessary to examine the divergent reflections of social dynamics on the experience of deprivation in the home. The approach places energy poverty at the nexus of three sets of relationships. In the first instance, domestic energy deprivation has been connected to the restructuring of—among other aspects—energy, housing and welfare policies in Macedonia. In this case, the available evidence pertains to the role of spatial and institutional dependencies in producing policy mismatches that could contribute to the vulnerability of particular groups of households. The second part of the approach interprets domestic energy deprivation as a lived experience, where energy-inefficient homes are related to the high energy costs of disadvantaged families. Finally, the third component looks at the way in which day-to-day social practices embody the relationship between housing infrastructures and socio-demographic formations, through the ability of heating systems to act as
social constraints in terms of achieving the necessary level of domestic warmth.

As indicated by the reviewed evidence, they can be triangulated to form an envelope around the problem of domestic energy deprivation. Through their fluid relations, the home becomes a ‘prison’, a space of virtual captivity that creates deprivation via its interaction with the households who use it.

Macedonia’s energy sector consisted of a vertically-and horizontally-integrated, state-owned electricity monopoly, in addition to a privately-owned oil refinery, and several private district heating companies. The largest such company heats 3.9 million m2 of residential and office space in Skopje with hot water produced in five gas-and heavy fuel oil-burning plants.

Macedonia also possesses a limited natural gas distribution network, whose expansion has been blocked by persistent ownership disputes (Utrinski Vesnik, 2005). But the electricity monopoly is by far the largest player in the energy sector, because it owns 11 thermal-and hydro-power plants of varying sizes, with a total annual production nearing 7 TWh, alongside cca. 25000 km of power distribution and transmission lines (EPCM, 2005). In order to prepare this company for unbundling and privatisation household electricity tariffs have been increased by more than 150% above the inflation rate between 1990 and 2002 (SSOM, 2003). The state has also been downsizing the comprehensive social protection system inherited from the Yugoslav era.

However, the raising of household energy prices has become a highly contentious political issue, because the country lacks a sufficiently strong welfare mechanism to compensate for the dismantling of social support instruments embedded in energy price structure. The privatisation of the electricity sector has been delayed on several occasions since 2004, in response to bouts of public discontent (Utrinski Vesnik, 2005).

The legacies of past economic policies are of particular importance for the emergence of specific patterns of energy poverty in Macedonia. Almost half of Macedonia’s inhabitants are concentrated in four large cities in the north (including the capital Skopje), while the remaining 35% are distributed in and around seven urban centres in the remainder of the country. The 40% official statistical share of rural population is highly misleading, because effectively more than 30% of this number is represented by peri-urban or suburban settlements.

The demise of large state-sponsored industries has forced many households to turn to agriculture or services as a source of income, increasing their daily mobility needs (FCSRD, 2002). While economic hardship has risen as a result of growing unemployment and falling incomes (MLSA, 2005), the housing stock has started to decay in the absence of any private-or state-sponsored maintenance programmes. More than 60% of Macedonian households have stated that they are unable to heat their homes up to a level “adequate” to their needs (SSOM, 2004). Furthermore, approximately 30% all
households report that their monthly income is insufficient to cover their utility bills without falling into debts or arrears (ibid).

The questionnaire surveys in Pripor and Isar detected the same types of disadvantaged groups recorded by national statistics. Nevertheless, there were more
households with “insufficiently heated” homes in Pripor, which may be attributed to
the higher share of rural (and consecutively, income-poor) families in this area. It also transpired that households were more likely to live in energy poverty if they contained unemployed adults and/or small children, as evidenced by the higher-than-average proportions of such demographic strata in the group of households with insufficiently heated homes, and their above-average cost-of-warmth ratios in Pripor and Isar alike.

Pensioners were also vulnerable to energy poverty by virtue of their heating costs, and subjective attitudes to the level of domestic warmth, especially if they lived in apartments. However, houses rather than flats, were associated with lower energy
costs. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the unusually low cost-of-warmth figures for extended families in houses, and the number of such families living in
“insufficiently heated homes” in Isar. While it was not possible to ascertain the
relative weight of district heating systems in this factor, there was some evidence that the presence of district heat can reduce a household’s energy costs and hardship: despite the comparable numbers of single parents living in flats in both districts, the cost-of-warmth ratio for this group was significantly higher in Isar, which has no district heating.

The survey thus connected the economic transformation of the energy sector with
three sets of poverty-inducing dynamics: (i) lower incomes, which often stem from the lack of regular employment and/or dependence on pensions (see MLSA, 2005); (ii)
collective housing, which is associated with increased domestic energy expenditures,
possibly due to inadequate heating systems or insulation standards; (iii) the presence of small children and/or pensioners, which raises the daily energy needs of households. The first two factors are clearly related to institutional and political processes and weak social safety nets. The legacies of past systems have also played a role in this process, as evidenced by their misbalancing influence on population and development patterns. ‘Sk1’ were experiencing major energy poverty problems, due to the poor quality of the building fabric, and the lack of disposable income. A further aggravating factor was the low energy efficiency of household appliances (which dated back to the 1970s), as well as the family’s domestic occupancy patterns.

Even minor improvements of the thermal insulation of external walls and windows could have reduced this household’s energy costs by a third, allowing them to spend the extra income on, for instance, heating the upper floor of the house, or burning the fuelwood stoves for a longer time. It appears that their vulnerability arises out of a combination of circumstances, including the need to stay at home during most of the day, the energy-wasting house, as well as the lack of regularemployment, which could provide a more stable source of income, as opposed to part-time work on the grey market.

According to expert opinion, prolonged exposure to domestic temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius can result in respiratory and blood circulation problems (Boardman, 1991; Healy, 2004).

They noted that “there are practically no indoor public spaces in our neighbourhood,
and we cannot afford to travel to the centre of the city”. ‘Sk2’ were forced to reduce their heating consumption by approximately a third below what they would normally need, and were facing health problems as a result: The experiences of these households are related to a wider problem at the level of the entire neighbourhood. As in other major towns that experienced a rapid urbanisation during the 1960s and 1970s, many houses in the districts of Pripor were built as extensions to older family homes, in an attempt to minimise construction costs. This housing is of smaller size, poorer quality, and lower energy efficiency than average, because the desire to build as quickly and cheaply as possible led many households to omit standard energy-saving measures, such as double-glazing and cavity wall insulation (SSOM, 2001).

“We mostly rely on the electric heater. When it is cold outside, the heating must be on almost during the whole day. But the high energy bills force us to wear coats, stay in bed all day wrapped in blankets, or to visit friends who can afford to use more energy” (interview with Sk2 household).

“We haven’t paid our bills for five years. We asked the electric company to ‘forgive’ the debt … Instead they offered to divide it in 10 payments. I keep begging them not to turn the electricity off … We can barely afford the electric storage heater for the small room where we spend most of the day”

Institutional mismatches have combined with the loss of regular employment, above-average energy needs (as a result of daily occupancy patterns), and poor-quality housing, to aggravate the domestic circumstances of a distinct set of social groups, which tend to be dominated by families with unemployed adults, young children, single parents, and pensioners. Thus, in addition to being income-poor, many disadvantaged households are also ‘flexibility-poor’, due to being unable to accommodate the rigid built and energy infrastructures of their homes to the fluid energy needs of different family members.

It can be concluded that energy poverty simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, the institutional relationships between relevant policy actors at different levels of governance, on the one hand, and the day-to-day interactions between vulnerable households and the built environment, on the other. This means that, in a broader sense, domestic energy deprivation is produced by the dynamic relations among organisational formations, household demographics, economic hardship, and the built environment. It has transpired that energy poverty arises as a result of relationships among, rather than combinations of, different dynamics. In other words, although energy poverty can be ascribed to a range of institutional, policy and socio-demographic processes, the sum of these factors cannot fully explain the production of the problem per se: it is necessary to delve into the grain of the social relationships among them.





Extracted:
Dr. Stefan Buzar1, Senior Research Associate
School of Geography, Oxford University Centre for the Environment