The environmental implications of multigenerational living: Are larger households also greener households?

Multigenerational family households rarely form out of environmental concern -

or an intentional desire to be 'green'. More typically, they form because of financial

pressures, caring responsibi1ities or to accommodate disruptions in extended

families such as divorce or unemployment. Yet, they offer

important, innate opportunities to reduce resource consumption. On a per capita

basis, household size is inversely related to resource consumption and waste

production. By housing more family members under one roof,

multigenerational family living presents unheralded opportunities to save energy,

water, building materials and land. Our ethnographic research with multigenerational

family households in Wollongong, in the Illawarra region of southeastern

Australia, explored the ways in which resources are consumed and shared in their

rhythms of everyday life. These families inadvertently reduced their consumption

of material resources by sharing space and everyday objects: white goods,

furniture, cooking equipment, electronics, clothing, books, food, swimming pools

and more. Although these sharing practices were not intentionally ‘green', they

nonetheless obviated the need for additional purchases to be made.

At the same time, these households were sites of environmental debate and intergenerational leaming.

01der generations - while not identifying as environmentalists

- sought to instil values of thrift among their younger relatives. They wanted

to pass their inadvertent - or unintentional - sustainabilities onto their children

and grandchildren. The term 'inadvertent sustainabilities' refers to practices not

conceived with sustainability in mind, but which are environmentally beneficial

nonetheless. Some younger

household members, for their part, made persistent attempts to counter their parents' and grandparents' climate change skepticism, and to promote intentionally

sustainable practices and purchases. Multigenerational family households thus

provide fertile ground for the frugal (inadvertently 'green') practices and skills of

older generations, and the intentional environmentalism of younger generations,

to collide and coalesce - with profound implications for everyday domestic life.

Throughout this chapter, we follow Blunt (2005) and Reid et al. (2010) in defining

a household as a social unit occupying a single place or space of residence (the

dwelling). Our definition of multigenerational family households is expansive. It

includes adult children who have remained in - or returned to -the parental home

(with or without their own spouse and children), and elderly parents living with

one or more adult children. Additional relatives (whether aunts, uncles, grandparents

or cousins) may be‘added on' to an existing nuclear family unit. Each of

these household configurations brings together related individuals in a manner

distinct from single-parent or nuclear family living arrangements that involve one

or more parents and their dependent child(ren).

In so doing, they decrease the overall number of dwellings required to house an

equivalent number of people.

In the remainder of this chapter, we provide detail around the innate environmental

benefits of larger households, before positioning our study within a broad

body of cultural environmental research at the household scale. After outlining

our research methods, we present empirical evidence of two types of sharing that

take place in multigenerational family households - of space and material objects

and more important, of ideas, skills and knowledge. Multigenerational family

households engender opportunities to be inadvertently and deliberately ‘green'.

We conclude by taking our research findings to a further, speculative, step: in a

climate-changing world, these households also hold important and unexplored

potential for coping with environmental calamities.