The starting point for the book was a recognition of the impact of housing on the rest of Nature and the contrast with the relative neglect of the issues involved in many academic and policy debates in housing. Where the topic was recognised there was a focus on a few individual issues, such as the impact of the use of carbon fuels on climate change, without a corresponding focus on other important issues such as the usage of non-renewable materials and biodiversity. Even when Nature was considered, the topics covered tended to be seen as separate subjects that were not integrated into mainstream housing research and policy. For example, the decision by the UK government to increase the level of new house building in England did not seem to consider the impact on the rest of Nature through factors such as increased energy and material use. Therefore, the first aim of the book has been to chart the ways that housing programmes and policies are linked to issues involved in the impact on Nature and this was covered in Chapter 1 and in the examples in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.

One of the reasons for the lack of integration of these issues with mainstream research and policy on housing is that the framework used to consider and analyse them was not appropriate or sufficiently holistic to enable all of the relevant factors to be considered together. The first stage in remedying this has been adoption of the definition of the field as being about inhabitation and so overcoming the disadvantages of the commonly used definitions such as ‘housing’. The most useful way of investigating inhabitation is through the framework of practices and the application of this was discussed fully in Chapters 3 and 4 and examples of the worth of the application given in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. In this discussion it was argued that the inhabitation practices framework provides important insights into the role of houses and households in Nature, but also, it provides a useful framework for the investigation of traditional housing research and policy issues such as homelessness and housing quality.