Whatever happened to 'housing and the environment'?

This paper takes stock of the housing and environment debate and argues that much of the optimism of the early 1990s has declined. Our own work is reviewed as an example of the limits of previous approaches to analysing contemporary housing and environmental issues. There appears to be a paradox in that housing organisations are now much more environmentally aware; many are developing green housing projects, and yet the development of theory has lagged behind. It is argued that the analysis of environmental issues in housing studies needs to be strongly linked to wider debates and cross-cutting themes such as social and economic sustainability, social integration and fair competition in the context of globalisation.