Energy poverty and spatial segregation: new urban dimensions for inequality

Abstract

The concept of energy poverty was born in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom as the inability to obtain an adequate amount of energy services at home for 10% of family income (Boardman 1991).

This definition has subsequently been complemented with constructive and habitability aspects, for example, from the establishment of a limit temperature for obtaining comfort (DOE 1996). In the most recent international literature, it is possible to find definitions with a strong interdisciplinary bias based on accessibility to 3 vulnerability thresholds: technological, physical and economic (González-Eguino 2015). The latter is the most widely used in developed countries, mainly associated with the consumption of heating for domestic use (more precise concept of "fuel poverty"), although it is recognized that it tends to underestimate the number of households that cannot effectively afford energy consumption for these minimum habitability conditions, or the provision of other energy demands, which constitute the so-called technological threshold (Mold and Baker 2017; Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015). On the other hand, the physical threshold has been studied more recently from thermal comfort, specifically in its relationship with vulnerability and health, finding significant correlations with respect to the constructive characteristics of the houses (Gray, Jiang, and Poortinga 2015; Atsalis et al. 2016).

In this context, the incorporation of socio-spatial segregation methodologies to enrich this concept is of very recent date and has not yet been applied at the national level. This approach is important, since it allows identifying areas of agglomeration of energy poverty, an important aspect for the design of urban policies.