Conceptualizing, practicing and assessing sufficiency in housing: a systematic literature review

The concept of sufficiency has recently gained momentum in the context of achieving a net-zero European building stock by 2050. Despite growing research interest, a comprehensive review of how sufficiency for housing is conceptualized, operationalized, and assessed remains lacking. This systematic literature review of 87 papers analyses the theoretical frameworks, practical strategies, and assessment methodologies present in the current literature, examining the goals, methods, and indicators used across the three pillars of sustainability. Results reveal, in the 87 reviewed papers, a misalignment between how sufficiency in housing is defined and how it is assessed. While most definitions adopt integrated socio-ecological frameworks — balancing social floors and ecological ceilings — most assessments evaluate only environmental dimensions. Energy dominates across assessments in this corpus despite not being a search term, while resources such as water and land remain largely underexplored. Thirty identified strategies span component-scale interventions (appliances, HVAC) to urbanscale approaches (density policies), with downsizing, sharing, and thermal reduction showing dramatic recent increases in research attention. Geographic concentration further amplifies these patterns: most research originates from European contexts studying overconsumption, privileging reduction framings (90% of European assessments), while non-European research emphasizes provisioning gaps (100% targeting safe-and-just goals). These findings reveal, within this body of research, a gap between how sufficiency in housing is conceptualized — predominantly through integrated frameworks — and how it is operationalized — predominantly through environmental assessment alone. Bridging this gap may be necessary if sufficiency is to fulfil its role as a key strategy of climate change mitigation in the building sector.