Social Dimensions of Digitalisation in Housing

Seven Social Dimensions of Housing

The social dimension of living can be described in terms of seven dimensions:

Social Health: the state of social well-being and the absence of socially caused illnesses - overloading at work, unhealthy, poor living conditions, poor hygiene conditions in the living environment, lack of health resources, etc.

Social Integration: overcoming loneliness, embedment in a supportive neighbourhood and a circle of acquaintances, integration by work into a meaningful context of society, a sufficiently secure income, and an apartment big enough to invite one's friends.

Social Mixing: Living in a social mix that creates a supportive and inclusive environment, so that everyone can seize the opportunity for integration and nobody grows up in the poor ghetto.
Social Ascent: The home and living environment should be designed to promote the escape from poverty and the ascent to the center of society. Being able to invite others into one’s apartment is a good indicator of social advancement.

Social Cohesion: Housing should take place in a culture of social cohesion where neighbourly help is a daily routine, in which a friendly laid-back "we" emerges, where people work together and help each other in case of emergency, and defend each other against unjustified attacks, bullying and hate messages.

Social Identity: Is a shared and narrated "WE-feeling", a sense of belonging, a feeling of being part of something bigger, something bigger that gives meaning and orientation.

Social Equalization: Social equality means the redistribution of wealth, from those that abound to those that live in deficit, poverty and misery. Social housing is undoubtedly one of the strongest levers of redistribution - redistribution from top to down.

What is digitisation?

Essentially, digitisation means that we can provide, process and use large amounts of information. This information corresponds to different levels: geographical over the whole world, historical over all epochs of time, up-to-the-minute news about all events in the world, economical over regions and individual firms, and information about technical operations.

We live in socio-technical systems. We all live in socio-technical systems - in cities and towns, in the educational system, in the world of work, in the healthcare system, in the one of leisure and culture, in social associations, in the system of interaction and communication - all of these are socio-technical systems. All these socio-technical systems develop towards digitisation.

Vienna is a city and therefore a very complex socio-technical system: The apartment, the interior, the house and the living environment belong to and are themselves socio-technical systems. All of these systems are changing by digitisation.

Digitisation increases the amount of information. We can inform ourselves about things that we have so far thoughtlessly accepted.

Digitisation as a basis for education and freedom

Knowledge is power and education frees us:

• from the economic dependency
• from political lawlessness
• and from mental degeneration

130 years ago Viktor Adler and Karl Kautsky formulated this for the workers' movement.

If digitisation is information and education has the ability to process information and to be able to use it competently for oneself or for a community, digitisation is a great project of liberation, opening up chances and opportunities through better information.

In fact, a large part of the population shares this optimistic view. Almost half of the population is confident about digitisation in the living and housing environment. The strong users of digital technologies are much more confident than those who use them a little.

Almost exactly half of Vienna's population is confident about the digitisation of communication and the world of work.

Optimism and confidence predominate, and the more one uses these digital technologies, the more optimistic and confident one is. Information gives you freedom - but this freedom is not evenly distributed. 

Who uses digital means in everyday life?

The use of digital information has highly expanded in recent years. This increases the number of those who feel overwhelmed by the wealth of information.

In Vienna, one-third are „intense users“, half of the population are "average users" of digital information and one-sixth are digital „light users“. The highest proportion of intensive users lives in private property and the highest proportion of light users lives in community buildings.
More than one in four is overwhelmed by the variety of information available at all times.

How does the population use digital resources?

In everyday life, people in Vienna use digital means for the following things:

• 84% of us use messenger services,
• 70% use social media platforms,
• 70% shop online, at least occasionally,
• 65% use digital information on public transport,
• 64% use digital information for spatial and geographic orientation,
• 30% use digital tools at home.

A quarter uses digital means in communicating with house administrations. Another quarter uses digital means to communicate with neighbours. 15% use digital neighbourhood platforms.
34% said that getting in touch with neighbours is going to be easier. 68% of strong users agree.
85% of employees see advantages in digitization, especially in the area of worklife balance.

Although the confidence of the population outweighs its concerns by far, some specific concerns are nevertheless widespread:

• Surveillance 68%
• Theft of Data 69%
• Fake News 56%
• Bullying 48%
• Threatening contents 46%
• Advertising 34%

It turns out, however, that the more we use the digital world, the stronger our skills are and the less worried we are.

Opportunities of digitisation

Digitisation offers opportunities to reduce the social gap in society. Digital communication enables us to involve that sixth of the population into the communication processes that is not able to grasp meaning from reading.

This includes the attempt to make complex texts understandable by using the rules of "easy language". The Wiener Zeitung for example has a very meritorious initiative. By clicking on “easy language” on Wikipedia you will find an introduction to this idea. YouTube tutorials enable better access to information for text illiterates. So we can use digital information to integrate the socially most vulnerable by making our websites and our offers on information particularly user-friendly.

This applies to the area of housing, especially for property management. Home administrations can support their complaint management through digitisation so that the satisfaction of their residents can be systematically improved. Property managers can provide tenants with low-cost access to cable television and Wi-Fi. If a property manager organises the contracts with Telekabel and Telekom for 100, 1000 or even 10,000 tenants, they have much more market power than the individual users have.

House hunting is predominantly carried out online - 70% of apartment seekers search online. Even 57% of the “light users” search for an apartment online. Adult education centres and senior citizen associations can offer courses on how to get well informed in the Internet. Thus social division of society may be reduced and the participation opportunities of socially disadvantaged may increase.

Chances against the concentration of power. We can also counteract the concentration of power in the construction industry and real estate groups, namely a policy that is as strong as possible and equipped with strong opportunities for intervention. For this purpose one must give laws sharper teeth - such as the antitrust law, the building code, the competition law. Beyond legislation, the city can also take advantage of digitization opportunities.

Evidence-based policy. Digitalisation also helps the city to develop an evidencebased policy. Digitisation enables figures, data and facts to be gathered together, to generate the necessary insights, to merge the data, to improve the analytics and to design a policy aimed at achieving the goals in all seven dimensions of social housing.

Evidence basing can create the foundations that policy needs as a basis to counter market forces and, above all, market failures.