Regulating Heat and Bodies: Building Legislation and the Ordering of Inhabitants

Other conference contribution, 2026

Building codes do more than regulate construction; they define the limits of architectural obligation. By specifying acceptable thermal conditions, they determine which bodies architecture must sustain, which discomforts count as failure, and which adjustments are presumed reasonable. Thermal standards thus participate in what Jacques Rancière calls a distribution of the sensible: a partitioning of roles and capacities within a shared spatial order. As summer overheating intensifies in Sweden and the 2024 revision of Boverket’s building codes (BFS 2024:8) removes detailed thermal standards, the allocation of thermal responsibility is unsettled.

The question is no longer only what buildings must guarantee, but how inhabitants are positioned within that frame: How does Swedish thermal regulation construct the role of occupants in relation to indoor climate? To do so we build on archival analysis of legislation and regulatory assessments between 1960s- 2024 traces a gradual reconfiguration of the inhabitant within the domestic thermal order.

Over six decades, regulation has shifted from prescriptive spatial guarantees to defining comfort as contingent on performance metrics and occupant behavior. What was once an architectural obligation secured through measurable standards is now framed as dependent on clothing, activity, duration of use, and the capacity to adjust the indoor environment. Thermal adequacy moves from building responsibility to inhabitant management. Read through Rancière’s notion of police order, this trajectory constitutes a redistribution of roles within domestic architecture. Thermal responsibility shifts from collective provision to individual adaptive capacity, transforming the inhabitant from protected beneficiary into the bearer of adaptive obligation.

Contemporary building codes thus reorganise not only standards of comfort, but the distribution of roles through which thermal experience becomes a matter of public claim or private endurance.