Intent and outcomes from the Retrofit for the Future programme: key lessons

The Retrofit for the Future programme, sponsored by UK government's Technology Strategy Board (TSB) from 2009 to 2013, demonstrated innovative approaches to deep retrofitting of social housing, using a whole-house approach for achieving an 80% CO₂ reduction target. The intent and outcomes of this programme (in which all authors participated) are critically examined through a cross-project meta-study of the primary data, substantiated by insights from secondary sources. Given that only three (out of 45) projects met the expected CO₂ target in reality, despite generous funding and professional expertise, it suggests that decarbonizing existing housing will not be particularly easy. Important lessons are found in this initiative's formulation, target setting, monitoring and evaluation procedures, and feedback mechanisms. These lessons can inform the formulation, delivery and effectiveness of future national energy retrofit programmes. Furthermore, to support the ‘scaling up’ of effective retrofit programmes and reduce the gap between intent and outcome, it is recommended that attention be moved from what level of CO₂ reductions are to be achieved to how (delivery models) these radical reductions can be achieved and by whom (supply chain). Such alternative delivery models to the ‘whole house’ approach include retrofit over time, city-scale retrofit and community-based energy retrofits.     

Designing an ‘optimal’ domestic retrofit programme

The US Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP) consisted of 41 different versions of thermal retrofit programmes with a common structure and objectives. This created a natural experiment in thermal retrofit programme design. This paper uses qualitative interviews with programme organizers measured against third-party programme performance data to create a model of 14 programme steps that were common to all BBNP grantees. This model uses the experiences of programme organizers to define best-practice principles associated with each programme step. Five themes emerge from the programme steps: (1) programme design: local market features and suitable programme structures; (2) marketing and outreach: the processes of creating awareness versus personal engagement – how community-based social marketing is a key strategy in driving demand; (3) workforce engagement: the skills gaps across the supply chain; (4) financial incentives: the merits of grants versus loans – how to use them in combination; and (5) data and evaluation: best-practice techniques for both programme evaluation and enabling iterative programme adjustments. These principles create a template for an ‘optimal’ programme model for retrofit programmes with stated objectives similar to the US BBNP. The potential and limitations in extrapolating this model to UK retrofit markets are considered.     

Harnessing social class,taste and gender for more effective policies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores why domestic energy policies, thermal retrofitting and the operation of domestic energy-efficient technologies are often met with social inertia in practice. Two sets of interview data – UK homeowners who have retrofitted their property and social housing tenants living in energy-efficient housing – reveal a very different mix of habits, skills and attitudes regarding domestic heating, rooted in socio-economic background and further determined by tenure. Middle-class homeowners’ retrofit design were part of their social and economic capital and self-expression of taste. These aspirational retrofits were characterized by comfort, conspicuous consumption and do-it-yourself (DIY) activities. Policy should strengthen these ‘paths of least resistance’ by providing resources to harness the taste-motivated retrofit stream. In contrast, the less-privileged tenant group struggled with the basic interaction with new technologies imposed on them and need more tailor-made paths: simpler heating controls; a simpler manual for some; and practical measures such as burglar-proof natural ventilation. The paper explores how social stratification and status-led consumption can be brought into understandings of energy retrofitting practices. Reflecting on gender in such contexts could also help to overcome exclusion practices and stereotyping, and there are market opportunities for retrofit packages to engage women and harness their emerging interest in DIY.     

An interpretation of Europe in planning and property development based on discourse analysis: The example of business sites

Discourse analysis, combined with an interactive and interpretive method, is used to approach the meaning and impact of ‘Europe’ for the development and planning of business sites. ‘European integration’, as a challenging metaphor of change, implies the transformation of their spatial and social organization. It is illustrated by the two opposite, but complementary, processes of ‘Europeanization’ and ‘site embeddedness’. ‘Europe’ is interpreted from both the discursive image (the metaphors at work) and identity (the territory at work) of business sites as a source of geographical uneven development. The paper proposes a reflection on the purpose of spatial metaphors in the field of business sites and shows why the meaning of a ‘business site’ should neither be used nor read as unproblematic. This focus on discourse analysis and discursive practices provides a conceptual and methodological tool allowing fruitful European comparisons of the development and planning of business sites.     

Unequal spatial distribution of retrofits in Bucharest’s apartment buildings

This paper argues that the current spatial patterns of energy retrofits in post-socialist apartment buildings are unequally distributed across municipalities in Bucharest, Romania. In addition to the dominant techno-economic and social framing of this type of retrofit action, an institutional and political perspective can provide useful insights into why this occurs. By drawing on secondary analysis of statistical data, grey literature and 20 semi-structured interviews in Bucharest, three important findings emerge. First, the institutional complexity of energy retrofit of apartment buildings in Romania is underestimated and the interaction between various institutions is poor, explained by lack of trust and collective action. Second, the spatial distribution of the retrofit of apartment buildings is unequally distributed across Bucharest’s six municipalities. Third, current action for retrofit does not reach municipalities with the greatest need and potential. A more bottom-up and decentralized institutional landscape exists than is currently acknowledged in public policy and the research literature. Findings show an unequal and unfair spread of retrofit action within and between cities – raising wider implications for the potential shortcomings of European Union retrofit programmes in Central and Eastern Europe.     

The life cycle impact of refurbishment packages on residential buildings with different initial thermal conditions

Existing buildings constitute a large portion of the UK’s housing stock. Refurbishment of existing buildings can, therefore, have an important role in achieving the UK government’s CO₂ reduction targets. While building regulations and rating frameworks mainly focus on the improvements of the operational performance of buildings, Life Cycle Analysis is considered to be a more appropriate framework to account for long–term CO₂ savings. This study evaluates a range of retrofit approaches (simple, medium, and deep), in terms of Life Cycle Carbon Footprint applied on a terraced house—one of the most common housing archetypes in London. The initial state of the original building has also been examined assuming three initial states (never refurbished, refurbished in compliance with the 1976 and with the 2000 building regulations). Results showed that for all initial state scenarios, deep retrofit achieved the lowest life cycle carbon emissions, in absolute figures, compared to the simple and medium retrofits. Simple retrofit packages, on the other hand, achieved quick and significant improvements, especially in buildings with poor initial thermal conditions. The study also indicated that retrofit packages applied on highly efficient building fabrics result in longer carbon payback time periods. The study recommends establishing a ‘staggered’ retrofitting approach, which pushes for ‘older building first’ and ‘simple retrofit packages first’, as these gain quick CO₂ savings. Deep retrofit packages and treatment of relatively new buildings should be implemented at a later stage, to push buildings further to Zero–Carbon target.

     

Magical or Monstrous? Hybridity in Social Housing Governance

While a growing number of national social housing strategies rely on the work of hybrid entities blending social and commercial tasks, the state/market dualism continues to dominate the conceptual landscape of housing research. This exploratory paper develops a conceptual approach to support research into the role of not-for-profit social entrepreneurs in the housing market. It looks for insights within their ‘hybrid’ status, spanning state and market, and subject to multiple sets of institutional conditions. Four frames of hybrid identity are developed, and then substantiated via a discussion of two different sectors of not-for-profit social entrepreneurs in Australia and the Netherlands. As the growth trajectory of each sector is traced and the construction of hybrid identity is explored from both public and private perspectives, institutional pressures are revealed that set the current context for development. This brings forth implications for existing conceptual tools, as well as directions for new research.     

Technology adoption: breaking down barriers using a virtual reality design support tool for hybrid concrete

The use of hybrid concrete technologies as a viable solution to traditional frame design has been inhibited by a general lack of information. The uptake of this technology has therefore been slow and parochial, as designers have tended to stay loyal to ‘traditional’, tried and tested technologies—their ‘comfort zone’. This research identifies the barriers associated with technology adoption at industry, organization and individual levels; and uses hybrid concrete as the core context for discussion. The role of an enabling design support tool (HyCon) is presented, which can allow designers to overcome these inhibitors by providing an immersive, interactive and information‐rich environment through which design solutions can be explored. This collaborative research project describes a ‘proof of concept’ design support tool to promote the use of hybrid concrete in structural frames. It encompasses knowledge creation, application and sharing functionality, to envision support and use of this new technology—thereby promoting organizational learning. Research findings note that, while design tools have a valuable role to play, it is also important to appreciate that the uptake of any new technology is a social phenomenon, and that subsequent adoption/uptake requires careful embedding and augmentation into company organizational systems in order to leverage advantage.     

The UK building education recruitment crisis: a call for action

There is a growing urge for a shift from ‘lowest-price wins’ to ‘multi-criteria selection’ practices in the contractor selection process. The rationale is to achieve best value (for money) for the client. Earlier investigations have found that the tender price (i.e. capital cost) still dominates the final selection decision despite increased emphases on the need for contractor selection based on ‘value’. This paper provides insights into the evaluation of contractors' attributes, particularly for project-specific criteria (PSC), that is, criteria against which tendering contractors may be considered. The importance attached by clients to the ‘lowestprice wins’ philosophy is also reported. The perceived importance of PSC (i.e. their influence on final selection choice) is determined through a structured questionnaire survey of UK construction clients. The results show an increasing use of PSC. It is also found that ‘lowest-price’ is not now necessarily the client's principal selection criterion, but rather, the realization that cost has to be tempered with evaluation of PSC in any attempt to identify value for money.     

‘in-between’: architectural drawing as interdisciplinary spatial discourse

This essay discusses the role of non-normative architectural representational practices in architectural design-based research. From a reading of Michel Foucault's concept of ‘discursive formations’, it sets out an inter-disciplinary practice-based design research approach to architectural drawing. It considers architectural research to be connected to the conception that drawing and the critical discourse of space are indissoluble and that the confines of each are products of specific ideological and disciplinary practices. Conventional, orthographic architectural drawings are challenged through ‘in-between’ drawings inspired by inter-disciplinary drawing methods. The site of exploration is the pedagogical context of the design studio.

Two different bodies of student architectural design research drawings are discussed. One set is of digitally produced collages that examine island colonisation and that incorporate drawing methods used in geology and archaeology. The other set comprises hand-made collage drawings that visually incorporate the qualities of home typically excluded from architectural drawing and which reference social and anthropological readings of the space. The essay aims to propose alternative modes of practice through drawing ‘in-between’ disciplinary conventions.     

On the Social Relations of Contract Research Production: Power,Positionality and Epistemology in Housing and Urban Research

The growing interest in reflexive social science has been matched by a voluminous literature on the epistemological consequences of positionality in social research. Inter-subjectivist approaches to positionality emphasise how social interactions within the field produce ‘interpretative moments’ and thereby consciously affect the process of knowledge production. Objectivist approaches to positionality emphasise the ‘background thinking’ that social researchers carry into the field, unexamined, as occupants of social positions that are class, gender etc. based. It follows that this (class, gendered) background thinking unconsciously influences the process of knowledge production. However, since this literature has had little impact on the field of housing and urban research, its relevance to these fields remains to be established and vice versa. In this paper, I discuss both of these approaches and find them helpful but limited in their relevance to housing and urban research. Since housing and urban research tends to be undertaken on behalf of ‘policy funders’, I argue that constant exposure to the ‘disciplinary gaze’ of those funders means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is also moulded during the course of the academic career. This means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is not simply established within the field nor carried into the field. Rather, the positionality of housing and urban researchers develops over time of constant exposure to the ‘disciplinary gaze’ of research funders and manifests itself in what Foucault refers to as ‘docility’, i.e. research practices intuitively and uncritically oriented to satisfying the needs and demands of research funders. I draw on my own research career experiences to demonstrate this argument and, in doing so, show how my docility manifested itself during recent ‘policy funded’ research into the housing and urban problems of visual impaired children.     

‘From Choice to Chance’: choice-based letting use in forced tenant relocations in New South Wales,Australia

Abstract

The redevelopment of large social housing estates has emerged as a central policy response to address housing affordability and social housing crises in Australia. These projects, often done in partnership with the private sector, are seen as opportunities to leverage government land assets and increase densities to expand social and private housing stock. While extensive research has been conducted on the rationale and processes of estate renewal, less attention has been paid to tenant relocation practices. This is the focus of this article. In particular we explore the New South Wales Government’s use of a choice-based letting program called ‘My Property Choice’ (MPC) that involves tenants bidding via a ballot system for available social housing properties. We argue, despite policy rhetoric emphasising resident ‘choice’, MPC emerges as a chance-based process for tenants seeking to ‘win’ their desired relocation destinations.     

The role of international actors in low-carbon transitions of Shenzhen's International Low Carbon City in China

This study looks into one of the most promising low carbon city planning initiatives in China, namely Shenzhen's International Low Carbon City (ILCC). First as a collaborative project between the Dutch and Chinese partners, the ILCC's international partners have expanded to include other countries, such as Germany, Italy, France, Australia and the US. This paper investigates the influence of these international actors in the development process of the ILCC and their benefits in the long run, through knowledge transfer and accumulation of resource.The paper first highlights a broad understanding of ‘low carbon city’ followed by detailed discussions on discourses of ‘low carbon city’, ‘eco-city’, and ‘low carbon eco-city’ in China. Then it provides insights on knowledge transfer in low carbon city development, and particularly the Sino-Foreign cases of China. The authors then introduce the case of study (ILCC) and highlight its visions, project planning, and partnerships. Using primary and secondary data, it then maps the ILCC's international actors and their roles, and then analyses their behaviours and impacts in the project's planning and development process. Next, the paper summarises the research findings with further updates on the case of ILCC. The authors conclude that the engagement between Chinese and international partners differ in three forms and they are (1) the type of involvement; (2) the level and timeframe of involvement; (3) the level of Influence in the project's multiple stages. The paper concludes that the role played by an international partner evolves as the project proceeds.     

Citizen dialogue for whom? Competing rationalities in urban planning,the case of Gothenburg,Sweden

This paper analyses citizen dialogue in urban planning from a governmentality perspective. We focus on (1) how motives and goals connected to ‘citizen dialogue’ and the activities and practices initiated to accomplish these can be understood in light of competing rationalities and (2) how public officials and other actors involved in organising citizen dialogues understand and manage the tensions between competing rationalities. The analysis draws on a case study of urban development in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. We suggest a critical approach to the use of citizen dialogue as a technology of government, an approach enabling an analysis of various functions and implications of citizen dialogues.     

Towards a progressive home-making: the ambivalence of migrants’ experience in a multicultural condominium

Following the rhetoric of globalisation and hyper-mobility, the ideas of placelessness and detachment from place seem to be the essential features of contemporary cities. This conceals the human necessity to constantly create new senses of home and new home-making practices. Starting from ethnographic research in a multicultural condominium (called Hotel House) in Italy, the paper uses the urban experience of migrants to look at different home-making practices by analysing them as multidimensional (spatial, social and emotional) processes. Firstly, migrants living in Hotel House produce ‘home’ by imbuing domestic spaces with their own memory and meaning and creating public and collective spaces characterised by ‘homely relations’. In both cases, they produce material, emotional and symbolic resources. Secondly, the paper analyses the ‘dark side of home-making’, inasmuch as the social density of the home-making practices in Hotel House’s domestic and public spaces also favours strong forms of social control, particularly relevant for women and young people. Thirdly, the paper analyses how the sense of home sustains a collective intercultural mobilisations against Hotel House’s institutional abandonment and stigmatisation that reveal the threshold-crossing capacity of ‘home’. Home, in conclusion, is not a romanticised, fixed and bounded place to protect. It is a plural and conflictual field of action that can support social exclusion but can also open new interconnections and possibilities of peoples’ empowerment.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

Low Carbon Housing: A ‘Green’ Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?

Ambitious carbon reduction targets are driving a new era of carbon control reflecting the UK, the EU and international commitment to mitigating the predicted impacts of global warming and climate change. Observed as a transition away from the more holistic goals of sustainable development (While et al., 2001), the ‘low carbon’ (LC) agenda is increasingly recognised as problematic in so far as it is pro-technological and promethean, marginalising the importance of social, political, economic and wider environmental issues. With specific implications for housing and householders, the paper explores how the current preoccupation with ‘LC’ presents some potential pitfalls in relation to advancing sustainable housing.     

Theoretical underpinnings of regenerative sustainability

Over the past half century, a discourse emphasizing environmental constraints and limits has both informed and provided many valuable ways of responding to complex environmental problems and has strongly shaped green building practices and associated environmental assessment methods. This paper delineates the concept of ‘regenerative sustainability’ – a net-positive approach to sustainability that is rooted in the notion of ‘procedural sustainability’ and a particular stream of constructivist social theory. The paper contrasts this to the concept of ‘regenerative development and design’ which, although having many commonalities, is based on different philosophical underpinnings. Since the origins of regenerative sustainability and regenerative design lie primarily in the social and ecological domains respectively, understanding their relationship is of importance in formulating approaches for the successful co-evolution of human and natural systems. The paper describes this relationship between regenerative sustainability and regenerative design, including a discussion of some of the key points of convergence and divergence between them, and concludes with an exploration of the practical implications of the regenerative sustainability concept.     

The role of housing policy in perpetuating conditional forms of homelessness support in the era of housing first: Evidence from Australia

Abstract

Despite widespread enthusiasm for Housing First approaches to addressing homelessness, conditional models of support that require ‘housing readiness’ persist in many jurisdictions. Existing research cites an ongoing commitment to conditionality amongst homelessness services providers as a key reason for its persistence. In this paper, we argue that State housing policies also play an important role in perpetuating conditionality in the homelessness sector. Drawing on research carried out in an Australian jurisdiction, we show how policies regarding the supply and allocation of social housing compel homelessness service providers—including Housing First services—to employ conditionality practices. We also demonstrate the detrimental impact this has on the housing outcomes of homelessness people with complex needs. We conclude that our findings challenge the claim made by some that Housing First constitutes a ‘paradigm shift’, and instead highlight the complex processes of policy translation and assemblage that shape the adaptation of Housing First in different contexts.