Urban Retrofitting for Sustainability

Mapping the Transition to 2050

Tim Dixon, Malcolm Eames, Miriam Hunt, Simon Lannon, Tim Dixon, Malcolm Eames, Miriam Hunt, Simon Lannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317911920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

With a foreword from Paul King, Chief Executive, UK Green Building Council and Chairman, Zero Carbon Hub

As concerns over climate change and resource constraints grow, many cities across the world are trying to achieve a low carbon transition. Although new zero carbon buildings are an important part of the story, in existing cities the transformation of the current building stock and urban infrastructure must inevitably form the main focus for transitioning to a low carbon and sustainable future by 2050. Urban Retrofitting for Sustainability brings together interdisciplinary research contributions from leading international experts to focus on key issues such as systems innovation, financing tools, governance, energy, and water management. The chapters consider not only the knowledge and technical tools available, but looks forward to how they can be implemented in real cities by 2050.

1
Introduction

Tim Dixon,^* Malcolm Eames^** and Simon Lannon^**

1.1 Background, aims and objectives

The overall aim of this book is to identify and explain the key trends in urban retrofitting which are likely to transform cities over the next 20–30 years and beyond to 2050. The book examines the key drivers and trends in the energy, water and waste and resource use arenas that are underpinning this transition, and, drawing on recent research for the EPSRC Retrofit 2050 programme,¹ sets this in the context of the wider agenda of urban retrofitting, both in the UK and internationally.

In recent years the need to ‘retrofit’ existing buildings and the built environment in response to the long-term challenges of climate change and resource constraints has gained increasing prominence (Dawson, 2007; Kelly, 2009; Sustainable Development Commission, 2010). In the UK, the Climate Change Act and related 80 per cent emissions reduction target for 2050 have done much to focus attention on the impact of the built environment in cities on carbon emissions. This is not surprising, given that emissions from buildings (35 per cent) and industry (35 per cent) account for more than two thirds of total GHG emissions in the UK, with the residential sector responsible for 23 per cent and the non-residential sector for 12 per cent (Committee on Climate Change, 2010). Moreover, the rate of turnover of the building stock in the UK is very slow: less than 1–2 per cent of total building stock each year is new build (Dixon, 2009; Stafford et al., 2011). Hence some 70 per cent of total 2010 building stock is expected to still be in use in 2050 (Better Buildings Partnership, 2010). Current renovation and refurbishment rates are somewhat higher, with between 2.9 per cent and 5 per cent of existing stock for domestic buildings and between 2 and 8 per cent for commercial stock, depending on the sector (Hartless, 2004; Stafford et al., 2011), but still present a very significant challenge in meeting the UK’s carbon reduction targets.

In this context the role of cities as major centres not only of human population and energy use, but also of innovation and governance capacity, is increasingly seen as central to scaling up existing ad-hoc and piecemeal retrofit activities. During the latter part of the last century, and the early part of this century, therefore, much thought has been given to how a new ‘urban sustainability’ agenda could shape a strategic response to climate change and resource constraints (Curwell et al., 1998; May and Perry, 2011; Whitehead, 2012). However, urban sustainability is a multi-dimensional problem that requires much more than reductions in carbon emissions (although these are often difficult enough to achieve) (Wheeler, 2004; Dawson, 2007).² In line with the UK 2050 carbon reduction targets, it is therefore important not only to look forward to 2020, but also beyond to 2050, as current policy drivers and ecological, resource and demographic pressures progressively take effect (Newton, 2007).

There is a need to envisage a systemic transition in our existing built environments; not just to zero carbon, but across the entire ecological footprint of our cities and the regions within which they are embedded, simultaneously promoting economic security, social health and resilience (Rotmans, 2006). The critical challenge for contemporary urbanism is then to understand how to develop the knowledge, capacity and capability for public agencies, the private sector and multiple users in city regions (i.e. the city and its wider hinterland) to systemically re-engineer their built environment and urban infrastructure (Living Cities, 2010; Sustainable Development Commission, 2010). To this end, cities around the world are increasingly focused on developing city visions for 2030 and beyond, promoted and underpinned by initiatives such as the C40 cities group (Inayatullah, 2011; Dixon, 2012; Eadson, 2012; Hodson and Marvin, 2012).

1.2 Cities, transitions and urban retrofit

Complexity in the internal and external environments of cities also means that it is no longer appropriate, if it ever was, to provide urban infrastructure in a piecemeal, project-based manner; instead a systemic (or system-wide), long-term strategy is required (May et al., 2010). At present, however, the capability to mobilise stakeholders coherently, and in a coordinated way, necessary to develop and operationalise such strategies for energy and water infrastructure at a city-regional scale is limited (Hudson, 2008).

Large-scale urban retrofitting requires systemic change in the organisation of built environment and infrastructure, and the integration of socio-technical knowledge, capacity and responses. It also requires new forms of knowledge, expertise and decision support systems that better integrate the technological, economic and environmental issues and options and societal challenges involved in implementation. Furthermore, relevant governance structures and capabilities to develop new societal visions and technological expectations are required, not only to enrol and align stakeholders, but also to deliver effective and efficient material change in infrastructure. Finally, there is recognition that technology impact can operate at a range of scales from individual buildings through, for example, to the wider spatial impacts of information and communications technology on future urban land use patterns (EPSRC, 2009). This is important because processes of urban development can apply to building, neighbourhood, city, regional, national and global scales.

Frequently our thinking has failed to treat the built environment as spatially connected and complex (Bai, 2007; Pinnegar et al., 2008). This spatial connectivity relates to the complexity of infrastructure, spaces and places and communities together with how urban form and function relate. In this sense a focus purely on buildings leads to lack of strategic focus. Moreover, as Bai et al. (2010) suggest (see Chapter 2, this volume), there is frequently an inherent temporal (‘not in my term’), spatial (‘not in my patch’) and institutional (‘not my business’) scale mismatch between urban decision-making and global environmental concerns, where urban decision-makers are frequently constrained within short timescales, the immediate spatial scale of their jurisdictions and ‘nested’ governmental hierarchies.

In the past 10 years, the literature on transitions has played an important role in helping understand the complex and multi-dimensional shifts needed to move societies to more sustainable modes of production and consumption in such areas as transport, energy, housing, agriculture and food (Coenen et al., 2011). Transitions theory postulates that successful systems (or ‘socio-technical regimes’) comprising networks of artefacts, actors and institutions, become stabilised over time through the accumulation of processes promoting ‘lock in’ and path dependency (for example, sunk investments in skills, capital equipment and infrastructures, vested interests, organisational capital, shared belief systems, legal frameworks that create uneven playing fields, consumer norms and lifestyles). In this conceptual framework, which offers a multi-level perspective (MLP), ‘lock in’ to existing systems is overcome and transitions occur as a result of experimentation and the emergence of new socio-technical configurations (innovations) within protected niches. These factors, combined with landscape pressures, destabilise and transform or replace the existing ‘regime’ (Rip and Kemp, 1998; Geels, 2010).

Although transitions to future sustainability cannot be managed in the traditional sense, because they are complex and uncertain, their direction and speed can be influenced by various types of steering and co-ordination (Rotmans, 2006). Based on the conceptual model of the fourth Dutch Environmental Policy Plan, transition management has emerged as a way of deliberately attempting to stimulate transition to a more sustainable future. While the specifics will vary depending upon the particular context and nature of problem at hand, transition management is in essence an open-ended form of process management against agreed societal goals. For Kemp and Loorbach (2006) key elements of the process are: (a) systems thinking across multiple domains, actors and scales; (b) long term thinking as a frame for short-term policy; (c) backcasting and forecasting; (d) a focus on learning and experimentation about a variety of options; and (e) stakeholder participation and interaction.

Proponents of the MLP argue that ‘regimes’ should be conceptualised in terms of systems of production and consumption serving broad societal functions (the provision of nutrition, shelter, warmth, mobility, etc.). In practice, within the transitions literature, there is considerable interpretive flexibility, with the notion of the regime being used synonymously with particular sectors, technological fields or environmental domains (energy, water, waste, transport, ICT, hydrogen and fuel cells, biogas, etc.), with the spatial boundaries of the regime left implicit. This raises important issues over defining scale and designing appropriate governance structures for socio-technical transitions, which have been highlighted by critics of the MLP (see for example, Smith et al., 2010).

In other words, how then can the notion of the regime be understood with respect to the retrofit of urban environments where they fulfil multiple societal functions integrated across multiple spatial scales, technological fields and environmental domains?

The issue of boundaries is closely linked to the role of spatial scale and place. While initially neglected within the MLP, issues concerning the geography of transitions have recently attracted considerable attention within the literature (see for example: Smith et al., 2010; Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Truffer and Coenen, 2012), with one strand of this debate focusing in particular upon cities and low-carbon transitions (Bulkeley et al., 2010; Hodson and Marvin, 2010, 2012).

1.3 Changing views of the city

Moreover, this issue of boundaries raises the question, what is a city? The term ‘city’ can refer to spatial form, but it can also refer to the multi-dimensions of urban living that includes ecological, cultural, technological, spiritual and socioeconomic elements and interactions. During the last two centuries a number of ‘theories of the city’ have been postulated in the context of urban planning, ranging from rational planning models (Edward Banfield, 1970), political economy models (for example, David Harvey, 2009) through to equity planning (Peter Hall, 1998) and the advocacy planning model (Kevin Lynch, 1960), which in turn have informed the way in which we understand cities. For David Harvey (2009: 46), a city is ‘a complex dynamic system in which spatial form and social process are in continuous interaction with each other’.

In contrast, Manuel Castells (1989) saw the city more in terms of a fragmented social-spatial reality (‘Dual City’) brought about by technological change, which created a conflict between a ‘space of flows’ and a ‘space of places’. For Peter Hall, writing in 1998, cities:

were and are quite different places, places for people who can stand the heat of the kitchen: places where the adrenalin pumps through the bodies of the people and through the streets on which they walk; messy places, sordid places sometimes, but places nevertheless superbly worth living in, long to be remembered and long to be celebrated.

(Hall, 1998: 907)

More than 50 years ago a city was first formally viewed as a ‘system’, which represented the distinct collections of entities and operated almost entirely as a closed system, with urban planning able t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Setting the scene for urban retrofit
• PART II Energy and urban retrofit
• PART III Water, waste and urban retrofit
• PART IV Emerging themes in urban retrofit
• Index