Retrofit
v.
the addition of new technology or features to older systems
Reimagine
v.
to reinterpret; imaginatively, creatively, resourcefully
We all know how important our homes, streets and neighbourhoods are. We may have many different ideas about how we relate to them and what they mean to us, but the pandemic showed us all how crucial they are in how we access education, our peers, green spaces, and much more, fundamentally shaping our health and wellbeing and how we experience our everyday life.
There is a well-established evidence base that connects thermally-inefficient and poor-quality homes with physical and mental health, including respiratory, circulatory and cardiovascular diseases, and extending to conditions such as depression and anxiety (Marmot et al. 2010). The impact of poor quality housing is a massive cost to our society, inequitably felt by those at the intersections of socioeconomic class, race, gender and disability.
From sky rocketing bills and the soaring cost of living, to the amount of energy lost in heating poorly insulated homes, and the strain on the NHS, we know these intersecting crises are at breaking point. In addition, we know the scale of the challenges we are facing is large, so any routes out of this that are more regenerative and future facing need to recognise these cascading impacts of our built environment, and to design strategies that take them into account with social, climate and energy justice firmly at their heart.
What if we saw the current energy crisis as a crucial intervention point for a bold and just transition across the UK?
There’s no doubt that this isn’t going to be easy. Retrofitting our homes, streets and neighbourhoods is situated in a knotty network of local services, spaces, skills, ownership, regulation, ambition, infrastructure, and trust, which also makes it a rich site of possibility from which to build a just transition. We must move away from the idea of retrofit as a superficial investment in fixing technical problems in individual buildings, to one which addresses the underlying systems that are tied to our domestic spaces. Retrofit should not only see the home as a strategic site for decarbonisation, but also as a site for addressing the inequalities of wider, interlinked systems, of which our built environment sits at the centre.
What if we understood energy, health, racial and climate justice to be inextricably linked, and we had a courageous interconnected approach to retrofitting our homes, streets and neighbourhoods?
A system map of retrofit ecosystem, Dark Matter Labs — original file here.
To meet the UK’s legal climate targets we need to ****retrofit one home every 20 seconds for the next 10 years.