CATEGORY

Retrofitting

Pioneering Sustainable Solar Panels: Amsterdam’s Move Towards Circularity

This article was written for CityChangers.org by Lukas Sloet, Policy Officer for Solar Energy, and Tabita Slimmens, Communications Specialist in Sustainability, both working for the City of Amsterdam. They explore the often-overlooked harmful implications...

Lessons from Edinburgh’s Retrofit Programme, Which Runs Hot & Cold

Inefficient building envelopes are huge carbon emitters. Retrofitting promises results but the time left to attain climate targets is narrowing. This calls for urgent, scaled-up action. With an abundance of social housing, city authorities...

How to Attract Considerable Investment for Large-Scale Sustainable Initiatives

Finance is an unavoidable puzzle piece in making cities sustainable. With scaling a priority, leveraging enough money is a challenge. Too often, if forces us to focus on a single objective, when what we...

Six Steps to Decarbonising Buildings

This article was written for CityChangers.org by Irene Garcia, Built Environment Lead, and Michael Shank, Director of Engagement, both with the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. In it, they outline a six-step plan – illustrated...

Green Finance Institute: Accelerating Retrofits Through Investment

Retrofitting Europe’s built environment would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and position us closer to climate goals. It’s a tantalisingly tangible but costly outlook, and progress is slow. To change this, the Green Finance...

How to Innovate Retrofitting

With so many properties failing to meet contemporary energy efficiency standards, much needs to be done to save occupants from needless discomfort and expense. There are plenty of mainstream retrofit concepts, but what about...

How to Excite People About Retrofitting

Big cities can learn a lot from smaller communities. Dunleer, a town in the northeast of the Republic of Ireland, has managed what many larger places have struggled to do: excite people about retrofitting....

Lyon Confluence: How a District is Retrofitting Heritage Buildings

SPL Lyon Confluence is carrying out a stand-out urban renewal project in a once-deprived district of central Lyon. Project Manager Etienne Vignali describes how this offers a significantly chance to undertake a large-scale decarbonisation...

CityChanger Alice Haugh: A Just Transition Towards Decarbonisation

What does a city of the future look like? For Alice Haugh, it is a regenerative and inclusive built environment that supports wellbeing and equality. In her work with the global philanthropic institution, Laudes...

CityChanger Frances Bean: Helping Public Bodies Decarbonise

Frances Bean joined the Carbon Trust, a mission-led sustainability consultancy in the UK, in 2018. As Manager in the Cities and Regions team, she supports municipalities and public bodies to understand and achieve their...

The Social Benefits of Retrofitting

While marketing it as a decent money saver, we rarely focus on the social benefits of retrofitting. Does that mean that they’re so minute as to be obsolete or do we just need a...

What No One Tells You: How to Frame Messages Around Retrofits

Retrofitting provides the tools to make older buildings airtight, temperate, pleasant places. It also decreases emissions and helps halt the damaging impact on the climate. There’s no disguising the fact that we need to...

Community Sociologist Jeni Cross: Building Better Retrofitting Behaviours

A toxic mix of bad habits and infrastructure that prevents change is holding sustainability back. This is as true for retrofitting as anything. Community sociologist Doctor Jeni Cross has dedicated 20 years to researching...

Renovating Makes Cents: How to Retrofit on a Budget

Realistically, for a shot at halting climate change, we need to make buildings more efficient, big time, with widespread retrofit rollouts in the next few years! Regardless of good intentions, that’s not easy without...

How to Motivate the Transition to Community Energy

Community energy is an agent of decarbonisation. Transition in the sector is gaining momentum. How can we motivate people to get involved and maintain that trajectory? We asked Éva Goudouneix, Community Development Manager with...

What Not to Do: How to Avoid Common Retrofitting Mistakes

Are you keen to retrofit? That’s what we like to hear. But hold your horses! Do you know what you’re doing? We mean, really know. Being ill-prepared may result in not-so-efficient changes, wasting more...

Investigating Investment: How to Pay for Retrofitting

Even knowing retrofitting will improve our standard of living and save us cash in the long run, finding the money upfront to pay for it can be a challenge. In this article, we prove...

Understand the Upgrade: Retrofitting Tools & Data

Navigating the ins and outs of energy efficiency can be challenging. If we are going to get the most out of fabric-first retrofits and smart technology options, we need a comfortable level of comprehension....