Transforming retrofit: how understanding housing as a cultural asset can develop more effective relational and regenerative retrofit designs.
Authors
Lucy McFadzean, Catherine Butler, and Gabriella Giannachi
Abstract
There has long been recognition of the need to move beyond individualist framings of housing retrofit with community-based approaches gaining increasing traction. More recently debates within design literatures have foregrounded concepts of regenerative design and relational approaches to transition as ways to move beyond more narrowly conceived concepts of sustainable housing. These ideas have often been applied to new build and larger scale socio-technical projects, but have been less well developed in contexts of housing retrofit programmes. Drawing on resident interviews and community workshops from two retrofit demonstrator sites in Bristol and Swansea, this paper examines the challenges and possibilities for community-based, regenerative, and relational approaches to housing retrofit arguing this is crucial in developing more effective, just, and widespread net zero housing. The analysis delivers novel insights by drawing together the social practices literature on domestic retrofit, that situates community-based programmes as providing alternative pathways to undertake retrofit at scale (e.g. Karvonen, 2013) with work on regenerative (e.g. Craft et al. 2017) and relational design (e.g. Escobar, 2018) and philosophical texts that situate houses as liminal spaces for social transformation (Coccia 2021). Going beyond theoretical reflection, the paper offers insights into the possibilities and challenges for practical implementation of relational, regenerative community-based retrofit designs that account for housing as a shared cultural asset.
Published date
27 October 2025
Notes
Published in ‘Innovative Approaches to Retrofit: Proceedings of the International Retrofit Conference (IRC 2025)’ edited by Christopher Tsang, William Swan and Richard Fitton.