1. EPSRC Retrofit 2050: critical factors for successful transition
Tim Dixon, Professor in Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment, School of Construction Management & Engineering, University of Reading 1

2. Retrofit 2050
Retrofit 2050
Funded under EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environments
October 2010 – September 2014
6 universities + non-academic partners
EPSRC SUE project
Running October 2010 to September 2014
6 universities – Salford, Oxford Brookes, Reading, Durham, Cambridge and Cardiff – and a number of non-academic partners including local and regional government such as Manchester and Cardiff Council and WG; government bodies such as Defra; professional bodies such as RICS; private sector groups such as Carillion and Tata

3. Vision
To deliver a 'step change' in current knowledge and capacity for a transition to urban sustainability, by working with key stakeholders to illuminate challenging but realistic social & technological options and pathways for systemic retrofitting of two core UK city regions (Greater Manchester and Cardiff/SE Wales) by 2050
Vision of project. Focus on working with stakeholders (foresight work, surveys, interviews etc); socio-technical approach; systemic rather than piecemeal

4. Project Objectives
Analyse through case studies, modelling and international comparison, the technical and social processes underpinning such transitions
Identify and characterise prospective disruptive technologies and systems innovations which will underpin a transition to sustainability in the built environment
Articulate and appraise regionally specific visions and prospective pathways for urban scale retrofitting of the built environment.
Three strands: 1. case studies, including comparison, foresight and modelling; 2. disruptive technology and systems innovations; 3. visions and corresponding pathways

5. contextual ‘socio-technical’ scenarios for testing in WP3
Project Structure
Work Package 1
Urban Transitions
Analysis
Urban Foresight Panel
Scenario
Workshops
Produces set of
contextual ‘socio-technical’ scenarios for testing in WP3
Work Package 3
Urban Options,
Visualisation
and Pathways
Analysis
Work Package 4
Synthesis,
Comparison
& Knowledge
Exchange
Work Package 2
Urban Foresight
Laboratory
( )
Broadly speaking:
WP1 have carried out case study work, including extensive interviews and literature reviews
WP2 responsible for scoping disruptive innovations through surveys and expert reviews
WP3 have focussed on the potential of modelling to work alongside foresight methods
WP4 continuing to work on synthesising and disseminating work
Scenario workshops alongside and across the work packages, working first with national experts, then grounding with regional stakeholders
More info in briefing papers and on website 5

6. Key Outputs
Number of articles published in academic journals, Relevant trade magazines, Special issue of BR&I
Earthscan Routledge book, Forthcoming book from International workshop
Compendium of working papers and presentations on website, Briefing papers available by the coffee

7. What does Retrofit mean?
To provide a component or feature that a system did not have it when first constructed.
Urban Retrofit “…the directed alteration of fabric, form or systems in order to improve energy, water and waste efficiencies.”
Focus = Existing stock + 1-2% replacement stock
In recent years, the need to re-engineer existing buildings and urban infrastructure has gained increasing prominence. Although cities are seen
as the source of many of our most pressing environmental and resource depletion problems, the creativity and innovative potential of cities may also
provide their solutions.
Moreover, in the UK, as with many parts of Europe and the US, the critical challenge is not so much how to build new smart cities or eco-towns, but how best to deal with our ageing building stock and urban infrastructure.
In the UK, for example, the built environment is currently responsible for over two thirds of our total carbon emissions, less than 1-2% of total building stock each year is new build, and some 70% of total 2010 building stock will still be in use in 2050.
Indeed there is now widespread agreement over the need for significant reductions in the energy we consume in our major towns and cities if we are collectively to have any chance of meeting the Climate Change Act 2008 and its related 80% emissions reduction target for 2050.

8. ‘how’ do we collectively organise urban retrofit activities at scale to deliver significant environmental, social and economic benefits?
From a technical perspective at least there is an increasing understanding of what technological changes could deliver in terms of radically reducing
carbon emissions from both our existing stock of domestic and commercial buildings and the broader urban infrastructures of which our cities are
composed, and at what cost.
Moreover, the potential economic, societal and health benefits of these energy efficiency and carbon reduction measures are attractive and well understood.
National and local government and commercial and civil society organisations alike all highlight the contribution which urban retrofit programmes can make to job creation, quality of life, fuel poverty and energy security, etc.
Despite this apparent consensus about ‘why’ government should prioritise policy frameworks to accelerate urban retrofit and a developing knowledge base
about ‘what’ needs to be done in particular cities and communities, the critical question remains…..

9. Vision
Our research reveals both: i) multiple and competing long-term visions of what a sustainable ‘retrofit’ city should look like; and ii) radically differing framings of the urban retrofit agenda amongst many of the current actors involved.
That is, if we understand the problem in terms of a longer-term process of transition to urban sustainability, there is currently little consensus
about either where we should be heading or how we should get there.
But scaling up urban retrofit activities implies a coordinated and strategic approach, reconciling multiple stakeholders and social interests (e.g. policymakers,
owners, occupiers, developers, financiers, contractors and utilities), where the aim must be to foster new forms of governance, which move beyond short-term policy and political cycles, capable of delivering systemic change over the next 10 – 20 years and beyond to 2050.

10. The two case study regions: boundaries
Greater Manchester
Cardiff City Region

11. Eight critical factors for successful transition
Vision
An inclusive urban retrofit agenda
Compelling retrofit city visions
Improved modelling and decision support tools
Institutional capacity, planning and governance
Access to ‘green’ finance
Effective partnerships
Long term sharing of risks and benefits
A whole systems perspective
An understanding of the critical challenges in scaling up urban retrofit suggests that cities will need to ensure the following eight elements are
in place in order to deliver sustainable futures for UK cities.

12. 1. An inclusive urban retrofit agenda
NTIONAL
Dominant economic policy framing (UK)
e.g. Green Deal
National
Retrofit on
‘Economic rationale’
Greater Manchester - as leader in retrofit markets
Retrofit with
‘Social rationale’
Cardiff/SE Wales - to deliver Sustainable development
Retrofit in
‘contextual rationale’
Bottom up initiatives - in multiple local communities
City/regional
scale
Extensive in-depth interviews with a broad range of actors (local
government officers, civil servants, private sector companies,
community groups and charities) currently engaged in retrofit
activities in different parts of the UK (Cardiff, Manchester, London
and other core cities) reveal quite different motivations and framings
of the retrofit agenda in different governance contexts and amongst
different social interests.
Routines of everyday life
Building

13. 1. An inclusive urban retrofit agenda
Vision
1. An inclusive urban retrofit agenda
Need to reflexively reconcile competing framings though:
consultation
experimentation
consensus building
to find solutions which work in specific local contexts

14. 2. Compelling retrofit city visions
Sense of purpose
Vitality and belief systems
What sort of future do we want?
Promote discussion and debate
Mobilise resources around desired futures
Visions of the city – both utopic and dystopic in nature – have long played a central role in the development of our urban civilisation. Many utopic city futures often envisage the creation of an ideal city from the ground up and tell us little about how to remake our existing cities.
Now more than ever, however, our cities need to envision and strive for a more sustainable future. Such visions help people to make sense of the future, and determine what sort of future we want.
They promote discussion and debate and allow us to see how we can mobilise, deploy, and manage resources to achieve a desired future.

15. Visions for urban sustainability: Retrofit 2050 Backcasting methodology
Phase 1
UK National Urban Foresight Panel Workshops
Foresight Expert Reviews
Urban Retrofit Roadmaps
Development of Retrofit 2050 Visions
Retrofit City Futures: Visions for Urban Sustainability
Phase 2
Regional case studies of urban retrofit governance (WP1)
Desk-based reviews linking Retrofit 2050 visions with local context and drivers
Scoping interviews -stakeholder expectations
Analysis of unfolding regional context
Phase 3
City Regional Futures: stakeholder workshops
Cardiff/SE Wales, 17 May 2013
Greater Manchester, 17 June 2013
Regional grounding and visualisation
Cardiff City- Region Futures

16. Retrofit 2050 City Futures
Smart-Networked City: A hub within a highly mobile and competitive globally networked society
Pervasive, information-rich virtual environments integrated with the physical world, driving efficiencies through automation with market oriented solutions.
Compact City: A site of intensive and efficient urban living
Urban land-use and infrastructure provision are optimised into dense urban settlement forms to reduce demand and improve use of energy and resources.
Self Reliant-Green City: A self-reliant bio-region, living in harmony with nature
A self-reliant system of circular metabolism, where resources are local, demand is constrained and the inputs and outputs of the city are connected (cradle to cradle).
The Retrofit 2050 research has shown how we can imagine a range of distinctive retrofit city futures: a ‘compact city’ of intensive and efficient urban living; a ‘smart city’ hub within a highly networked, competitive society; or a ‘self-reliant’ green city in harmony with nature, with each of these visions having different implications for people, technology, and governance structures.
The important point here is that the Retrofit 2050 futures are not intended as self-contained predictions. Rather, they draw attention to the competing pressures and dynamics capable of shaping the evolution of our existing cities.

17. Cardiff City-Regional Futures

18. 3. Improved modelling and decision-support tools
Need to recognise limitations of current top-down and bottom-up approaches to urban scale modelling:
Enhance user engagement and user relevance
Emerging challenges of data rich cities
Move beyond ‘BAU’ framings
Use of more ‘dynamic’ approaches which acknowledge complexity

19. 4. Institutional capacity, planning and governance
Failure to develop city scale governance systems with adaptive capacity for long term planning:
Lack of integration
Leadership
Silo mentality
Short-termism
Capital vs. whole life costs
Neglect of KT & best practice
Stronger role for regulation to drive uptake of retrofit
Role for aggregating/ intermediary body integrating multiple stakeholder interests at city level.

20. 5. Access to ‘green’ finance
Greater role for UK Green Investment Bank (GIB)
City-wide financing
Competition-based policies?
Re-configuration of business rates (energy retrofit tax?)
Learning from US PACE Model?
Carbon Bonds?
I think the comparison with UKGIB and KfW is worth making
Needs to be bigger role for Green Deal
We are in an era of competition-based policy around cities in UK—sign of austerity: doing more with less in short/medium term
City Deals have in some instances included low carbon agendas and some degree of focus around retrofit: but these have been few and far between
Longer term—how might we re-design our financing at city level
Might it be through reconfiguration of business rates—vis a vis British Retail Consortium’s energy tax replacement
Could we learn form US PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) model –where US municipalities are using this to fund large scale commercial retrofit bonds
Or perhaps using carbon bonds which are floated to secure additional city-wide funds

21. 6. Effective partnerships
Public private partnerships
Linking back to scaling up responses
Community buy-in
Business buy-in
‘Sticky infrastructure’ to attract commercial players
Here the focus is on PPPs
But linking back to the idea that scaling up enables benefits of retrofit to be realised by whole city
This requires community and business buy-in
As far as the commercial sector is concerned we are seeing the importance of sticky infrastructure.
Some good examples of how this is starting to work—Manchester, London, Cardiff & Leeds.

22. 7. Long term sharing of risks and benefits
The current ‘economic’ policy framings of retrofit (e.g. the Green Deal’s ‘golden rule’) concerned with creating private value from commercially ‘cost effective’ measures
Inevitably focus on the ‘low hanging fruit’
But retrofit for deep decarbonisation will require long-term sharing of risks and collective benefits
Need for innovative business models which ‘recycle’ savings for socially necessary investments.

23. 8. A whole systems perspective
System level innovations hold potential for deep cuts in carbon emissions
Need to learn from international experience
Financial and institutional barriers critical for UK
‘Sticky’ infrastructure (urban heat networks, etc.) key to binding large commercial property interests into city retrofit agendas
Figure: A Schematic view of a heat distribution network

24. In Summary: An Integrated Approach
An integrated approach to city scale retrofit is therefore essential. This means targeting investment to maximise environmental, economic and social benefits, often through area-based initiatives
It also means:
urban green growth strategies that promote greener public services
greener industrial production
raising education and awareness programmes in cities to help underpin technology deployment,
and supporting innovative research and development.

26. Thank you! Contact: Professor Tim Dixon
Chair in Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment
School of Construction Management and Engineering
University of Reading
Engineering Building
Whiteknights
PO Box 205
Reading
RG6 6AY