Regenerative Places: Empowering communities to improve homes and neighbourhoods for the benefit of people and planet.
As autumn draws in, and winter approaches, many people’s thoughts are turning to the big question – ‘how long can I last before I have to put the heating on?!’
For those of us lucky enough to be able to afford our heating bills, despite the recent sharp rises, this thought is perhaps more of an inconvenience, or a self-inflicted endurance challenge, or motivated by not wanting to add GHG emissions to the atmosphere by turning up the thermostat and getting the gas boiler going again.
However, for many people, this thought fills them with dread – how long before I have to start choosing between whether to eat or heat my home? How long before the kids start complaining that they can’t sleep because it’s too cold? How long before I have to start washing the black mould off my windows and walls?
In 2024, this is a shocking state of affairs, and what’s more, it really does not have to be this way. We, as an industry have the technology and the know-how to upgrade the majority of these homes and turn them into warm, comfortable, affordable places to live. Places where no one needs to feel cold at best, and worst die of preventable respiratory diseases, as we saw in the tragic case of Awaab Ishaak 4 years ago – a little boy who died from breathing in black mould every day of his short life.
What’s more, retrofitting our homes and neighbourhoods can also offer multiple ‘co-benefits’ such as: reducing costs to the NHS of poorly insulated, damp homes; improving health and wellbeing; reducing the load on local energy systems, and creating local green jobs and supply chains.
That’s why we’re enormously excited and proud to launch UKGBC’s new ‘Regenerative Places’ Programme, which has home retrofit at its heart.
What do we mean by ‘Regenerative’ places?
The terminology is drawn from Bill Reed and others’ thinking around how we need to shift from ‘sustainability’ to a more regenerative, integrated approach, encouraging the need to look beyond reducing negative impacts, improving efficiency, and being ‘less bad’, to having a positive impact on society and our environment.
We use the term “Regenerative” as our North star, guiding our work to set the level of ambition, and the necessary shift in mindset. We emphasise that while current projects may not immediately demonstrate regenerative traits, we are inspired by the Three-Horizons Framework, which we are using as a way of mapping how a shift could take place from the established patterns of the first horizon (business-as usual) to the beginning of new patterns and emerging future in the third horizon. Disruptive innovations and industry actions of the second horizon will be crucial to make the shift from the current system to the emerging future a successful one. The diagram below illustrates this in a bit more detail.
UKGBC envisions the Programme setting out our own “Horizon 3” – a shared vision of an emerging future that has positive, regenerative impacts on people, planet, and place.
So, what might this mean in practice, and how does it relate to home retrofit?
Our new Programme will work in partnership with the MCS Foundation (MCSF) to support and draw learnings from their new Local Area Retrofit Accelerator (LARA) pilot. Through this pilot, four places (in England initially) are being supported to develop ‘Local Retrofit Strategies’ for their area. These strategies will take a systems-led approach and be place based, collaborative and locally led. We had the first of the LARA pilot workshops with our first ‘place’ this week, where over 40 local stakeholders gathered to discuss the development of their Local Retrofit Strategy. It was fantastic to hear the level of enthusiasm across the different local authorities and other stakeholders for getting retrofit going at scale.
UKGBC will work alongside the LARA pilots (which are also supported by Ashden, the National Retrofit Hub and others), and with our Regenerative Places Programme Partners, to explore and demonstrate how home retrofit can act as a catalyst to ensure wider regenerative benefits to communities, such as:
- Decarbonising heat and energy
- Improving biodiversity and green space
- Offering health and social value benefits
- Embedding climate resilience
- Strengthening community relationships and networks
While retrofit is a huge part of the problem and the solution, we also need to consider how new buildings and developments can move beyond ‘doing less harm’ and towards a more regenerative approach. We were very excited to speak at an ‘Architects Declare’ event last week and start to share our thinking around how regenerative principles should be applied to both new development and retrofit.
We will also be building a compendium of experiences, projects and processes that demonstrate regenerative traits. The aim is to help guide others in their thinking about how to move towards regenerative approaches.
With this in mind, we need your help! Please tell us about projects and processes that you’re aware of that should be in our compendium! You can add them to our Miro Board here.
As we know, no one has all the answers here – we’re all learning all the time. At the heart of a regenerative approach is collaboration and we can’t wait to work with you, our members, and the wider industry and local communities as we develop our thinking and practice on regenerative places.
Finally, if you’re a local authority officer and would like support in developing retrofit services for householders in your area, with our partners the MCS Foundation we’ve created a ‘Getting Started Toolkit’ to help you build the business case for a Retrofit ‘One Stop Shop’. Keep it bookmarked as we’ll be adding more resources on a regular basis.
Regenerative Places
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