The physical upgrading of the existing domestic and industrial building stock to improve energy performance is an essential part of a transition to a low carbon society. Successfully retrofitting buildings to improve energy performance is not simply a technological challenge, it is a complex socio-technical problem that needs to be addressed in a co-ordinated way, utilising skills and knowledge from a range of industrial and academic backgrounds. Within both the academic and practitioner communities there is a growing understanding of the scale and nature of the problem, one which encompasses issues such as policy and regulation, people and behaviour, supply chain and process, as well as issues of technology. Retrofitting the Built Environment discusses the factors that impact on the retrofit problem, providing a clear analysis of the main issues that the academic and industrial communities must engage with to resolve the problems of domestic energy and retrofit. The book is divided into four broad sections: Understanding the Problem Policy and Regulation Implementing and Evaluating Retrofit People and Communities Academic and industrial researchers, policy makers and industry practitioners will find each section covers a mix of policy, technical and social science issues, presented by both academic and industry authors, giving a wide and detailed perspective of the issue. The Editors Will Swan is a Senior Lecturer in Buildings Retrofit in the School of the Built Environment at the University of Salford. He leads a number of projects in the field of sustainable retrofit, covering a number of topics including monitoring, behaviour and retrofit project delivery, as part of Salford’s Applied Energy and Buildings Research Group. He sits on the Greater Manchester Buildings Group and also is Chair of the Retrofit Innovation Group. Philip Brown is Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Salford Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford. He is the lead academic on end-use energy demand within the Applied Energy and Buildings Research Group, and sits on Greater Manchester’s Low Carbon Economic Area group for Customer Engagement.

The building sector exerts huge pressure on the built and natural environment and despite significant efforts to minimise the consequences, the International Energy Agency submitted that, by 2050, emissions related to buildings could double. However, in the building sector, significant improvement in energy use and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved, given the potential to do this at no cost, using new technology. Since most buildings that exist now will still exist in 2050, the greatest energy savings can be made through refurbishment. In the future, legislation on carbon usage, as well as innovative technologies and knowledge, will trigger aggressive emission reductions in buildings, and this will compel installers of retrofit options to consider embodied emissions in order to achieve the best-value retrofit plan. This book, in response to the growing environmental importance of retrofit options, describes the development of a powerful decision support system, detailing both theoretical and practical insights, for the evaluation of environmentally and economically optimal retrofit options for non-domestic buildings. The chapters within it discuss engineering, energy, environment and economics in the context of climate change and sustainability, while a methodological framework of a decision support system is used to analyse a range of building energy retrofit options. The theoretical developments provided in this book can be transferred to other industries beyond the built environment and will be useful to researchers, energy systems engineers, architects, building energy managers, supply chain and procurement managers, sustainability managers and policy makers.

Cities are responsible for three-quarters of the world s energy consumption. If we are to reduce our demands on the planet s resources how can we make our urban areas more energy efficient? One way is to refit existing buildings with more thermally efficient building materials. But such retrofitting involves significant issues of social acceptance and public participation. Retrofitting the City provides an important corrective to the assumptions that have been made concerning the ability of people and places to cope with such residential transformation. Drawing upon case studies from a number of European cities that have undergone far-reaching change in their built environments, the author shows that supposedly inadaptable people and places show a strong, if often hidden, degree of flexibility in responding to economic change and building transformation."

With a foreword from Paul King, Chief Executive, UK Green Building Council and Chairman, Zero Carbon Hub As concerns over climate change and resource constraints grow, many cities across the world are trying to achieve a low carbon transition. Although new zero carbon buildings are an important part of the story, in existing cities the transformation of the current building stock and urban infrastructure must inevitably form the main focus for transitioning to a low carbon and sustainable future by 2050. Urban Retrofitting for Sustainability brings together interdisciplinary research contributions from leading international experts to focus on key issues such as systems innovation, financing tools, governance, energy, and water management. The chapters consider not only the knowledge and technical tools available, but looks forward to how they can be implemented in real cities by 2050.

Despite recent improvements in energy efficiency being made in new build, it is important that the existing commercial building sector also take action to meet emission reduction targets. The objectives and challenges of such action will reduce the risk of the sector becoming obsolete due to high energy use and poor environmental performance. This book presents a theory-based, practice-support methodology to deal with sustainable retrofitting opportunities for existing commercial buildings in warm climates using bioclimatic design as the basis. The book has four main parts, focusing on eco-design and renovation, bioclimatic retrofitting, technological and behavioural change and case studies of retrofitting exemplars. In the first part, the context of climate change effects on design and renovation at the city scale is discussed. The second part looks at bioclimatic retrofitting as a 'design guide' for existing buildings, highlighting the significance of architectural design and engineering systems for energy performance. The technological and behavioural contexts of the existing building sector – policies, modelling, monitoring and trend analysis in respect to energy and environmental performance – are covered in part three. The final part gives some case studies showing the effectiveness of strategies suggested for effective environmental performance. This book is a must-have guide for all involved in the design and engineering of retrofitting projects in warm climates.

In The Power of Existing Buildings, academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save the world. The insights and practical experience of Sroufe, Stevenson, and Eckenrode, along with the project case study examples, provide new insights on investing in existing buildings for building owners, engineers, occupants, architects, and real estate and construction professionals.

Developing an up-to-date critical framework for analysing urban retrofit, this is the first book to examine urban re-engineering for sustainability in a socio-technical context. Retrofitting Cities examines why retrofit is emerging as an important strategic issue for urban authorities and untangles the mix of economic, competitive, ecological and social drivers that influence any transition towards a more sustainable urban environment. Retrofitting Cities comparatively explores how urban scale retrofitting can be conceptualised as a socio-technical transition; to critically compare and contrast different national styles of response in cities of the north and global south; and, to develop new research and policy agendas on future development of progressive retrofitting. Bringing together a group of researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds that reflect the complexity of the research challenge, Retrofitting cities looks across different infrastructures and types of built environment, dealing with diverse urban contexts and examining formal as well as community responses. This is a uniquely practical book for urban planning and policy professionals as well as for researchers in urban studies and urban design.