Copyright: Sandra Guinand, 2024
Scientific Background
The historic housing stock in the European city is often found as a compact, densely built-up area, enclosing the city centre. Today, this specific stock presents significant challenges for urban climate action plans (regulations). In some cities, decision makers are considering demolition, arguing that this is less expensive and more carbon-neutral than retrofitting (Jones et al. 2013; Sugár et al. 2020). In others, planners and developers acknowledge the cultural-heritage value of this housing stock (Organ et al. 2022). They thus seek alternative approaches to undertake ‘climate gentrification’, upgrading property values to compensate retrofitting costs. Such adaptation examples have demonstrated the technical feasibility of approaching carbon neutrality. Yet retrofitting remains costly and often inhibited by local planning, regulation and policy (Sugár et al. 2020; Ide et al. 2022).
Against this background, this project focuses on understanding how adaptation of the historic housing stock, holding specific local technical-urbanistic and social qualities, can be achieved and supported at the city scale to mitigate climate change.
Aims and Research Questions
We address how cultural heritage may act as a resource for climate adaptation and mitigation, simultaneously exploring sustainable solutions for cultural heritage. As society responds to the challenges of climate change and new climate action policies are enacted, there is a need for greater awareness of the effects of cultural heritage value on the responses to climate risk. This project thus aims to provide original and innovative thinking that addresses three main questions:
Cultural Heritage as a ressource
Can enhanced recognition of the cultural heritage value of historic housing increase opportunities and reduce barriers to making a positive shift towards climate action goals and targets in cities?
Climate adaptation and mitigation
How can interventions and technical solutions that enhance the carbon neutrality of buildings be improved to make them affordable and achievable across this sector of the urban housing stock?
Sustainable Solutions
What changes are required in policy and practice to support such scaling up of adaptation and retrofitting?
Methods and research design
The research design of SUSTHERIT is based on transnational in-depth comparative case studies located in Vienna, Marseille, Prague, and Glasgow, engaging with local stakeholders and communities. This shall help to understand current approaches towards climate action and historical housing, and to identify impact barriers and catalysts. Further, we drive qualitative and quantitative multi-layered analyses of the relationships between climate action and cultural heritage within and across each city to identify good practice and inhibitors to meeting ambitions.
Our project is organized in five thematic Workpackages (WP), whereby each workpackage creates new knowledge which function as a basis for the next. An additional WP focuses on the project coordination. The five workpackages are related on different spatial scales, from the urban scale (WP 2) to the scale of the individual building (WP6).
Project coordination (WP 1)
Coordination: ISR
City strategies & policies (WP 2)
Coordination: Charles Univ.
Data Analysis (WP 3)
Coordination: ISR
Heritage & sustainability (WP 4)
Coordination: IREMAM
Best Practices (WP 5)
Coordination: IFC
Evaluation ETH Zurich,
Toolkit (WP 6)
Coordination: IFC
WP 2: City Strategies and Policies for Climate Change, Housing and Heritage
Based on the content analysis of institutional documents and interviews we investigate whether and how strategic policy and planning documents at the city level reflect and include historic residential neighbourhoods in their climate change prevention, mitigation, and adaptation plans.
WP 3: Structure of /and dynamics within the historic housing stock
For each city, we run socioeconomic and market dynamics for the areas dominated by the historic housing stock on the scale of small scaled statistical units. This provides insights in housing-market dynamics and conflicts (affordable housing, gentrification) in identified urban areas.
WP 4: Heritage and sustainability transformation
Based on WP3 we identify neighborhoods where we conduct a residents survey and follow-up semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of households, to identify residents’ awareness, attitudes, and practices regarding climate-change issues, in all the cities.
WP 5: Best-practices evaluation for climate change actions and building test
Within the neighborhoods, we collect and analyse best practices regarding climate change actions in the historic housing stock; we simulate and evaluate climate-change actions with identified stakeholders (identified in WP2 & 4).
WP 6: Scalable toolkit for sustainable heritage transformation
Based on the output from WP2-5, we create a pan-European toolkit for the implementation of sustainable transformations of historic housing stock for climate-change adaptation and mitigation (at both local and European scales). Relevant objects will be chosen by architecture students (ETH Zurich) in the Master of Advanced Studies Denkmalpflege as cases for in situ simulation research design to test the toolkit. The results provide feedback to the research project, especially in terms of scalability.
