Scaling the Right to Retrofit
By: Dark Matter
Tags: Retrofit, Smart Contracts, Community, Climate Justice, Democracy

This article proposes key principles which we believe could be the foundation for replicating democratic models of retrofitting. It is part of the ‘A Right to Retrofit’ series, and you can read all other related blogs by following the links at the bottom of the page.

The way we retrofit needs to be redesigned to meet the urgent need for climate transition in the built environment. To overcome the systemic constraints on the potential impact of retrofit, a fundamental shift in the system is required. [For more on this, see The System Challenges to Retrofit]

We believe this systemic shift can be achieved by testing strategic interventions in the ‘dark matter’ of the retrofit ecosystem: through piloting and proving out new infrastructures, new standards, new legal patterns, or new institutions. Our ‘dark matter’ experiments and propositions will be oriented around these key principles which we believe will begin to deliver a sustainable, socially-just future.

01 — Collective and democratic

The individualisation of responsibility over retrofit continues to frame retrofit solutions with individualised approaches. [For more, see this section of The System Challenges of Retrofit] Instead, when a whole street is considered as the subject of retrofit, the ambition of retrofit is a scale of magnitude beyond the sum of individual households, by considering not just these private spaces themselves, but in combination with the public spaces in which they coexist. The ambition of collective retrofit could include public realm, green mobility, and community amenities; these are necessary in a climate transition that includes all of the built environment. As a minimum unit of organisation, a street-wide community provides a critical mass to test systemic changes that reshape the retrofit market and the wider ecosystem, such as exploring new models of collective financing that remove cost burdens from the individual. The street as a unit of organisation is also a familiar, natural scale for deliberative decision-making as a community.

02 — Performance-oriented

The justification for retrofit is still viewed primarily through its ability to deliver decarbonisation, yet retrofit’s ecosystem is rarely structured around its actual performance in doing so, relying on theoretical and indirect measures. In restructuring incentives around measured performance, the dynamics of the system will not only shift in favour of better performing retrofit, but have wide-ranging systemic impacts — from providing the upstream impetus for improving skills, tools, and services to deliver on this demand for performance, to broadening the definition of what makes a high-performing retrofit project by analysing and accounting for its full range of co-benefits. We think that with this new knowledge infrastructure, built on data from IoT, sensor technology, and automation using smart contracts, the definition of ‘performance’ can evolve from energy use into a more holistic and precise resident-oriented metric such as ‘comfort’ instead, and be built right into the incentives of contracting for retrofit work. [For more on how performance-based incentives can shift the retrofit system, see this section of The System Challenges to Retrofit]

03 — Empower the local

Moving from being “done to” their communities, to being “done with” them, a future retrofit ecosystem must empower residents to be in the driving seat of their community’s climate transition. Building their trust, agency and capability is fundamental to have enough community buy-in for its long-term success, and to ensure a democratised transition. This also means challenging the false economies of delocalised, value-extracting approaches. Instead, leveraging local supply chains, local skills, and local networks of knowledge and trust ensure that retrofit is not just about short-term investment in emissions reductions, but also long-term investment in community wealth and resilience. This emphasis on the local also means moving away from assumptions of one-size-fits-all retrofit service models, instead moving to modular, adaptive models that may be built on wider systemic learnings, but tailored to the specificities of the local context. [For more on our research on local retrofit models, see this section of The System Challenges to Retrofit]

04 — Built on open knowledge

Knowledge and data around retrofit drives better decision-making, yet data gaps exist in the ecosystem for many stakeholders, from residents, to suppliers and municipal governments. Building this open knowledge infrastructure serves as an evidence-base for new infrastructures, new standards, new legal patterns, or new institutions, and each future retrofit project has the potential to become a longitudinal study, offering a wealth of data into the comprehensive impact of deep community retrofit. This knowledge infrastructure must be in place to harness the future utility of these insights. Building this open knowledge infrastructure for the long term ensures that innovation capability in the retrofit ecosystem is not exclusive to proprietary services and governments, but too is democratised. [For more on our research on why this knowledge infrastructure is critical, see this section of The System Challenges to Retrofit]

Future retrofit starts now: testing and demonstrating

These principles need to be translated from ‘thinking’ into ‘doing’. The work of Dark Matter Labs is currently scoping and investing in strategic experiments to make this future retrofit ecosystem a reality. These ‘system demonstrators’ consist of what we believe to be the minimum viable propositions to prove out a systems change, based on the dynamics of the system we’ve mapped out so far, and in line with the principles we believe are necessary for a democratised climate transition.

It is important to note that these propositions and demonstrators are part of an ongoing iterative process: as our learning evolves from sketch to prototype, concept to context, so too will the nature of these propositions. Based on our work so far, we believe there are some interesting lines of enquiry that include;

Service journey for community retrofit

Can we redesign the citizen experience of retrofit for a community at the scale of a street or block to maximise the potential of its ‘beyond the individual’ approach? By building and ensuring processes to empower the community’s democratic, and deliberative, decision-making capability, can this collective approach form the critical mass needed to reshape the wider ecosystem, such as broadening the range of financing and reinvigorating local supply chains?

Can we redesign the citizen experience of retrofit for a community at the scale of a street or block to maximise the potential of its ‘beyond the individual’ approach? By building and ensuring processes to empower the community’s democratic, and deliberative, decision-making capability, can this collective approach form the critical mass needed to reshape the wider ecosystem, such as broadening the range of financing and reinvigorating local supply chains? Data platform

Can we lay the foundations for retrofit’s knowledge infrastructure, and design an open platform that presents relevant insights to stakeholders across the retrofit ecosystem for holistic, data-informed decision-making, at all stages of the service journey? Can this foundation include a protocol to capture the potential insights from future retrofit projects to help grow this knowledge infrastructure?

Can we lay the foundations for retrofit’s knowledge infrastructure, and design an open platform that presents relevant insights to stakeholders across the retrofit ecosystem for holistic, data-informed decision-making, at all stages of the service journey? Can this foundation include a protocol to capture the potential insights from future retrofit projects to help grow this knowledge infrastructure? Smart comfort contracts

Can we structure contracts so that their incentives are not based solely on completing agreed retrofit work, or relative energy savings, but instead contract around broader definitions of performance, such as comfort?. Can potential beneficiaries of retrofit outcomes extend beyond the residents? Might these standards be co-created with the communities who will use them, and might they be structured with financing to overcome high upfront costs and tenure barriers?

These interventions aim to target fundamental and interconnected leverage points in the retrofit ecosystem, with propositions that we think could shift the underlying dynamics, rebalance incentives, and empower actors. In the next phase of this work, our ambition will be to build and test these interventions in-situ with the residents of these retrofitted homes, to ensure these interventions create cascading, multiplied impacts and prioritise deep, comprehensive retrofit through systemic changes that are sustainable in the long-term.

Over the next few months, Dark Matter Labs will be pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, applying future retrofit principles in real places to test propositions with system-shifting potential. We believe that the system not only needs to change to deliver wider adoption of deeper retrofit, but these changes must ensure that the climate transition of the built environment is democratised, equitable, and just. We will begin building this collective, democratic vision of retrofitting, and also rebuilding trust in the systems of how our built environment is made and remade. As our testing progresses, we will be updating blogs in this series with a deeper look into some of the prototypes/propositions that are emerging.