Housing stock renovation for decarbonisation – what would new transition design guidelines suggest?
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Progress toward decarbonising national housing stocks has been slow across Europe. In most countries, renovation rates remain far below the levels required for climate neutrality, and current strategies struggle to address the complex and systemic nature of large-scale renovation. Housing renovation is increasingly being recognised as a “wicked problem”, characterised by uncertainty, interdependencies and multiple stakeholder values interests. New synthetic methods have emerged within transition design to support systemic change in sustainability transitions, but their relevance to housing renovation has not yet been explored. This paper makes an overview on key transition design methods developed over the past two decades and examines their applicability to housing stock renovation. Using desk-based analysis, it maps the potential implications of these approaches in two national contexts with contrasting governance arrangements and market conditions. The contribution of the study lies in: (1) introducing transition design methods to the housing renovation literature, (2) demonstrating their relevance in two European country contexts.
Institution: Tallinn University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7220834142