A homeowner-centred approach to housing retrofit: aligning consumption logic and neighbourhood context for retrofit at scale

Housing retrofit has become a key priority in the sustainability agenda due to the importance of decarbonising the housing stock to achieve climate change goals. The importance of housing retrofit is not solely related to decarbonisation, but a range of socio-economic and technical factors such as fuel poverty, health and well-being of the occupants. Despite its importance, housing retrofits stagnate in most contexts due to poor engagement from homeowners. There are criticisms that the retrofit drives have not focused on the homeowner behaviour. They are designed as a top-down approach under technical rational models. The key questions of this study are what the constraints of resident engagement in housing retrofit are and how homeowners can be better engaged with the retrofit process. Accordingly, this study aims to understand the homeowner behaviour in the context of housing retrofit for better homeowner-centred retrofit project delivery. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 40 retrofit industry stakeholders. The findings can be summarised as changing the investment focus of housing retrofit into a consumption focus, changing the property-centred retrofit approach to a homeowner-centred approach and undertaking a socially contextualised neighbourhood approach to drive housing retrofit. One specific contribution of this study is the identification of the housing retrofit strategies that already worked. The other contribution is how to change the existing strategies for better homeowner engagement. The novelty of the paper lies in the empirically strong recommendations for retrofit at scale solutions.