T-AP SI: uVITAL - User-Valued Innovations for Social Housing Upgrading through Trans-Atlantic Living Labs

Housing debates concentrate less on upgrading than on new buildings, even though upgrading can have positive social, health and financial outcomes for low-income populations. Upgrading the existing stock of social housing (SH) offers an opportunity to ease effects of inadequate housing through improvements; alleviate housing deficits; and promote sustainability. Upgrading efforts involve sensitive processes, and this research proposal uses Living Labs (LLs) as social innovations to communicate with SH agents like housing associations and local authorities (United Kingdom (UK), Germany (DE)) and residents (Brazil (BR), the Netherlands (NL)) to create and validate solutions for upgrading programmes. Especially residential or user values are important to grasp to solve social and environmental issues. There is an urgent need to enhance communication between SH agents and users, and this proposal emphasizes the potential of new visualization approaches, such as gaming, Virtual Reality (VR), and Building Information Modelling (BIM) as means to bridge boundaries between stakeholders and users. Following Star and Griesemer (1989), these visualizations can be considered as Boundary Objects (BOs), and will be flexible enough to adapt to individual needs of involved stakeholders, yet specific enough to maintain a common meaning across all different stakeholders to support decision-making in participatory procedures. A transatlantic articulated nexus between research institutions in BR, DE, NL and UK orchestrates the LL experiences, and will contribute to idea generation and test decision-making efficiency. Each of these institutions investigates specific contexts and the combined nexus will increase understanding of how SH upgrading processes promote sustainability under different climatological conditions. Since visualisations are expected to act as boundary objects, the locally specific approaches and tools will be compared in comparative case studies to assess social innovation procedures; resolve conflicting understanding of problems and needs; to stimulate value-adding results; explore synergies between stakeholders as positive solutions to a global social problem.

Social Housing Users will benefits from the approach through the more appropriate consideration of their needs, delivering better wellbeing and comfort levels for users through the implementation of the proposed SH upgrading protocol. They will also benefit from the possibilities of using technology to test ideas and better understand possible outputs from the SH upgrade process.
For housing associations and authorities, benefits will be achieved through the potential reduction of costs of upgrading and retention of users in SH schemes. Housing associations will also benefit from a simple approach that could be applied to improve the upgrading processes and SH users satisfaction including individual values, while focusing on the main objective to define collective and feasible briefs for SH upgrades.
Local authorities have the need to support the upgrade of existing SH, while social dynamics increase the obsolesce of existing housing. Through this project this issue will be tacked through the identification and testing of individual values (including new social dynamics deriving from recent changes e.g. social media), through a simple process supporting the brief definition for SH upgrades.
The government will benefit from a better usage of existing SH which are fit for purpose, and the potential reduction of energy consumption in existing SH, thus helping achieve the government targets for reduction of CO2 emissions.
Architects, urban planners, design managers and other construction stakeholders will benefit from the proposed approach through a better understanding of needs, more appropriate collaboration levels and hence improved design decision making processes in SH upgrades.

Environmental Impacts: There is a need to improve the processes and outputs of SH upgrading across the UK. One of the main challenges is to improve energy efficiency of the existing housing stock, whilst considering changing user needs and providing positive social, health and financial outcomes. Any attempt to improve the conditions of existing housing is beneficial to the environment and contributes to the climate change agenda. This project will arrive at a SH upgrading protocol, which will enable the appropriate identification of user needs (including reduction of energy consumption) and the testing of these solutions. This will impact the sector in relation to encouraging the upgrade of existing SH, which will eliminate waste and support social inclusion. Additional environmental impacts arise from poorly utilised existing SH stock that could be appropriately upgraded, helping to reduce the need for new construction and supporting the environment.

Social impacts: The cost of construction has proven to be prohibiting to many groups of people. This project will impact design thinking behind SH upgrading and has the potential to deliver significant benefits on a scheme-by-scheme basis by better understanding the divergent needs of stakeholders and enabling the virtual testing of solutions. Social costs from inappropriate existing SH are hard to measure; housing quality, affordability and project location are closely related to social challenges such as stress related health risks, isolation, negative social behaviour, urban violence, abandonment etc. Through our innovative approach, improvements in terms of quality of life can be delivered to the most vulnerable in society.

Economic impacts: This project has the potential for significant economic impact through the creation of the protocol to optimise the value added by every pound spend on SH upgrades. Cost reductions will be achieved through SH upgrades which are fit for purpose and hence support users, through appropriate collaboration, reduction or energy consumption and increase the lifecycle of the existing housing stock.