High-Rise Residential Building Makeovers: Improving Renovation Quality In The United Kingdom And Canada Through Systemic Analysis

Y The need to renovate high-rise residential buildings to maintain or improve indoor environmental conditions and reduce energy use is becoming prevalent worldwide. Climate change concerns have driven the development of policies, regulations, and standards for building renovation; however, these standards are often narrowly focussed on energy use and fail to consider the complexities of high-rise residential building systems. To understand policy, process, and practice barriers to improving the high-rise residential building renovation process, we first examined high-rise residential building renovation policies, protocols, and guidelines in the UK and Canada - two countries which have significant stocks of aging high-rise residential buildings. This revealed several common limitations across jurisdictions, including a lack of consideration of non-energy and cost-related benefits, failure to adopt the 'building-as-a-system' approach and vague or inconsistent use of terminology surrounding the scope and feasibility of renovations which provide excessive latitude for non-compliance. Next, an example of an existing high-rise residential building renovation processes is presented, in which a system dynamics approach is used to identify systemic barriers to improving renovation processes in the UK and Canada. Causal loop diagrams were developed to represent important variables and the causal interrelationships between variables using a combination of grounded theory analysis, validation interviews, and workshops involving stakeholders from both countries. Recommendations for improving renovation policies are presented including: mandatory standards for IEQ; incentivization of integrated design; improvements to practitioner education and training; implementation of feedback mechanisms to inform practitioners of successes and failures; and simplification of material and design certifications.