The Urban Context

Abstract

When reviewing the current literature available on mass retrofits, it soon becomes clear this is at best patchy in addressing the challenges the Hackbridge project sets in terms of the policy statements made by the London Borough of Sutton with respect to the vision, master plan, design and redevelopment strategy the sustainable suburb is based on. Indeed, in reviewing the literature currently available on mass retrofit proposals, it becomes all too obvious the models in question are based on the agency of architects, planners and designers and the capacity of their expert systems to align retrofits proposals with targets set to lower energy consumption and reduce levels of carbon emission. As such they lie in the first category of models criticised by Bourdic and Salat (2012) for not even meeting the robust standards of the building scientists they criticise, let alone those relating to the type of context-specific transformations they seek to usher in.

setting out the context of this transformation