Retrofitting Cities: Priorities, Governance and Experimentation

This important and timely collection brings to the fore one of the most compelling questions of the urban age, how to retrofit the troubled cityscapes bequeathed by two centuries of industrial capitalism? This is to challenge the ethos of mindless material expansion, with all the waste and redundancy it generates, and urge its replacement with a new urban political ecology that values restoration and resilience. Retrofitting Cities offers much wisdom for an urban world at risk. -Brendan Gleeson, University of Melbourne

Retrofitting cities is THE pre-eminent sustainability challenge of the 21st century. It is complex - and requires assembling and applying a new matrix of innovative technical, design, governance and community processes to the varied urban fabrics of metropolitan areas, across all global settings. Hodson and Marvin make an important early contribution to this challenge of urban transformation by directing our attention to how this might begin to be implemented. -Peter W. Newton, Swinburne University of Technology and Co-operative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living

This marvelous and timely volume provides critical insight into the social, technical, political, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, and environmental factors that urban retrofitting programmes face. Weaving together critical conceptual insights alongside rigorous empirical evidence, this volume travels the world in order to explore and analyze the complex processes of metropolitan retrofit. Combining optimism with suspicion in appropriate amounts, this book provides an unparalleled insight into one most important agendas of our time. -Mark Whitehead, Aberystwyth University

Refurbishing the existing building stock or upgrading energy infrastructures are crucial to make our cities more climate friendly and sustainable. Still, current research and policy making largely focuses on the development of new technologies and systems. This book makes up for this deficit and provides a much-needed and fresh perspective on urban retrofit. Applying a socio-technical perspective helps us understand key challenges of infrastructure change and develop governance capacities for urban retrofit. -Harald Rohracher, Linkoeping University

This fascinating, wide-ranging, state of the art volume sheds light on both the technological concerns associated with urban retrofitting and the complexity of governing processes that sustain them. The contributors to Retrofitting Cities reject the technological automatism associated with mainstream retrofitting conversations and provide a critical perspective on the societal and political consequences of the urban transition in an era of climate change. -Roger Keil, York Research Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies

The book sheds light on the complexity of urban retrofit and presents retrofitting as a `deeply social and political concern' (p.266). The various contributions illuminate that retrofitting is inherently contested and subject to different interpretations, which can be traced back to it being a socio-technical endeavour involving a diverse range of domains, actors and technologies and starting from very different cultural and material preconditions. - Lea Fuenfschilling, Lund University, International Journal of Housing Policy