Yule Heibel's Library tagged retrofit →  View Popular, Search in Google

This sounds like a great idea, except (as a commenter already points out) the bit about replacing windows. No, don't do it, especially not with vinyl window garbage!
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Living City Block’s basic concept is simple. Small buildings rarely have the resources to do a serious retrofit. For most of them, the idea is cost-prohibitive. But what if you combined a small building with 10 more like it? If all of those building owners got together to order high-efficiency water heaters in bulk, or to collectively replace one-thousand windows, could they achieve the kind of economies of scale that the Empire State Building gets?

This sounds feasible, and Riley is sure the idea will work. But he's talking about creating a kind of building owners’ association that has never been modeled before, one in which neighbors who otherwise have very little in common might make common decisions about pooling their trash pick-up, paying their utility bills, and renovating their properties.
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green_buildings green_strategies urban_energy atlantic_cities retrofit

Must-see video, with Tom Rand explaining clean-tech.
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Tom Rand, Cleantech Practice Lead at MaRS Discovery District, inventor of the Green Bond, previous entrepreneur and successful Venture Capitalist talks about his journey to build "the continent’s greenest hotel" - Planet Traveler.

Rand sees the world through green-colored glasses. There is too little time and too much at stake to invest in “green” technologies that do not succeed in effecting a substantive reduction in carbon emissions. Low carbon technologies represent a third-industrial revolution that Rand believes must take place. And soon.

In pursuing the goal of building the greenest hotel, Rand didn’t waste time quibbling over payback periods on geothermal heat exchangers, or spend months negotiating with government agencies to obtain retrofit grants. In fact, Rand and his partner are making this project work without the help of any grants or subsidies as an example to others that the adoption of green technologies isn’t prohibitively expensive. Day-to-day building operations are responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions: a huge market. And greening buildings are the low-hanging fruit of carbon emissions reduction, ripe for the adoption of new green technologies.

Rand talks about City cooperation, payback periods, technology and financing options and how to measure the cost savings of green technologies.
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tom_rand cleantech economics ecology climate_change retrofit greenwashing green_strategies green_buildings

Retrofitting older cities/ existing communities to green-ness?
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We are studying different business models (and their pilot projects) for creating better urban environments (aka "smart cities" or "eco-cities"). Living PlanIT is the first business model we have examined in depth. On June 28 one of us (Bob) attended an event in Paredes where an important deal between Living PlanIT and Cisco was announced. It's important because the imprimatur of Cisco, a leader in networking technology, means that Living PlanIT can now shift into execution mode and try to demonstrate that its co-founders' vision for creating a sustainable smart city can work.
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urbanism green_technologies green_strategies retrofit harvard_business sustainability

Nice presentation by Ellen Dunham-Jones on retrofitting suburbia. "We need to retrofit the corridors" - so true. Let new urbanism do a do-over of arterials. "Restore the local ecology" - restore the original wetlands: hmm, that's what the City of Victoria should have done at the View St. and Vancouver St. intersection! Another idea: "eco-acre transfer." Possible problems: astro-turf and urban streetscapes but suburban parking ratios.

suburbia video ellen_dunham_jones ted_conference sprawl retrofit

I'm really not sure that putting the equivalent of a high-tech textile paper bag over an ugly building can really "fix" an ugly building. On the other hand, maybe it's an idea whose time has come, especially since it's an alternative to wasteful demolition & rebuilding?
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"The “Tower Skin” concept is a transparent cocoon made of high performance composite mesh textile that is wrapped around an existing structure to act as a high-performance “micro climate”. Surface tension allows the membrane to freely stretch around walls and roof elements achieving maximum visual impact with minimal material effort. The skin is also easily repairable, is removable and upgradable and features a self-cleaning coating."
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architecture facadism retrofit skylines

I'm bookmarking this Richard Florida/ Creative Class blog post since it's one I left a long(ish) comment on, this time around the need for buildings to be adaptable.

retrofit adaptability housing built_environment comments