RISE RISE

current  ·  2026

Re:Living - Scaling Renovation: Impact Hierarchy

Set out a hierarchy for action on Europe's housing - renovate first, extend second, build new last - and quantified what following it would save.

Sufficiency & spaceMaterials & circularityRegenerative design and construction

From traditional new build, through Living Places, towards Re:Living renovation.

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Context

Renovation is where the largest opportunity in the built environment sits, and it is the one that consistently fails to scale. It stays fragmented, gets reduced to a technical upgrade, and is argued for one building at a time.

Re:Living, part of the VELUX Living Places programme, treats renovation instead as a systemic transformation - one that has to link environmental impact, health and affordability at once, because in Europe’s housing those three are the same problem seen from different sides.

RISE’s contribution is the part that turns the argument into something rankable: a hierarchy for action, and an estimate of what following it would actually be worth.

The argument

  • The buildings are already here. Around 85% of today’s European building stock is expected to still be in use in 2050. Any strategy that treats new construction as the main instrument is working on the small end of the problem.
  • The crises are one crisis. Climate and biodiversity, energy and resources, housing affordability, and unhealthy homes are usually addressed by separate policy. Over 40 million Europeans are in energy poverty, a third are exposed to indoor climate hazards, and house prices rose 53% between 2015 and 2024 - the same stock, failing on four counts.
  • The space problem is a distribution problem. 20% of dwellings are underoccupied while 16.8% are overcrowded, and the EU needs more than two million additional homes a year - about a third more than it builds. Some of that demand can be met by using what exists differently rather than by building more of it.

Objectives

The paper’s central device, in strict order of preference:

  • Renovate - first. Reclaim, reshape, refine, repurpose, resize. These unlock capacity and cut energy use for the least material. Reshaping an underused dwelling uses roughly five times less material than compact new build.
  • Extend - where renovation cannot meet demand. Attic conversion, building up, building out.
  • Build new - last resort. Compact construction, with biobased preferred over conventional mineral construction, which the paper treats as the reference case to move away from rather than the default.

Alongside it sits a four-quadrant reading of material intensity against emissions impact, which separates what looks like progress from what is: a measure can cut emissions and still sit in the wrong quadrant if it does so by pouring in material.

What following it would be worth

  • Capacity. Using buildings better could unlock 50–107 million dwellings and 4–9 billion m² of floor area - housing for roughly 120–250 million people, without new land.
  • Emissions. 3.9–19.1 billion tonnes CO₂e avoided over fifty years, which is 8–32% of annual building-sector whole life carbon and 2–11% of EU-wide annual emissions. About three quarters of that comes from renovation measures, and the renovation measures pay their carbon back in three to seven years.
  • Material. 5.8–13 Gt avoided, roughly two years of total EU material consumption.
  • Cost, where it has been tested. Some completed conversion projects delivered homes up to 20% cheaper than new construction.

What this is not

The quantification is a theoretical and technical potential, and the paper says so plainly. It does not model demographic change, local market dynamics or future grid decarbonisation, and it does not pretend the economic, social and regulatory barriers are small. The number is what is physically available if the hierarchy were followed - the argument is about how much is being left on the table, not about what will happen by itself.

Results

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Partners

the Re:Living experiment is being tested with IBA'27, DGJ Architektur and Transsolar

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