Towards a Holistic Methodology in Sustainable Retrofitting: Theory, Implementation and Application

Abstract

Sustainability paradigm foresees a balance of energy production and consumption with no, or minimal, negative impact on environment (within the environmental tolerance limits). It gives an opportunity to a country to employ its potentiality of the social and economic activities. An overview of recent researches about building renovation context demonstrates the lack of an appropriate methodology and decision support framework -by compounding the typical challenges of sustainable retrofitting from theory to implement stages- that takes into account the retrofitting projects throughout more comprehensive insights and perspectives. It calls, therefore, for a deep building renovation approach. The major difference between a deep building renovation project and an ordinary one is commitment to a holistic approach. From one side, it initially should be able to deal with the society including various stakeholders with different priorities and barriers -on the top of the list is behavioral barriers about energy consumption- in order to improve their learning; to the other side, it has to perform multiple optimization through sustainability development perspective in its full sense. The intent is to identify, manage, and evaluate the renovation objectives through different available retrofitting alternatives during the early design stages. In this framework, the paper considers building renovation as a complex messy/wicked problem and later it gives details on how combinations of methods that are parts of SSM (Soft Systems Methodologies) and MCDM (Multi Criteria Decision Making) may support multiple perspectives of such a problem. The aim is to promote a methodology which is initially able to deal with complexity of the detected problem and subsequently to address building renovation process in order to involve the various stakeholders in the design process [and keep them involved in all design stages]. Doing so leads to more effective and sustainable retrofitting actions within different criteria including functionality, feasibility, and accountability.