Abstract
Current European policies aim to promote the sustainable urban regeneration of housing stock while ensuring aging in place. Following these targets, this research proposes the Architectural and Psycho-environmental Retrofitting Assessment Method (APRAM) as an interdisciplinary decision support system, specifically designed to be applied in building renovation, which considers architectural demands and residents’ perceptions. This method generates an integral diagnosis that combines an architectural evaluation, through technical inspection grids, and psycho-environmental perceptions, by gathering residents’ responses from a participatory survey, in order to facilitate decision-making regarding renovation proposals. Retrofitting interventions, structured in public space, building, and dwelling scales, are assessed using architectural priority levels as well as social and engagement indicators of satisfaction, attachment, social need, and willingness to participate, thereby establishing a decision support system for property owners or public entities. APRAM is applied and tested in a residential neighbourhood of Lisbon (Portugal), for which its architectural, social and economic reports are defined in a summary table and a graphical display that show the integral performance of each intervention. Over 80% of responses involve major demands for which the proposed method shows close connections between the architectural diagnosis and residents’ perceptions for the decision-making process.
Highlights
The growth and expansion of European cities in the second half of the 20th century, mainly due to the population increase and the mass exodus from the countryside to the city, generated an architectural style that would satisfy the huge demand for housing in very short implementation times. This resulted in numerous residential neighbourhoods of an exclusively functional character (European Union (UE), 2015), whose dwellings were conceived as a result of a simple division of areas in accordance with the different uses of the rooms (Causapié, Balbontín, Porras, & Mateo, 2011)
The social needs index (SNi) is obtained [eq 3] as the relation between the sum of responses demanded by each intervention (y) and the total number of participants (P), and multiplied by the adjustment factor (Ơ=5), since it allows re-scaling in order to range from “no expressed needs” (0) to “high level of needs” (5)
U The architectural diagnosis, by using technical grids applied to the three APRAM scales, N enables the identification of which elements are necessary to repair, introduce, or replace through A various targeted interventions
Summary
The growth and expansion of European cities in the second half of the 20th century, mainly due to the population increase and the mass exodus from the countryside to the city, generated an architectural style that would satisfy the huge demand for housing in very short implementation times. N applied in residential retrofitting interventions and focused on the elderly, and that, considering the A occupant behaviour, guides the decision-making process in building renovation The originality of this M method consists of the integration of an architectural diagnosis, developed through technical inspection grids, with a psycho-environmental assessment of the needs and preferences of the resident population, through a participatory survey. This is an open and flexible procedure, which could be applied in different case studies from various cities, and is adaptable to diverse architectural, social and economic contexts Following the scheme, this decision-making method combines: architectural demands, such as the technical results that, considering non-compliance, deficit, or conservation levels, classify the necessary interventions into three levels of priority; and residents’ perceptions, such as those social and engagement indicators related to residential satisfaction, place attachment, social needs, and willingness. - High: The intervention introduces a significant improvement in architectural features, and resolves an important regulatory breach in the conditions of safety, habitability and/or comfort, and improves or renews its state of conservation
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