The Healthy Homes Forum is a good example of how community-led co-design can address the complex challenges to retrofit.

The Queens Park Estate in North West London  is a unique, historic conservation area comprising of high density, listed Victorian Cottages which residents experience as cold in winter, hot in summer, prone to mould and damp and expensive to heat.

A priority of Westminster City Council is to provide residents with healthy homes and meet net zero targets. However, a complex and fragmented matrix of tenure, planning restrictions in the conservation area and low trust in the council meant that an innovative approach needed to be adopted to find retrofit solutions that could be adopted by both renters and owner occupiers.

The primary challenge to retrofit is not technical, it is human, and in Queens Park the range of tenancy requirements means that one of the biggest barriers to retrofit on the estate is designing delivery systems that fit a range of situations.

Methodology:

The Healthy Homes Forum was a co-design project working with a citizens panel of 26 residents. The panel were selected by Sortition Foundation to represent the diversity of the area and the mix of tenure types in Queens Park. Collaborating with Anna Odedun of Future of London and Archio to understand how residents experience their homes, build capacity with residents to enable them to make informed decisions and then share knowledge to inform Archio’s Healthy Homes Guide and develop a strategy to design delivery mechanisms.

Finally working with residents to co-write an introduction to the document and run a sensitivity test on the text.