Observations from 15 years of built environment reuse research about how change occurs

Satu Huuhka (Tampere University) reflects on why the needed changes in practice are often slow and difficult in the building sector even when proved beneficial. Overcoming this inertia and accelerating widespread change requires a coordinated multi-level approach. The research agenda must not only be to produce new technology and practices but also to facilitate its uptake. This calls for understanding and addressing societal structures and collective behaviours: regulation and policy, market and industry structures and infrastructures, as well as education and culture.

In 2009, I was an aspiring young researcher finishing my master’s thesis (Huuhka 2010), in which I studied – among other things – real-life cases of (partial) deconstruction of precast concrete buildings and the subsequent reuse of the salvaged precast elements. (Since then, another young researcher, Célia Küpfer (2023) and her colleagues have made an excellent review of the same and other similar projects.) Relying on novel, unestablished techniques, some of the cases had run into organisational troubles and failed, if not technologically, at least timetable-wise. However, the majority of the cases had been implemented successfully, at least when studied in hindsight, when problems potentially encountered had already been obscured by the passing of time. My findings were overwhelmingly positive: deconstruction and reuse had not only been technically feasible but had also saved natural resources and GHG emissions. Not to mention that the projects had been economically viable for the building owners, often saving money in comparison to the business-as-usual of conventional demolition and virgin material-based construction. The economic feasibility had to be taken with a grain of salt, though, as public subsidies for revitalisation had usually been involved, since the buildings were located in declining regions. Nevertheless, the findings begged the question: if deconstruction and reuse had been so well received by most people with hands-on experience about them, why were they still so marginal as practices?

In later more in-depth research (Huuhka et al. 2019), I found with colleagues that the decisions to engage with deconstruction and reuse had often depended heavily on having a visionary leader on the decision-maker’s seat. Investing company assets into using experimental techniques can indeed be viewed as brave, if not outright foolhardy.

Since 2021, I have had the privilege to initiate and lead the first international large-scale research and innovation project focusing on reusing precast concrete, namely the ReCreate project (www.recreate-project.eu, EU H2020 GA 958200). Real-life pilots are a focal tool for the project to observe and mitigate the bottlenecks of deconstruction and reuse. However, when negotiating about potential pilot collaborations with building owners, history has once again seemed to repeat itself. Even though by now, most large and medium-sized organisations have introduced at least some kind of commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles, having the right person in the right place has still determined whether there have been prerequisites for discussion, let alone for tangible collaboration.

This is noteworthy because societies cannot rely the implementation of the entire construction sector’s circularity transition on the shoulders of a few courageous individuals, while the  majority waits by the sidelines. While a careful attitude to risk aversion is understandable, it renders the circularity transition painfully slow in the face of the global environmental crisis, which is only accelerating in speed.

Moving forward with the help of transitions studies

In 2002, social scientist Frank Geels (2002) put forward a theory about the multi-levelled nature of technological transitions, which has since become influential in sustainability transformations research (Geels 2019). Though the theory has been formative for the ReCreate project (Huuhka et al. 2023), it has been rarely referred to in city and building sustainability research, apart from the context of energy or mobility systems.

Socio-technical transitions denote fundamental changes in how society and its constituent parts, such as the construction sector, are run. Geels (2002) argued that in addition to changes in technology, such transitions necessitate a thorough reconfiguration of regulation and policy, market and industry structures and infrastructures, as well as education and culture. Together, these form a tight-knit web of a ‘socio-technical regime’, which effectively resists all but incremental changes to present technologies.

To give an anecdotal example from Finland: in the mid-20^th century, technical requirements inherent to concrete construction were made into regulations pertaining to all but low-rise buildings. This effectively stifled timber construction for half a century. Such a move would hardly have been possible without a culture that historic events had engrained deeply with a fear of urban fires. The renewal of regulation starting from the mid-1990s lifted what was essentially a regulatory ban for wooden blocks of flats. However, even after three decades, such buildings are still barely more than a curiosity: a mere 1% of flats built during this time are located in them. Could something similar explain the difficulty of mainstreaming reuse?

While regimes can be seen to form the main level of Geels’ (2002) multi-level perspective, the others are ‘landscape’ and ‘niches’, situated respectively above and below regimes. Niches are environments within regimes temporarily protected from normal market mechanisms, where all radical technological innovation – i.e. any innovation that is not incremental – develops. Niche innovation bubbles under the regime surface, and only a select few succeed in breaking through. Landscapes, on the other hand, represent the wider societal contexts that the regimes (and niches) are nested in, which consist of overarching systems of (geo)politics, economics, culture, and environment, which are external to technologies and even slower and more difficult to change than regimes.

The multi-level theory on socio-technical transitions helps to understand why sustainability and circularity transformations – whether based on timber, reuse, or other niche innovations – can be so difficult to catalyse. In doing so, however, the theory also lends itself to the formation of research agendas, programmes, and proposals that can support such transitions (cf. Huuhka et al. 2023).

Conclusion

My 15-year research career on reuse has luckily coincided with a substantial evolution of the landscape, manifesting in the growing acknowledgement of climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss. Understanding the severity of the global environmental crisis has opened the window of opportunity for the breakthrough of niche sustainable construction technologies, such as reuse. This is evidenced, for one, by the emergence of construction and real estate companies’ ESG commitments, as mentioned previously. More recently, both COVID-19 and geopolitical destabilisation, which have impacted global trade, have brought the significance of material self-sufficiency to the fore in Europe, creating yet another potential landscape shift in favour of material circularity.

So far, experiences from the ReCreate project (Räsänen et al. 2024; Vullings et al. 2024) reinforce the notion that I had already back in 2009: reusing precast concrete is technically feasible. While technology is of course foundational, other factors are decisive in the transition process. Introducing new technologies inevitably disrupts the ‘well-oiled machine’ of business as usual. Moreover, it does so differently in different contexts, as the built environment sector is much more fragmented than most other industries. Centuries of local practices and traditions have been cemented not only into sectoral policies, such as building codes, but also into industry ecosystems and educational contents. Due to the regime resistance that follows from this interconnectedness, change must be leveraged in lockstep on all fronts. The agenda of research must not only be to produce new technology but also to facilitate its uptake in different contexts. This calls for understanding and addressing societal structures and collective behaviours.

Social sciences and humanities can help uncover unspoken rules, underlying motivations, and hidden biases in companies as well as in authorities. Identifying such root causes to resistance pave the way to change. Pushing on a string is inherently unproductive, so scholars should drive the change by engaging in co-research with industry leaders that are willing to embrace it. A priority item is to ensure, in discourse with public policy makers, that regulation is enabling. Rather than rigid pre-defined solutions, building codes and standards must be based on evidence of performance, which allows novel sustainable technologies to emerge. Better still, policies could be made responsive, meaning that proactive industry leaders could be provided with more flexibility within reasonable performance-based boundaries, while less advanced entities could be regulated in more detail to ensure compliance to minimum acceptable environmental criteria (cf. Ayres & Braithwaite 1992). New science-based educational contents must also be devised for both basic education of future professionals and continuous professional development of the current ones to ensure that the industry keeps moving in a sustainable direction.

References

Ayres, I. & Braithwaite, J. (1992). Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate. New York: Oxford University Press.

Geels, F.W. (2002). Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: A multi-level perspective and a case study. Research Policy, 31(8–9), 1257–1274. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(02)00062-8

Geels, F.W. (2019). Socio-technical transitions to sustainability: a review of criticisms and elaborations of the Multi-Level Perspective. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 39, 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.06.009

Huuhka, S. (2010). Kierrätys arkkitehtuurissa: Betonielementtien ja muiden rakennusosien uudelleenkäyttö uudisrakentamisessa ja lähiöiden energiatehokkaassa korjaus- ja täydennysrakentamisessa. [Recycling in architecture: Reuse of precast concrete elements and other building parts in new construction and energy efficient renovation and infill construction of mass housing neighbourhoods]. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201004161101

Huuhka, S., Aarikka-Stenroos, L., Lahdensivu, J., Jonker-Hoffrén, P., Arnold, V., Stenberg, E., Blok, R., Gudmundsson, K., Teuffel, P. & Mettke, A. (2023). Recreating the construction sector for circularity: Catalysing the reuse of prefabricated concrete elements. In H. Lehtimäki, L. Aarikka-Stenroos, A. Jokinen, & P. Jokinen (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy (pp. 42-66). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003267492-4

Huuhka, S., Naber, N., Asam, C. & Caldenby, C. (2019). Architectural potential of deconstruction and reuse in declining mass housing estates. Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 31(1), 139–179. http://arkitekturforskning.net/na/article/view/1173

Küpfer, C., Bastien-Masse, M. & Fivet, C. (2023). Reuse of concrete components in new construction projects: Critical review of 77 circular precedents. Journal of Cleaner Production, 383, 135235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.135235

Räsänen, A., Lahdensivu, J., Gudmundsson, K., Dervishaj, A., Westerlind, H., Lambrechts, T., Vullings, M., Arnold, V. & Huuhka, S. (2024). Properties and quality of precast concrete elements deconstructed in ReCreate’s pilots. The ReCreate project. https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50a93132d&appId=PPGMS

Vullings, M., Huuhka, S., Wijte, S., Lambrechts, T., Houtman, J., Salmio, E., Räsänen, A., Jonker-Hoffrén, P., Weijo, I., Lahdensivu, J., Wedelsbäck, C., Appelqvist, T., Gudmundsson, K., Dervishaj, A., Westerlind, H., Hernandez Vargas, J., Henschel, C., Fischer, J. & Gottschling, D. (2024). Best practice guidelines and recommendations for reuse-optimised deconstruction. The ReCreate project. https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50c10b542&appId=PPGMS

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