November 2025 marked the end of the first year of Urban Retrofit and, with the Festive Period quickly approaching, I wanted to share some reflections on the activities we have been engaged in over the past twelve or so months.
Urban Retrofit began not long after a new Labour government was elected in the UK. The government’s focus on aggressively pursuing economic growth by de-regulating the planning system and kickstarting a nationwide housebuilding programme raises myriad questions about how and where growth should be delivered and, in the context of the climate emergency, whether growth should even be a priority – a topic that co-investigator Andy Inch and I reflected upon in The Conversation in March.
Against this backdrop, the chief focus of Urban Retrofit in 2025 has been on coproducing the conceptual and analytical pillars of the research. Whenever possible, we have done this in collaboration with our partners in the planning, property and community sectors and our project advisory group. This approach has precipitated a critical dialogue with scholars, policymakers and community advocates on the extent to which ‘growth’ can be reconciled with ‘net zero’ and whether urban retrofit offers a pathway to low-impact growth in the places that need it most.
Throughout 2025, a number of events and activities have shaped this dialogue. Early in the New Year, we launched the project website and established our social media presence on LinkedIn and Bluesky. The website provides key information on Urban Retrofit and hosts a blog series, an emerging collection of urban retrofit case studies, as well as links to our recent publications and events. We also added four fantastic colleagues to the Urban Retrofit team in the winter months – three research associates, Jingyi Zhu, Ying Wang and Graeme Stewart-Robertson plus a PhD student, Husniya Denur, whose work focuses on urban retrofit practices in African cities.
The spring and summer marked the start of Urban Retrofit’s programme of face-to-face events. In early May, the chair of our project advisory group, Lord Richard Best, hosted us for our inaugural Away Day at the House of Lords. At this formative meeting, we established the focus of an emerging evidence review with our project advisory group and took part in a discussion on ‘post growth’ planning at a roundtable hosted by UCL.
Members of the Urban Retrofit team and advisory group at the House of Lords, May 2025
The first of our two ‘big’ events in 2025 began at the end of May with a two-week Study Tour of Canadian cities led by co-investigator Jeff Biggar. Chief planning officers from two UK cities plus a representative of the Core Cities UK network, one of our project partners, joined the academic team on the Study Tour, which took in a diverse range of urban retrofit case studies in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton. The Study Tour proved to be a constructive networking opportunity and a forum for transatlantic lesson sharing. Numerous blogs, case study reports and videos were produced during the tour and are available on our website – with more forthcoming in 2026.
Study Tour participants on the Halifax Waterfront, Canada, May 2025
Not long after the Study Tour, in early September, we hosted our second big event: the Urban Retrofit International Symposium. It was held at the Social Hub in Glasgow and brought together 50 members of our partnership consortium and project advisory group, as well as some of the practitioners we had met in Canada and colleagues at the University of Glasgow.
The aim of the symposium was to encourage connections between planning, property and community stakeholders in a collaborative forum and share practices and ideas. We also launched our first major publication at the symposium – Urban Retrofit: A Systematic Evidence Review – and hosted a sold-out public lecture and panel discussion headlined by Yvonne Rydin on her book Planning without Growth. A video with reflections on the symposium from the organisers and participants can be viewed on YouTube (or below) and case studies and blogs from participants will appear on our website over the coming months.
Planning without Growth talk, Urban Retrofit International Symposium, September 2025
Throughout the latter half of the year, Urban Retrofit team members were also active at various external conferences, including RGS-IBG 2023 at the University of Birmingham, the UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference at Ulster University and the Regional Sustainable Built Environment Conference at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Team members have also begun to work collaboratively on a range of scholarly and practice-focused papers articles that will be published or submitted to journal periodicals in 2026.
The publication of the Systematic Evidence Review in September was a significant milestone for Urban Retrofit and marked the end of the evidence gathering phase of the project. As a busy 2026 beckons, we are embarking on the data collection phase. To this end, the task of selecting case studies was recently initiated at our second Away Day in November hosted by our co-investigator Hannah Hickman at the University of the West of England.
As the Away Day was the last face-to-face meeting of the project team before the Festive Break, it was also an opportunity to thank the team, and particularly our research associates, Jingyi Zhu, Ying Wang and Graeme Stewart-Robertson, for their hard work throughout 2025.
We look forward to sharing news and updates on the progress of Urban Retrofit during 2026. Do look out for these on our website and on LinkedIn and BlueSky.
With best wishes for the season!