Housing is more than a product or service within the built environment value chain. It’s a complex network of interconnected systems that come together to create the places we call home. Collectively, our homes have a huge impact on our health and wellbeing, safety, local economies, neighbourhoods and the natural environment.
The grand challenges that we’ve explored in this issue are highlighting the need for decision makers across all sectors, tenures and housing typologies to adopt a systems-thinking approach. In a post-pandemic world in which we’re also tackling a climate emergency, we also need to ensure that our housing stock (new and old) is resilient and adaptable enough to meet the challenges in the decades ahead.
To achieve this, we need a housing market that is agile, innovative and able to foster new business opportunities and economic growth. The Connected Places Catapult is committed to supporting the market by helping to bring together government, business, academia and the wider supply chain in three key areas.
Firstly, we’re developing the evidence base and the systems-thinking that industry needs to overcome existing market failures. We want to look beyond just decarbonisation for instance and identify other future trends that will affect the resilience and adaptability of future housing stock – including water consumption, flooding and fire safety. We’re also supporting the market to identify the skills and local supply chains needs in, for example, the residential retrofit market to meet future demand. Secondly, whilst digitalisation has the potential to bring huge benefits to the built environment sector through scenario modelling, automation and optimising efficiencies, the UK housing industry still largely relies upon analogue processes. We will help the sector to harness digital twins technology and explore new data standards, security, ethics, procurement and governance structures to realise the benefits of scenario modelling to bring confidence to the market. We’re also helping place leaders and decision-makers across different sectors. The aim is to test and demonstrate the value of data and the innovative new products and services that UK companies are bringing to the market to urgently transform housing design-thinking and create new business models.