Retrofitting Concrete Utopias:Climate Change Adaptation for Mid-Century Housing Stock

Frederick Peters, PhD, MES (Planning)

Major Paper (Excerpts)

[Copyright is Frederick Peters, 2023.]

Abstract

Toronto is the site of nearly two thousand 1960s concrete residential tower blocks in various states of maintenance, in various locations, more or less peripheral to the major public transit corridors, housing in many cases vulnerable populations on the peripheries of the economic core of the city. Overcrowding of apartments, lack of affordability, inadequate maintenance of basic amenities has been identified as significant problems in academic and social agency reports. This paper is concerned with extreme heat events related to climate change and mortality especially for vulnerable populations in these legacy towers. My contribution to this discussion takes as its framework of analysis an understanding that social processes are socio-political negotiations in uneven relative power relationships. They are political and environmental. This project is driven by concerns for the experiences of human well-being in the face of the global climate emergency, efforts at reducing operational carbon emissions, and energy consumption, for cooling especially. Comparable towers in France and Switzerland, as well as low rises there and in Germany, are examined, buildings that have undergone significant retrofitting to address these issues. The towers and site analyses are approached within their specific locations, the natural environment and the social infrastructure within which they stand. Practical learnings from European cases and current practices in Toronto lead to practical policy recommendations that aim to bolster institutional and financial capacity in the Toronto situation to address the dual crises of affordable housing and climate change mitigation.

Introduction

Toronto is the site of nearly two thousand 1960s concrete residential tower blocks, in various states of maintenance, in various locations, more or less peripheral to the major public transit corridors, housing in many cases vulnerable populations on the peripheries of the economic core of the city. The United Way Greater Toronto Area (UWGTA) refers to those mostly privately owned rental towers above five stories, purpose built before 1985, as “legacy” towers and they estimate there are some 1715, containing some 200,000 units, with 26 percent of these units as unsuitable, according to the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation definition (UWGTA 2021:10-12). City of Toronto estimates suggest there are 1887 of them (Johnston 2023). Overcrowding of apartments, lack of affordability, and inadequate maintenance of basic amenities, are identified by the authors of the United Way report as symptoms of structural inequalities that exacerbate poverty within the legacy towers (UWGTA 2021:16) in this powerful report. As Loren March writes, in a contribution to the report published as part of the Affordable Housing Challenge Project of the University of Toronto School of Cities: “Residents of these excluded neighbourhoods are not just faced with social marginalization, but also with the everyday challenges of aging and substandard housing, yet towers remain some of the few places providing affordable rental units to the city’s marginalized, racialized and low-income tenants, and its diverse immigrant populations. Many residents do not have other options” (March, 2022: 103-4).

I am concerned with extreme heat events related to climate change and mortality, especially for vulnerable population in legacy towers. My contribution to this discussion and my focus here is driven by concerns for the experiences of human well-being in the face of the global climate emergency for those living within them: acceptable thermal comfort within these units, the operational carbon emissions, and costs of energy consumption, for cooling especially. The towers are also approached within their specific locations, the natural environment and the social infrastructure within which they stand.

The term ‘social infrastructure’ often is set in a binary formulation to physical infrastructure—interhuman, service agency to individual versus built technical systems. This formulation of what is social infrastructure obscures the socially negotiated nature of government agency and private investments into both community services and services such as public transit, for example, “creating arbitrary boundaries for resident and agencies in accessing resources” (Cowen & Parlette, 2014: iv). I prefer ‘social’ to refer to what Lo et al. describe as ‘public’ to step out of overemphasizing public/private dichotomies—legacy towers are largely privately owned but some are socially or publicly—but use it analogously to address social inclusion:  

All types of public infrastructure – physical infrastructure such as transportation systems, water, sewer, and other utilities; health infrastructure; amenities such as parks and recreational services; knowledge-based infrastructure such as education facilities and libraries; and social services such as settlement services, affordable housing, and employment services – influence the inclusion of urban residents (Lo, et al. 2018: 4).

In writing about specific buildings and neighbourhoods I am localizing these dual challenges in specific sites, situating them within their larger socio-political and socio-natural contexts (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006) in this modest contribution to critical debates within the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) in the “spatialized political ecology of the city” (Keil, 2020). My aims are to offer practical and practicable accounts of the approaches that have been, are being and need to be made to address what I am calling the dual challenges of housing affordability and the climate emergency that are upon us.  

Extreme weather events are increasing, and without significant upgrades to this housing, resident populations will suffer. Extreme heat events, exacerbated by global carbon emissions will cause increases in mortality, especially in vulnerable populations, as happened in Chicago, 1995, France, 2003, France, Italy and Germany, 2022, Vancouver, 2022, and is happening across the US and Southern Europe in the summer of 2023. (C.E.R., 2023; Royal Meteorological Society, 2021; AP, 2023; Niranjan, 2023). Neoliberal austerity and institutional retrenchment in 1990s Chicago were part of that crisis. These are lessons Eric Klinenberg wrote about in his account of the socially mediated levels of mortality rates in the 1995 Chicago heatwave (Klinenberg, 2015). Climate change related mortality rates and catastrophes are increased by significant socially mediated factors (Mulvihill & Ali 2016)

Energy costs for maintaining habitable indoor temperatures in extreme heat events are difficult for lower income people to pay, this is especially true with insufficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning (in short now HVAC) efficiencies and building envelope upgrades in the older buildings. Yet, the older housing stock is crucial, the costs of replacement challenging. The expenditures for retrofitting, upgrading, renewing, can however, be estimated. Models exist and work has slowly begun in Europe, and even more slowly in Toronto.

Research Questions

This research has been directed by a series of interconnected questions: what were the circumstances in planning and developing Tower Neighbourhoods in Toronto at their inception in the post-war period? What were policy makers, planners, architects, developers, builders in the period of the 1950s to 1970s when these immense 12 to 16 story concrete towers were largely built thinking? From the modern planning perspective of the era, as argued below, these were utopian solutions to avoid sprawl while building affordable housing bright, clean and rational. We are well aware, of course, that the (utopian) solution of one era might prefigure the crisis of a subsequent period as David Harvey and Leo Panitch among others have pointed out (Harvey, 1996; Panitch & Gindin, 2012, Ch, 12). Toronto in 2023 is in crisis in terms of housing availability, in terms of housing prices, in terms of civic and social infrastructure and it is indispensable to look at what solutions have been put in place by state and financial actors to address previous crises.

The question: What is that legacy looking like in contemporary Toronto? stems from that observation. Writing about capital mobility seeking new sites of profitable investments are abandoning older ones when profit rates fall—a dynamic of “spatio-temporal fix” (Harvey, 2013)—Harvey’s work furnishes an understanding of how different economic sectors and the geographies of built environments rise and fall in investment terms. Cities, their infrastructure and housing stock are to be understood as “strategic sites for commodification processes . . . major basing points for the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities, and their evolving internal socio-spatial organization, governance systems, and patterns of socio-political conflict must be understood in relation to this role” (Brenner, Marcuse & Mayer, 2012: 3). Housing, especially tower apartment buildings since in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have been hyper-commodified, subject to this dynamic—with Central Bank and regulatory framework set with state involvement—in where historically low interest rates made the private financing of the purchase of larger scale real estate assets especially where rent controls had been minimized but, also, where regulation allowed for rent increases with renovation, an attractive place for corporate forms to invest (August, 2020; Gertten, 2019).

Social and environmental challenges have emerged that have made for difficulties in achieving well being in what are referred to as Tower Neighbourhoods in the Toronto context. A further question—what is to be done? [1]—is directed at the legacy of the modern planning in the existing housing stock made up of these Tower Neighbourhoods. What models exist that would work here? Models for Toronto to consider are already built, or better, have been retrofit and rebuilt, in exactly the places Toronto learned its modern planning from: European antecedents. What were built as modernist concrete blocks of mass housing have in specific cases (discussed below) been retrofitted, rethought, the building envelopes reconceived, into what might be called post-concrete utopias. What can Toronto learn, emulate, and implement from the retrofitting of modernist tower blocks in France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands? What socio-technical solutions have been implemented and what governance and financing models have led to sufficient capacity-building and execution skills for the retrofitting of towers there, that can be brought to Toronto? What solutions are could be affordable and scalable across the region? Who would and who could bear those costs?

These questions are not just socio-technical or can be answered technocratically. Technical knowledge can very well serve the achievements of progressive planning (Raco & Savini, 2019). Progressive planning works only if it is coupled with social justice and de-coupled from shareholder value maximization. Mobilizing capital for investment in addressing housing and climate change mitigation has been done successfully in the partnerships we see in the European projects, partnerships between real estate investment foundations, regional and national governments and at the European Union (EU) level discussed below.

The potential transformative power wrought by technocratic urbanism is a socio-political choice with consequence to recall Erik Swyngedouw’s (2004) formulation of his skepticism about technocratic solutions.[2] David Harvey also recognized that there were trade-offs to negotiate between social, political, and environmental projects. To paraphrase: “all socio-political projects have environmental consequences—at issue is urban political ecology with its foundational practical and theoretical concerns” (Peters, 2013: 3, paraphrasing Harvey, 1992).

The costs of doing nothing are hard to calculate accurately. Extreme weather events are hard to predict and maybe Toronto will be ‘fine’ despite global temperature increases and extreme weather event increases. An estimate from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) gives the figure of one dollar invested for municipal climate change adaptation on the city scale saves six dollars in disaster recovery (FCM 2020, 7). Costs of not investing in adequate housing and thermal comfort provision would be externalized to public services budgets in the form of healthcare and emergency services expenses, increases in energy infrastructure provision capacity and energy usage costs, productivity costs, the waste of human potential and opportunity costs as was the experience in recent extreme heat events. Bernstein (2022) and Shiab and Bouchard (2022) have between them harvested and cross-referenced extensive data on spatializing heat and social marginalization in Canada, presented through a CBC interactive website with extensive data references. They count upwards of 600 deaths linked to extreme heat in British Columbia, Canada, but point to insufficient Ontario mortality data.

What can be done? This project seeks to offer recommendations that are practical and scalable across the region. There are strong arguments for ways to at least partially de-commodify and decarbonize housing through the mobilization of other sources of capital in the form of public banking institutions as Thomas Marois (2021) argues and institutional investors (public pension funds) to which in some combination the European retrofitting projects described below testify. Increases in Central Bank interest rates (in 2023 to 5 percent in Canada) makes the argument for the much needed capital mobilization for addressing the dual challenges of housing affordability and decarbonization more acute still. My research into European cases of radical retrofitting on the second chapter below has been partially concerned with the project of ownership and financing as well as costs and potential or actual operational and construction carbon reduction. Institutional investment models found have significant relevance for practical suggestions for what might be achieved in Toronto.    

Seen from another perspective, insufficient investment in building envelope and HVAC on a building level, pushes thermal regulation costs onto the unit level – the residents. Heating, but increasingly importantly, cooling costs on the unit level are expensive. Energy Poverty (EP) frames the lived experience of people in the overlap of issues of insufficient or low income, energy costs, climate change and inadequate and inefficient housing in terms of energy usage (CUSP, 2022). Rising energy costs is eroding housing affordability. This takes money away from other necessities. Canadians pay on average 3 percent of their household income on energy. In Canada, the academic and activist literature on EP places that at six percent (Das et al., 2022; CUSP, 2019:5), double the Canadian median energy costs. Low income makes people more vulnerable to EP, but it is more than just that. The household experience of being chronically, seasonably, too cold or too hot, because of the costs of running typical air conditioning (AC) units, of upgrading them and the windows or insulation yourself, is more than an income issue or a weather issue. It has to do people having to pay a significant portion of their earnings for energy needs to live in and manage with our Canadian climate, or go without to afford their other basic costs, let alone expand their lives and thrive. Energy Poverty is where a cluster of issues meet that can harm well-being, social and economic participation in our society.

Heat and Mortality

In Canada, the “Heat Dome” Vancouver, British Columbia, experienced in 2021 (C.E.R., 2023; Royal Meteorological Society, 2021), forest fires in the summers of 2021, 2022 and 2023, and the smoke clouding the sky over cities across the Eastern side of Canada and the US, made climate change denial increasingly untenable and the costs and effects on energy infrastructure, hospitalization, and deaths, undeniable. Climate emergency awareness is strong within the European media as mortality associated with heatwaves is becoming increasingly acute and European temperature increases are higher than the global average. The Associated Press, carried in El Pais, and the Guardian UK, covered the release of a report published July 10, 2023, in Nature Medicine, led by Joan Ballester, an associate research professor in climate and health at Barcelona Institute for Global Health: there were over 61,000 deaths directly due to heat waves in Europe in 2022. (AP, 2023; Niranjan, 2023). The numbers were worse for Southern Europe: France, 73 heat-related deaths per million inhabitants totalling 4,807; but, in Spain, 237 per million or 11, 324; Italy’s was 295 or 18, 010. Germany lost 8, 173 people to heatwave related deaths (Niranjan, 2023). The total in Europe was 25,000 more than the average of the previous six years. For France, this is not new: “Possibly France drew lessons from the experience of 2003,” Joan Ballester said (AP, 2023).

France in 2003 saw 15,000 people succumb to heatwave related death. In 2003, reports then drew attention to what was also reported with this study, that vulnerable populations, especially older people—more so women than men—were subject to suffering and mortality from heatwaves (Met Office, 2023; BBC 2003). Niranjan in the Guardian, July 2023, finishes with a crucial Public Service Announcement: it was imperative that older people be socially connected and be checked on: “Julie Arrighi, acting director of the Red Cross Red Crescent climate centre. ‘It’s so crucial for people to look out for neighbours and loved ones – especially those living alone’” (quoted in Niranja, 2023). These are lessons Eric Klinenberg wrote about in his account of the socially mediated levels of mortality rates in the 1995 Chicago heatwave (Klinenberg, 2015). While neoliberal austerity and institutional retrenchment in 1990s Chicago was part of that crisis, the social isolation of vulnerable populations and abandonment of poorer neighbourhoods by social services Klinenberg identified remain of concern in 2023. Social infrastructure and sociotechnical infrastructure are deeply intertwined in any effective mitigation of the climate emergency there is no doubt is upon us (Mulvihill & Ali 2016).     

Following models of this sort of development from Europe, concrete tower blocks were built in from the 1950s to 1980 to make what Toronto’s Tower Renewal Partnership calls Tower Neighbourhoods, many are in clusters like a campus with some as stand alone within low-rise areas (TRP, 2023; Johnston 2023; Dennis, 1994; McClelland and Stewart, 2007; Young, 2006; Sewell 2016; Wight 2016). Stated roughly again, these towers were built to provide housing affordably at densities to avoid sprawling low-rise alternatives. Half a century or more later, with social, political and environmental challenges, extreme weather events related to climate changes that are upon us, quality of life within many of what the United Way Great Toronto refer to as “legacy towers” built up to 1985 is being significantly denigrated (UWGT, 2022: 14). Legacy solutions have created contemporary problems.

Concrete Legacies

Concrete and social liberation are linked in modernity. This modest and ubiquitous building material has been able, with reinforcement, to redefine what urbanism looks like. Its origin story in concrete industry accounts goes back to Bedouins in Syria, perfected by the Romans with the recipe lost after that Empire collapsed but rediscovered in mid 19th Century France and perfected again in the United States (Nationwide Concreting LTD, 2023; PCA, 2023). The concrete industry itself sees social liberation and its own shareholder value increase as intertwined.

The Vicat Group Website writes: “Louis Vicat revealed the secrets of artificial cement in 1817 while building a bridge over the Dordogne River, between Souillac and Lanzac, in southwest France. He filed no patent and freely give advice to the architects and contractors of his time” (Vicat, 2023). Vicat is a French based, Paris La Défence headquartered, international publicly traded corporation, founded by the son of Louis, Joseph Vicat in 1853 with Vicat family members still involved on the Board of Directors and a capitalization of EUR 1,338 billion (https://live.euronext.com). Lafarge Cement is bigger, founded in 1833 by Joseph-Auguste Pavin de Lafarge with nearly ten times the employees, and is connected to the Suez Canal construction of the 1860s. Englishman, Joseph Aspdin is attributed with the invention of Portland cement in 1824, made by burning finely ground chalk and clay attribute until the carbon dioxide was removed (Giatec Scientific, 2022). Aspdin named the cement after the high-quality building stones quarried in Portland, England. In the 19th Century concrete was used mainly for industrial buildings. The first widespread use of Portland cement in home construction was in England and France between 1850 and 1880. Joseph Monier patented the technique of reinforcing concrete in 1867 in France and Francois Coignet used the added steel rods to prevent exterior walls from spreading apart in domestic architecture. In the US, Ernest L. Ransome is celebrated by the American Society of Civil Engineers for his use of reinforced concrete since the mid-1800s, and his development of ways to increase its strength. In 1884, Ransome patented the use of twisted steel bars for the reinforcing of concrete and in 1903 the 16-story Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, Ohio is named as the world’s first skyscraper (ACSE, 2023). By the mid 20th century, steel reinforced concrete defined the architecture of the era.

The carbon footprint of concrete production, the building construction industry and waste.

Carbon dioxide emissions from manufacturing new concrete requires power largely from fossil fuels, and the chemical process of making the cement portion of the concrete also produces significant amounts: roughly 620 Kg of CO2 is produced for every metric tonne of cement manufactured and 8 percent of the worlds CO2 emissions compared to 2.8 percent from aviation (Tigue, 2022). 40 percent of global raw materials is consumed by building construction industry (BCI) while it generates about 40 percent of waste, emits about 25 percent of carbon dioxide (Oluleye et al.,2022). The process of cement manufacture involves heating kilns the size as long as a 40-storey building is high, large enough to fit a car into it with a diameter of 3.6 metres to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,480 degrees Celsius. “The finely ground raw material or the slurry is fed into the higher end. At the lower end is a roaring blast of flame, produced by precisely controlled burning of powdered coal, oil, alternative fuels, or gas under forced draft” the American Portland Cement Association explain with heroic prose (PCA, 2023). Certain (unnamed) elements are burnt off, red-hot clinker is produced.  

The carbon footprint of concrete disposal is being addressed in Europe with an emphasis on recycling. Estévez, Aguadoa, & Josaa (2006:1), using data from the EU around 1999 estimate “current annual production of construction and demolition waste (C&DW) is on the order of about 180 million tonnes, of which, about 28% is recycled.” Targets for recycling 70 percent of C&DW, or building construction and demolition waste (BCDW), are discussed in the Waste Framework Directive Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC) and a 2018 report commissioned by the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. The EU Waste and Construction and Demolition Waste Protocol and Guidelines came into effect 2018 (European Commission, 2018; 2023). Resource efficiencies and opportunities for the building sector are outlined in these guidelines. The market for C&DW/ BCDW in Canada is less developed as might be expected with the differences in scale between the two bodies, the two populations. The figures for percentages of solid waste produced by the construction industry in Canada in 2000 are identified as around 25 to 50 percent of municipal waste, 9 million tons of C&DW annually (Yeheyis et al., 2012). Environment and Climate Change Canada (Government of Canada) (EEEC, 2021) identifies the figure as 4 million tonnes of BCDW in 2021 without a clear account of how that figure was reached. Oluleye et al. make a strong case for the crucial importance of circular economy (CE) research and reform for the BCI as they emphasize the importance of Spain, Italy and Canada in conducting that research. The reduction of construction waste saves waste disposal fees or when recycled near building or demolition sites, which is relatively easy to do, transportation costs are less. “The extension of the useful life of materials through recycling has a cumulative advantage that spans beyond the building itself to the externalities, thus contributing to socio-economic and environmental development,” they argue (Oluleye et al., 2022:7).

Retrofitting and repurposing existing buildings, as architects Lacaton & Vassal (2022) argue and practice, would reduce further the carbon footprint of the BCI, the BCDW and any recycling industry efforts. Existing buildings require however significant reductions in the energy consumption requirements of thermal control. Toronto-based The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) estimates that 44 percent of carbon emissions in Toronto comes from buildings (https://carbon.taf.ca). Like with interventions by Lacaton & Vassal in Bordeaux or Paris, discussed below, a report from 2012 by TAF underlines the site specific nature of any roll-out of retrofit strategies (Toucie, et al. 2012). Whereas the modernist apartment tower block could be characterized as a cookie cutter roll out of a certain concrete heavy urban density intensification, what is required urgently is a site specific, site by site sensitivity to the most cost effective approach to achieve both the carbon and cost reductions to domestic tower living, while ameliorating the living conditions of tower residents. The roll out of a post concrete utopia needs to be site by site, but be scalable and roll out across the region.      

Concrete is an ideologically and socially mixed bag, witness large scale apartment tower blocks built in the post war period across big cities in Europe, as they were in North and South America. Concrete was shaped into buildings that were celebrated as new, clean, and bold until the buildings came to be seen as ugly and were maligned. Many were built as inexpensively as possible and not well maintained. Yet, the housing stock provided was and remains crucial; people have to live somewhere.  

The architecture industry and media in Europe and the UK are taking retrofitting and refurbishment of existing buildings seriously. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have launched in 2023 a concerted effort to promote refurbishment with an award, the RIBA Reinvention Award (RIBA, 2023) and the argument for CO2 reduction from the refurbishment, and repurposing of existing buildings is expressed also a cost savings on the level of both the projects and the experience of fuel costs for thermal regulation living within them. The obligatory calculation of embodied carbon in new building development is also on the British government regulatory agenda, enacted in 2013 in the Netherlands, 2021 in France (Harrabin, 2023). The UK based Architects’ Journal (AJ) has been awarding retrofitting efforts under the rubric of the AJ Retrofit Award since at least 2012, with awards under different categories including housing. The 2021 award went to the refurbishment of 314 flats in three residential towers in Woodside, Glasgow, owned by the Queens Cross Housing Association with work led by Leeds, UK, based Engie Regeneration (https://www.engie.co.uk/). The price point per unit was under GPB 40,000 (CDN 67,000) with operational carbon emissions reduced by 70 percent. Expressed in the project aims was a concern for the mitigation of what in the UK is called “Fuel Poverty”, another term for energy poverty (EP). Residents not evacuated during or after the project completion was also noted by the award judges as an important factor in the Woodside project (Wilson, 2021).

The 2023 winner of the AJ Retrofit Award for Housing was the second retrofit phase by the architecture practice of Mikhail Riches of the historically listed Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, UK. Sheffield-Park Hill is a high profile modernist housing estate, the product of an ethos of slum clearance and intended as social housing that looms over the city both physically and emotionally for the people of Sheffield. The Park Hill estates, roughly 1000 flats completed in 1961 designed by Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn was built as a “slum” replacement to modernism ethos of the separation of cars from pedestrians, with recreation of ‘streets in the sky.’ For Sheffield it has been a high profile feature on the skyline of the city, and a council housing project that ran deep in local imagination. Witness the recent celebration of it and working class culture living within it in the form of a musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, first performed in Sheffield, 2019 and 2022, and then to be staged again London’s West End, 2024. This cultural intervention I include here to talk about the human experiences of living within the sorts of legacy tower neighbourhoods explored too in cultural terms.

The musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge is about families who lived there over generations, based on music from Sheffield’s own Richard Hawley from his 2012 album of that name (Akbar, 2023). The album is a simply gorgeous wall of sound like ballads of love and loss with flights of lead guitar soloing and a dynamic range covering a profound emotional one. The 2019 review of the musical in The Guardian (Kalia, 2019) features a strong image of the phase one retrofit beside an unrenovated portion of the building. The UK Grade II listed “brutalist” building, as Kalia calls it, although it is not obviously brutalist— just big and made in large part from concrete—is seen in the theatrical review to reflect the lives of its working class residents. The utopian hopes of the 1950s are described with those very hopes declining with the downturn in the steel production industry in the later 1970s in the UK, and the post-industrial fortunes of the whole city. Current residents point to the socio-economic and demographic diversity of the phase one retrofit completed then but are also quoted by Kalia as saying it’s a Marmite situation: you either love it or hate it. The retrofitting comes at a cost seen as high by former residents, too high for some to move back in, an irony perhaps for an iconic working class housing form. It is an indication of inadequate governance of housing prices in the financial planning of the project and eco-gentrification of once publicly owned working-class housing.

Fran Williams, writing for the AJ award announcement says: “As a project, it embodies everything these awards advocate: from decarbonisation to social sustainability” (Williams, 2023). The scheme for this phase of a further 195 units to the first phase of 260, involves a mix of market rate and subsidized housing, with the target of 20 percent “social rent” or subsidized housing hoped for (Wilson, 2022), significant upgrades to the building envelope to reduce thermal regulations cost.

Energy efficiencies achieved in the refurbishing are not accounted for in assessing total housing costs, a question worth asking for further study. But this also a part of the conflict between social and environmentalist agenda setting in retrofitting housing. The practical argument for retrofitting in the UK context is made by an AJ initiative called RetroFirst, trying to balance that conflict (Hurst, 2019) and promote their thinking with a social media tag of #retrofirst. In a sort of manifesto, the campaign is aimed to promote taxation incentives to promote rather than block (as it presently does in the UK), policy around existing building promotion and recycling of materials and around public procurement policies. Energy consumption is central to that argument, energy and emissions in the building process, the demolition process: the “substantial embodied energy savings made in repurposing existing buildings, compared with the ultra-high embodied energy costs of demolition and rebuild” (Hurst, 2019). Energy consumption reduction for the thermal regulation of the living space of the completed project is also part of that argument. In the North American context, the urban planning and architecture organization Urban Land Institute is promoting the retrofitting argument in its Summer 2023 issue of Urban Land (Lerner, 2023; Oestreich, 2023). The reduction of operating energy consumption is there added to the account, with numbers achievable with simply upgrades as significant as 20 percent. Residential towers in North America are not yet sufficiently on the radar, but need to be.   

The social aspects of the projects of retrofitting tower apartments are important, as in the Glasgow project above, the Bordeaux La Cité Grand Parc below. Hodson and Marvin have engaged with the core issues of governance of a socio-technical transition to systematically re-engineering the built environment and urban infrastructure in response to resource constraints and climate change (2013, 2016). Here, I am looking at the apartment building scale. While the aesthetics of legacy towers as they stand are not everyone’s ideal, buildings that contain apartment spaces with two or three bedrooms and usable balconies, even up to the top floors, serve a needed purpose for social reproduction. One might think of family units or other social groupings who want to live together. Central cities have once more become attractive and valuable residential areas, with gentrification of the central cities into extremes as Ehrenhalt (2012) calls “The Great Inversion” in the American city. Sprawl containment to protect rural areas is linked with rising land costs in the European cases (Bocquet & Cavailhès, 2020). The peripheral tower blocks erected in the 1960s in Europe, as in Toronto, were also conceived as anti-sprawl strategies (Sewell, 2009). Toronto never “abandoned” its downtown core, although it has certainly gentrified it with housing costs skyrocketing, rents soaring, and the suburbs sprawling throughout the region where land is expensive everywhere. The legacy peripheral towers in Toronto are located in what are now no longer on the outskirts of built-out areas yet remain on the edges of socio-economic and political powers. Lower-middle and working classes finding housing at high densities are increasingly rendered peripheral to mainstream discussions about urban development as well as outside of position of the financial resources to make any other choices. Residents in the peripheral towers are also stigmatized, socially and politically outcast (Charmes & Rousseau, 2022: 23).

Costs associated with retrofitting perfectly solid concrete towers is significantly less than tearing down and rebuilding anew. This is certainly true where height restrictions of 12 stories have been put on new buildings, as they have in Paris recently, with a new ‘Plan Local d’Urbanisme’ adopted in June 2023 (O’Donoghue, 2023). To justify the costs of a tear down, much higher density is required to satisfy investment, as in 88 Isabella Avenue, Toronto, where a perfectly functional white brick and balcony clad 14 story tower was to be replaced with a Diamond Schmitt Architects designed 62 story condominium (Landau, 2022), taking advantage of density allowances along Toronto transit corridors, obliterating rental housing stock in the process. That project remains in the pre-construction phase at the time of writing. Downtown and transit corridors are a different market than the peripheral neighbourhoods not yet served well by public transit, and those towers are often in need of basic maintenance. Retrofits seem distant possibilities, but we must bring this discussion to the fore, under obligations for safe housing and carbon reduction simultaneously.     

Rental housing in towers has become an object of corporate interest in the form of Real Estate Investment Trusts, that have, since the financial crisis of 2008, turned attention on the relative safety of the investment and the potential for returns on minimal upgrades when tenant turnover and increasingly high rents for new tenants can be done. The documentary Push by Fredrik Gertten (2019) outlines international levels of crisis. Tenant strikes in Parkdale including in 2023, and in July 2023 in Weston have tried to highlight what is an increasingly predatory practices of using minimal renovations and tax increases to justify rent increases well above the 2.5 percent allowable (August, 2020, Hurst, 2023). The tower at 33 King Street, Weston, is owned by Dream Unlimited, traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange with residential and office space assets under its management of 24 billion as its website boasts (https://dream.ca/). The Weston area King St tower features minimal quality interior or exterior finishes, but people live there and can not afford Above Guideline (rent) Increases (AGI) of 2.5 percent. The legal frameworks for protecting affordability in Toronto are difficult to manage. Rent strikes in Thorncliffe Park are being reported in mainstream Maclean’s Magazine (Shea, 2023), and in the CBC in Parkdale over buildings owned by Akelius Canada — a Sweden-based multinational corporation. (Brown, 2023). These are anecdotal signals to a larger crisis, where retrofitting investment is even harder to imagine when some tenants report their elevators don’t work, their balconies are not functional. Yet, investment is urgently required to achieve carbon reduction, environmental justice and social justice. How this can work is the object of this exploration and of necessity has to be addressed in part on a building by building basis where larger opportunities become apparent. Current legal frameworks around mandating maintenance are weak in Toronto as are regulations and enforcement around energy efficiencies and carbon reduction. This is where learning from international examples can be fruitful. Governmental capacity increases in both regulation and in the provision and brokering of adequate financial tools is needed. Public money spent on private asset improvement as handouts won’t work, but there are tools of public agency creation, of development banking that have worked. And can work (McDonald & Marois, 2021).      

Structure

Chapter One addresses Toronto history with the planning and building of modernist high rise residential towers. Toronto is the site of nearly 2000 1960s concrete residential tower blocks in various states of sufficient maintenance, in various locations, more or less peripheral to the major public transit corridors. This section shows how Toronto adapted modernism from European examples as part of a localized cautious small-c conservative approach to what Wight insists is modern planning (Wight, 2016). I want to underline the under-realized legacy of modernism in the planning and building of legacy residential towers in Toronto and write to underpin a renewed socially emancipatory and environmentally conscious concern around them. The legacy towers are essential rental housing stock and home to hundreds of thousands of Toronto residents.

In Chapter Two, I am concerned with some of those tower projects in Europe today, projects that addressed housing shortages due the combination of wartime destruction of existing housing stock but, also, to house immigration of working people to help rebuild from the war, density issues. I am not so much concerned with those buildings as historical artefacts, but as legacy buildings that have been sites of serious efforts to rehabilitate and retrofit that legacy of 1960s residential towers, to radically retrofit existing housing stock in the face of the dramatic effects of climate change in the recognition of the climate emergency we are all facing. Looking at European examples, I am arguing what is possible and what needs to be done around tower block renewal. Fieldwork is crucial to understand social and environmental outcomes from retrofitting interventions and in understanding the situational differences between these projects and Toronto, but also to learn from leading practices, methods and the socio-material (socio-technical) engagement with that climate emergency.

Chapter Three is concerned with the current state of Toronto’s legacy towers, the communities who live there and the challenging economics and politics around the maintenance and improvement of those towers, where serious engagement with radical energy consumption reduction for thermal regulation is slow to begin. The argument for retrofitting is strong, but financial and capacity building for industry and governance are not in place in the Canadian context.

Conclusions (Four) are presented as urgent calls to actions around policy, around financing, and governance, and around facing up to challenges too long ignored.

[For the complete Major Paper, please contact me at the coordinates below]

[1] This revolutionary utopian question stems from Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, well before Lenin took the title for a 1902 pamphlet. Utopian thinking in the face of socio-economic challenges, political, financial and socio-technical realities in 21st Century Toronto, I argue, is called for, but these utopias, like the socialist cooperative movement Cherneshevsky’s protagonist Vera called for, offer models.

[2] "In other words, the transformations in the world wrought by architects and engineers designing, construction companies building, what scientists and politicians ‘empirically’ and rhetorically pronounce, or defend, or commission in the name of ‘disaster prevention' or ‘scarcity’ or ‘increased efficiency’ or ‘development’ are both material and discursive constructs where there is no relative truth to squabble over” (Swyngedouw, 2004: 25)