Urban regeneration One-Stop-Shops in the Post COVID Recovery

The first-anniversary webinar of the project Opengela was held on the 12th of May 2020, online, given the particular context. Although isolated, the project partners were joined by representatives of 6 fellow One-Stop-Shops (OSS) European Projects to this webinar, which gathered 180 attendees from 26 countries. It intended to reflect on different European OSS projects on the challenges and opportunities urban regeneration can raise in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ignacio de la Puerta, Coordinator of Opengela and Director for Urban Regeneration and Territorial Planning in the Basque Government, opened the session with the question “How can we face this new reality?“ and highlighted the necessity of collective brainstorming in this period of uncertainty. Ignacio made clear that, regarding the challenges posed by the health crisis for OSS projects, regional and local governments have an important role to play as they are the ones who are closer to the citizens.

On that note, Christophe Milin from EASME added that the COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity to help us prepare for a future crisis, as the Climate Crisis. But this raises the questions: how do we take this opportunity, where do we go and with what tools? These are some questions the panellists tried to answer through specific examples of OSS.  

During the webinar, it clearly appeared that, in addition to the obvious health consequences, the most striking impact would be economic and social, especially for vulnerable neighbourhoods. Social and economic imbalances will be accentuated, leading to a paralysis of investment possibilities. This raises a basic problem: How to encourage a neighbourhood in investing when a significant part of the society sees their jobs put at risk, is unemployed or is under the necessity to spend as little as possible?

With this question in mind, the webinar continued with the presentation of the project, EuroPACE. It has developed an innovative home-based financing formula that allows long-term loans at affordable rates for all homeowners, including those in vulnerable conditions.  Davide Cannarozzi elaborated on this effort for eco-sustainable renovations. The need for affordable and smart funding is one of the keys. He added that “the access to finance, in a crisis context, will be really important, how to pay will become more important“. Stephan Hartmann from RenoBooster also highlighted the issue of accessing funds by saying: “We have done an assessment of our project and the conclusion is that we don’t have to change the basis of our framework, but of course, financing is more of an issue now“.

Other speakers repeated that the post-COVID-19 challenges will centre around the question of financing, but this is not the only issue. Home renovation must be integrated with other measures. As an example, Cecilia Hugony from CitiesSharing explained that their goal was to decrease by 50% the use of energy with a strategy focused on ecodesign combined with a simplification of physical meetings post-Covid19.

Another lesson taught by this crisis is the need to guarantee health as an essential element of our life. The sanitary conditions of the houses in which we live therefore become an element of the first order to transform our society into a more resilient one. On this note, Andoni from the Opengela project commented that “the concept of home has changed so much into a wider concept. It has turned into a school, a work centre (…) it is not about refurbishing, it is something deeper to adapt to the ‘new normal’ situation“. In that sense, SuperHomes, another OSS Project, gives us a good example. It focuses exactly on the health component of our homes. The initiative supports homeowners in a residential deep retrofit to achieve more comfortable, healthier homes with better air quality through sensible and cost-effective energy measures. 

Wrapping up with the session, the panellists concluded that financing is as important as innovative ideas to get projects going. However, technical assistance and providing tailored advice to homeowners will be more important. The COVID-19 situation is not only a stress test for One-Stop-Shops business models, but for every action that is taken to tackle the climate crisis. This emphasizes the need to ensure that the EU Renovation Wave we are constructing is local, bottom-up, green and fair!

If you missed the Webinar, check out the recording here! Don’t miss the Radio interview of the Opengela Coordinator, Ignacio de la Puerta and Davide Cannarozzi on the EUROPACE project, accessible here (in Spanish).