One of the most intriguing parts of Transforming Infrastructure Performance: Roadmap to 2030, is the potential for a government mandate within the next couple of years.
RIBA has recently published the Social Value Toolkit for Architecture, developed in partnership between the University of Reading and the London-based Research Practice Leads, as an attempt to establish a common methodology for measuring the monetisation of social value through calculating the social return on investment.This is intended as a starting point for use by practitioners in the industry to understand and embed social value in architectural practice.
A central recommendation is an attempt to increase the prevalence of post-occupancy evaluations conducted by architects, to enable mapping of intangible impacts such as social value.The current, alarming, lack of collection by architects of real-life data on the impact of their schemes suggests that this societal feedback loop is not necessarily being designed into future schemes..Within a wider context, the construction industry itself is fundamental to the implementation of these social values.
It is central to the delivery of places in which people live, work and socialise, in addition to the connections between these places and communities.Measured in the UK, the construction sector is the sixth largest in terms of employment and is responsible for over 12% of the UK’s 5.9m small and medium-sized enterprises.
Although already one of the leading industries for numbers of apprenticeships, greater emphasis must be placed on diversification of the workforce and Modern Methods of Construction (MMC).
Doing so will help us to deliver the projects of the future and further increase social value in construction..As a result, we’ll need help from complementary, advanced heat solutions to bend the curve on carbon emissions and meet our net zero goals.. One of the biggest decarbonisation challenges we face, and one of the biggest opportunities presented to us, comes in the form of repowering coal power plants.
Incredibly, the coal-fired capacity being used in the world today is emitting around 15 billion tonnes of carbon emissions each year, representing almost half of all our carbon emissions.Bryden Wood is working alongside non-profit TerraPraxis, as part of the Repowering Coal Initiative.
We’re developing transformative design and construction solutions aimed at retrofitting the existing coal-fired power plants for suitability with new nuclear, advanced heat solutions, while still retaining the substantial societal and economic value of the existing power plant infrastructure.The process will be both highly efficient and cost-effective, overcoming existing viability barriers and creating a realistic path to sustainable, reliable energy for areas of the world still reliant on coal-fired power.. Terra Praxis: new nuclear is key to helping achieve net zero.