The Retrofit Lab is a Research and Innovation Laboratory activating the transition of Australia's buildings, infrastructure and landscapes for resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities.
The cities of 2050 have already been built. Urgent action to retrofit existing built assets is needed if Australia is to meet its carbon targets and develop resilience against ongoing climate, biodiversity and public health risks. A major challenge is that the property and construction sectors are geared towards building new assets and not retrofitting existing buildings, infrastructure, and urban landscapes. These sectors lack the skills, coordination, and motivation to develop resilient buildings for a post-carbon world.
Our Solution
The Retrofit Lab is an innovation ecosystem within Melbourne that aims to transform the Australian property and construction sectors to deliver integrated retrofit for urban resilience at scale. Located within the heart of the Melbourne innovation precinct, the Retrofit Lab will leverage combined knowledge across academia and industry to undertake collaborative research and innovation.
This ecosystem will:
- Enable the valuation of existing carbon, energy and materials embodied in existing assets.
- Integrate policy, finance, development, design, construction and operations in the built environment.
- Create urban places for resilient, healthy communities that celebrate culture and country.
Established cities will achieve the largest GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions savings by replacing, repurposing, or retrofitting the building stock, strategic infilling and densifying, as well as through modal shift and the electrification of the urban energy system.’
Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (Technical Summary of IPCC Assessment Report 6) pp.97
Partner with The Retrofit Lab
The Retrofit Lab is currently looking for connections with industry, government and research disciplines to partner and collaborate with to support specific research projects.
There are a range of opportunities for significant in-kind co-investment from partners through access to retrofit demonstration projects, with specific focus on the Melbourne innovation precinct.
