The renovation sector holds great potential for the social-ecological transformation of the building sector. Currently, only 1% of Europe’s buildings have been renovated, with 99% remaining to meet the 2050 climate goals. This presents a great opportunity for architects and small businesses, offering a growing market where they can find meaningful work and establish new alternative practices.

"Is everything in the city up for demolition? Potentially yes, because if we approach the land and the city through a speculative lens, then the biggest increase in value comes from constant demolition and rebuilding. Through the financialization and globalization of the economy, we are pulled into this cycle of demolition and creation."

"The value of architecture is more than providing the service of building. We have to redefine the role of the architect as someone who is able to address the great challenges of today. Someone who can read these issues systemically and dissect their full complexity, beyond a narrow interpretation of individual liberty and creativity. We must return to the social premise of architecture and commit ourselves to a common goal. This capacity can become architects main value."

"We need to understand what makes change contagious, through persuasions and discrepant messages. It seems there isn't any chance that the spatial changes we want to make are going to be made unless we can not only design the thing, but design the advent of that idea into culture."

"Architecture is so tantalizingly close yet neither the practices that we have nor our typical architectural education give us the tools to really deal with it. Instead, we have to think about another kind of form-making which gets us closer to having agency, and to pair this form-making with an understanding about making changes not only to organization, disposition and space, but also to our narratives."

"Some of the greatest changes of the globalizing world are being written in the language of architecture and urbanism, so there has to be a chance that we know something about it, or can contribute to these changes in some way. I am sure that we, more than the 28-year-old McKinsey consultant who is making most of the global decisions, I am sure that we know more about it."