Edinburgh Residents’ thoughts on Building Retrofit and Improvement: Homeowners Questionnaire Results (2023)
The Collective was awarded some funding in early 2023, on the votes of citizens of Edinburgh, from the City Council’s ‘Edinburgh Community Climate Fund’, on the basis that we could provide a service of use to people right across the city. With limited resources, knowing that there’s a huge amount to do and yet being unable to do ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’, it was important to introduce our ideas as widely as possible and test our belief that there would be interest in collaborative community-led building retrofit and improvement among the homeowners of the city. We did this by creating a homeowners questionnaire* which we circulated as widely as possible.
In the context of building retrofit and improvement, the questionnaire explored the perception of obstacles (and their relative importance), as well as the things that might help to overcome them. It covered individual work and then introduced the potential of collaborative community-led work, before exploring respondents’ perceptions of its benefits and challenges.
The responses received over a period of six weeks in June and July were analysed in some detail and are reported in the document below.
We’re using the results to help us plan what to do, where and when.
*NB: The issues facing tenants in the private rental sector are more complex again than those for homeowners. For practical reasons we chose to limit our research and focus initially to the homeowner community.
Our thanks are due to the volunteers of ‘Data 4 Climate Action Edinburgh‘ for the generous donation of their time and expertise in carrying out some of the analysis and preparation of graphics used in the report.