Towards climate change adapted built environments - Retrofitting the existing building stock if multistorey residential buildings from the 19th and early 20th century in urban areas in Germany.

As an adequate response to the new environmental conditions expected to arise due to climate change, our cities must be adapted to continue serving as pleasant and liveable spaces for its inhabitants and visitors. Large parts of our existing building stock remain unprepared/inadequate for the anticipated climatic changes. Adjustments are urgently needed. Within this paper a strategy has been elaborated about how retrofitting can significantly contribute to the climate change adaptation of our urban environments, as will be strongly required in the future. The focus of this study is directed to possible climate change related adaptations of multistorey residential buildings from the 19th and early 20th century in inner city areas of Germany. Building on the general principles of climate responsive and ecological architectural design and construction, it poses the following question: How can our existing buildings be transformed in order to explicitly reduce the impact of climate change on our built environments? Following an evaluation of the new climatic conditions influencing our buildings and looking into current knowledge of sustainable architecture and urban design and construction methods, this paper goes onto propose a set of guidelines for climate change adaptive retrofitting of 19th and 20th century multistorey residential buildings of inner-city areas of Germany. On one hand these optimization proposals are addressed to respond better to longer heat and dry periods in summer and to more extreme rainfall, snowfall and storms in the winter. On the other hand, these adjustments aim to build a criteria that serve to mitigate adverse effects of climate change, like an improvement of the buildings' energy performance and ecological efficiency. The results of this study demonstrate that the buildings focused on are well suited for retrofitting interventions, which would reduce the impact of climate change and which in parallel would constitute effective measures to strongly improve the buildings' ecological performance in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]