Development of a local housing policy to facilitate the sustainable refurbishment of high rise residential buildings

European countries are currently facing serious problems with the quality of their high rise housing stock. The majority of the high-rise housing stock was built in the first decades after World War II, and cannot meet the current standard in terms of technical and social quality. The need for refurbishment of these buildings and their environment is an urgent problem, but has not been adequately solved by the local government. There is still a need for a well-organised governance system at city, district and neighbourhood level that is able to initiate and facilitate the refurbishment programme. An MSc graduation research project at the Eindhoven University of Technology on a pilot project in the Slovak Republic has shown that the effective implementation of new technical solutions for refurbishment is failed due to financial and organisational barriers. On the one hand, as home-owners or inhabitants are facing increasing costs for services (heat, gas and electricity) and maintenance, many of them are not able to take part in financial investments for major refurbishment. On the other hand, the intention of the European Union and different national governments to address the issue of sustainable regeneration often fails to reach the individual home-owners or inhabitants. After describing the current situation and problems, this paper moves on to propose a new systematic approach for policy development. Based on an ongoing research project at TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), conceptual process models are presented