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Short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork on renovation in the Baltics, and citizen and stakeholder workshops on the decarbonization of housing, I juxtapose five temporal contestations where histories of building maintenance, price changes, climate perception, sufficiency, and ageing frame the affordances of renovation.

Long abstract:

The affordances of refurbishing and transforming buildings depend on a variety of temporal concerns related to situated social, political, and technological imaginaries and materialities. While the European Renovation Wave has challenged the state of unrenovated buildings as detrimental to chances of reducing the significant climate impact of the housing sector, everyday struggles of renovation draw on broader temporal contingencies. Juxtaposing data from fieldwork on building renovation in the Baltics, citizen and stakeholder workshops on decarbonization of housing in lifestyles compatible with limiting climate change to 1,5 °C, and involvement in housing-climate policy development processes, in this paper I explore the interaction between five forms of how temporal contestations ground local imaginaries of building transitions: (1) climate policy against affordable housing development; (2) infrastructural decay against technological and investment return calculations; (3) construction inflation periods against governmental support schemes; (4) expectations towards living area per person after experiences of overpopulation against proposals of return-to sharing; (5) ageing and long-term against short-term sufficiency. The paper is located within a context of economic, governance and technological struggles towards renovation in Latvia where rates of renovation of ageing housing stock are low which is increasingly narrated as of critical importance if not a situation of ‘crisis’. In this context, changing technologies and systems of building maintenance responsibility, expectations towards changing construction and housing prices, ageing of both housing and people, and divergent understandings of climate change make temporal concerns at the forefront of renovation decisions.