Habitat Values

To achieve a sustainable society, the reuse of resources must increase and climate emissions from the built environment must decrease. This applies to new construction, existing buildings, and infrastructure surrounding the buildings. New approaches to planning, building, and managing cities and communities are therefore required. This involves rethinking both the built living environment and how shared resources and living environments are valued and managed.

Municipalities play a key role in the transition, both in fulfilling climate goals and in enabling inclusive processes where inhabitants can participate in shaping sustainable and equitable living environments. This requires new knowledge, competencies, and working methods that can support structural transformation in spatial planning and the land-use economy.

Towards an equitable, resource-efficient and circular built living environment

The transition from a linear to a circular built environment requires spatial planning to shift its focus from new construction to transformation, renovation, and reuse. The project applies the New European Bauhaus principles — sustainable, beautiful, and together — linking circularity to architecture, design, and urban development.

Enabling this transition requires challenging prevailing values, planning systems, and land-use policies. New construction must shift from being the default option to becoming the last resort. At present, there are limited economic incentives within the land-use economy to maintain and enhance existing habitat values from a resource-efficiency perspective when living environments are developed, managed, or transformed.

Challenging current practice

The Habitat Values project contributes knowledge and a methodology for better utilising, broadening, and developing existing socio-economic calculations in detailed planning. The aim is to provide municipalities with improved tools to value and enhance cities’ living environments.

The point of departure is that habitat value, understood as the existing qualities of a place, cannot be bought or sold, but must be managed and refined through co-creation with inhabitants. In the long term, the project seeks to enable structural changes in the land-use economy within municipal spatial planning to support the transition to a circular built living environment.

By challenging current practices, the project initiates a shift in the governance and management of the circular economy in the public sector. A re-evaluation of governance structures and economic perspectives related to living environments can strengthen society’s capacity to address climate challenges while recognising the importance of social, cultural, and artistic drivers in sustainable transformation. 

Four cases in Gothenburg, Sweden 

The framework for calculating habitat values is developed iteratively through four cases in Gothenburg, Sweden covering different circularity perspectives of the built environment and ensuring robustness and scalability.