Novel methodology for the Social sustainability assessment

The goal of the task is to develop a methodology that can be applied to evaluate the socioeconomic impacts and risks of building retrofitting in a user—centred perspective. Building residents are directly impacted by retrofitting, but more actors are involved in the life cycle of building renovation. Therefore, different stakeholders and both positive and negative effects must
be considered in a comprehensive analysis of the retrofit process.

The methodology aims to provide a step by step guidance from the case study definition, to stakeholder and indicator selection and assessment possibilities. The idea is to provide generic guidelines for the social assessment of building renovation that can be easily adapted to the different cases and needs of 
practitioners. The framework is tested and validated with the INFINITE industrialized retrofitting case. The three demo sites in Slovenia, Italy and France were used for validating the methodology.

The methodological framework proposed for the social sustainability assessment of building retrofitting considers 16 steps. The 16 steps are described in the deliverable, including the specific application of each step to the INFINITE project.
The first steps proposed in the methodology focus on how to establish the scope of the analysis and define the building context and the indicators for the social assessment. The remaining steps focus on data collection, impact assessment and recommendations.

The results highlight that social performance of industrialized retrofit solutions may be improved by the following aspects: On the one hand industrialization potentially has a positive impact on Health and safety. On the other hand, if technology assembly is moved from building sites to industrial plants, there may be a lack of skilled workers for off-site assembly of new and more 
complex solutions. Consequently, we highlight the importance of training and visual guidelines for workers. Further findings include an expected reduction of disturbance for residents due to less works that need to be performed on site, employment as a geographic challenge and maintenance cost as a potential hotspot as modern technologies arguably become harder to maintain. It is crucial to take on a life cycle perspective in order to avoid focusing on direct benefits and