Guest blog: To Retrofit or Futurefit - Why Successful Climate Solutions Still Require Us to Think Differently

When it comes to urban climate adaptation, retrofit is a term that’s heavily used; improve what we already have rather than starting from scratch. While this approach is correct, the term itself fails to capture the extent of innovation required to both identify solutions and convince people of their value. Rather than our starting point being the status quo, how do we adopt a forward-facing mindset of curiosity to generate solutions that will ‘futurefit’ our cities?

At a recent conference on Urban Analytics run by the Alan Turing Institute, a key point of tension was the definition of digital twin. A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical system (think flooding alerts, transport congestion, energy use, etc.). The nuance sparking disagreement was the degree of feedback required between the physical and the digital in order to claim that there is a ‘twin-like’ relationship.

The concern here is obvious. If the digital environment doesn’t receive relatively frequent updates regarding what’s happening in the real world or if the data being used is incomplete, the digital model can quickly become ineffective. Or worse, problematic.

An alternative was thrown in from the crowd: the digital cousin.* I liked this because it more accurately reflects the relationship (and expectations) we ought to have with technology. Decades ago, the Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski made this exact point when he coined the phrase “the map is not the territory.” He used it to describe the seemingly inevitable semantic and structural gap between the description of a landscape and its representation.**

While digital solutions alone cannot address climate challenges, they are powerful enablers of effective climate adaptation. Urban areas face unique challenges that require a boots-on-the-ground understanding, but advanced software can provide more strategic insight for where those boots should go.

Recently, the UK government announced its ambition to build 1.5 million new homes over the next five years. While many question this goal's feasibility, both the appetite and need are clear. This expansion of homes, offices, and civic spaces could benefit communities—but not if new developments compromise existing residents' quality of life.

The past decade's development surge has led to a dramatic loss of green spaces. In fact, neighborhood green space provision in 21st-century developments has fallen by one-third, resulting in 9 million fewer trips to green spaces annually.*** This isn't merely about having fewer parks for dog walking—the implications run much deeper.

In a recent letter to the Financial Times, the London Surface Water Strategic Group revealed that London needs the equivalent of 10,000 football pitches to address its current surface water flooding threat.****

An obvious problem with that statistic is that you won’t readily find enough space for even one football pitch in central London, let alone convince the relevant stakeholders to make it into a meadow with retention basins to capture surface water runoff. In a desperate attempt to chip away at the 10,000 football pitches we need, all you will find are scraps of spare land scattered throughout the city. But what use are they?

While individual spare spaces may seem insignificant, when combined they create powerful opportunities for strategic climate adaptation interventions that can scale effectively across urban areas.

Modern geospatial computing and data analytics are changing how we identify and utilise these scattered urban spaces. By analysing vast amounts of spatial and climate data, these tools uncover patterns and opportunities that human observation alone might miss. This city-wide perspective, spanning property portfolios, boroughs, and regions, reveals impacts that extend beyond individual property boundaries. Tactically targeting high-impact locations, this technology-driven approach transforms small, seemingly insignificant spaces into a valuable network of assets for climate adaptation.

The path to climate-resilient cities requires futurefitting our existing infrastructure and our approach to problem-solving. While the challenges we face are daunting—from diminishing green spaces to flooding risks—technology offers powerful tools to transform scattered opportunities into coordinated climate solutions.

_{*Digital Twin Meets Digital Cousin— “Bidirectional "twin-ing" between physical entities and the digital proxies are difficult in terms of accuracy with respect to sensing, visualisation of change and management of metrics with respect to precepts, environment, actuators, sensors (PEAS). Therefore, rather than the exactness of "twins" perhaps the idea of "cousins" (potential for high similarity but not identical twins) offers operational flexibility, agility and adaptability of operations (e.g., supply chain optimisation).” https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/140791.}

_{**Paraphrased from the Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design & the Nature of Cities by Nicholas De Monchaux. De Monchaux goes on to highlight two essential lessons from geospatial computing pioneer, Howard Fisher. “First, maps remain at their most powerful when used not as instruments of unattended action or procedure, but rather as devices to change our perception of the world, and understanding of its possibilities. And second, that architecture matters—inside and outside of the computer, and in particular the connection between the two. Particularly as the distinction between the space of information and the space of our own cities is subject to its own, evermore complex shades of gray, we need to be mindful in a new way. We need to remember that the way in which we would seek to operate in the city—carefully, transparently, collaboratively, and creatively—must old true in the irreversibly interlinked space of city and data as well.”}

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