Designing Incentives for Change in Brussels

A surplus of vacant offices, urgent housing needs, a growing and diverse population, and overlapping policy frameworks made it the ideal laboratory for the Holcim Foundation Fellowship’s latest edition. Co-led by Olaf Grawert and Josiane Schmidt from ETH Zurich’s station+ chair, and supported by Saba Meidany and Luisa Pastore representing the Foundation, the two-week program brought together early-career Fellows from across Europe to test a simple question with far-reaching implications — What incentives would make reuse the default?

Fellows immersed themselves in Brussels’ built environment—from ZIN and OXY to The Cosmopolitan and KANAL (the future Centre Pompidou)—while engaging with architects, contractors, developers, policy advocates, and financiers including &bogdan, 51N4E, noAarchitecten, Democo Group, Whitewood Asset Management, and the Building Performance Institute Europe. They also visited the European Parliament and European Commission to understand how multi-level governance shapes change across the continent.

Why incentives—and why now?

The construction sector accounts for roughly 40% of CO₂ emissions and 36% of EU waste. At current rates, Europe would need to triple its renovation pace to meet 2050 goals—making adaptive reuse not only a climate imperative but an economic necessity that also addresses pressing housing shortages. The Fellowship framed this as a systems challenge: how to align incentives across the “chain of space production” so that policy, finance, and culture pull in the same direction.

The Fellows’ diagnosis was candid: the sector is fragmented, risk-averse, and structurally biased toward new build. Architects have limited agency; contractors join too late to influence sustainable methods; capital markets prioritise exchange value over use value; and policy cycles remain too short to drive long-term transformation.

A multi-stakeholder, multi-scalar playbook

In response, the cohort produced a set of actionable incentives designed to work across stakeholder groups rather than in isolation. Their proposal was organised around three interdependent themes—regulatory, financial, and socio-cultural—to be implemented at EU, national, and local levels on a timeline to 2050.

Regulatory measures included the creation of Local Offices for Renovation to align departments and market actors, fast-track permitting for reuse, and shared digital and physical infrastructure for building data and material flows. Financial strategies proposed ESG-aligned capital, municipal risk-reduction instruments, and tax structures that reward circular outcomes. Socio-cultural levers focused on education, professional upskilling, applied research, and citizen engagement platforms to normalise renovation as the standard practice.

Brussels’ urban conditions made it the perfect prototype: abundant 1970s–1990s office stock, political density, and an active circularity agenda. Fellows’ dialogues with design teams, investors, and policymakers grounded their ideas in real decisions—when to strip back to structure, how to phase tenants, and how to secure quality reclaimed materials at scale. Sessions with the European Commission linked these practicalities to the policy frameworks shaping Europe’s regulatory future.

Digital publication: turning Europe’s “Renovation Wave” into action

The digital publication traces the Holcim Foundation Fellowship’s two-week journey in Brussels, where Fellows explored how Europe can make adaptive reuse the default. Through fieldwork, site visits, and dialogues with architects, developers, policymakers, and financiers, the cohort developed a practical “playbook for change”. Their proposals include local Offices for Renovation, streamlined permitting, shared data infrastructure, and ESG-aligned investment to accelerate circular construction across Europe.

Designing Incentives for Change captures this process of collaboration and systems thinking—showing how policy, finance, and culture can work together to transform the built environment.