Comparative Assessment of the Urban Housing Stock Refurbishment and Renovation Effectiveness

In city planning policy practice there are several fundamentally different modes of the existing housing stock’s transformation, including modes for renovation and refurbishment of the housing stock. The current study raised the question: which of the two methods of transformation of residential buildings - renovation or refurbishment - seems to be the more effective in terms of the costs of natural resources? As a measure of the costs of natural resources in the work for the first time in such calculations, the ecological footprint is taken for the measures for renovation or refurbishment the five-story housing stock of the first period of industrial housing construction. Methods of estimating the magnitude of the ecological footprint as characteristic that objectively shows the level of impact of measures for the transformation of the residential housing stock is given in the context of the utilization of construction waste and the construction of new residential buildings or the refurbishment of existing ones. The results of the calculations show that refurbishment is more effective from the viewpoint of ensuring the sustainability of development by the kind of transformation of the housing stock of Moscow. According to the results of the study, the ecological footprint from the refurbishment of the houses of the I-515, I-510 and I-511 types throughout Moscow is 1.73 times less than from the renovation.