Twilight Talks

The Green Register's early evening talks supported by Ecomerchant: together promoting ethical, healthy sustainable building materials.

On the second Monday of each month The Green Register brings you our Twilight Talks - a relaxed and informal string of events on sustainable building matters to complement our regular training topics.

Each one-hour event is FREE of charge and features short talks from one or more speakers. With Q&A and discussion sessions throughout, everyone is invited to be part of the conversation. We hold Twilight talks at 5-6pm, in the sweet spot between work and dinner – so join us to nourish the mind before replenishing the body!

Is Stopping Building New Homes the Solution to the Twin Climate and Housing Emergencies?

The UK's new government has pledged to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years. Such ambitious targets are not new, and mismatch with the continuous decline in the total number and share of social rented homes in England.

To meet these targets within the current system, social housing providers have been pressured to demolish social housing estates and densify them with market homes to reinvest the surplus in the maintenance and construction of social housing—a practice known as the 'cross-subsidy’ model.

But what if, instead of building more, we stopped building altogether? Following a brief introduction to the findings of an exploratory study with English housing associations, we will reflect on the potential consequences of a new housebuilding moratorium for the construction sector.  

About the Speakers

Anna Pagani

Anna Pagani is an architect and an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering.

Her research interests lie at the intersection between housing studies, systems thinking, and degrowth. In her work, she mobilises systems and transdisciplinary approaches to co-design interventions on the complex system structures that hinder the provision of healthy and sustainable housing for all. She earned her PhD with distinction from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

In 2022, she was awarded a Postdoc.Mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, to pursue research on a project titled “A just transition towards housing sustainability: where architecture and systems science meet.” Please click here to read her paper "What if there were a moratorium on new housebuilding? An exploratory study with London-based housing associations".

Twilight Talks are supported by Ecomerchant.