Olaf Grawert

But it's not only the people who suffer, the planet suffers too.

Because the building sector is the biggest CO2 emitter on Earth, yet no one speaks about it.

38% come from the building industry, compared to roughly 3% for flying, a number that we discuss a lot, for instance.

But it's not only the biggest CO2 emitter, it's also Europe's biggest waste producer.

36% of all the waste comes from the construction industry.

And again, to put it in context, compared to only 8% from private households.

So all the energy it takes to demolish a building and all the energy it takes to rebuild a building is only unleashed because the real values, the social and the ecological values, are not accounted in our system.

So we are tearing down buildings and ironically heating up both the planet and the housing market.

So architects are part of this value chain.

Architects are part of it, of real estate speculation, of demolition for new construction.

But as a citizen, I'm suffering its consequences of rising temperatures and rising rents.

So the question is, how can the whole value chain evolve?

How can we evolve the value chain by looking differently at what we already have?

And that's getting really interesting because what do we have around us?

Actually, Europe is already built.

And that's really the good news.

Europe is built.

Why?

Because after the Second World War, we introduced policies that made rebuilding fast, cheap and easy.

And this system was basically based on three key pillars.