Delivering Construction in Occupied Buildings While Sustaining a Sense of Community
Renovating an occupied residential estate is not only a technical challenge, but a social one: how can this be done without eroding trust, well-being or community?
Holistic housing renovations that combine physical housing improvements with social and socioeconomic interventions, if executed well, can have positive effects on residents’ mental and physical health (Koops-Van Hoffen et al., 2024). Our previous work at Akumen Labs on the social impact assessment at Dolphin Square in London showed that success lies in finding ways to manage disruption and minimise its impact on residents. A relationship-based management culture, visible and human-centred leadership, cross-team collaboration, consistent communication, and a commitment to social responsibility alongside technical delivery are key factors that enable projects to move forward while maintaining stability, confidence and connection across all user groups. Residents tolerate disruption when they retain agency, receive predictable communication, and perceive management as present, fair and effective (Morgan et al., 2024).
Effective management and community engagement depend on how disruption is framed, shared and supported
Delivering construction within occupied buildings means intervening in active sites shaped by routines, relationships and expectations. People are living, working and moving through the building every day while works are taking place around them. In this context, technical delivery and social experience become closely linked. By interviewing and conducting focus group sessions with residents at Dolphin Square, we found that the main stressors were noise, dust, the movement of belongings and temporary relocations. These stressors are not only operational challenges but lived experiences that shape how residents perceive the place, the building and the way the live-in construction is managed, and therefore how disruption is experienced and absorbed over time. What emerges in practice is that disruption is not only a function of the works themselves, but of how they interact with everyday life and the broader social environment of the estate.
Figure 1 shows the approach of holistic housing renovation, a framework put forward by Koops-van Hoffen et al. (2023), which provides a structured way of understanding these interactions. It shows that housing renovations, especially in the case of a large housing complex such as Dolphin Square, which has more than 1,200 housing units, must account for a range of underlying human factors and can generate effects in the short, medium and long term. Combining physical renovation with social interventions can produce added or reinforced health effects: where both are implemented together, residents experience lower levels of stress and anxiety associated with the renovation, buffering negative health impacts. Drawing on the wider determinants of health theory, improvements are greater when multiple life domains are addressed simultaneously (additive effect), and changes in one domain can strengthen positive effects in others (reinforcing effect).
Leadership and Management as Stabilising Forces
A key to successful project management in live-in construction is sustained investment in fairness, transparency and approachability throughout the process. As uncertainty affects all parties, acknowledging it openly helps to create an environment in which people feel that leadership understands both the practical and emotional implications of living or working within a construction setting. A key success factor at Dolphin Square was the emphasis on relationship-based, human-centred management. Leadership was visible and approachable to residents, and some employees developed direct relationships with residents. Management remained grounded in day-to-day realities, which fostered trust and accessibility. In practice, this is reflected in small but consistent actions: presence on site, tone of communication, and everyday interactions that enable people to feel understood and able to speak openly.
Central to human-centred leadership is proactive communication. Management needs to communicate in the period leading up to the renovation (Koops-Van Hoffen et al., 2024), respond quickly, inform residents of developments before they need to ask, and provide sufficient clarity for them to feel they are participants rather than subjects of the project (Morgan et al., 2024; CMHC, 2018). Communication must be treated as a continuous process, the quality of which is defined as much by timing, consistency and honesty as by content. Early notice of changes, regular updates and clear expectation-setting were provided as consistently as possible at Dolphin Square to enable residents to plan and adapt. The key is that information flows reliably so that disruption becomes more manageable and less intrusive.
Equally important, successful delivery relies on close collaboration between the different parties involved in construction and renovation. Construction, design, operations and client teams all operate within the same live environment, and their alignment directly influences outcomes. At Dolphin Square, multiple parties were involved, including the managing team overseeing the restoration, contractors executing the works and external partners. What proved effective, and was widely recognised, was open dialogue, regular coordination and a shared understanding of priorities, enabling targeted responses and effective problem-solving. This collaborative dynamic becomes more pronounced under pressure, as well-connected teams are able to adapt quickly and maintain momentum. More broadly, it was important that all parties remained closely connected both to the asset and to its users. This proximity reduces delays, improves coordination and ensures that decisions reflect realities on the ground while maintaining an overall vision for the community.
Keeping the Sense of Community Alive
Community wellbeing in the built environment is acknowledged as being “greater than the sum of its parts”, a process that emerges as residents negotiate shared understandings of community within common spaces (Lach et al., 2022). Sustaining a sense of community depends on protecting the small social rituals that make an estate feel like a place rather than a worksite.
According to Ricketts (2008), four aspects of community wellbeing are particularly enhanced through participatory processes:
Increased empowerment;
Enhanced vision-making and advocacy capabilities;
Increased collective action;
And an enhanced sense of pride, belonging and connectedness.
Effective participatory projects typically include community-led support initiatives, involvement in social analysis, celebration events, engagement processes for visioning and decision-making, work-group collaboration, participation in implementation, partnerships with stakeholders and post-project involvement. Two conditions are critical to achieving authentic engagement: involving participants at the earliest stages of preparation and appointing a community advocate to guide the process (Ricketts, 2008). At Dolphin Square, we found that community engagement was a defining feature of the estate and a central component of its value. The estate has a long-standing identity shaped by its residents, which constitutes an important part of its heritage. Participatory initiatives included estate-wide events such as summer gatherings as well as other small-scale events, book clubs, discussion circles and informal opportunities that enabled residents to exchange directly with one another, and regular satisfaction surveys to gather feedback.
Keeping the sense of community alive requires recognising that communities are not uniform, but made up of different groups with distinct needs, rhythms and expectations. This calls for careful attention and continuous adjustment in how engagement is approached. Social contact should not pause during live-in construction, but should become part of everyday life on site, whether through shared experiences of the works or informal exchanges between neighbours (Koops-Van Hoffen et al., 2024). These interactions reinforce the idea that buildings are “places of soul” (Day, 1990): not simply physical structures, but lived environments shaped by relationships, where community identity connects diverse groups and continues to be expressed through shared spaces.
References
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. (2018). Retrofits occupied multi-unit buildings. Available at: https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/nhs/nhs-project-profiles/2018-nhs-projects/retrofits-occupied-multi-unit-buildings
Morgan, D. J., Maddock, C. A., & Musselwhite, C. B. (2024). These are tenants not guinea pigs: Barriers and facilitators of retrofit in Wales, United Kingdom. Energy Research & Social Science, 111, 103462. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780080544380
Koops-Van Hoffen, H. E., Poelman, M. P., Droomers, M., Borlée, F., Vendrig-De Punder, Y. M. R., Jambroes, M., & Kamphuis, C. B. M. (2023). Understanding the mechanisms linking holistic housing renovations to health and well-being of adults in disadvantaged neighbourhoods: A realist review. Health & place, 80, 102995. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829223000321
Lach, N., McDonald, S., Coleman, S., Touchie, M., Robinson, J., Morgan, G., … Jakubiec, A. (2022). Community wellbeing in the built environment: towards a relational building assessment. Cities & Health, 6(6), 1193–1211. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2022.2097827.
Ricketts, A. (2008). Participation in Place-Making: Enhancing the wellbeing of marginalised communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. (n.d.). Victoria University of Wellington Research Archive. Available at:https://doi.org/10.26686/wgtn.16959256