What’s guiding our Regenerative Futures?
Possibilities for the Built Environment, part 1 of 3
This is the first in a series of three provocations, which mark the cumulation of a collaborative effort between Dark Matter Labs and Bauhaus Earth to consider a regenerative future for the built environment as part of the ReBuilt project.
In this publication, we lay out the historical, professional and theoretical context for the contemporary push toward regenerative practice, and offer six guiding principles for a regenerative built environment, looking beyond profit tunnel-vision. In the second and third pieces, we propose pathways, configurations and indicators of the transformation our team envisions.
What isn’t regenerative? Debunking a misconception
When it was completed in 2014, Bosco Verticale, a pair of 40-story residential towers on Milan’s outskirts, was celebrated as an example of leading-edge regenerative building design for the 800 or so trees cascading from its balconies. In describing the project, its architect Stefano Boeri sketches the figure of the “biological architect”, who is driven by biophilia and prizes sustainability above other design concerns. Praise for Bosco Verticale, in the architectural press and beyond, implies that the development’s vegetal adornments represent a meaningful substitution of traditional building materials with bio-based ones, and further that measures supporting biodiversity constitute climate-positive architecture.
The list of green credentials associated with the project ignores other characteristics of Bosco Verticale that don’t align with this vision. The steel-reinforced concrete structure was designed with unusually substantial 28cm deep slabs to support the vegetation’s weight (which totals an estimated 675 metric tons) and associated dynamic loads. Considering that this slab depth is about twice that of comparable buildings without the green facade, the embodied carbon associated with the project’s 30,000m² floor slabs alone is approximately double that of a standard building.
In tandem, an existing workspace for local artists and artisans based in a former industrial building was demolished to make space for the premium residential units accessible only to the few. Although a replacement workspace was eventually built nearby, the structure’s regenerative aspirations are weighed down by profound contradictions beneath the leafy surface.
Certainly, Bosco Verticale is significant as an exceptional investment in urban greening on the part of the developer, and as a leading-edge demonstration of innovations that enhance the multiple benefits of green infrastructure. Bosco Verticale contributed to the viability of future developments that extend the geographic reach of urban greening discourse into new geographies: copy-cat schemes have been built in East Asia and elsewhere. However, it’s clear that Bosco Verticale fails to stand up to a holistic consideration of what regenerative building looks like. Many voices overlooked the social and material impacts of the project, instead dazzled by the urban greening.
Puzzle pieces of the regenerative
In recent years, societies worldwide have become familiar with weather events and political shifts that were unprecedented or previously unthinkable. Six of the nine planetary boundaries that demarcate the safe operating space for humanity were crossed as of 2023. There is now a strong case for the idea that our entangled human and planetary systems exist in a state of polycrisis. Bearing this in mind, what do we mean when we refer to a built environment that is regenerative?
This piece aims to add nuance and system-scale perspective to our working definitions. As examples like Bosco Verticale show, it’s possible to be green in the public eye while counteracting what is regenerative. Perhaps we need new methods to help us understand:
How long a building will last,
How its materials will be stewarded,
Whether it is built in a context that enables low-carbon living,
And what its end of life might involve.
System-scale perspective is needed because the built environment cannot be disentangled from systemic needs like the demand for affordable housing and the reality of physical, material constraints. Although we do need initial demonstrations to spark change, a single, locally-sourced timber building constructed with ethical labour does not define wholly regenerative practice in itself.
What is regenerative?
Regenerative is the term of the moment, yet it remains loosely defined in public discourse: we rely on examples, implicit understandings, and theoretical frameworks to give it meaning. How, then, is it used in particular contexts?
Beyond ‘green’
Regeneration refers to approaches that seek to balance human and natural systems, allowing for coexistence, repair and self-regulation over time.
The regenerative paradigm seeks to look beyond what’s merely ‘green’, and to do net good. A broader lineage of thinking around the term spans agriculture, biology and ecology, medicine, urbanism and design: disciplines and industries that connect to the health and wellbeing of biomes, bodies and buildings. Variation in definition can be observed in different contexts, sectors and aims.
‘Regenerative’: a brief history of the term
The term regenerative began to gain traction in fields including agriculture and development to outline a new paradigm from the 1980s. The US’ Rodale Institute popularised the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ to describe farming systems that go beyond sustainability by improving soil, biodiversity and ecosystem health. The practices invoked are ancient, with precedents across the globe, and rooted in Indigenous land management. However, this specific application of the term ‘regenerative’ articulated an emergent attitude in this period that focused on renewal and improvement of ecological and social systems. The Rodale Institute advanced this concept through research, advocacy, farmer training, publications and consumer education geared toward regenerative organic agriculture, laying the groundwork for its integration into mainstream agricultural discourse and integration into other disciplines.
From the early 2000s, the work of Bill Reed and the Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice has anchored the application of regeneration to design fields and the built environment in particular. With a focus on ecosystem renewal and coevolution of human and natural systems, Reed’s framework implies that regenerative design goes beyond sustainability by restoring and renewing ecosystems, integrating humans and nature in a symbiotic relationship. Expanding this idea beyond ecology, many architects and urbanists have adapted Reed’s model to their own corners of their fields, looking for design that doesn’t simply do less harm, but does more good. Bauhaus Earth maps Reed’s familiar bowtie-shaped diagram onto four basic categories for the built environment: from conventional, to green, to restorative and finally regenerative–that which has the greatest positive environmental and social impact.
Across applications, several elements of a core meaning of what is regenerative exist: a focus on supporting systems of different scales to recover from loss, to take on new life, to grow responsively. The evocative nature of this idea, easily applied across different disciplines, has inspired a range of permutations and schools of thought.
Other key references on the regenerative:
1 Regenerative Development, Regenesis Group, 2016.
2 Regenerative Development and Design, Bill Reed and Pamela Mang, 2012.
3 Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration, Bill Reed, 2007.
4 Towards a regenerative paradigm for the built environment, Chrisna du Plessis, 2011.
5 Doughnut for Urban Development, Home.Earth, 2023.
6 The Regenerative Design Reading List, Constructivist, 2024.
The term’s uses have gained traction and proliferated within the particular historical context of the last half-century, during which concepts like the anthropocene and the full extent of human impact on the planet have been evidenced. As technology has enabled our understanding of the ways in which humanity has degraded our environments — at scales from the cellular to whole earth systems — to grow, so too has our desire for models that point to possible ways to repair this damage. Conceptualising the regenerative across scales and disciplines opens the door to alternative futures in which planetary demise at the hands of humans is not inevitable. The application of the core elements of regenerative theory to fields like architecture has spurred a range of generative and planet-benefitting practices. However, these individual actions, and even the rise of the sustainability paradigm across design fields, cannot override the prevailing limitations of capitalism that continue to increase rates of extraction, social inequality and environmental degradation. As it stands, regenerative approaches continue to be exceptions working against the odds.
The main limitation: political economy
These frameworks were written within academic and industrial contexts, largely from a Western, wealthy nations’ perspective. While regenerative thinking has inspired thinkers across the planet and across fields, attempts to translate these concepts into a global, political economic scale fails to account for deep-seated inequalities. We are limited by the systems and power imbalances in which we’re working. Capitalism, in particular, compounds these blindspots, limiting attempts to translate regenerative thinking into other spaces such as the built environment. As such, while trailblazing organisations, communities and individuals are offering proofs of possibilities in regenerative infrastructure and urbanism, these are currently exceptional cases. It is not yet evident how these ideas can be instantiated at scale to benefit all people and meaningfully address systemic inequalities.
The role for and responsibilities of professionals
The interconnected challenges of this moment invoke new layers of complexity. But if professionals can’t understand or deploy the idea of regeneration, then it won’t guide their decisions and actions.
Extractive activities led by the industrialised global North continue to irreversibly alter our planet at pace, while the transition to renewable energy will involve even higher rates of extraction of critical minerals than those of today. As such, the earth’s systems’ ability to regenerate is stressed more than ever. The built environment, with its outsized responsibility for global carbon emissions associated with construction, building operations and demolition, must admit these impacts and face up to its epoch-defining responsibility. So how do we get off the one-way road of identifying problems without solutions?
There is a separation between perceived responsibility and power in today’s professional landscape. This moment necessitates a shift from individual to collective agency in taking on advocacy for the regenerative potential of the built environment.
Imagine this: you are an architect today, trying to answer the client’s brief by maximising the use of responsibly-sourced bio-based materials, embedding social justice in your design processes and objectives, and considering carbon-storage potential and place stewardship for future generations, while accepting that your brief is to create market-rate apartments. This is nearly impossible in the context of today’s imperative to maximise profits and commodify housing. Architects in the current professional environment are profoundly limited in means to meaningfully address these intersecting priorities, whether one at a time or in concert. Our current economic system simply does not position architects to be the core innovators, as much as Stefano Boeri’s reflections on the Bosco Verticale boast otherwise.
These professional limitations are an indirect signal of the political economy of real estate development and the power relations underpinning the construction industry. Only a systemic shift can address the limitations facing individuals operating within a design scope. To genuinely take on the intersections of ecology, social justice and the built environment, architects need to see their work for all its entanglement with the broader political, economic and social forces, using the tools of the profession and connections, bolstered by connections with aligned collaborators, and their collective power to dismantle the systems of power that limit transformation at across scales.
We’re orienting ourselves toward a future in which there is more latitude for these crucial priorities to be addressed. This future will hold an altered scope for decisions made by architects and other built environment professionals in the course of development processes, and a transition to a regenerative built environment driven by collective commitment.
A growing field: precedents and trailblazers
A range of contemporary initiatives, programmes and projects aim to establish frameworks to define the idea of a regenerative built environment. Drawing on advancements in circular economic thinking, increasing recognition of the significance of embodied carbon in addition to operational carbon in buildings, and as the industry’s understanding of indicators like biodiversity and water use that are tied to planetary boundaries grows, these programmes help experts and the general public to move beyond misconceptions.
Bauhaus Earth emerged in 2021 as an initiative around the use of timber and other bio-based materials for construction and their ability to store carbon. Today, Bauhaus Earth is a research and advocacy organization dedicated to transforming the built environment into a regenerative force for ecological restoration. It brings together experts from architecture, planning, arts, science, governance, and industry to promote systemic change in construction practices.
Index of aligned enquiries
A global range of community-led and grassroots organisations focusing on the work and needs of underserved groups receive grant funding from and can be discovered via the Re:arc Institute.
Non-Extractive Architecture(s)’ directory gathers a global index of projects that rethink the relationship between human and natural landscapes, alongside questions about the role of technology and politics in future material economies. The directory is an ongoing project itself.
A range of related organisations and initiatives in the working ecosystem of Europe can be found in the table below. The range in types of these enquiries represents the broad coalition of stakeholders and types of activity that will be required to activate transformation toward a regenerative built environment.
Bio-based building materials are an important nexus of social and material relations. These materials, which bridge human and earth-based capacities for creation, urge an expanded view of stewardship. Understanding this will enable us to move past a paradigmatic dichotomy between the human and the natural, which enables humans to exploit planetary resources. Bio-based building materials were humans’ first building materials, and over millennia the practices, most notably agricultural and indigenous ones, that created the materials we work with today, have developed in concert with human civilisations and material realities. Holding these strands together, it’s evident why a maintained focus upon bioregionally-sourced and bio-based materiality is crucial for a regenerative future.
For a contemporary design and research practice that focuses on this intersection of agendas, see Material Cultures.
Regeneration across time horizons: shortsightedness and the Capitalocene
As Reed’s Trajectory of Ecological Design diagram and the examples above indicate, regeneration of ecosystems and societies are continuous, open-ended processes that occur over time, at scales from the cellular, to the neighbourhood, and to the planetary. As the repair and balancing of regenerative processes have occurred in many contexts across eons, we need to understand regeneration across multiple accordant time horizons. Within this complex and extensive landscape, time horizons can act as organising units that help make sense of interconnections and nested scales of action.
In construction, key processes take place across different timescales. These range from time needed for a regenerative resource such as a forest to grow, to the lifespan of a building, to the longer time periods associated with meaningful carbon sequestration. In each of these cases, regenerative interventions involving acts of maintenance and design directly modulate the temporal register of the built environment. For example, extending a building’s lifespan through processes of care and preventing demolition impacts the future form of its locale and pushes back against the conceptualisation of buildings strictly as sources of profit within capitalist logic–that is, viewing buildings primarily in terms of their capacity to generate immediate economic returns through cycles of development, exploitation and obsolescence. By this means, it is within the medium of time that a regenerative lens on the built environment can be most revealing.
Regeneration in deep time and at the timescale of ecosystems has been disrupted by human processes. We are accustomed to the idea of the Anthropocene, in which an epoch defined by human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, which was initiated by the industrial revolution. However, recent discussions by Jason W Moore, Andreas Malm and others offer a critique of this concept in making the case for the Capitalocene as a more precise term. Rather than treating humanity as a homogenous force as Anthropocene theory does, the Capitalocene examines how differences in responsibility, power and agency within societies have been compounded in the context of the capitalist system, and how this system has driven ecological crisis. Rather than humanity as a whole, Moore argues that we should examine how the social, economic and political processes that have shaped recent centuries, and which reach back to the early modern period, provide a better basis for understanding the relationship between human activity and planetary wellbeing, and how this dynamic produces ecological crises. Using this focus on the un-natural and political origins of the crisis we face today, it’s possible to see how shifting senses of responsibility, agency and relationships, operating against capitalist logics, are essential for developing effective pathways toward planetary regeneration. In the predominant logic of the Capitalocene, short-term profits, increases in productivity, and optimisation around flawed ideas of efficiency are necessitated–and regeneration could be mistaken for a loss, an indicator of inefficacy, a concession to the ineffable–and as such, unwarranted. This is the systemic logic that must be resisted.
The prevalence of demolition today is one example of how this systemic short-sightedness is bad for people and the planet. The UK is now facing the consequences of the prevalent use of reinforced aerated autoclave concrete (‘RAAC’), in municipal buildings nationwide during the 1980s. With a material lifespan of only 30 years, many hospitals and schools built of RAAC are now being demolished. Indeed, the lifespan of many of the structures that are most viable in our current urban development models are steadily decreasing in spite of increasing awareness of the embodied carbon impacts of demolition.
We would do well, in looking toward a regenerative future for the built environment, to retune our time horizons. This might involve syncing carbon sequestration time with lifecycles for construction that create value over time, taking into account things like municipal land leases and emerging whole life carbon regulations. What if we had a way to see the long-term impact of decisions made today?
In this effort to hold more timescales in mind when we consider processes of regeneration, we can learn a great deal from indigenous cultures from across the world, many of whom have developed, over the course of millennia, methods and ideologies supporting the human ability to connect with scales of time beyond our species-specific and news-cycle dependent parameters. Some of these examples are evidenced in the above Index of enquiries.
Theoretical underpinnings: what constitutes a regenerative built environment?
The built environment is both a physical and a social construct: it’s not fitting in this moment of polycrisis to continue to abstract the physical materials that shelter us from the labour that built them, the livelihoods that maintain them, the design processes that make them fit for purpose, and the policies or decisions that keep them standing.
To identify ways to directly address the injustices to people and the planet engendered by the Capitalocene, we need to look to historical and political decisions that have driven the crises in housing affordability and race-based inequality that are defining features of cities today. In recent years, there has been a greater focus on how the built environment can benefit from the application of lenses that focus on the distribution of power and agency within societies, including critical theory and urban political ecology. These approaches can help us to articulate how the built environment and natural resources can be viewed in the context of human struggles to meet their needs in the context of today’s critical conditions.
David Harvey, most notably in Social Justice and the City, points to how a purely quantitative or spatial design-based approach to understanding urban space consistently fails to engage socioeconomic phenomena like inequality and urban poverty, while arguing for the necessity of approaches that integrate the spatial with the social. Harvey’s reading, grounded in radical geography, makes clear how spatial development processes are driven by financial capital, which keeps governments, civil society, communities and individuals in predetermined roles, ill-equipped to resist the calcification of capitalised space. Recently, climate justice movements like the Climate Justice Alliance (on the grassroots side) have formed alliances with decision-makers and activists in the built environment around causes like health and buildings, retrofit poverty and feminist approaches to building, under banners like a Global Green New Deal, in which a spatialised social justice lens can be directly applied.
Harvey’s work is a key influence on urban political ecology approaches, which assist us in understanding of how cities are hybrids of natural and social processes, rejecting a dichotomy between people and nature. Similarly, Marxist political economic thinkers like Raymond Williams have pointed to how capitalism organises space and produces environmental inequalities, as analysed using multiscalar analysis, among other techniques. Through a political ecology lens, we see that developers and investors, not communities or ecological needs, shape the built environment, often through speculative real estate practices that exploit labour and resources. These critiques of the built environment emphasise that urban development is driven primarily by capitalist interests, prioritising profit over social and environmental well-being, leading to inequality, displacement, and environmental degradation. Theory can support an analysis of exclusion in planning, and advocacy for participatory processes that could support socially regenerative places.
In sum, focusing exclusively on buildings misses the point that cities are fluid, open, contested multivocal landscapes. At scales from the individual building, to the neighbourhood, including infrastructure like street systems, as well as cities and regions, the built environment is a negotiation between matter, human behaviour and social systems over time.
As we look to the future, how will our urban environments be produced? Who will benefit from them? And how can we challenge the environmental injustices inherent to the systems we live in?
Guiding principles for regenerative practice
Six layered principles for a regenerative built environment
Expanding our definition of what’s regenerative in the built environment calls for clear ways to speak to the material, economic and social dimensions of cities. We need ways of accessing and assessing regeneration that cut across disciplinary boundaries, invite broader participation in these conversations, and account for future risks and technological developments.
What layers and principles might expand and deepen our understanding of systemic interactions as we work toward more holistic indicators? Below are six suggestions to focus our gaze.
Time horizons and generational preparedness
Future indicators of a regenerative built environment must take a long-term view. If the built environment is to form a matrix in support of human life for generations to come, it should fundamentally be building material preparedness for the future. This means the way we measure and quantify what the built environment does ought to speak to this extended time horizon, for example by considering how much carbon is stored for three generations to come, how much of our timber is sourced in a way that will allow for replanted trees that will mature over decades, or how much of a building’s material stock can be disassembled and reused within the same settlement.
Today we have standard metrics like Floor Area Ratio (FAR) that are aligned with present development models and profit-driven logics requiring maximum saleable use of space, fundamentally constraining possibilities for the built environment. Foregrounding time horizons for change enables retooling of these ways of measuring cities, focusing not on short-term, singular profits and benefits, but rather on the future generations and our planetary resources.
Geopolitical resilience and security
Future indicators for a regenerative built environment should address the geopolitical stakes of decisions.This is especially relevant now in Europe, with regard to geopolitical dynamics within and between the US, Russia and China, in light of multipolarity and the EU Strategic Autonomy conversation. Can we refashion the socioeconomic and material dependencies in cities so that they are resilient to the crises that may face future generations, while supporting enhanced responses to geopolitical dangers? We should look to modes of resilience that address the political and economic systems that exacerbate geopolitical precarity, such as the extractive nature of global trade, and the ongoing influence of multinational corporations in shaping environments across scales. The status quo propositions toward resilience often fall short of addressing geopolitical power structures.
Place-based and planetary approaches
Future policies and indicators should adopt a multiscalar view that takes into account the unique local context to which it’s applied, as well as the transformative potential and influence interventions may leverage across scales (e.g. throughout the value chain). Contextual specificity is associated with direct impact in regenerative efforts, but these must be connected to transformative change that fundamentally alters the properties and functions of systems.
Living systems approach
Actions should help to shift thinking towards more holistic and ecocentric worldviews, in which non-capitalistic, nature-centred systems of values are given primacy. This layer considers interventions as part of dynamic social-ecological systems rather than isolated components. It is crucial to see these social-ecological systems for their complex adaptive qualities, in which people and nature are inextricably linked.
A living systems approach supports biogenerative thinking, in which processes, systems, or designs that actively promote, support, and regenerate life — both biological and ecological — create conditions for continuous growth, renewal, and self-sustaining ecosystems.
Co-evolutionary and community-led
Interventions should structurally empower communities to act and evolve in line with their ecosystems. Structural empowerment means building systems and resources to make communities stronger and self-sufficient and allowing nature to flourish in tandem. This approach foregrounds the utility of feedback mechanisms from nature, like soil health indicators, phenological changes, and biodiversity and species presence, to support the co-evolution and improvement of social-ecological systems.
Supporting holistic value creation
A regenerative built environment should operate on the basis of a broad definition of value, from economic, to ecological and social. As the theoretical approaches discussed previously indicate, the built environment is a hybrid of natural and social processes occurring in the constraints of systems that thrive on extraction and inequality. A holistic approach that combines material, interpersonal and spatial integrators to consider what is regenerative generates cascading value across multiple scales.
“Measuring the impact of regenerative practices on living systems must therefore recognise entangled systemic value flows. Current economic approaches fail to account for this complexity.”
— Dark Matter Labs, A New Economy for Europe’s Built Environment, white paper, 2024
Conclusion
In the context of the polycrisis, we need to move beyond notions of sustainability, toward, as Bill Reed’s diagram suggests, creating healthy, counter-extractive communities and bioregions that can scale from exceptions to define new norms.
Embracing a broadened definition of regenerative practice — one which is informed by the historical and contemporary context of such practices — will evidence the potential contradictions and tensions in the current system. Deploying multimodal metrics and indicators, of the type that the principles introduced in this piece imply, will enable new thinking for net-regenerative outcomes in our cities. Without redirecting our points of orientation toward these six principles, even motivated actors will be limited by today’s system, which allows only for shifting of blame and incremental, localised improvements in the status quo. We will never reach a regenerative built environment without transformational change.
Further pieces in this series will explore in more detail the systemic shifts we envision, pathways toward regenerative practice, and possible indicators for recognising progress.
This publication is part of the project ReBuilt “Transformation Pathways Toward a Regenerative Built Environment — Übergangspfade zu einer regenerativen gebauten Umwelt” and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.
This piece represents the views of its authors, including, from Bauhaus Earth, Gediminas Lesutis and Georg Hubmann, and from Dark Matter Labs, Emma Pfeiffer and Aleksander Nowak.
Awesome to read pieces that are this detailed about regenerative practises in specific sectors, especially in the built environment which can really change the way people interact in space, and facilitate the new coming of Community, which is essential for regeneration.
We talk about Regeneration as a way of living in Meander Magazine.
Vol 1 - Returning to Place launches this week including an interview with Bill Reed
https://www.meandermagazine.earth/product/returning-to-place