Throughout this book, you will find considered narratives, detailed exploration and practical applications of digital tools, resources and frameworks that guide building and facilities designs towards a regenerative model based on these Pillars:
- Climate and Energy (chapter 3) - Ecology and Carbon (chapter 4) - Human Wellbeing (chapter 5)
CLIMATE AND ENERGY
Regenerative Design adapts to, harmonises with and enhances microclimates in a harmonious relation to larger climatic flows (e.g.
thermal and water flows), through designs that are a part of nature, rather than ‘apart’ from nature. The balance of energy generation and use is positive.
Because there is a synergistic relationship between the climate, ecosystems and human life, strategies to address the causes and impacts of climate change may be found in managing local microclimates as a way to reduce and produce energy, eliminate and absorb emissions, tackle the loss of biodiversity and promote the life of people in outdoor spaces. This would mean at the same time restoring or creating ecosystem services, thus adding to the overall resilience of the built environment, creating favourable climatic conditions for people to spend more time in public spaces. Substantially people need to design with climate, design with nature and design with people in mind. New cities and buildings should provide substantial opportunities for initiating and demonstrating this change.
Professionals need to ‘Design with Climate’. This is also the tile of a book published in 1963 [1], which stood as one of the most pioneering books in the field of adaptation to climate. It remains a reference nowadays that climate change is an emergency. It includes principles from ecology, biology, engineering, climatology and physics, and proves how a systematic approach to climate change can be aesthetically sound.
This presents planners and designers with the significant challenges of rediscovering bioclimatic principles and learning to apply them to create innovative urban environments. These environments should be thermally liveable, and with positive energy and emission balances. Cities should be able to produce more energy than they use and absorb more emissions than they emit. Cessation and absorption of the use of GHG emitting energy sources contribute to reducing the causes of climate change.
Furthermore, professionals need to ‘Design with Nature’. This is also the title of the book written by McHarg in 1971 [2]. Design with nature means cities ‘live with’ rather than against the more powerful forces and flows of nature. Cities can cope with the reversing of climate change while concurrently responding to the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity.
With a shift of this kind, complex and mutually beneficial interactions between the built environment, the living world and human inhabitants may more readily occur. Ecosystems and the biodiversity within them can affect climate through interacting with surfaces, carbon storage in vegetation and soils, vegetation albedo, evapotranspiration, structural change in biological communities and peat-land methane emissions [3]. This is also the topic of the book ‘Regenerative Urban Design and Ecosystem Biomimicry’, written by Maibritt Pedersen Zari.
Finally, professionals need to ‘design with people’. If the integration of climate and nature is achieved, cities and buildings will play a crucial role in maintaining and improving people lives. It is thus necessary to promote outdoor thermal comfort, air quality and flood and water management to ensure the quality of outdoor experiences. Thermally tuned outdoor spaces that are pollution free, that connect people to nature, and that are safe in case of extreme climatic events could accommodate various outdoor activities and contribute greatly to urban livability and vitality. The co-evolutionary approach that is proposed here addresses climate change, ecosystem quality, energy and life in the city. These topics are all discussed in the chapter titled ‘Climate and Energy’.
ECOLOGY AND CARBON
Regenerative Design reverses environmental impacts, with designs that are carbon positive, use clean energy, incorporate waste products and cleanse the air, water and soils, with a focus on reversing climate breakdown.
Regenerative Design keeps buildings and products in use as long as possible, creating designs with long, even undefined lives that have second and future reuse potentials designed in. While part of the damage done to the ecosystem may be irreversible, it is still possible with the use of a wide range of design measures to understand, control and enrich global eco-balances with a careful circular design. Barry Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology outlined in the first chapter of The Closing Circle [4], now seen as one of the foundations of the circular economy principles, provides a sound framework for ecologically based regenerative design:
- Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms, and what affects one affects all. The cities, buildings, components and products we design and inhabit are interconnected parts of an ecosphere.
- Everything must go somewhere. Instead of the current take- make-dispose system, natural ecosystems are circular:
There is no waste. Regenerative design brings products and components from previous lives into buildings, and ensures future lives through circular economy principles.
- Nature knows best. Distrubances of natural ecosystems should be avoided by means of acting in line with natural processes and substances. Regenerative design should learn from nature and embrace natural materials and solutions.
- There is no such thing as free lunch. We need to design and to live within the balance of nature and planetary boundaries. Natural resources used should be seen as being on loan, to be paid back, and the longer we take to pay back the worse and more rapid our climate breakdown becomes.
The 2016 update of the EPBD [5] mandates all member states to establish long-term building renovation strategies aiming at decarbonising national building stocks by 2050. In addition, during the May 2019 ‘Future of Europe’ Sibiu Summit of EU leaders, eight countries called for the adoption of regulations requiring net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. However, reaching net-zero carbon emissions may not be sufficient: all detailed pathways for future CO2 reduction proposed by the IPCC report incorporate carbon dioxide removal and net negative emissions to ultimately limit global warming to 1.5°C (after a potential overshoot).
We have an urgent need to reimagine carbon, not only to reduce fugitive carbon but also to increase durable carbon, carbon that we can lock into buildings and products, that within a circular, or better still a regenerative economy, can last for hundreds of years (see Figure 3). Also, regenerative design addresses and enables the vital increase in living carbons through embracing carbon benefits of living ecosystems. The IPCC’s 12-year window to act highlights the importance of limiting the carbon we emit today. Instead of only evaluating the performance of the life cycle operational carbon, the carbon we emit today for tomorrow’s buildings (i.e. the embodied and construction carbon) needs to be a strong focus. This is the focus of the chapter titled ‘Carbon and Ecology’.
increase durable carbon
restore living carbon
remove fugitive carbon Figure 3
Reimagine Carbon: reduce fugitive carbon, increase durable and living carbon storage in buildings and natural resources.
HUMAN WELL-BEING
Regenerative Design focuses on salutogenic health and designs that are socially and culturally ‘just’. Designs for indoor and outdoor environments must demonstrably improve inhabitant health, and not merely seek to reduce ill health.
We are increasingly aware that only reducing our impact is inadequate if we are to address the myriad health issues we face. We are also increasingly aware that our actions across the built environment, through commissioning, designing, procuring, constructing, operating or disposal, have a very significant impact on human health, for better or for worse. Architects can thus be seen as ‘upstream doctors’, as buildings contribute significantly to the population’s health outcomes [6].
The interconnection between human health and the planet’s health can be used as a driving incentive for regenerative design.
This implies an in-depth knowledge and understanding of how the health of the planetary ecosystem connects with the health and well-being of people. Designers and built environment practitioners have only recently begun to understand the full impacts of building on health within the World Health Organisation definition.
Meaning ‘the generation of health’, salutogenesis describes an approach that focuses on factors supporting human health and well-being, not just on factors that cause ill health. An understanding of salutogenesis is key to progressing towards a regenerative built environment. Terri Peters, in ‘Design for Health’ [7], asks the question: ‘Can Architecture Heal?’ We are seeing evidence emerging [8] that it can and indeed is the role of Regenerative Design to ensure that it does. This is the focus of the chapter titled ‘Human Well-being’
REFERENCES
[1] Olgyay, Victor, and Aladar Olgyay. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism. Some Chapters Based on Cooperative Research with Aladar Olgyay. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1963.
[2] McHarg, Ian L. Design with Nature. 25th Anniversary edition. New York Chichester Brisbane Toronto Singapore: Wiley, 1995.
[3] Zari, Maibritt Pedersen. Regenerative Urban Design and Ecosystem Biomimicry. 1 edition.
Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
[4] Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. 1st edition. New York:
Random House Inc, 1971.
[5] Amendment of Directive 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings, Pub. L. No.
COM(2016)765 (2016).
[6] M. Brown et al., Eds., Sustainability, Restorative to Regenerative. Vienna, Austria: RESTORE, 2018.
[7] Peters, Ms Terri, ed. Design for Health: Sustainable Approaches to Therapeutic Architecture.
Wiley, 2017.
[8] Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Today ‘we have emerging strategies, approaches and tools that will allow systems to flourish and evolve’ [1]. These strategies, approaches and tools will aid and support regenerative design and include:
The education. Regenerative models, from natural ecosystems to regenerative cultures and communities, are increasingly part of the built environment curriculum, training workshops and conferences.
The thinking. Many of the greatest minds in ecology, sociology, biology, health and the built environment are setting out how we can make the regenerative journey
The language. From one of a combative, egotistic approach to design and construction, to one that embraces a worldview, seeing ourselves and our buildings as part of nature, rather than apart from it. [1]
The economic frameworks. The circular economy and doughnut economy are just two examples that are turning the take, make, dispose culture on its head. A transition to a Regenerative Economy entails changing the worldview; Fullerton and Hunter suggest ‘a shift to an ecological world view in which nature itself is the model’ and that ‘The regenerative process that defines thriving, living systems must define the economic system itself’[2].
A regenerative economy redefines wealth in terms of multiple kinds of capital rather than just financial, including living, cultural, experiential, intellectual, spiritual, social, and material capital [3].
The standards. There are emerging sustainability standards that promote regenerative practices. Examples of these standards include The Natural Step, Living Building Challenge, WELL Building Standard, One Planet Living, Planet Mark.