Regenerative Design Guidebook Outlines Principles to Move Beyond Sustainability
Key takeaways:
- Regenerative design goes beyond minimizing ecosystem damage to actively promoting restoration.
- Regenerative design principles recognize that environmental, social, and economic factors are linked and must be considered together to prevent further environmental damage while offering solutions for renewal.
Why we think this matters to designers: A framework of regenerative design principles may help professionals ask questions that direct advances in materials, products, and practices to further develop a circular economy in the architecture & design field.
Academics from the University of Bath have issued a new resource on the potential for regenerative design to deliver net-positive benefits, as well as actionable principles for change. RENEW: a manifesto for regenerative design and engineering is a 35-page electronic guidebook developed by the university’s Centre for Regenerative Design & Engineering for a Net Positive World (known as RENEW).
A top 10 ranked university in the U.K., the University of Bath has demonstrated international leadership in research dedicated to achieving climate resilience, decarbonization, and a healthy future for the planet.
The RENEW center takes a cross-disciplinary approach to developing systems for the built environment that harmonize benefits to society with the natural world.
RENEW combines expertise from more than 40 academics, researchers, and industry stakeholders in water and chemical engineering, materials and composites, and placemaking and architecture with social science, economic, governance, and ecological studies.
Regenerative > Sustainable?
Technology, science, and education have long focused on improving the human experience—such as by extending life expectancy worldwide—and evolving the spaces where we live, work, and play, but have done so through “extractive, non-regenerative practices,” said RENEW members in the manifesto.
Sustainability has been championed for four decades to manage and minimize damage to the Earth’s resources but has been slow to penetrate the industrialized world. The guidebook’s authors note that contemporary net-zero emissions efforts and global climate target policies do not prescribe a way forward for “human systems to contribute positively to natural systems.”
In order to adequately mitigate the impacts of climate change, improve biodiversity, and rebalance social inequities, the RENEW manifesto authors indicate that society requires an evolution from resource exploitation to a framework that prioritizes restoration of the global ecosystem.
“Regenerative design, as a philosophy and practice, aims not merely to limit the damage we cause to the environment but to restore natural systems.”
In an announcement launching the RENEW guidebook, center director and professor Sukumar Natarajan said that the initiative is designed to provide guiding principles for engineering, architecture, and other disciplines that enable society to “create resilient, fair communities that can thrive in balance with nature, while improving standards of living.”
Six Principles of Regenerative Design
The RENEW manifesto lays out six guiding principles of regenerative design, then offers a framework for putting them into practice. The six principles include:
- Reflective governance—Establish continuously evolving metrics and monitoring practices to track progress and impact.
- Embrace interconnectivity—Recognize that the world is intricate and interdependent. Take a holistic view accounting for the dynamic relationships between ecosystems and communities.
- Work as nature—Work harmoniously with and as nature. Design systems that work as part of species and ecosystem patterns, processes, and cycles.
- Prioritize net positive—Prioritize regeneration, replenishment, and restoration, recovering and reusing waste to create net-positive solutions and an abundance of resources. The aim should be to repair, sustain, and enrich the planet, rather than deplete its precious resources.
- Cultivate resilience—Systems should be designed with a capacity to adapt, diversify, and self-renew even in the face of uncertainty, change, and disturbances.
- Transmit—Document, curate, and publicize to help proliferate best practice through active discourse on a global scale.
The authors concluded that the guide is intended as a foundation for continuously evolving this multidisciplinary approach to solving building/engineering problems.
Center co-director Emma Emanuelsson observed that “We want this manifesto to help create a less anxious future for today’s young people, and for humans and nature to prosper in equal measure. […It] may not show us the full journey, but it does have advice and a framework to allow us to get started.”
For the full guidance, readers can download RENEW: a manifesto for regenerative design and engineering free of charge from the University of Bath’s website.
