“Every project, no matter its size, has the potential to contribute to its local, regional and global contexts. We live in times where every single project becomes an opportunity to channel our collective creative capacity towards more regenerative ways of living and practising.”
— Angelica Rojas
The following text is taken from Angelica’s PhD thesis
Transformative Processes for Architectural Design: A Heuristic Study of Regenerative Practices (Rojas-Gracia 2020).
What is Regeneration?
Regeneration sees all human activities and habitat (homes, neighbourhoods, cities, regions) able to contribute to planetary health (Walh 2016). This means that design and development practices can be channelled towards ‘creating conditions conducive to life’ (Benyus 2002).
Regeneration and sustainability are practices that are complementary and can work together. However, regeneration seeks beyond reducing waste and resource consumption and implies understanding projects from a living systems perspective, working to create positive outcomes for people and all living beings.
Regenerative Design was first introduced to the built environment by John T. Lyle, an educator, landscape architect and architect. Lyle proposed a shift from linear processes that create adverse environmental impacts at all the different states (extraction to waste) to circular flows of resources in which the idea of waste is replaced by self-renewing or regenerative cycles (Lyle 1994). For this circular cycle to happen, an approach that looks beyond highly technologically based models to models of greater complexity rooted in natural processes is needed.
Regenerative Design and Development focus on the potential to create mutually beneficial relationships between the living systems, the built environment and the communities that interact in a project.
It seeks to reconnect human intentions, activities and habitat with the evolution of natural systems in a constant process of co-evolution (Hes and du Plessis 2014).
What does it mean for Design Practice?
Regeneration understands the design process as a pivotal period to develop capacity within the social and ecological systems that interact in a project.
Spatial projects, or urban interventions (including buildings), are understood as nodes where the different flows of a system interact (Ryan 2013; CLEAR 2016). For example, the design of a school brings together the flows of students, parents, teachers, neighbours, learning pedagogies, materials, natural resources, built environment practitioners and monetary resources. Therefore within the design process lies the potential to nurture beneficial connections between the different aspects that come together and to harness the possibilities presented during the creative process of a spatial project in a way that supports ecological and social systems.
Regeneration implies looking at complex issues through the lenses of potential. For example, the Australian housing crisis brings the opportunity to create developments, frameworks, and systems that raise the quality of housing and construction practices and to foster beneficial relationships between communities, neighbourhoods, project teams, natural systems, and local economies.
From a regenerative perspective, design interventions are capable of ‘developing capacity’ and ‘creating new potential’ for living systems (Mang and Haggard 2016).
Developing capacity: “The process of cultivating the capacity and capability in people, communities, and other natural systems to renew, adapt and thrive” (CLEAR 2016).
Creating new potential: “Creating systems and places that have the capacity to evolve towards increasing states of health and vitality” (CLEAR 2016). This involves working with the existing assets of a place while developing a deeper understanding of the possibilities presented through the design intervention.
At IncluDesign we are applying regenerative principles in our projects and we are thrilled to support our clients, partners and fellow design practices through their own regenerative journey.
Through her practice-focused PhD, Angelica developed a design approach that enables designers, built environment professionals, communities and stakeholders to nurture social, ecological and personal development by applying regenerative practices in their projects and processes.
Regeneration is an on-going process that needs as many organisations and individuals involved … so Let’s work together!
How can the design process enable regeneration?
Cultivate and nurture
Relationships
The purpose of modifying an existing place and imagining something ‘ought to be’ is a medium to bring multiple agents, actors, disciplines, and resources together towards supporting regenerative outcomes for the social and ecological context of a project.
Activate individual
and collective agency
The concept of agency connects intentionality, awareness and action or retrieving from harmful activities (Awan et al. 2011).
Design processes offer a fertile ground to activate individual and collective agency that can manifest in diverse forms.
Agency in design refers to the ability to work and collaborate with ‘others’ (communities, disciplines, non-human agents) (Petrescu 2013) and on behalf of ‘others’ (future generations, the ecological of a river, other creatures) connecting actions, skills, decisions and potential interventions with a common purpose.
“Personal agency is the strong inner urge that people have to be active players in their world”
Caroline Sanford
.
Stimulate active and
inclusive engagement
Design that aims to support and serve local communities and places would have more chances to respond to their needs by integrating collective processes that involve the stakeholders who would ultimately be affected by potential design outcomes.
Tip: Inclusivity involves other species, the water cycle or a river as stakeholders. Think about how their interests and wellbeing are considered and represented during the design process (CLEAR 2016).
Develop inner
Capacity
Professional practice and personal development are deeply interconnected. Embracing regeneration includes our minds, hearts, emotion and spirits.
“if we don’t address intangibles like motivation and will, the tangible solutions that seem so obvious will continue to elude us” (Mang and Haggard 2016, xiv).
Embrace transdisciplinary collaboration
Transdisciplinary collaboration enhances the possibilities of a project to respond to the existing place values and needs and to create outcomes and processes informed by a wider knowledge base
(Reed 2009; Walh 2016).
Tip: Invite people with social and ecological skills and knowledge such as social workers, psychologists, ecologists, landscape architects not only professionals in the technical aspects.
Nourish interconnected
benefits
The design process can encourage interconnected initiatives such as community programs and partnerships, creation of local jobs, training programmes and collaborations toward regenerating degraded ecosystems.