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Regenerative Urbanism: the Meaning, Challenge, and Value

 

This article was originally published in the APA International Division's InterPlan.


Regenerative urbanism is, at present, an emerging, unorchestrated response to our sustainability planning predicament. That predicament is, an ad-hoc greening approach that cannot produce sustainable cities, regions, and planet and our need to achieve sustainability before the opportunity passes. Regenerative urbanism allows us to shift from degenerative to regenerative urban-regional systems performance. This is accomplished by changing our focus from project sustainability to urban-regional systems sustainability. We need to shift our practice from simply reducing the rate of destruction, e.g., net negative mitigation, to expanding the life support capacities our city-region systems in nature, in our economies, and in our communities, , e.g., net positive regeneration.


Regenerative urbanism accomplishes this by addressing impacts at their source, the economy, by designing out negative impacts through on-going innovation. That innovation uses living systems principles as a guide. The initial focus for planning is the built environment and infrastructure (cities), and ultimately extending to the whole urbanregional system, including the economy’s supply chains. Not only would regenerative urbanism produce better places, it would create the circular ecological sustainability economy that is the necessary material basis for sustainable cities and society, for sustainability success. As a result, good planning, design, and building become more than optional nice-to-have aesthetic values when affordable. They become the source of the necessary, must-have economic development needed as the material basis for sustainability success (cities, regions, and planet), while simultaneously being the only real antidote to the climate crisis. This article summarizes key points of this opportunity.



Transit Center Park (5 acres on roof)
Transit Center Park (5 acres on roof)

What is Regenerative Urbanism?

Cities that “make” more than they “take,” regenerative cities of inclusive prosperity and wellbeing -- fact or fiction? Ten years ago, they were fiction. Today, they are an emerging fact, designed as the necessary innovation to scale at the velocity needed to respond to accelerating unsustainability.[1]


Regenerative urbanism, meaning regenerative urban systems sustainability, is arising from the familiar arena of “ecological” planning theory and practice (and design) that stretches back to the first-generation environmental movement of the 1960s.[2] Its roots go further back into the 20th century with the work of Buckminster Fuller, who some regard as an underappreciated sustainability pioneer. Fast forward to the early 21st century, and regenerative urbanism is beginning to flourish in the work of the International Living Future Institute, EcoDistricts, the Biophilic Cities Network, the APA and that of other pioneers of urban innovation.


Regenerative cities are implied but not explicitly formulated in the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Habitat III New Urban Agenda (NUA) [3] , where cities are finally on the center stage of international development policy and planning. The need for regenerative urban systems sustainability policy and planning is underlined by the current phase of the urban transition. The share of the global population living in urban areas has increased from 46% in 2000 to 55% today and is projected to be 68% by 2050. Much of that growth will reside in cities and neighborhoods that have yet to be planned, designed, and built, with the main question being, will we build regenerative cities or traditional degenerative cities?[4]


Regenerative urbanism involves developing cities whose economies and metabolisms no longer destroy the environmental life support system of the planet (net negative). Regenerative cities would eliminate impacts at their source (the economy) and produce net positive, inclusive abundance through redesign and innovation of the existing and new built environment. Regenerative cities will be a core component of and catalyst for developing the new circular ecological sustainability economy of sustainability success.[5]


From an Optional Aesthetic to a Powerful Must-Have Source of Economic Value

Regenerative urbanism, and therefore, urban planning and design, plays an essential role in creating the sustainability economy that is the material basis for sustainable cities and society. With cities and the built environment being a hard and very slow-to-change spatial dimension of our economy, how we plan, design, manage, and renew the built environment fundamentally determines urban, regional, and global sustainability performance for the next 50 to 100+ years.


As a result, the contribution—or value added--of good planning, design, and environmental quality changes profoundly from being nice-to-have optional aesthetic practices to being essential, must-have economic practices. Planners, planning, and the built environment become creators of the necessary sustainability economy. Investing in, planning, designing, and building regenerative city-regions becomes the imperative of our time and for our profession. Regenerative urbanism is the antidote for society’s current unsustainability trend. It is the method and central task on the path to city/global sustainability. From this perspective, regenerative urbanism becomes the source code, the DNA, for shifting our economy to one of net positive, regenerative, inclusive abundance and achieving the UN SDGs & NUA.


Next Step: Understand, Cultivate, and Amplify

Fortunately, regenerative urbanism does not need to be invented anew. It is already “bubbling up” from the spontaneous and uncoordinated innovation occurring across our planning, design, and building professions. This innovation has accelerated over the past 10+ years. However, there is no guarantee that it will continue or produce sustainability success. Regenerative urbanism is in its infancy. Therefore, it needs cultivation to realize its potential as a powerful source and method for city-region sustainability. We must recognize, understand, and harness it for our own cities with innovative policies and programs at each inter-related scale of practice and policy. As a result, recognizing, cultivating, and amplifying this spontaneous innovation and harnessing it for sustainability success becomes our profession’s (and society’s) core sustainability planning challenge and task.


Contours of Practice

In regenerative sustainable city-regions, the nature of the planned and designed built environment and metabolic systems become the critical focus in the shift from net negative to net positive “regenerative” systems performance.[6] Expanding use of current innovative practices would be a start. However, the shift will only be accomplished with on-going innovation (technical, financial, policy, social) so that the built environment and the larger city-economy system will perform up to the imperatives of sustainable, regenerative, net positive systems.


As a guide, regenerative urbanism uses the integrated processes of living systems to inform on-going planning, design, and building innovation, including the shift from a linear “take, make, waste” metabolism to a circular metabolism and economy.[7] Such innovation adds more total value than total cost (including externalities) in comparison to current practice. As an added bonus, it produces better urban neighborhoods and districts. They are more attractive to people and healthier places compared to those produced by traditional development or with ad-hoc greening under our current economy.


Curiously, practice--not research--is leading this pathbreaking innovation in our professions, as shown in these examples:

  • Burnaby, BC: Full strategic integration planning for a regenerative city

  • Vancouver: 100% renewable energy supply, including mobile

  • Sydney: Net positive water reuse

  • Amsterdam: Circular local economic development

  • Shanghai: Public realm vertical farming systems

  • Kashiwa-no-ha (Japan): New governance & smart regenerative city development

  • Vienna, Helsinki, Palo Alto: Automobile-eliminating, emissions-free transit

  • (Biophilic) Singapore: Integrating wild nature into the city

  • Chicago: Managing urban development to achieve health for all

  • Copenhagen: Redevelopment for the regenerative city


A critical premise of regenerative urbanism is the need to intentionally design and plan systems integration to achieve regenerative sustainable urban system performance. This requires that the focus of urban sustainability planning expand from the project to the system (nested districts, cities, and regions).[8] A regenerative approach involves “big,” system-wide integrated moves to set the foundation for easily producing the regenerative systems performance of sustainability. Four such “big moves” applicable to one test application, but also reflecting regenerative principles with transferable value, are as follows.[9]


1. Installing district water + heat/cooling exchange infrastructure to reuse existing water and energy that is lost otherwise.


2. Developing an extensive system of blue-green, biophilic city Infrastructure [10] that creates a high-value/ high-performance health environment (community, human, habitat) and that also defends against global warming challenges.


3. Connecting and integrating the built environment across scales (district, building, occupant) to easily share resources and costs in a circular metabolism and economy.[11]


4. Developing integrative metabolic centers, as part of the renewable-energy-powered circular spatial economy and to reap the benefits of a circular urban metabolism.


Preliminary testing of these regenerative sustainability system planning and design concepts suggest that regenerative design and infrastructure may cost roughly 10% more than traditional development but yield approximately 50% more value.12 This order-of-magnitude estimate indicates that benefit exceeds cost, thus warranting further attention. As a bonus, the investment would create the more attractive places that people want—and NEED for public health--in our urbanizing world (68% by mid-century in city-systems not yet constructed, but 100% of existing urban settlement patterns and infrastructure are in need of repair, replacement, and investment).


Experience with a regenerative approach suggests that new governance principles and forms of organization are required to “unlock” and produce the full value of regenerative urbanism and sustainability success.[12] Instead of traditional developers focusing on a parcel or masterplan area of new development, they will need to be new “district- or city-sustainability-developer” actors taking responsibility for producing and incorporating the full regenerative system performance of a district or city. This approach would integrate government, private, and civic functions in new partnerships to create the needed capacity for regenerative sustainable development and ultimately, sustainability. They would be able to coordinate across the sectors, scales, and phases of development beyond which any one partner could accomplish alone in the on-going innovation planning, designing, financing, building, and management of regenerative sustainability. This coordination is essential for securing, increasing, and optimizing the multiple benefits and success that a regenerative sustainability approach produces.


A Timely Opportunity

If regenerative urbanism is emerging from spontaneous innovation across our planning, design, and building professions, then we can and must harness and cultivate it to plan, design, and build cities that “make” more than they “take.” Doing so will resolve our sustainability planning predicament and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and the New Urban Agenda (NUA) of Habitat III. This success will create the good, inclusive, equitable, and climate-mitigating places we want and need. It will create the economies we need as the material basis for authentic sustainable city-regions and planet as a bonus. Thus, we need to recognize the full value of this opportunity and intentionally cultivate and use it by developing a new integrated, local-to-international urban-regional policy and planning practice. Planning, designing, and building regenerative city-regions is an opportunity that we must seize and advance, not ignore.


 

1. This formulation is developed most recently in, Mason, Pamela, William C. Clark, Krister Andersson, Pursuing Sustainability---A Guide to the Science and Practice, Princeton University Press, 2016; and earlier in a variety of seminal works, including:


  • Brown, Lester, Plan B, Environmental Policy Institute.

  • Lovins, Amory & Hunter L., Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism-Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Little Brown & Company, 1999.

  • Mang, Pamela & Bill Reed, Regenerative Development & Design, Wiley, 2017 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273379786_Regenerative_Development_and_Design).

  • Meadows, Donella, Beyond the Limits-Confronting Global Collapse and Envisioning a Sustainable Future, Chelsea Green, 1992.

  • Sachs, Jeffrey, Common Wealth – Economics for a Crowded Planet, Penguin, 2008.

  • Senge, Peter (et. al), The Necessary Revolution – How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, Doubleday, 2008

  • Steiner, Frederic, et. al., Nature and Cities—The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2016. Also, Chap 7, Creative Fitting: Toward Designing the City as Nature, Jose Alminana and Carol Franklin is an exceptional summary of the regenerative approach arising within landscape architecture.

  • Tillman Lyle, John, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, Wiley, 1996 (https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Regenerative+Design+for +Sustainable+Development-p-9780471178439).


2. Edmondson, Scott, The Regenerative Urbanism Guide – A Brief Introduction and Bibliography, Sustainability 2030 Initiative, 2016, revised 2018. https://www.dropbox.com/s/unars9x8zjg18z8/0_RegenUrb_Guide_030319.docx?dl=0


3. UN, 17 Sustainable Development Goals to Transform the World (http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/) and Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda (http://habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda).



5. McDonough, William, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability-Designing for Abundance, Northpoint Press, 2013. This theme is central to Buckminster Fuller’s comprehensive anticipatory design science and to the long thread of ecological planning theory and practice, including the work Living Future Institute and EcoDistricts


6. Tyler, Mary-Ellen “Ecological Plumbing in the Twenty-First Century,” MetroPlanner, Newsletter of the APA New York Metro Chapter, March 1999. (click) https://www.dropbox.com/s/3osctzqh06ohuik/1a1_Ecological_Plumbing.pdf?dl=0 Two recent books extending the topic substantially include:


7. See Biomimicry Institute. This component of regenerative urbanism might be termed bio-systems-mimicry! See also, Amsterdam’s approach to the circular economy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ylvr7w20e1k7zza/2c_towards_the_amsterdam_circular_economy_web.pdf?dl=0


8. A recent example that recognizes the importance of this shift to a systems focus is Stanford Engineering Program’s Sustainable Urban System Initiative, http://sus.stanford.edu/.


9. SF Planning, Regenerative San Francisco: Phase 1 - Explorations and Proposal for Action, April 2018.


10. SF Planning and the International Living Future Institute, Living Community Patterns – Exploratory Strategies for a Sustainable San Francisco (https://living-future.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Living-Communities-Patterns-SanFrancisco.pdf). Example Patterns: 01-Rewilding, 04-BlueGreen Streets, and 05-Streets to Table. Also, Biophilic Cities Network, http://biophiliccities.org/about/.


11. ZGF Architects, Environmental Stewardship--Building Across Scales.


12. Op. cit., SF Planning, Regenerative San Francisco.


13. See Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha (UDCK), the new sustainable district development entity of Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City, Japan. http://www. kashiwanoha-smartcity.com/en/concept/makekashiwa.html and https://www.zgf.com/project/kashiwa-no-ha-smart-city/.

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