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The regenerative projects that show us how buildings can positively affect the planet

Words:
David Cheshire

The few truly regenerative buildings across the world can teach us how the built environment could help to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis

The PAE Living Building, Portland.
The PAE Living Building, Portland. Credit: ZGF Architects

There are precious few truly regenerative buildings scattered across the world, but these exemplars have a lot to teach us about how the built environment can become an active part of the ecosystem and help to avert the worst impacts of the climate and biodiversity crises.

Buildings and cities are currently a huge burden on the planet. As well as the land required to build on, they cast a long shadow on our ecosystems, from the mining of resources through to capturing and treating water, dumping sewage into our rivers and polluting pristine environments with ‘forever chemicals’.

When many of us spend most of our time surrounded by concrete, steel and tarmac, it is easy to forget that we are utterly dependent on natural systems for every breath of fresh air, sip of clean water and mouthful of food. The ecosystem is already in crisis and every building we construct further undermines the very mechanisms that allow us to survive.

Over the last 30 years, we have been trying to reduce this harm by designing sustainable buildings that use less energy, water and materials, while generating less waste and pollutants. This has been invaluable in raising awareness and starting the journey towards improving performance, but all these efforts have only made the built environment less harmful to the planet. The increasing natural disasters and freak weather events are a stark reminder that this is no longer enough.

What if we could, instead, design buildings that had a positive impact on the planet? Ones that restored and regenerated natural systems and even metabolised like living organisms.

Imagine creating buildings and cities that contribute energy and food, capture water, sequester carbon, clean the air, treat pollutants and reclaim nutrients from waste. All made from locally available resources. Imagine local infrastructure that defends against flooding, is a haven for pollinators, reduces overheating and reconnects humans with nature.

Synthesis of regenerative design principles.
Synthesis of regenerative design principles. Credit: Regenerative by Design, David Cheshire, RIBA Publishing, 2024

It may sound like a wild daydream, but there are examples of regenerative buildings that have become an active part of the ecosystem. There are even design approaches, such as the Living Building Challenge, that are encouraging and certifying projects that achieve this aim.

My newly published book, Regenerative by Design, includes several case studies that demonstrate how regenerative design principles can be implemented in practice.

Based on extensive research and interviews with designers who are already creating regenerative buildings, the book includes seven regenerative design principles and maps them onto the hierarchy of scale from the site through to the ecosystem, all bounded by the planetary limits (as shown in Figure 1 above).

The design principles (the seven dark green ellipses) straddle across all four of the concentric circles to demonstrate that the building and the site is intimately linked to the ecosystem, and that the wider context of each building has to be considered – not just the site with the red-line boundary.

The book includes pioneering case studies that demonstrate how each of these design principles can be applied. Here are five key lessons that can be applied to other projects.

  • PAE Living Building: net positive by keeping the energy and water use within the budget afforded by the site.
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    PAE Living Building: net positive by keeping the energy and water use within the budget afforded by the site. Credit: ZGF Architects. Photographer: Benjamin Benschneider
  • PAE Living Building.
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    PAE Living Building. Credit: ZGF Architects. Photographer: Lara Swimmer
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Gain a deep understanding of the ecosystem of the site and the context

Regenerative design starts with an in-depth understanding of the site all the way back to the pre-development conditions. The pre-development state provides an insight into what a thriving ecosystem would look like in that location and this can even be measured using existing tools that quantify the services provided by ecosystems, such as the pollination of crops, the purification of air and water, and even climate regulation. The values of each ecosystem service can then be set as a target for the new development, so the project can achieve the same level of carbon sequestration, flood resilience or water purification as the greenfield site.

The Google HQ in San Francisco Bay, designed by Heatherwick Studio, has an engineered wetland habitat on its campus which captures all the stormwater run-off, provides habitat, mitigates flood risk, and purifies the water. This successfully mimics many of the ecosystem services that would have been on the pre-development site and allows staff and visitors to connect with nature.

Schoonschip sustainable floating community, Amsterdam.
Schoonschip sustainable floating community, Amsterdam. Credit: Space and Matter. Image by Isabel Nabuurs

Set budgets based on resources available

A regenerative building makes best use of every drop of rain and every ray of sunshine. The site analysis considers the amount of solar energy and rainfall that can be captured, which then dictates the budget limits for the design. Both the PAE Living Building (ZGF Architects) and the Santa Monica City Hall East (Frederick Fisher and Partners) are net positive by keeping the energy and water use within the budget afforded by the site.

Look at the whole system

Creating regenerative buildings requires designers to think beyond the site boundary and to be aware of the systems that support the construction and operation of buildings. The ideal outcome is to shift away from relying on the wider natural and human infrastructure, moving the emphasis towards site-based and local systems before scaling up towards the city or regional level. As well as being more regenerative and resilient, creating local energy generation, capturing rainwater, locally growing food and treating waste makes building occupants more immediately aware of the impacts of their actions.

Learning a new discipline

To deliver regenerative buildings, design teams will have to break away from their defined roles and understand the wider context and implications of design decisions. They will have to learn new skills and gain new knowledge in exciting topics such as ecosystem services, ecology and biomimicry. Ecologists typically only have a walk-on part in the majority of projects, but regenerative design requires people with knowledge and understanding of natural systems to be centre-stage

Schoonschip. Credit: Alan Jensen
Schoonschip floating gardens. Credit: Isabel Nabuurs

New mechanisms needed

Regenerative design needs new rules that challenge everything from the way projects are funded through to how they interact with utility companies. For example, the Schoonschip floating neighbourhood in Amsterdam is a community-led scheme that used an alternative financial mechanism (collective private commissioning) for its procurement and funding. The community set up a foundation, contributed to the collective budget and invested in the sustainable solutions. The community commissioned Space&Matter to develop the urban plan, the design codes for the plots and the design of the ‘smart jetty’ that would provide the infrastructure for the scheme.

The project also applied a microgrid to exchange the energy generated by the photovoltaics between each of the homes. This requires another type of organisation – an aggregator – to manage the transactions and create links with other networks. This required an experimental exemption from the current energy laws, which was actively encouraged in the Netherlands and paved the way for other projects to adopt a similar model.

  • Schoonschip floating community under construction
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    Schoonschip floating community under construction Credit: Jan Willem Sieburgh
  • Schoonschip living on the water.
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    Schoonschip living on the water. Credit: Alan Jensen
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These case studies show that it is possible to create regenerative buildings and communities. These ideas have already started to be scaled up to other projects. Pioneering schemes such as Schoonschip have been very generous in providing feedback and lessons learned, which goes against the grain for many projects that only communicate the positive outcomes.

Regenerative design is a radical concept. It moves away from a human-centric view that ecosystems and the planet’s resources are there to be used, towards one where humans and ecology co-exist. It acknowledges that humans are part of the web of life, not apart from it. It is a huge challenge, but one I believe we have to rise to. The alternative is the decline and destruction of our life support system and there’s no way we can build our way out of that.

David Cheshire is a director at AECOM, specialising in sustainability in the built environment.

Regenerative by Design: Creating Living Buildings and Cities is published by RIBA Publishing

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