Five budding action areas for regenerative design

Delivering infrastructure that connects rural communities is key to overcoming rural poverty. There are multiple ways to do this regeneratively, such as utilising sustainable technology and community-based participation and capacity building.

These more regenerative approaches are beginning to occur in some pockets, with organizations like Bridges to Prosperity using stones for rural infrastructure to leverage an abundance of local materials and skills in Rwanda.
Partnering with diverse stakeholders to collaboratively plan, construct, and manage rural transport infrastructure can create place-based designs that respond to the potential of local conditions.

This could encourage a shift away from default reliance on high-tech, imported and standardized approaches by blending external expertise with local knowledge to construct infrastructure that is sustainable, scalable, and tailored to the region's needs.

Reliable and comprehensive data is a key element that connects actors in the built environment system. Making the social and environmental impact of built environment choices visible increases accountability and enables scrutiny.

There has been a growth in embodied carbon dashboards connecting to Building Information Modelling (BIM) to align project decisions with some ecological impacts, as ways to promote long-term and systemic improvements. Extending this to also include the "second site" involves recognizing the broader ecological, social, cultural, and economic systems that influence and are influenced by a project, making these systems visible to decision-makers.

This approach fosters interconnectedness between nature and people, and decisions can be taken to align with broader system improvements rather than isolated and specific considerations. It integrates industry-accepted tools, such as embodied carbon tracking, and extends them to include wider system connections.

Steps in this area can expand traditional corporate accountability, encourage holistic problem-solving, and shift focus from short-term gains to long-term impact. Exercises like ‘Regenerative Twin’ studies, that centre regenerative principles in early design stages, help demonstrate the potential of regenerative design in real-world projects.

Finding ways to retrofit existing structures using a regenerative approach will be essential across much of Europe’s building stock to achieve environmental and social goals.

Steps are happening here, with initiatives like The UK Green Building Council’s Regenerative Places Programme exploring how retrofitting can catalyze systemic benefits, using a place-based approach to strengthen local networks and foster long-term resilience.

Regenerative retrofitting involves updating and renewing buildings in ways that restore and enhance broader social and ecological systems. This approach emphasizes the interconnectedness of physical, human, and natural systems, ensuring that retrofits contribute to decarbonization, improved biodiversity, social value, and climate resilience.

It challenges the conventional push for building new structures and technical fixes, such as isolated energy efficiency measures, by focusing on adapting existing built environments to become regenerative.

Planning systems hold critical sway over large-scale land-use decisions in the built environment.

Recent years have seen initial steps in the UK to integrate nature protection and recovery in planning decisions, through Biodiversity Net Gain requirements for built environment developments and a system of spatial strategies for local nature recovery across England (LNRS).

These recent developments include aspects of regenerative design by increasing the importance placed on nature, and can form a foundation from which to learn and subsequently deepen and extend regenerative practices in planning policy.

Deeper engagement with regenerative design at a planning level would likely include approaches that integrate natural and social systems as equal partners and cut across established local authority and policy domain boundaries. It would also challenge traditional urban development focused solely on growth by incorporating local knowledge into decision-making processes.

When operating within existing business models and regulations it can be difficult to establish physical spaces to experiment with regenerative practices, fail, and learn.

Regenerative design requires deeper, long-term engagement with place, which is often more feasible in contexts that move beyond the dominant paradigm of private ownership—where individual control and profit are prioritized. Demonstrating these alternatives through pilot projects can create case studies that serve as foundations from which expanded or joined up projects could develop.

There are nascent regenerative actions in a range of experimental spaces, some intentional and others emerging out of crisis – like in Syria with the ‘Make Rojava Green Again’ activities. Philanthropic funding can establish and protect long-term use of land for regenerative experiments, as shown by Atelier LUMA, which transformed a former SNCF railyard in Arles, France. Acquired by the LUMA Foundation in 2008, the site became Parc des Ateliers, hosting Atelier LUMA’s regenerative design and research lab.

Creating places for regenerative experiments at small scales can foster collaboration and experimentation. These live laboratories can demonstrate the potential of regenerative design in a way that shift mindsets, shapes alternative economic models and influences policy agendas.