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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Theoretical underpinnings of regenerative sustainability from 2015 by John Robinson and Raymond Cole, published in the Building Research & Information journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the difference between regenerative sustainability and regenerative development and design. This article discusses the relationship between regenerative sustainability and regenerative design.

The currently predominant sustainability discourse, emphasizing environmental constraints and limits emerged in response to increasing concern in the second half of the 20^th century about the issues of population growth, pollution and non-renewable resource depletion. This discourse has informed and provided many valuable ways of responding to complex environmental problems and strongly shaped green building practices and associated environmental assessment methods. But it has proven to be problematic in at least four key ways:

1. Its message of scarcity and sacrifice is inherently uninspiring and may be more likely to induce apathy or denial than active engagement and change.
2. In emphasising harm reduction and damage limitation, this narrative does not go far enough to counteract dangerous trends and potentially catastrophic consequences of unsustainability, rather is has prolonged inevitable environmental decline by aiming to make things less bad.
3. In attempting to measure biospheric limits or carrying capacity, this narrative has been mainly environmental in focus and paid much less attention to the social dimensions of sustainability, even if sustainability were developed precisely in order to argue for the need to integrate ecological, social and economic dimensions.
4. Ecological limits and scarcity arguments have primarily rested on an unproblematic view of scientific knowledge and a unidirectional path for knowledge transmission which rarely recognise the degree to which such understandings are rooted in cultural, political and other processes of knowledge constitutions.

The end-game of doing less harm approach has logically led to setting net-zero impact. Recently, however, net-positive propositions and approaches to building design practice have emerged due to the realisation of need to shift the perception that the act of building has negative environmental consequences to one where it adds benefit and value to its context. This paper explores the notion of regenerative sustainability – a net-positive approach to sustainability that departs from dominant sustainability narratives. However, interestingly, there are several key differences between the core underpinnings of regenerative sustainability and regenerative design.

It is important to understand the differences due to two reasons: the notion of regenerative is garnering greater interest among key stakeholders associated with the production of buildings therefor requiring clarity as to its meaning and implications, and the notion of regenerative embraces social and ecological systems, and the ways that the interactions of these systems are evidenced in formulating strategic direction in sustainability is critical. Since the origins of regenerative design and sustainability lie primarily in the social and ecological domains, understanding their relationships seem of equal consequence.

There are multiple understandings and how it is positioned within the regenerative design literature. Sustainable design has been used interchangeably with green, regenerative buildings and designs, while some depicted sustainable design as an intermediate or neutral stage between green and regenerative methods. However, the distinctions between green and regenerative approaches to building design are also evidenced in more practical ways. Green design usually refers to building form and technical systems for higher levels of environmental performance through incremental changes, as an iterative process through the lifecycle. The regenerative approaches emphasise the pre-design stage process and engage a broader range of participants within it, and they can be viewed as educational vehicles for the design team, the client and community stakeholders. Regenerative approaches are thus fundamentally about rethinking the role of buildings, the types of questions asked during the design process.

Regenerative sustainability and regenerative design reflect the different ways in which their proponents have come to grips with the notion of sustainability. While there are many similarities between them, their scientific and philosophical bases are qualitatively different. Regenerative design literature is rather rooted strongly in ecology, living systems theory, whole systems thinking and radical ecologism. The concept of regenerative sustainability rests on the notion of procedural sustainability which is rooted in experience of collaborative planning for sustainable community development.

Regenerative development and design have their roots in an ecological worldview wherein the almost infinite interrelationships of ecological systems are the way living entities, including humans, relate to, interact with and depend upon each other in a particular landscape in order to pursue and sustain healthy lives. Regenerative development and design are also approaches that support the co-evolution of human and natural systems in a partnered relationship. It is not the building that is regenerated, it is about the ways that the act of building can be a catalyst for positive change within and add value to the unique place in which it is situated. Within regenerative development and design, built projects, stakeholder processes and inhabitation are therefore collectively focused on enhancing life in all its manifestations – human, other species, ecological systems – through an enduring responsibility of stewardship. Furthermore, even regenerative design and regenerative development differ: regenerative design builds the regenerative, self-renewing capacities of designed and natural systems, regenerative development creates the conditions necessary for its sustained positive evolution.

The roots of regenerative sustainability narratives in the western world lie in a literature about environmental limits that emerged in the late 20^th century from the increasing evidence that scale and the types of human activity are producing impacts that ore both dispersed and close to or exceeding global limits or production and assimilation. The health of the biosphere is considered from this point of view to be the limiting factor for sustainability. A prerequisite for sustainability is therefore seen as the maintenance of the functional integrity of the ecosphere so that it can remain resilient to human induced stresses and remain biologically productive. For Robinson and Cole, regenerative sustainability highlights the procedural approach which goes beyond harm reduction and is based on the view that human activity does not necessarily have to be minimised because it is inherently harmful but can instead contribute directly to both environmental and human well-being, meaning net-positive outcomes.

On the one hand, the concept of regenerative sustainability and the core concepts of regenerative design are well matched in that both represent a departure from the predominant sustainability discourses. They both carry the positive message of considering the practice of building as well as human activities more generally, as things that have potential to give back more than they receive. Both of them embrace the notion of adding value to place and aspire to deliver enduring net-positive benefits to social, economic, and ecological systems while considering these systems and benefits in an integrated way.

On the other hand, regenerative design and regenerative sustainability have some fundamental differences. Regenerative design includes the science of ecology, whole systems thinking, and the political ideology of ecologism, which armed regenerative design scholars with the worldview that aligns human activities with the creative efforts of nature. However, with this latter ecologism, these scholars essentially replaced one set of goals for how we ought to live with another. Thus, regenerative design is rooted in a particular set of truths about the world. In contrast, the notion of regenerative sustainability is rooted in an understanding of reality as contested and social constructed in the procedural approaches. In other words, while regenerative design scholars would assert that there is a right way to go about designing net-positive environments, regenerative sustainability scholars would assert that there might be many ways to go about it.

While regenerative design and development and regenerative sustainability share many core assumptions – notably the focus on net-positive solutions – they also differ in ways having mostly to do with the role and status of scientific understanding and thus the degree to which certain ecologically derived goals can be specified in advance. Regardless, both suggest a reorientation of focus from reducing harm and damage to creating net-positive outcomes in both environmental and human terms at the building and neighbourhood scale.

A defining characteristic of the regenerative sustainability approach is a procedural view of sustainability, which suggests that the meaning of sustainability cannot be stated in absolute terms but must be discussed and negotiated for particular times and places. Scientific and other knowledge about natural and human systems and processes play an essential role as inputs to normative, ethical and political decisions about what kind of future we want to create.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Sustainability can be approached in a less reactionary way reducing the freeze it causes due to its doomsday mood with the regenerative approaches.
2. Although regenerative design and regenerative sustainability have similarities like going for net-positive solutions, their approaches differ
3. Both of these approaches are positive for the act of building with the need to create net-positive situations, giving back more positive things to the environment than taking out.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What does net-positive mean? Robinson and Cole also suggested this question for further research.
2. What would net-positive mean to you?
3. How can you embrace the regenerative sustainability approach questioning usual processes to find the best solution?

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