Check out the episode:
You can find the shownotes through this link.
Are you interested in how to regenerate urban ecosystem services?
Our debate today works with the article titled Biodiver_Cities: An exploration of how architecture and urban design can regenerate ecosystem services from 2019, by Jennifer Koat and Maibritt Pedersen Zari, presented at the 53rd International Conference of the Architectural Science Association 2019.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Joris de Leeuw in episode 438 talking about the opportunities within regeneration.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how regenerative architecture and urban design can actively restore ecosystem services. This article proposes the integration of biophilic design principles and ecosystem biomimicry to improve socio-ecological health.
[intro music]
Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
[music]
Speaker 1: Imagine a skyscraper that doesn’t just block the wind, but actually cleans the smog out of the air.
Speaker 2: Or a building that produces more fresh water than the people inside it consume.
Speaker 1: Exactly. For decades, our gold standard has been sustainable architecture, which really just means buildings that try to do slightly less damage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, doing less bad, basically.
Speaker 1: But today we are asking a bigger question. As cities like Wellington, New Zealand densify, how do we move to regenerative design, where urban areas actually create ecological health?
Speaker 2: It is a massive shift in thinking.
Speaker 1: It is. And my main takeaway from this study is that individual buildings must function as active technical ecosystems that need to directly provide necessary services like fresh water, energy, and habitat.
Speaker 2: While I completely agree that the current paradigm of just trying to minimize our ecological footprint is failing us, the mechanics of achieving that regenerative future look very different at scale. An individual building simply lacks the physical footprint to solve macro ecological problems.
Speaker 1: You really think so?
Speaker 2: I do, yeah. True regenerative success has to rely on urban scale master planning We need to leverage biophilic design to trigger widescale human behavioural change.
Speaker 1: The sheer urgency of the population math forces us into this building-level approach, though. Like in New Zealand alone, we are looking at a predicted increase of one point one nine million people in urban centres by the year twenty forty-three.
Speaker 2: That is a tight timeline.
Speaker 1: Extremely tight. As urban populations boom and traditional green spaces vanish, we just cannot rely on parks or distant nature reserves to do the heavy lifting anymore. The buildings themselves must take on the burden. The study actually breaks this burden down into three categories of ecosystem services: provisioning, which is what the ecosystem gives us, like water; regulating, how it balances the environment, like cooling the air; and supporting, which means creating habitats.
Speaker 2: And those are great metrics.
Speaker 1: They are. And their design experiment on Wellington’s Tory Street proves architecture can technically mimic natural ecosystems right now. It is a terraced new build incorporating rainwater collection, solar panels, and indoor food gardens.
Speaker 2: See, those categories are incredibly useful, but they actually highlight the flaw in hyper-focusing on the individual building. When you look at the study, it explicitly points out that vital regulating services, like climate regulation, are much better suited to the master plan scale. They rely heavily on reducing transport emissions. You cannot solve that with one building’s plumbing or solar array. When a master plan integrates deep biophilic design, say, turning a concrete street into a shaded plant-lined greenway, it psychologically lowers human stress. It changes how people interact with their environment. Suddenly, walking or cycling becomes more appealing than driving. That psychological and behavioural shift triggers a systemic drop in emissions that one building’s technical upgrades could never achieve.
Speaker 1: Those behavioural shifts are great in theory, but they are incredibly slow. Let’s look at the hard metrics of the Wellington design experiments because they show immediate results. A building shouldn’t just be a sheltered box. It should act as an active organ in the urban body. Just like your kidneys filter toxins for your biological system, a regenerative building uses biofiltration walls to actively clean the city’s polluted rainwater. In the Tory Street master plan metrics, the building-level design demonstrated the capacity to capture over a hundred twenty-six thousand cubic meters of rainwater per year.
Speaker 2: That is a lot of water.
Speaker 1: That is enough freshwater provision for eight hundred ten dwellings. They also achieved fifteen point five percent indigenous habitat, which is well over their ten percent target. That is concrete, immediate proof that technical ecosystem provision works locally.
Speaker 2: I come at it from a different way, though Those water capture numbers are great for the building’s inhabitants, absolutely, but they completely ignore the wider climate issue and the physical limits of the architecture itself.
Speaker 1: What physical limits?
Speaker 2: The researchers explicitly noted they lacked accurate calculations for purification, climate regulation, and nutrient cycling at that local scale. Let’s take air purification as an example. To purify its own proportionate share of the air, the ecosystem services goal for a single building site requires processing 160 kilograms of nitrogen dioxide. To actually do that, the building essentially has to become a giant breathing lung.
Speaker 1: That sounds impressive.
Speaker 2: Impressive, yes, but it requires massive complex infrastructure. If a building is entirely consumed by the heavy machinery required to process that much NO2, it leaves very little room for it to be a comfortable, functional office space or home.
Speaker 1: But if you’re listening to this and picturing a massive, loud industrial exhaust pipe taking up the lobby- We need to adjust that image. The technical systems don’t have to be intrusive in a negative way.
Speaker 2: But often they are intrusive, and that leads to a critical disconnect in how humans actually experience these spaces. The paper categorizes biophilic design into three areas based on thirty-two distinct elements. It explicitly finds that the third category, the experiential nature of the space, has the absolute least synergy with practical ecosystem service provision.
Speaker 1: Remind me what falls under that category.
Speaker 2: It includes vital psychological needs like mystery, refuge, and spatial harmony. If you over-engineer a building to heavily process waste or capture every single drop of water, you risk turning it into a processing plant. You compromise the very architectural qualities that give humans psychological well-being and a cultural attachment to their place
Speaker 1: I’m not convinced by that line of reasoning because you are focusing on the category with the least synergy rather than the one with the most.
Speaker 2: Fair enough.
Speaker 1: The text explicitly states that the first category, physical nature and space, which incorporates elements like flowing water, living plants, and natural thermal variability, has the highest synergy with ecosystem services.
Speaker 2: But how does that look in practice?
Speaker 1: This is where the concept of eco-revelatory design comes in. Eco-revelatory design means the building’s literal plumbing is on display. If a building’s water purification system is visible to the user as an indoor waterfall or an exposed biofilter, it provides the ecosystem service and the visual biophilic connection simultaneously.
Speaker 2: A functional waterfall in the lobby.
Speaker 1: Exactly. It actively educates the user and prompts the very behaviour change you are advocating for, but it does so while actually doing the hard ecological work of cleaning the water.
Speaker 2: Relying on an eco-revelatory waterfall in a lobby to slowly educate citizens about their consumption patterns is a beautiful architectural concept. I really mean that. But it simply does not match the scale or the timeline of our macro-level ecological problems.
Speaker 1: See, the timeline is exactly why we need these technical interventions built into the concrete immediately.
Speaker 2: Immediately.
Speaker 1: Yes. I will admit translating complex nutrient cycling into a single building blueprint is incredibly daunting, like aiming for a target of 104,000 fewer tons of annual waste.
Speaker 2: That is a massive target for one building.
Speaker 1: It is. But look at the reality on the ground. Native land cover is currently less than 2% in urban areas. We are functionally operating at zero.
Speaker 2: That is grim.
Speaker 1: We do not have time to wait for a generational shift in human transport or systemic consumption behaviours. The immediate technical integration of supporting services like nutrient cycling and habitat creation into every single new building is a non-negotiable necessity for our cities to survive.
Speaker 2: The scale of survival requires systemic cooperation, not just individual building heroism. The paper’s conclusion is very clear on this point, actually. Architects cannot solve these issues alone.
Speaker 1: No one is saying they should work in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: But they require cooperation across social, cultural, and economic systems. If we focus too heavily on building level technical fixes, we risk creating isolated green fortresses.
Speaker 1: Green fortresses?
Speaker 2: Yes Perfectly functioning eco-bubbles sitting in the middle of a dying, polluted city grid. The real solution highlighted in the Tory Street master plan wasn’t just highly technical terraced buildings. It was redesigning the street itself to drastically reduce vehicle use.
Speaker 1: Which takes years of city council approvals.
Speaker 2: Maybe. But that urban scale lever creates deep structural human behavioural shifts that a single building simply cannot achieve, no matter how efficiently it runs its own internal ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So looking at the big picture, we arrive at two distinct paths toward the exact same regenerative goal. On one hand, the push for architecture to serve as direct technical infrastructure, actively mimicking ecosystems at the building level to guarantee immediate service provision.
Speaker 2: And on the other, the emphasis on macro level master planning and biophilic design as levers for broader systemic behavioural change.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Both paths acknowledge that merely trying to be sustainable is no longer enough. Cities must transition into active generators of ecological health. We just fundamentally disagree on the most effective primary mechanism to get us there.
Speaker 1: Technological provision at the building scale versus behavioural influence at the broader urban scale.
Speaker 2: Precisely.
Speaker 1: It is a fascinating tension. Looking at urban development through this dual lens is incredibly valuable, especially as we figure out how these specific ecosystem trade-offs will be managed in the cities of tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Complexity in a system like a city almost always requires multiple perspectives to fully appreciate. We need to understand the limitations of our structures just as much as we understand their potential to transform our daily lives.
Speaker 1: There is undoubtedly much more to explore in Koat and Zari’s work. We will leave it to you to form your own conclusion. But the next time you look at a new high-rise going up in your city, ask yourself, is it just a passive box, or could it be a living, breathing organ in the urban body?
[music]
What is the future for cities podcast?
Episode and transcript generated with Descript assistance (affiliate link).
What is The Future for Cities? Podcast 
Leave a comment