"More and more designers and builders are realizing that...solutions to the real problems of development continue to elude us. Today’s green projects conserve energy, reduce wastes, and improve the quality of life. Yet these improvements only slow the degradation of planetary ecosystems. ...Development, with its high impacts on the planet, needs to become a source of ecological health."
Revitalist Magazine article, 2006
"Regenerative Design is grounded in...the belief that, as a part of a larger order, we humans must act in harmony with those larger patterns. When we do so, our designs become instruments for enabling the whole of a place to move to a richer and healthier expression of life. And in turn, a healthier whole grows the viability and vitality of the part (be it a river restoration or a housing development). By seeing the ultimate aim of all our work as the regeneration and evolution of increasingly vital, viable and inspiriting places, we not only create extraordinary designs, we become more fully human.”
Design Intelligence article, 2001
Examining Curitiba Through a Living Systems View
"Central to Jamie Lerner and his core team's success is their way of relating to their city as a living and evolving collective being. Rather than seeing it as an independent series of urban planning problems and issues, to be corrected through technological engineering and policy-making, they saw it as having heart and spirit that must be nurtured and elevated in its self-generating and self-regenerating capacities."
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A Living Systems Approach to Design
In the context of sustainability we are proposing a philosophical shift and an expansion of
the purpose of architecture. Sustainability is not a deliverable. Sustainability is not a thing. Sustainability is not simply about efficient technologies and techniques. It is about life – a process by which living things such as forests, neighborhoods, people, businesses, mushrooms, and polar bears ensure their viability over the long haul. It is a process of reciprocal relationship – a process by which living things support and are supported by a larger whole. That means a building can’t simply be high performance and considered sustainable.
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Principles For Sustainable Community
Community is an act of Will. It requires commitment to engage in a dynamic natural process that enables coalescence of diversity toward a common purpose. A sustainable community is life giving for generations. It includes place and people, engaged in value-adding, reciprocal relationships. It evolves in harmony with changing demands on its internal and external environments.
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The Next Step: Transforming the Building Industry to Model Nature
The site assessments commonly conducted within Permaculture often ends up yielding a laundry list of characteristics we learn about the effects of wind, water and other energies on a site, soils and underlying geological structures, plant and animal communities and their relative health, etc.. But this is like trying to understand a person by describing the color of eyes or hair, or the way they walk. When it comes to living systems, the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. If we actually want to know someone, and if we want to know a place, we must penetrate beneath the surface characteristics to discover the organizing core that generates those characteristics. Like people, places have soul.
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Introduction to The Thinking Behind Regenerative Design/Development
This bibliography lists some of our favorite books from the multiple disciplines that shape and have shaped our thinking.
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