Join the Movement Towards Regenerative Design
Chosen theme: The Movement Towards Regenerative Design. Discover how designers, builders, planners, and communities are shifting from minimizing harm to restoring ecosystems, strengthening culture, and creating places where both people and nature can flourish.
From Sustainability to Regeneration: A Movement Takes Shape
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Regenerative design reframes success from doing less harm to actively creating the conditions for life to thrive. Instead of only reducing footprints, we grow handprints—measurable benefits for water, biodiversity, carbon, and community resilience. Share your perspective on this shift.
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Every place has a living story—its geology, soils, hydrology, species, and cultures. Regenerative practice listens first, mapping bioregional flows and histories to guide design decisions that align with local ecologies. Tell us what your place is teaching you.
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In one city, daylighting a buried stream reduced flooding, cooled summer air, and drew families back to an overlooked park. Businesses emerged around new shade and water. Regeneration often begins with humble reconnection to living systems. Would your city embrace this?
Core Principles of Regenerative Design
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Reciprocity and Living Value
Regenerative projects seek reciprocal relationships: buildings give back more energy, water, and habitat than they take. This view treats structures as partners within a living system, continually enhancing local vitality. Comment with examples of reciprocity you admire.
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Systems Thinking and Feedback Loops
Design choices ripple through energy, water, materials, mobility, and culture. Systems thinking uses feedback—monitoring, learning, and adapting—to improve outcomes over time. Post-occupancy lessons become design intelligence for the next project, accelerating movement-wide progress.
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Co-Creation With Communities and Indigenous Knowledge
Regeneration grows through collaboration, honoring Indigenous stewardship, traditional ecological knowledge, and community priorities. Co-creation builds trust, reveals place-specific wisdom, and yields solutions that endure. Share how you center community voices during early design conversations.
Fifteen-Minute Cities and Mixed-Use Vitality
Compact districts with homes, schools, clinics, shops, and parks within a short walk or ride reduce travel emissions and invite spontaneous connection. Regenerative mobility begins with proximity. How close is your daily life to what matters most?
Nature-Based Infrastructure at City Scale
Permeable streets, bioswales, shade trees, and sponge-city strategies cool heat islands, manage floods, and clean air. These green systems also spark civic pride. Post your city’s best nature-based example, and we may feature it in a future story.
Equity, Health, and Cultural Regeneration
True regeneration includes social repair: safe streets, inclusive public space, affordable homes, and cultural anchors. When mobility works for children, elders, and workers, the whole system thrives. Tell us how your community measures mobility justice.
Measuring What Matters
Use Living Building Challenge, One Planet Living, or Doughnut Economics to frame net-positive goals for carbon, water, biodiversity, and equity. Targets grounded in science and place reduce greenwash and inspire credible, transformative action.
Measuring What Matters
A school retrofit installed sensors for energy, indoor air, and water reuse while students led biodiversity counts. Sharing results with parents built trust and momentum for district-wide change. Would your team publish a transparent performance report?
Codes, Standards, and Public Leadership
Cities can prioritize deconstruction, mandate low-carbon concrete, reward water reuse, and adopt nature-positive planning. Public projects should model best practices and share open data. Which policy would most accelerate regenerative outcomes where you live?
Financing the Regenerative Transition
Green bonds, mission-driven capital, impact funds, and performance contracts can de-risk early adoption. When we value avoided floods, cleaner air, and healthier people, projects pencil differently. Tell us what financing tools your organization is exploring.
Ask Regenerative Questions Early
Who or what will be healthier because this exists? How will the project give back to water, soils, and culture? Framing questions shape outcomes. Share yours, and we will compile a community-sourced checklist.
Prototype, Pilot, and Learn Fast
Start small: a modular garden bed, a reclaimed material wall, a bio-based insulation mockup. Measure, iterate, and scale what works. Subscribe for our monthly pilot challenges and peer-reviewed case notes.