Designing for Regenerative Cities

As we navigate the current climate crisis and emerging environmental and economic challenges, we need to reconsider how we design for future cities and rethink our relationship with the planet to build a thriving ecosystem between our environment, society, and the economy. It’s become more critical than ever to reconsider our human-centred approach and start adopting a more life-centred approach. Adopting more expansive thinking and leveraging various advanced technologies can create the paths towards designing regenerative cities of the future. Similar to natural ecosystems, regenerative cities replace linear flows of resources and energy and adopt circularity in all its flows including those of people, activities, and data, and treat every input and output as part of a greater flow of consumption and production. Emerging technologies such as Digital Twins, AI, and blockchain, to name a few, have the capabilities to analyze energy and data flows, resource consumption, system dependencies and interconnectedness, and environmental biodiversity, and simulate and determine the best ways to produce and use materials, build better products and processes, and reuse and recycle resources into new system flows. They will also enable us to understand and learn from the bio-cultural uniqueness of places at many levels such as communities, ecosystems, and regions. These insights will provide us with the ability to understand the regional and global impacts of our actions and provide us with more holistic solutions so that we can live in harmony with our planet. 

Through this talk, we will discuss approaches and frameworks to design for regeneration, successful case studies, and practical strategies we can implement today.