1.Introduction

This Introduction covers key concepts underlying the set of proposed Best "Approach" Practices in the section that follows.  Both sections are summarized in the introductory video presentation above. 

In the 21st Century, humanity faces two interrelated defining challenges:  (1) visible accelerating climate change, and (2) invisible declining sustainability.  International agencies and scholars have documented these challenges in many reports and conferences over the past 50 years. How we respond matters. How quickly we respond matters. Ukraine faces a choice in how to build back better, and what to build. That choice will affect the extent of prosperity in the face of these 21st century trends. Fortunately, there is a new approach emerging from innovation across the planning, design, and sustainability practices of the past 20+ years.

The purpose of Guidelines Part 2:  The Regenerative City is to illuminate this new emerging approach – a new response option – with the potential to respond effectively to BOTH challenges, simultaneously.  However, using the new option requires changing our approach -- that is how we respond -- to climate and sustainability challenges. Success requires shifting from our current approach that continues to produce impacts but at a slower rate, and will only achieve partial sustainability, to the new, emerging, regenerative systems sustainability approach, or Regenerative City, that produces complete systems sustainability that solves the interrelated challenges simultaneously.  This new approach is intended for use with current best technical practices for specific environmental topics highlighted in Guidelines, Part 3.

The second-to-last section of Part 2, Regenerative city, summarizes how the new approach relates to the environmental topics addressed in Part 3, with best "technical" practices as well the degree to which the new approach is practiced by leading sustainability organizations. The final section (Conclusion:  Key Points & Summary) summarizes the essential points of this necessary shift of approach, and the primary steps of shifting to and using the new approach for each of the main types of actors.

Regenerative City:  A New and Better Label

The regenerative city is a new label for a sustainable city. It is an emerging idea enabling new concepts, content, and practice. It also illuminates a core theme of sustainable cities that has been largely invisible otherwise. Thus, it is a better label. It highlights and will help advance the shift in understanding and practice needed for climate and sustainability success for cities, city regions, and the world. 


Focus: Local Urban & Territorial Planning for Climate and Sustainability Success

This “Regenerative City” section of the Guidelines develops the concepts required for understanding the new approach (this Introduction subsection) and shifting practice (the next subsection section on Best Practices) to plan regenerative cities for climate and sustainability success. 

Regenerative City - the Key to Success

The regenerative city is one high-leverage key to climate change and sustainability success. However, planning a regenerative city requires a shift in city planning practice and sustainability practice. Practice must shift from planning parts (e.g., green buildings, EVs, etc.) to planning systems—more specifically, regenerative living systems sustainability and regenerative cities. Sustainability is not a static state or characteristic of a part. Sustainability is a dynamic systems condition where parts share characteristics that allow them to perform their function but also simultaneously support systems sustainability. 

Sustainability:  Expanding Life Support Abundance

Sustainability in nature is a perpetual life support system (regenerative, self-organizing, complex) that continually adds as much life support (wealth) as possible to a place given the constraints of energy, water, and materials cycling. Human systems, the economy in particular, can and must mimic the principles of nature to thrive and survive. In so doing, humans create a life support system (economy) of abundant, inclusive prosperity that also enhances nature’s life support capacity instead of destroying it (along with the human economy). 

Doing so will solve the twin, interrelated challenges of climate change and unsustainability simultaneously. It is the only option capable of success, and if we use regenerative systems sustainability to solve the climate crisis, we can accomplish both only for the price of one. Not only is sustainability the smart approach, the best business model, but it is a good deal!

Integrative Local and National Systems Planning

Given that the purpose of these Guidelines is focused on urban and territorial (local) planning for recovery, this Regenerative City section emphasizes planning the regenerative or sustainable city. This scale should also be understood as city-region. However, success at the local level requires a range of similar practices at the national level for maximum success. These practices are not fully developed in the Regenerative City section, but the logic can be extended to the national scale, and a national policy and program initiative should be undertaken as a companion to the local-level initiative. 

Amplifying the Built Environment-Economy Connection

Due to the built environment-economy connection, the primary step in creating the regenerative city (and region) is creating the regenerative built environment (buildings, infrastructure, roads, energy, water, waste, agriculture). Because the built environment is a core component of the local economy, doing so also creates a core component of the needed sustainability economy. Realizing the built environment-economy connection in producing either sustainability or unsustainability adds tremendous value to planning for urban sustainability (and regional, national, global) compared to the past vast undervaluation of green planning and design practice and urban sustainability more generally. 

Seven Key Points of the Built Environment-Economy Connection

The primary reasons the built environment-economy connection is important for climate and sustainability failure or success are as follows.

Using the approach of regenerative systems sustainability and urbanism is the only approach that will reduce and eliminate GHG emissions while accelerating (socio-economic) development and lifting people out of poverty, even to sufficient abundance.

The Core Theme of Regeneration 

Current Predicament – Current Sustainability Approach Cannot Produce Sustainability

From where did this regenerative approach arise? The emergence of regeneration as a central theme of sustainability and sustainable cities arises as humanity faces a predicament after its 30-year-long sustainability response since the 1992 Earth Summit:  We appear to be winning battles but losing the war. The dilemma is that our current approach is incapable of producing sustainability—and most importantly, time is running out. If so, what do we need to understand to launch an effective response?

Need for a Different Approach

Fortunately, that understanding has been emerging over the past 20+ years of planning, design, and sustainability practitioners’  innovation in their attempts to forge an effective response to the accelerating twin challenges of climate change and unsustainability. Both challenges arise from business as usual (BAU) and the ineffectiveness of current sustainability practices to reverse the economy’s destruction and pollution of the regenerative life support system of nature (referred to as sustainability as usual or SAU). SAU simply reduces the amount of incremental impact reduction, which only slows the increasing total impact but does not reverse and eliminate it. The expanding, largely unregulated, and largely unmonitored proliferation of chemicals and their industrial use is a good example. SAU will not produce sustainability and raises the need for a different approach. The literature around this need for a shift characterizes it as a shift from net negative to net positive impact.

The New Approach: Regenerative Systems Sustainability & Urbanism

The different effective approach is regenerative systems sustainability in general, and regenerative (systems) urbanism when applied to urban planning. This approach simply makes different design, material, process, purchase, and investment choices over the technology used for designing, producing, operating, and renewing infrastructure, products, services, and materials over their life cycles. In addition, these different actions are supported by policy and governance based on prices reflecting full economic costs and benefits. This approach harnesses the price mechanism and dynamics of the market to produce regenerative systems sustainability instead of degenerative demise.  For sustainability success, practitioners need to recognize, advance, and scale this emerging approach quickly.  

Use the Design Template of Regenerative Living Systems

Regenerative systems sustainability planning uses the principles of nature’s regenerative life support system as the design template. Its distinguishing characteristic is a regenerative living systems approach to sustainability. Sustainability becomes redefined around the core concept of living systems regeneration. Doing so not only reverses the economy’s destruction of the earth’s (and our human) life support system, but also creates a durable, nature-enhancing, more prosperous, and inclusive ecological economy, that is circular, resilient, and abundant.  It shifts sustainability initiatives from producing static “parts” sustainability, such as green buildings and electric vehicles, to producing whole systems sustainability.  Whole system sustainability eliminates negative impacts on nature by design and enhances nature’s natural capital and the regenerative life support processes of its circular economy. In doing so, the human economy increases production and productivity, which in turn becomes the basis for inclusive, ongoing prosperity.

Regenerative (systems) urbanism uses the same principles at the urban scale to create a regenerative built environment. That regenerative built environment is a core component of the local urban economy and sustainability.  Thus, planning, designing, and producing a regenerative built environment becomes a high-leverage, high-value sustainability initiative for reversing climate change and unsustainability. 

Innovation Trajectory

History

This new approach has emerged from innovation across many practice areas, as shown in Figure 1. 

Early innovation focused on ecosystem restoration with concepts applied to human systems (ecological planning and design). Some practices arose as nature-based solutions (NbS) focused on urban infrastructure (wastewater, stormwater, and water management and treatment, even roads). Others arose in green (living) architecture, green urban (ecological) design, and green (ecological) urban planning. They were applied mostly to new development (buildings, sites, master plans, functional plans such as infrastructure, parks, and recreation), with some applications applied to renovating the existing built environment. It was also applied to community economic planning and development. Over the past fifteen years, the new practice of biophilic city planning and design has extended these innovations, adding not only nature to the city but doing so in ways that increase the human connection to -- and appreciation of -- nature, which is essential for individual and community health. Thus, biophilic planning adds a second important function for the built environment beyond the traditional one of shelter in an aesthetic and economically efficient land use pattern and beyond that of civil engineering’s contributions to public health and safety:  clean water supply systems, wastewater treatment facilities, and sanitation systems. Other practices have arisen from ecosystem and regenerative approaches to agriculture (agroecology), to industrial design (biomimicry, cradle-to-cradle and upcycling, eco-industrial parks), and to the economy (ecosystem services, natural capital, and natural capitalism). 

Figure 1:  Sources of Knowledge and Practice – Regenerative Systems Sustainability

Professions

The new roles and trends arising from 20+ years of innovation in our planning and design professions can be summarized as follows:

From the Academy to Global Cities

Scaling regenerative systems sustainability and urbanism to a formal global practice will require recognizing, understanding, mastering, and advancing it with innovative practice. Fortunately, these processes are already occurring on an ad-hoc basis. Over the past 10+ years, the center of innovation for sustainability has shifted from the academy to cities as the following examples illustrate.

Unifying Theme—Bio Systems Mimicry

To shift the approach and practice from incremental impact reduction to systems sustainability, it is helpful to understand the unifying theme underlying current green best planning practices and the innovation that has produced them. That theme is biomimicry and an ecosystem approach. This concept understands nature and its operating principles as the economy of our regenerative life support system, not as secondary or tertiary principles that humanity can ignore and violate without severe consequences to natural and human systems. 

As such, nature’s processes and operating principles become the ruleset and design template for human activity – and for the new approach to sustainability planning. This approach has the power and potential to reverse the human economy’s present destruction of nature and the accelerating trends of climate change, unsustainability, and the resulting accelerating life support insecurity. In addition, it has the potential to usher in an age of material abundance and perpetual inclusive prosperity. 

Redefining Sustainability:  From Mitigation to Regeneration, from Parts to Systems

As a result, the primary characteristic of regenerative systems sustainability and urbanism is redefining sustainability around biological and ecological regeneration instead of incremental environmental impact reduction. Such a redefinition connects the human economy and society to the biosphere’s living systems at the foundational level of operating principles. This definitional shift illuminates the many necessary and resulting shifts in sustainability practice as shown in Table 1, principally: from components to the system, from environment to economy, and from problem solving to designing the desired future.

Table I:  Shifts in Practice When Regeneration is the Core Principle of Sustainability

Understanding this point reveals the power, potential, and innovation needed to effectively produce future urban forms whose performance (metabolism) will create a core component of local and global sustainability, climate mitigation, and resilience from a redesigned and abundant regenerative ecological economy. 

The point of departure for a regenerative systems sustainability approach is beginning with the imperatives of regenerative living systems. These imperatives are formulated as the set of performance imperatives required to eliminate negative impacts and create positive, life-support-expanding impacts. The following Figure 2 presents the core imperatives.

Figure 2:  The Regenerative Systems Performance Imperatives & Framework

The Practice

The practice of regenerative city planning begins by using the current best green planning and urbanism practices together (see the technical best practices of each of the environmental sections of these Recovery Guidelines), as a powerful package and first step. 

These then become the foundation for the continuing innovation and development of the new practices needed to close the systems sustainability performance gap. 

Conducting a strategic analysis reveals the gap by comparing current performance to needed systems performance defined by the regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives.

These practices will form the core component of the local sustainability economy—the regenerative built environment.

Although this section of the Guidelines focuses on regenerative city planning (regenerative systems urbanism), working with the best practices of the next subsection may require working in the other three practice areas (nos. 2 - 3, below) of regenerative systems sustainability, to varying degrees needed for the success of the regenerative urbanism initiative, as follows. 

A more complete treatise on regenerative systems sustainability would develop the details of practice areas nos. 2 - 3. 

The next section presents a core set of regenerative systems urbanism’s best practices (BPs) required to create the regenerative built environment of urban sustainability.