Process-oriented whole systems approach to design
Regenerative design is about designing systems and solutions that work with or mimic the ways that natural ecosystems return energy from less usable forms to more usable forms. Regenerative design uses systems thinking and other approaches to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society and the well-being of nature. Regenerative design is an active topic of discussion in engineering, economics, medicine, landscape design, food systems, and urban design &amp; community development generally.
The regenerative design paradigm encourages designers to use systems thinking, applied permaculture design principles, and community development processes to design human and ecological systems. The development of regenerative design has been influenced by approaches found in biomimicry, biophilic design, net-positive design, ecological economics, circular economics, as well as social movements such as permaculture, transition and the new economy. Regenerative design can also refer to the process of designing systems such as restorative justice, rewilding and regenerative agriculture. In other words, regenerative refers to advances in Sustainable design since the 1990s, and the terms sustainable and regenerative are largely used interchangeably.
Regenerative design is increasingly being applied in such sectors as agriculture, architecture, community planning, cities, enterprises, economics and ecosystem regeneration. These designers are using green or sustainable design principles observed in systems ecology and recognize that ecosystems that are resilient typically operate in closed loop systems. Using such models, regenerative design seeks feedback at every stage of the design process. Feedback loops are integral to regenerative systems as understood by processes used in restorative practice and community development.
Regenerative design is interconnected with the approaches of systems thinking and with New Economy movement. The 'new economy' considers that the current economic system needs to be restructured. The theory is based on the assumption that people and the planet should come first, and that it is human well-being, not economic growth, which should be prioritized.
Whereas the weak definition of sustainable development was to satisfy fundamental human needs today without compromising the possibility of future generations to satisfy theirs, the goal of sustainable design was to develop restorative systems that are beneficial for humans and other species. Sustainable design is participatory, iterative and individual to the community and environment it is applied to. It intends to revitalize communities, human and natural resources, and society as a whole.
In recent years regenerative design is made possible on a larger scale using open source socio- technical platforms and technological systems as used in SMART cities. It includes community and city development processes like gathering feedback, participatory governance, sortition and participatory budgeting.
History.
Permaculture.
The term permaculture was developed and coined by David Holmgren, then a graduate student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education's Department of Environmental Design, and Bill Mollison, senior lecturer in environmental psychology at University of Tasmania, in 1978. The word "permaculture" originally referred to "permanent agriculture", but was expanded to stand also for "permanent culture", as it was understood that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming philosophy. Regenerative design is integral to permaculture design.
In 1974, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison first started working together to develop the theory and practice of permaculture. They met when Mollison spoke at a seminar at the Department of Environmental Design and began to work together. During their first three years together Mollison worked at applying their ideas, and Holmgren wrote the manuscript for what would become "Permaculture One: a perennial agricultural system for human settlements" as he completed his environmental design studies, and submitted it as the major reference for his thesis. He then handed the manuscript to Mollison for editing and additions, before it was published in 1978.
Regenerative organic agriculture.
Robert Rodale, son of American organic pioneer and Rodale Institute founder J.I. Rodale, coined the term 'regenerative organic agriculture.' The term distinguished a kind of farming that goes beyond simply 'sustainable yield'. Regenerative organic agriculture "takes advantage of the natural tendencies of ecosystems to regenerate when disturbed. In that primary sense it is distinguished from other types of agriculture that either oppose or ignore the value of those natural tendencies." This type of farming is marked by "tendencies towards closed nutrient loops, greater diversity in the biological community, fewer annuals and more perennials, and greater reliance on internal rather than external resources."
John T. Lyle (1934–1998), a landscape architecture professor saw the connection between concepts developed by Bob Rodale for regenerative agriculture and the opportunity to develop regenerative systems for all other aspects of the world. While regenerative agriculture focused solely on agriculture, Lyle expanded its concepts and use to all systems. Lyle understood that when developing for other types of systems, more complicated ideas such as entropy and emergy must be taken into consideration.
In the built environment.
In 1976, Lyle challenged his landscape architecture graduate students at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona to "envision a community in which daily activities were based on the value of living within the limits of available renewable resources without environmental degradation." Over the next few decades an eclectic group of students, professors and experts from around the world and crossing many disciplines developed designs for an institute to be built at Cal Poly Pomona. In 1994, the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies opened after two years of construction. In that same year Lyle's book "Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development" was published by Wiley. In 1995 Lyle worked with William McDonough at Oberlin College on the design of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies completed in 2000. In 2002, McDonough's book, the more popular and successful, "" was published reiterating the concepts developed by Lyle. Swiss architect Walter R. Stahel developed approaches entirely similar to Lyle's also in the late 1970s but instead coined the term cradle-to-cradle design made popular by McDonough and Michael Braungart.
Sim Van Der Ryn is an architect, author, and educator with more than 40 years of experience integrating ecological principles into the built environment. Author of eight publications, one of his most influential books titled "Ecological Design," published in 1996, provides a framework for integrating human design with living systems. The book challenges designers to push beyond "green building" to create buildings, infrastructure and landscapes that truly restore and regenerative of the surrounding ecosystems.
The Living Building Challenge (LBC) is recognized as the most progressive green building standard that can be applied to any building type around the world. The goal is to create Living Buildings that incorporate regenerative design solutions that actually improve the local environment rather than simply reducing harm. LBC was created by Jason F. McLennan and administered by the non-profit International Living Future Institute (ILFI), a global network dedicated to creating a healthy future for all. In addition to the Living Building Challenge, ILFI runs the Living Community Challenge, Living Product Challenge, Net Zero Energy Certification, the Cascadia Green Building Council, Ecotone Publishing, Declare, JUST and other leading-edge programs.
"What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?" — The Living Building Challenge (LBC).
Regenerative Cultures.
Regenerative design advocate and author Daniel Christian Wahl argues that regenerative design is about sustaining "the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain this planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish." In his book, Designing Regenerative Cultures, he argues that regeneration is not simply a technical, economic, ecological or social shift, but has to go hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life as a whole.
Green vs. sustainable vs. regenerative vs net positive.
There is an important distinction that should be made between the words 'green', 'sustainable', and 'regenerative' and how they influence design.
Green design.
In the article "Transitioning from green to regenerative design", Raymond J. Cole explores the concept of regenerative design and what it means in relation to 'green' and 'sustainable' design. Cole identifies eight key attributes of green buildings:
By these eight key attributes, 'green' design is accomplished by reducing the harmful, damaging and negative impacts to both the environment and humans that result from the construction of the built environment. Another characteristic that separates 'green' design is that it is aimed at broad market transformation and therefore green building assessment frameworks and tools are typically generic in nature.
Sustainable design.
'Sustainable' and 'green' are for the most part used interchangeably; however, there is a slight distinction between them. 'Green' design is centralized around specifically decreasing environmental impacts from human development, whereas sustainability can be viewed through an environmental, economic or social lens. The implication is that sustainability can be incorporated into all three aspects of the Triple Bottom Line: people, planet, profit.
The definition of sustainable or sustainability has been widely accepted as the ability to meet the needs of the current generation without depleting the resources needed to meet the needs of future generations. It "promotes a bio-centric view that places the human presence within a larger natural context, and focuses on constraints and on fundamental values and behavioral change." David Orr defines two approaches to sustainability in his book "Ecological Literacy": "technological sustainability" and "ecological sustainability." "Technological sustainability" emphasizes the anthropocentric view by focusing on making technological and engineering processes more efficient whereas "ecological sustainability" emphasizes the bio-centric view and focuses on enabling and maintaining the essential and natural functions of ecosystems.
The sustainability movement has gained momentum over the last two decades, with interest from all sectors increasing rapidly each year. In the book "Regenerative Development and Design: A Framework for Evolving Sustainability", the Regenesis Group asserts that the sustainability "debate is shifting from whether we should work on sustainability to how we're going to get it done." Sustainability was first viewed as a "steady state of equilibrium" in which there was a balance between inputs and outputs with the idea that sustainable practices meant future resources were not compromised by current processes. As this idea of sustainability and sustainable building has become more widely accepted and adopted, the idea of "net-zero" and even "net-positive" have become topics of interest. These relatively newer concepts focus on positively impacting the surrounding environment of a building rather than simply reducing the negative impacts.
Regenerative design.
J.T. Gibberd argued "a building is an element set within wider human endeavors and is necessarily dependent on this context. Thus, a building can support sustainable patterns of living, but in and of itself cannot be sustainable" Regenerative design goes a step further than sustainable design. In a regenerative system, feedback loops allow for adaptability, dynamism and emergence to create and develop resilient and flourishing eco-systems. Cole highlights a key distinction of regenerative design is the recognition and emphasis of the "co-evolutionary, partnered relationship between human and natural systems" and thus importance of project location and place. Bruno Duarte Dias asserts that regenerative design goes beyond the traditional weighing and measuring of various environmental, social and economic impacts of sustainable design and instead focuses on mapping relationships. Dias is in agreement with Cole stating three fundamental aspects of regenerative design which include: understanding place and its unique patterns, designing for harmony within place, and co-evolution.
Net-positive design
Positive Development (PD) theory and net-positive design emerged from 2002 as a critique of sustainable and regenerative design. It argued that buildings, landscapes and infrastructure that restore the damage they do over their lifecycle are, in reality, negative in the context of the overshoot of planetary boundaries. The thesis was that buildings could in fact have net positive (global) outcomes that reverse ecocide and environmental injustices. However, as the textbook "Positive Development" explained - current institutions of governance, planning, and decision-making, as well as design, must be redesigned and retrofitted on radically different premises. 
A subsequent 2020 textbook, "Net-Positive Design", detailed the theory and explained the 'STARfish' net-positive design app, a free online resource, which guides (synergistic, adaptable and multi-functional) net-positive design. The app is also used for building assessment. The STARfish inverts three dozen fundamental flaws with both quantitative and qualitative green building certification or rating tools. In Positive Development, a building is not sustainable if it merely has more good than bad impacts. It must increase natural and social life-support systems in absolute (global) terms - sufficient to reverse its share of the cumulative and remote impacts of human expansion and consumption.
Fundamental aspects.
Co-evolution of humans and nature.
Regenerative design is built on the idea that humans and the built environment exist