DEFINING AND PRACTICING REGENERATIVE DESIGN: MOVING BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY
Presenter: William Reed, AIA, LEED
President of the Integrative Design Collaborative, in Arlington, Mass., and principal with Regenesis Group, Inc. in Santa Fe, N.M.

We talk about high-performance buildings. You could also talk about high-performance livers—but no liver is high-performance outside the body. A building is also part of a larger whole that, like the body, has organs that perform different functions. We're making identical buildings all over the planet as if we can manufacture sustainability—but 100,000 LEED platinum buildings will destroy the plant. (I am a big fan of LEED—I was one of its founders—but it was meant not to define green building, but to redefine the marketplace.)

Buildings are inevitably connected to place. We must move beyond our fragmented view, beyond "systems thinking" to "whole systems understanding," to achieve sustainability.
Regeneration is not a synonym for restoration.

Regeneration means to create a new spirit. (The word development means to reveal or bring forth new potential. If developers were to return to their honorable profession, to go about "development" in the true sense, they would be restoring the planet.)

There are three essential aspects to this work. The first is understanding place—this particular place—by experiencing the whole system. There is a difference between understanding and data; we need to understand how the data fit together and what they mean. Evaluating the proposed site of a development near Sundance, we found no signs of any previous human occupation, which is unusual. Looking further, we realized native peoples avoided this valley because they recognized geological danger signs—of forest fire, earthquake and avalanche. It's about putting information together in patterns.

Second, we must harmonize information with the people who live there, to convey and hold the whole system through the story of the place, not the data. Who are these places? Not what are these places: what is descriptive; who is the essence. In the course of the planning for a new town in the desert between Tucson and Phoenix, some one stood up and asked us, "Do you know what this used to be?" It had been grassland. It needed humans to recover it, as they had destroyed it with cattle. People are recovering places all over the planet; we can begin to heal the earth, but it takes understanding.

Third, regeneration requires a continual process of dialog: if we allow the dialog to stop, we will never create a sustainable environment. This means teaching—teaching children, teaching property owners, teaching planners. It also means connecting. A recently completed LEED platinum project in Ann Arbor is regenerative because it engaged the larger ecosystem as a stakeholder, helping others achieve their missions—because it all comes down to water, soil and air.

What does sustainability require of us? It requires a new mind. We need to change from a mind that sees a world of discrete elements that can be separated, aggregated and manipulated to serve human purposes to a mind that understands the world as a single web of interconnected and interdependent living systems. To create differently we need to actually see differently. We must develop pattern literacy: the ability to see a landscape as a sophisticated, dynamic system—a virtual organism formed by energy flows and nutrient exchanges, rather than a series of two-dimensional maps and overlays.

From that we will discern the essence of place. If you're dealing with essence of place, you will make the right decisions; if you're dealing with detail, you will make the wrong decisions. Dealing with essence means understanding the core purpose of the place in its larger, proximate environment. And to do that, you must first generate the living story of the place.

All design work involves both activating and restraining forces. Regeneration is an activating force; conservation is a restraining force. Both are essential, and the way they are reconciled is through a whole system mind. That's sustainability.

This is really about changing who we are—reestablishing a healthy web of planetary systems and in the process finding a co-evolutionary role for humanity. How do we become indigenous again, in the sense of being part of our place? How do we tend the wild? Partnership with nature requires us to exercise humility and to accept feedback. It is a continuous, never-ending process of engagement.

Additional Information

Integrative Design Collaborative: www.integrativedesign.net/home

The Regenesis Group, Inc.: www.regenesisgroup.com

> BIOMIMICRY: NATURE AS MODEL, MEASURE AND MENTOR