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INVITATION TO SUSTAINABILITY SUCCESS

The Regenerative Systems Sustainability (RSS) Center invites you to explore the emerging innovation of regenerative systems sustainability (the general case) and the regenerative built environment-city-region (applied to urban planning) as a key pillar of — and generative component of — the ecological circular no/low carbon economy needed for sustainability success.

INTRODUCTORY RESOURCES

Over the past 15 years, my professional and extra professional work has developed a particular interpretation of the sustainability challenge, the requirements for an effective response, and the contours of a particularly promising emerging response for addressing the deepening sustainability predicament that society faces: winning battles but losing the war of the twin intertwined challenges of accelerating climate change and unsustainability. That interpretation has evolved over time in a variety of work listed below. That interpretation is most easily accessed by reviewing them, understanding that each one emphasizes a particular component relevant to the particular project. This interpretation is a synthesis, drawing on the work of leading sustainability proponents.

This particular interpretation begins from a few key assumptions that may not be widely shared. First, that responding to the sustainability challenge effectively is society’s preeminent, first-order item of business, superseding all others. Second, the best scientific evidence and interpretation of the accelerating unabated climate crisis and unsustainability trends pose an existential threat that will culminate over the second half of the 21st century. They will lead to substantial, unprecedented, and often irreversible biospheric and economic system destabilization and potential collapse by century’s end as society. Third, society and individuals will not be able to continue to meet their needs, goals, priorities without resolving this fundamental crisis. Fourth, and fortunately, an effective response is arising from a wide range of sustainability innovation over the past 25+ years, including green urban planning and design. This response is best titled regenerative systems sustainability in general. Applied to planning and designing, it implies a new planning practice: planning and designing the regenerative built environment (RBE) and city. (RC) If one holds these assumptions, then the agenda becomes one of recognizing and understanding this new approach and using, advancing, and scaling it as quickly as possible. Doing so is the Center’s mission. The following resources are one good start.

  • Listen to the Regenerative City Symposium (1.5 hrs), Sept. 2024. Review the Slide Deck, 56MB, PDF Link. Read A “Responses to Questions” document (Link). The Symposium presents RSS and RBE in the context of primary proponents of such an approach: EcoCity Builders, Biophilic Cities, LEED Cities & Communities, Green Urban Design, Planning 2050, Regenerative City Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group.

  • Read the Regenerative City, Part 2, (or the PDF with more detailed footnotes, 55 pp) of the Environmental Sustainability Planning Guidelines, listen to the summary presentation (20 mins.), Mar. 2024. APA International Divsion’s Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group (URAG). This effort develops the understanding and practice steps to shift from creating parts sustainability to authentic systems sustainability.

  • Review the Resources Page for Regenerative Urbanism & the Systems Thinking Panel at the American Planning Association’s Sustainable Communities Division Climate Change Symposium, 2023. This work deepened the systems understanding of the sustainability challenge and response. This resources page contains a range of contributory resources providing a glimpse into the larger context of this emerging response.

    • Listen to the presentation, “Applying Systems Thinking Yields Regenerative Urbanism - A Platform for Inventing Sustainability Success,” Pre-recording (20 mins) and skim through the Slide Deck PDF, 2023.

  • Read the Regenerative Urbanism white paper (13 pp); watch the recording (15 mins), 2022. This paper developed the initial synthesis for urban planning more generally.

Understand how, regenerative systems sustainability:

  • is the antidote to the compounding twin, intertwined problems of accelerating climate change and unsustainability;

  • reframes the necessary climate change solution FROM simple GHG elimination TO GHG elimination PLUS accelerated global economic sustainability development by creating the regenerative global economy of inclusive prosperity that does not kill the planet or humans as doing so simultaneously reverses climate change;

  • applied to urban planning illuminates how planning, designing, and building the “green” built environment creates the local sustainability economy needed for sustainability success, has been undervalued in practice to date, and has therefore been under produced (by a factor of 10+);

  • and how it is also the best defense against the increasingly inhospitable environmental and economic conditions that will intensify during the 100-year-long-plus climate recalibration period of mitigation success.