Regenerative Urbanism at EcoCity World Summit 2022
Scott Edmonson, AICP, ISSP-SA, Charles Kelley AIA, and ZGF Architects prepared a panel presentation and a white paper on REGENERATIVE URBANISM – A SYNOPSIS: Inventing the Platform for Sustainability Success.
They describe how the emerging response of regenerative systems sustainability and urbanism can achieve success in time by investing in regenerative urban infrastructure, which, in turn, generates the circular, regenerative, ecological economy that fully mitigates climate change and creates the foundation for inclusive prosperity and enduring community wellbeing.
Access the White Paper here: Regenerative Urbanism — A Synopsis: Inventing the Platform for Sustainability Success (abstract follows below).
Watch a ten-minute presentation on the topic prepared before the paper as part of panel at the Ecocity Summit here: Regenerative Urbanism—A Platform for Next-Generation Practice: Inventing the Platform and Path to Sustainability Success.
View the slide deck here.
Visit our websites for more information on our work on regenerative urbanism at the Sustainability 2030 Institute, (the Regenerative Region Initiative), Green Urbanism Design, and at ZGF Architect’s web page on creating closed-loop value.
Email scott-e@sustainability2030.com and Charles.Kelley@greenurbandesign.com.
Explore the Summit, whose content will be accessible for three months for registered attendees.
Read the Call to Action and the Synopsis Abstract below.
Explore S2030’s “action:” Regenerative City Region Demonstration Project Initiative & Network.
Call to Action
This paper proposes embracing the emerging regenerative systems sustainability approach as the necessary guide for 21st century sustainability and urbanism. It is the only antidote to climate change because it eliminates GHG emissions by correcting a self-destructing economy and associated destruction of nature (our irreplaceable regenerative life support system) and replacing it with one of inclusive prosperity. However, only the first chapter of that guidebook has been written. It is enough to begin quickly and then we can write the rest of it as we invent the balance of the approach in practice. Realizing our regenerative approach’s potential given its incipient state will require that we recognize the innovation, understand it, and advance its use quickly in practice with the education, research, innovation needed for sustainability success in time.
This synopsis illuminates key characteristics for that purpose. The emerging approach of regenerative sustainability and urbanism described poses a question to us all: what can and should each of us do to secure climate and sustainability success? The answer is to integrate this knowledge into our lives, economic decisions, political support, and activism. For planning and design professionals, a few additional steps are clear. They are our call to action: learn, make the market, deliver the value. Please join the Sustainability 2030 Institute, Green Urban Design, and ZGF Architects in contributing to building an effective and powerful community of learning practitioners. That growing community is trying to advance strategic regenerative systems sustainability and urbanism at the scale and speed needed for sustainability success in time.
ABSTRACT
Regenerative Urbanism – A Synopsis: Inventing the Platform for Sustainability Success
Scott Edmondson, AICP, ISSP-SA, Principal, Sustainability 2030 Institute, San Francisco CA, USA, scott-e@sustainability2030.com
Charles Kelley, AIA LEED BD&C, Principal, Green Urban Design, Portland, OR, USA, charles.kelley@greenurbandesign.com
This paper describes humanity’s sustainability predicament and the new approach needed over the 10-15 years remaining to reverse course and accomplish key milestones. It identifies a promising response emerging from innovation occurring across our planning, designing, and building practices at this moment of global environmental, economic, and social reckoning: strategic regenerative systems sustainability or regenerative urbanism. Three cases illustrate the approach and suggest the district as the best strategic scale. Descriptions of its characteristics enable recognition, understanding, and use. Initiatives pursue certifications such as Living Community Challenge, EcoDistricts, and LEED-ND, which are society’s most evolved codifications of regenerative sustainability and urbanism.
This response is a work in progress that requires global recognition, acceleration, and scaling. It is a beacon for 21st century urbanism being the antidote for our dual climate and sustainability challenges. The built environment-economy connection reveals how regenerative urbanism could catalyze the only complete solution; that is, the transition to a circular ecological global economy of inclusive prosperity within one generation for 9 billion people by 2050 and up to 12 billion by 2100. That solution would simultaneously mitigate climate change, establish the economic basis for inclusive prosperity, and defend against the extreme economic conditions that will intensify during the 100-year-or-more period of climate recalibration.
As a bonus, solving the climate crisis with regenerative systems sustainability would cost no more than the climate solution itself and would create the only basis for the needed climate cooperation.
Finally, regenerative sustainability and urbanism creates a compelling new value proposition and role for planning and design professionals that needs continuous invention: planning and designing regenerative global urban and regional systems sustainability.