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 a refined version here: Regenerative Urbanism — A Synopsis: Inventing the Platform for Sustainability Success (abstract follows below).
Access all the EcoCity World Summit 2022 proceedings here, including the submitted paper on p. 801.
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 upcoming/current and past EcoCity Summits.
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.