Regenerative design principles - Ball State University

Regenerative design principles

Joseph Bilello, course instructor
Architecture 498
Spring 2002

Based on the course text by John Lyle

Paleotechnic (industrial) and
Neotechnic (regenerative) models

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 1. Let Nature do the
work

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 2. Considering Nature
as Both Model and
Context

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 3. Aggregating not
Isolating

Strategies for Regenerative

Design

• 4. Seeking optimum
levels for multiple
functions, not the
maximum or
minimum level for any
one

– Regenerative systems
always have more than
one goal

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 5. Matching
technology to need

– Appropriate
technology

Strategies for Regenerative

Design

• 6. Using information
to replace power

– Overwhelming
industrial technology
in modern society
because the positive
feedback concerning
technology operations
is usually stronger than
the negative feedback

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 7. Providing multiple
pathways

Strategies for Regenerative

Design

• 8. Seeking common
solutions to disparate
problems

– Regenerative systems
encompass whole patterns
of flows

• San Jacinto wildlife area:
wastewater and diverse
habitat in a dry landscape

• West Texas sustainable
community development

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 9. Managing storage
as a key to
sustainability

– At the core of
regenerative systems

– Balancing storage and
replenishment

Strategies for Regenerative
Design

• 10. Shaping form to
guide flow

– Flow follows form
follows flow

Strategies for Regenerative

Design

• 11. Shaping form to
manifest process

– Technophilia and
technophobia

– Regenerative
technologies are harder
to hide because they
are by nature more
integral to their context

– windmills

Strategies for Regenerative

Design

• 12. Prioritizing for
sustainability

– If we take the point of
view of society as a
whole, the
sustainability must
behave a high priority,
perhaps an overriding
priority (to individual
concerns )

Chapter 9

Regenerative Systems in the

Social Fabric

Scale and Social Structure
• Economies of scale--tend

to grow continuously in
organization as well as in
physical size
Regenerative technologies
vary greatly in scale
because they must be
responsive to given biotic
communities.
•

Industrial societies

• Bigness
• the identifying

characteristic of industrial
society is rationalized
administration.
•
• Corporations (Galbraith)
• First purpose achieve
short-term profits to keep
holders satisfied and
uncritical of management.
Second, growth.

Drive to grow has provided much of the impetus for the throughput
economy and its one-way flows.

Private techno structures alliances with programs.

Oppose environmental safeguards make changes in consumption
patterns; and encourage use of smaller-scale technology, land use
controls, social welfare and equitable distribution of income.

Regenerative societies

Regenerative systems generally
rely heavily on continuous
infusions of information

•
• Community functions as

an ecosystem
•
• Regenerative agriculture
•
• More-careful and

intensive management
quality of thought.

Participation

• Wendell Berry (1977) put it this
way:

– The community disintegrates
because it loses the necessary
understanding, forms and
enactments of the relations among
materials and processes, principle
and actions, ideals and realities .

•

• Broad participation, like
interdisciplinary teams, is a means
for expanding the information base
for regenerative design.

Community

• Reasons to believe we are making a
transition in both public and private
organizational structures from rigid
vertical hierarchies to more flexible
network-like structures that can
facilitate flows of information in all
directions.

•
• NIMBY

•
• Fostering a sense of

community

Regenerative technologies

• Regenerative technologies engender An artificial heart that grows
more active and more effective
participation.

•

• Regenerative technologies are more
diverse, they can offer more
alternatives with varying levels of cost
and environmental effects.

•

• It is not unreasonable to expect that
regenerative systems given their
smaller scale of operations, their
tendency to work with participatory
rather than hierarchical organizational
structures, their community
interactions, and their decentralizing
tendencies, will tend to foster more
equitable distribution of wealth and
greater social justice.

Suburban paradox

• In California, for
example, suburban
residents have
persistently resisted all
forms of cluster
development even
when clustering
allowed large areas of
land to remain open.

Education as the Motive Force

• Faith in experts has
declined dramatically

The Fundamental Relationship
between Place and Process

• To understand the earth’s larger processes, it is necessary first
to understand those occurring in one place.

Relationships with Land

The profound meaning of
landscape.

• The view of land as a source of
private wealth has a long
history in Western culture.
Both capitalist and Marxist
doctrines define land as an
economic resource, tacitly
denying its larger values. Until
banking developed during the
Renaissance, land was the only
truly dependable source of both
wealth and power.

Relationships with Land

• During the industrial period the
importance of land in
generating wealth was
diminished somewhat by the
rising importance of capital and
labor. Thorstein Veblen (1921)
called land one of the three
“factors of production,” the
other two being labor and
capital; for Veblen the three
factors of production
represented the three classes of
income, which were rent,
wages, and profits.

Land as commodity?

• More recently, the
speculative value of land
has far surpassed its rent
value. The increase in
land speculation has
multiplied the difficulties
of establishing sustainable
patterns of land use,
driving land prices in
many places up to levels
that can only be paid
through intense
exploitation.

Regional Scale

• Regional
conurbations

•

• Regional
development
and
infrastructure

•

Portland growth boundary mapping

Chapter 10

Garden Communities in Gaia’s
Garden

• Watershed unit is
generally an appropriate
unit for regional landscape
planning.

Gaia’s Garden

• Mind of nature will
redesign the earth.

•
• Art of gardening mutually

energizing cognitive and
emotional relationship
between humans and
nature that regenerative
development requires.

Biosphere Reserves

• Surrounding this core
is a zone of managed
landscape.

•

Future Cities

• The keys to
sustainability lie in the
urban landscape.

•
• The child who grows

up in a regenerative
city. What will her
experience be?

Chapter 11

Economic, Policy and
Transition

• Regenerative techno-economies:
• Must cost no more than competing technologies,

and they most be supported by public policy.
•
• Economics of Regeneration

– Five ways

First Costs

• Energy-myth cost --More than that produced by fossil fuels.
•
• Water-conventional sewer versus On site retention, vegetative protection, of

watersheds and use of reclaimed. (Woodlands example)
• Taoist system of human made streams and swales.
•
• Agriculture--Eliminate chemical use while maintaining high levels of both

productivity and profit.
•
• Waste Management--Regenerative systems generally cost no more, and in

some cases far less, than equivalent industrial systems that perform the same
functions.
•
• Subsidies-as distortion

Total Measurable Costs

• Include measurable
externalities----85 percent
use is for agricultural that
most water is paid for
mostly by urban dwellers
rather than by the farmers
who use it.

• They cannot recover
investment in water
conserving irrigation such
as through money saved
on water bills. Over
watering makes short term
economic sense.

Costs and the Macro-Marketplace

• Regenerative technologies tend to
employ more people.

•
• Regenerative technologies require

lower levels of capital investment for
each enterprise.
•
• 400 to 600 people per million tons
processed and composting about 225 to
325 land filling employs about 40 to 60
and incineration about 100 to 300
•
• Regenerative systems involve less
capital investment overall and less
concentration of capital.
•

Agribusiness

• Access to capital accounts for most
of the competitive success of the
heavily capitalized agribusiness
corporations. Corporate farms are
not necessarily more efficient than
smaller farms; they simply are
better capitalized.

Costs of Environmental Degradation
and Resource Depletion

• The cost of acid
precipitation

•
• Cost of pollution
•
• Work day lost
•
• Somehow, economic

measures came to
represent the value system
of the society.
•

Economics and ecology

• Economic principles are
effective only within the
limits of the marketplace –
the realm of things
regularly bought and sold

•
• Hierarchical order
•
• Economic performance

can be evaluated in
ecological terms and not
the reverse.

Economics and ecology

• In the absence of the
larger framework,
economic goals tend to
override ecological goals
because they can be
quantified in a
Paleotechnic culture that
greatly respects numbers
and because ecological
purpose is not backed by
institutional authority.

•

Regenerative design and

the La Luz site

• La Luz, a Creative Fusion

• Developed in the mid-1960s by Ray
Graham III and Didier Raven, the
residential townhouse site was designed
by Antoine Predock on 500 acres of
mesa land near Montaño and Coors.
The clustered houses, with their clean
lines evoking both Spanish and Pueblo
imagery, face carefully preserved open
space that stretches down to the bosque
on the Rio Grande.

• One of the developers' goals was to
show how land could be improved by
development rather than despoiled by it.
La Luz is a pioneering venture in
environmentally respectful land-use
planning. Its importance to New
Mexico's architectural history has
already been recognized by its
placement on the New Mexico Cultural

Properties Register.

Regenerative design and the
WTC site?