Regenerative Development as an Integrative Paradigm and Methodology for Landscape Sustainability

Abstract

Although the integration of sustainability, ecology, and design has been recognized as necessary by scientists and practitioners, most transdisciplinary frameworks are not inclusive of the worldviews, paradigms, aims, processes, and components necessary for sustainability. Landscape sustainability science helps to focus scientist, scholar, practitioner, and stakeholder efforts toward sustainability at a pivotal level; however, collaboration and progress have been slow. Significant potential exists for design to be an integrative and transformational methodology toward landscape sustainability, yet it has not fulfilled this ambitious role. In this paper, we first build a case for regenerative development, a development and design methodology based on an ecological worldview, as an integrative platform for a new paradigm. This new paradigm, which we call regenerative landscape development, has the potential to thoroughly catalyze a shift toward regenerative sustainability. We then detail this new paradigm as a process that could continually enhance the capacities of living systems to increase health, well-being, and happiness. Next, to illustrate regenerative development in practice, we provide brief case studies of projects in Viña del Mar, Chile and Juluchuca, Guerrero, Mexico. Finally, we propose future recommendations and precautions in the construction of regenerative landscape development as a new paradigm. If fully understood, embraced, and realized, regenerative development holds incredible potential for a sustainable future.

Managing the Transition towards Circular Metabolism: Living Labs as a Co-Creation Approach

“…Regenerative design works on the balance within natural cycles, integrating environment and anthropic systems. It promotes a new human-human and human-nature relationship as the ultimate driver of analytical and transformational sustainability (Gibbons et al, 2018). This is achieved using innovative technologies aimed at establishing healthier lifestyles and habitats, in coherence with on-going initiatives of the EC towards technological and non-technological eco-innovation.…”

Moving Beyond Sustainability: A Regenerative Community Development Framework for Co-creating Thriving Living Systems and Its Application

“…It offers an alternative approach to sustainable development that focuses on building the capacities in whole living systems to manifest potential and co-create continually higher levels of health and well-being. Because it works across scales, addresses worldviews as the root cause of (un)sustainability, and follows nature's principles, it is a viable approach to transform landscapes, cities, regions, and beyond toward thrivability (Gibbons et al, 2018).…”

“…It would be worthwhile to test the RCD Framework at larger scales-larger communities, landscapes, cities, regions-within a regenerative landscape development paradigm that aims to catalyze regeneration at landscape scales and above (Gibbons et al, 2018). The landscape scale, in particular, has been identified as a key scale to mediate between local and regional levels (Gibbons et al, 2018;Hobbs, 1997;Opdam et al, 2013).…”

“…It would be worthwhile to test the RCD Framework at larger scales-larger communities, landscapes, cities, regions-within a regenerative landscape development paradigm that aims to catalyze regeneration at landscape scales and above (Gibbons et al, 2018). The landscape scale, in particular, has been identified as a key scale to mediate between local and regional levels (Gibbons et al, 2018;Hobbs, 1997;Opdam et al, 2013). The RCD Framework can be used at the landscape scale and is designed to incorporate co-production and co-design, which have been shown to be successful in producing more integrative and sustainable development and design outcomes at this scale (Bos et al, 2013;Reed et al, 2010;Watson, 2014).…”

Regenerative—The New Sustainable?

“…While it better incorporates ecological concepts such as complex adaptive systems [32], it still tends to work with fragmented parts of systems rather than whole complex systems-working transdisciplinarily and integrating disciplines have proven to be challenging [10]. Contemporary sustainability mostly focuses on symptoms rather than causes of unsustainability-in other words, shallow leverage points in systems, such as technological, policy, and economic changes-and supports the continued existence of unsustainable systems and thought patterns (e.g., continued economic growth, managing environmental resources for human consumption, efficiency) [4,10,14,33,34]. In practice and even academia, contemporary sustainability still gets caught in traps of greenwashing, efficiency, relying on technological improvements, and unintentionally fostering greater unsustainability [4,23,35].…”