Regenerative Buildings & Districts

Regenerative buildings and districts promote holistic design approaches that integrate buildings within their natural and social environments, aiming to restore ecosystems, enhance community well-being, and achieve net-positive environmental impacts through sustainable practices and innovative technologies.

Regenerative buildings and districts aim to restore a healthy relationship between buildings, nature, communities, and place. Practitioners design holistically, embedding projects within their environmental and social context. This includes using closed-loop systems, passive design strategies, and renewable energy to minimise waste and maximise net-positive impacts.

Inspired by nature, regenerative buildings treat resources responsibly—ensuring that what is considered “waste” becomes input for another system. They operate like living organisms, with principles such as self-sufficiency, adaptability, and multifunctionality at their core. These buildings actively contribute to the ecosystems and communities they are part of, rather than merely reducing harm.

Design tools like the Living Building Challenge (LBC) promote performance goals that go beyond “net zero” to achieve net positive. Biophilic and biomimetic design principles are central—fostering a deeper human connection to nature through architecture that supports well-being, biodiversity, and community resilience.

Regenerative design addresses a broad spectrum of urban challenges:

• Excessive carbon emissions and resource consumption
• Disconnection between urban environments and ecosystems
• Energy inefficiency and water overuse
• Urban heat island effects
• Lack of community cohesion and resilience

Strategies such as biophilic design, integration of green infrastructure, decentralised services, and energy-positive systems aim to overcome these issues. It’s no longer enough to “do less harm”; regenerative approaches seek to “do good” by restoring ecosystems, strengthening communities, and creating buildings that contribute to their surroundings.

Giving back to the environment means setting performance goals for buildings that go well beyond green building performance, or energy or water efficiency and balance. It means designing buildings that operate as power plants and water treatment plants, by covering their overall demand as well as generating surplus for the benefit of the overall urban energy and water balance.

Implementation begins with a shift in design thinking: viewing buildings and districts as dynamic, co-evolving systems. Key strategies include:

• Rainwater capture and greywater recycling
• Renewable energy generation and storage
• Carbon sequestration through material choices and greenery
• Urban food production and biodiversity support
• Restoring local hydrology and ecosystems

Design must be contextual, learning from natural systems that are adaptable, co-dependent, and multi-functional. Evolutionary change—incremental, collaborative, and locally rooted—replaces rapid, disruptive novelty.

In urban contexts, regenerative districts may feature:

• Re-greened corridors and restored waterways
• Adaptive reuse of industrial sites
• Community gardens and food systems
• Decentralised infrastructure for energy, water, and transport

Nature’s designs are also characterized by a high multifunctionality of imperfect solutions, which are the result of bricolage rather than the work of specialists that focus on controllability and optimized monofunctionally.

Urban citizens must relearn the eco-competence of living among other species with respect to the laws of ecology. This requires craftsmanship, tolerance, patience, responsibility, and humility – explains Christoph Küffer in “Cities as ecosystems and buildings as living organisms” in The Materials Book, a publication inspired by the Holcim Forum 2019.

Regenerative Districts

Re-greening our environments comes with the responsibility of rethinking how we experience urban space. Our current urban design paradigm still revolves around vehicular mobility, particularly single-occupancy vehicles. City developments are often dictated by street widths designed to accommodate traffic volume, parking spaces, and buffer zones separating sidewalks from roads.

The 15-minute city is a new urban planning and design paradigm that reintroduces human-centric thinking by decentralising urban services and amenities—keeping them equitably accessible within a 15-minute walk or cycle. The concept was developed by Professor Carlos Moreno, now Special Envoy for Smart Cities at the Paris City Council. He was awarded the Obel Award in 2021 for this solution, which is now being explored in cities around the world. Paris, Seoul, Bogotá, Detroit, London, Melbourne, Milan, and Portland are among those introducing the idea to enhance quality of life, expand green and communal spaces, reduce car dependency, and improve air quality.

An Important Shift Toward Projects That “Do Good”

We are increasingly seeing projects that aim to be net positive. It is no longer enough to simply minimise harm—these initiatives seek to actively repair and regenerate neighbourhoods. Meaningful change depends on expanding priorities and actions, moving beyond short-term cost and profit. To make this approach more widespread, government involvement is essential. Policymakers must align the development of the built environment with long-term goals that prioritise broad well-being—encompassing both natural ecosystems and the social networks communities rely on.

Greening districts, reimagining urban corridors as vibrant ecological spines, repurposing industrial zones for urban agriculture, and restoring urban waterways as public leisure areas are all compelling examples of how to reconnect people with nature—creating places that are livable, promote clean air, and provide habitat for plant and animal species.