🌱 [Pod] The Power of Regenerative Design: Flourish in Asia
Hello everyone! Our podcast series is back this week with an exciting episode about the power of regenerative design and what it means for cities across Asia. Wait, what is regenerative design? For more than three decades, architects, planners, designers and others shaping the built environment have been following and promoting sustainable design. In 1987, the United Nations’ Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainability was introduced with good intentions and there has been important progress in terms of energy-efficient buildings, use of materials and resources, change management and general awareness. But overall, the sustainable design movement has fallen short of the progress needed to prevent substantial environmental damage and climate change. The concept has been so widely misused that it has lost its original meaning. As architect and circular economy advocate William McDonough observed, if we get to complete sustainability, we simply get to the point of being “100% less bad”. Our current trajectory in construction, energy use and resource consumption guarantees we will exceed 1.5°C global warming. Across the world, natural habitats continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate. There is a need for a paradigm shift and the language and terms we use strongly influence the way we tackle our problems. So enters regenerative design. The quest for sustainability has moved society forward in important ways, but we believe it is now time to embrace a new regenerative approach to design and development. As a globalized society, we urgently need to reach the turning point in human civilization where everything we do has a net positive impact on the environment. We contend that this is a transformation that is within our reach. It is time to shift from merely mitigating negatives to optimizing positives. We need to embrace approaches that restore ecosystems, reunite divided communities, and reciprocally enhance the interdependent health of people, place and planet – schemes that, in myriad ways, restore what we have lost and deliver compounding net benefits – actualizing regenerative potentials that are beyond the limits of what ‘sustainability’ can imagine. Sarah Ichioka, Michael Pawlyn, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency I hope I got you interested in this approach because that’s precisely what we will discuss in today’s episode with Sarah Ichioka. Sarah is a strategist, urbanist, curator and writer. She is the Founding Director of Desire Lines, a Singapore-based consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social-impact organizations and initiatives. In previous roles, she has explored the intersections of cities, society and ecology within leading international institutions of culture, policy and research, including Singapore’s National Parks Board, La Biennale di Venezia, LSE Cities, NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development, as Director of The Architecture Foundation (UK) and Co-Director of the London Festival of Architecture. Her new book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency (2021) is co-authored with London-based architect Michael Pawlyn. It’s a wonderful (and engaging) read which unpacks the possibilities offered by regenerative design. 🎙 In our podcast episode, we discuss, among other things: * What it means to transition from “100% less bad” to regenerative design * The story of the Flourish book and its five principal messages * How we could bring regenerative design principles to cities, especially in the context of urban Asia * The various tipping points to change Asia’s complex urban systems and how Doughnut Economics can help us approach Asia’s various development levels * The role of nature-based solutions and indigenous knowledge in today’s work on cities across Southeast Asia
