Oliver Broadbent (left) and James Norman, co-authors of the Regenerative Structural Engineer.
What brings you to The House of Commons?
The Building Blocks Manifesto is a call to action for the next UK government. It’s essential that we get buy-in at political level – wholesale systemic change is essential if we are to move towards a genuinely regenerative way of building. Imagine a situation where every time we designed a building we made the world better rather than worse. What would it take for that to happen? We know that despite over twenty years of trying to design and build sustainably, the construction sector is making a significant contribution to the climate and biodiversity emergency. Regenerative design is emerging as we realise we can’t just try harder at sustainability. We need to do something different. We’ve done systems mapping for the construction industry and we’ve come up with a simplified model that says what we design is constrained by the operations that define the system, and those are constrained by the mindset – and ultimately the paradigm – we’re in, which is continuous growth.
The goal of regenerative design is for human and living systems to survive, thrive and co-evolve. So that, simply, every time we built something, our communities and our ecosystems got better. So where do we begin, and what role can we play? These are the questions that James Norman and I have aimed to answer in our book, the Regenerative Structural Engineer which, incidentally, is not just for engineers, but for anyone working in the built environment. Because it’s not about what we do in our siloes, but about how we work together to create system change.
How did you find the time to write the book?
I’m an 1851 Fellow in Regenerative Design, which basically means I’ve been given two years’ funding to focus on the issues around shifting the built environment sector away from the paradigm of extraction and environmental degradation to a paradigm of repair and renewal. The Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition aims ‘to increase the means of industrial education and extend the influence of science and art upon productive industry’, and one of the ways it does this is to fund fellowships. Michael Pawlyn and I are the first two people to hold this position.
What’s your understanding of regenerative design?
Regenerative design has at its heart the philosophy that rather than trying to solve our climatic, ecological, social, economic and health challenges separately, we should focus our efforts on enabling the overarching ecosystem that we are part of to thrive once more. If we can create the conditions for life to thrive once more, then we too can thrive.
In the Global North we are finally realising that we can no-longer treat living systems as something that we can exploit, control, destroy and ignore. The living system that exists between the Earth’s crust and outer space, the living system that we are part of is immensely complex and not fully knowable. It is not something that we can control; rather it is something that we have to work to learn from and learn to work with.
Regenerative design has as its goal the creation of a thriving socio-ecological system in the places where we work. Like beavers who can transform species-poor and drought-vulnerable valleys into thriving places, we will know where regenerative design has been successful because of the increased thriving of human and other living organisms.
Key to thriving is the ability for the system to self-organise and adapt based on the potential of site and the changing environmental stimuli. From a design perspective, achieving this quality fundamentally changes the mode of design. We move from our current mode of design in which we seek to shape the physical world in our image to one in which our aim is to build the capacity of the local system to develop its own emergent designs that are uniquely suited to the potential and ecosystem limits of the site.
View the Building Blocks manifesto.
