Planning matters

For decades the development industry has been re-thinking and re-designing ways to reduce the impact buildings have on the environment. Increasingly, there is an understanding that for the industry to best respond to our environmental challenges and natural environments, thinking needs to change from development ‘being less harmful’ and ‘doing more good’. This shift in approach to the way we plan for, construct and live in our built ‘environments’ is being achieved through regenerative design.

 

This blog reflects upon some of the opportunities and challenges that a regenerative design approach presents.

 

Therefore, regenerative design asks the question: how can development proposals reverse ecological damage, replenish natural resources and enhance ecological and social systems?

Regenerative design seeks to renew and promote the health of social and natural systems so communities thrive. For example, a development can be ‘carbon positive’ by using materials that take carbon out of the atmosphere and aiming for a building that generates more energy than it consumes[1]. Interventions can also include restoring lost public footpaths that connect to a site to have a positive impact on the wider community.

The Environment Agency has reported on the increasing need to manage water demands[2] and it therefore seems pertinent to consider the value in examples where wetlands are designed for in masterplans to capture and naturally store stormwater to replenish the underground aquifer, or examples of design codes that rethink how our buildings can capture and treat rainwater. Designing places and buildings in this way could be a solution to improving water supply in the long term.

Lichfields are assisting Latimer, who are the master developer, and their appointed design team, to bring forward the Tendring Colchester Borders Garden Community[3]. The Garden Community is the largest strategic allocation in the North Essex Authorities’ Shared Strategic Section 1 Plan for between 7,000 and 9,000 new homes, 25 hectares of employment land, university expansion land, community, leisure, retail and other associated uses and development. Regenerative design principles can be identified in the emerging Development Plan Document (‘DPD) for the Garden Community which sets out how the new Garden Community will be designed, developed, and delivered in phases, in accordance with a detailed set of principles. For example the emerging DPD’s vision for nature in the Garden Community is to “provide a natural support system for both people and wildlife” and the draft Illustrative Framework Plan shows thoughts on the development of an ecological network across the Garden Community in the aim to support native species to thrive and existing habitats to be enhanced and connected.

 

In development and planning, regenerative design requires:

• collaboration, commitment and the right expertise to grapple with environmental and societal challenges;
   
• a multidisciplinary team to take a systems-based approach from the outset of a project and be driven by evidence and metrics that clearly define design principles and objectives;
   
• teams need to use data and establish performance metrics to test ideas and be innovative. This is a key part of the process. In this way, regenerative design does not ‘fit’ a proposal to a site, it does the reverse and designs are truly context-led to restore and enhance existing systems;
   
• to achieve the above, teams need an in depth understanding of place and communities. This is why continual engagement with communities and stakeholders is essential.
   

Regenerative design therefore is inherently complex and requires quite a considerable shift in mindset; it challenges us to re-examine how we view property, ownership, rights and public goods and asks questions such as what you might need to change in yourself, in your practice or the way you work with clients or stakeholders to be more outcome-driven.

Two key ideas to remember:

• regenerative design can apply to projects of all scales. For strategic sites, regenerative design needs to be embedded into the masterplan and for smaller sites, from the initial scoping and site analysis stage.
   
• Regenerative design can apply in plan-making. The legal and policy context for addressing the environment and climate change is evolving rapidly in the UK. For example, the Environment Act 2021introduced a number of new duties for local authorities which are of relevance to nature recovery and biodiversity[4]. These agendas are changing the approach LPA’s are taking to plan-making, shown by recent research findings from the Planning Advisory Service (PAS) [5]. PAS found that some LPA’s are suggesting that an alternative approach to plan-making would focus on environmental recovery and starting with a map, add designations, then green infrastructure and other environmental assets, and then consider how development can fit in.

Regenerative design as a practice is evolving and another part of the puzzle will be how we retrofit our existing built environments and adapt systems in order to make them regenerative. Nevertheless, it is encouraging and exciting to think that local plans in the near future could not only support regenerative design practice but also promote it. It seems that now is the time for regenerative design be more mainstream and adopted more widely.