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Regenerative design

Regenerative design

Charlotte Walker 11 Mar 2024
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.
 
Defining regenerative design
     
 
Regenerative design is best understood as overlapping with the concept of sustainability in planning and architecture by seeking to reduce resource consumption. Whilst sustainability often means developing a site to have little to no impact on the environment during construction and operation, regenerative design goes beyond this to create a net positive impact on the environment, ecology, health and society.
 
     
Therefore, regenerative design asks the question: how can development proposals reverse ecological damage, replenish natural resources and enhance ecological and social systems?
 
What can regenerative design achieve?
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.
Regenerative design in practice
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.
 

Challenges

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.

Opportunities

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.
     
 

Case Study: Colchester City Council’s Local Plan Review

Colchester have commenced work on a green network and waterways framework, to think about opportunities to enhance the green network and waterways through the Local Plan Review Issues and Options consultations. Such opportunities will then be considered alongside the sites submitted as part of the Call for Sites process. This is so that new housing allocations, which will be needed as part of the Local Plan Review, could facilitate new green spaces including creating better linkages between existing green spaces and waterways for the benefit of people’s health and wellbeing and for wildlife. This is a great example of how plan-making can take a regenerative design approach towards the environment and create synergies between local plan objectives.
 
     
Final thoughts  
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.

 

 

[1] RIBA Journal article

[2] Securing England’s water resources: right now, and for the future - Creating a better place (blog.gov.uk)

[3] HOME - Tendring/Colchester Borders Garden Community (tcbgardencommunity.co.uk)

[4] https://www.local.gov.uk/pas/topics/environment/nature-recovery-local-authorities#what-is-nature-recovery-and-why-is-it-so-important

[5] https://www.local.gov.uk/pas/topics/environment/planning-better-environment/how-can-we-plan-better-environment#5-what-does-this-mean-for-plan-making

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Do Not Pass Go! How to start on site with BNG

Do Not Pass Go! How to start on site with BNG

Heather Overhead 26 May 2023
There’s been a flurry of recent activity from the Government in relation to the forthcoming mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirement in England. In February they released their long-awaited response to the consultation on regulations and implementation, alongside some new guidance. In March, Natural England published the Biodiversity Metric 4.0 which includes a small sites metric.
One thing that is clear is Government still intends for the mandatory requirement to come into force for all major applications submitted in England this November, although secondary legislation is required to enact this.

What do we know?

The guidance and consultation response have provided clarity on some of the outstanding issues and has filled in some of the detail that was missing.
Key things we now know are:
  • Timescales: applications submitted from November this year for major development (in England) will be subject to the mandatory BNG condition, for ‘small sites’ (i.e. non-major development) this will be imposed on applications submitted from April 2024 and for NSIPs ‘no later than April 2025’;

  • Exemptions: development impacting habitats below a set threshold, householder applications and BNG sites will be exempt, whilst previously developed land, Change of Use and temporary won’t be exempt;

  • Section 73 applications: These will only be subject to the mandatory BNG requirement where the original permission was granted after BNG became a mandatory requirement;

  • Outline and phased permissions: the approach to delivery of BNG from the whole development on a phase-by-phase will be required up front but LPAs will have some discretion how and when delivery is achieved. There will be a requirement for approval of a biodiversity gain plan prior to commencement of each phase;

  • Mechanics: Biodiversity gains will be secured through a combination of planning conditions, planning obligations or conservation covenants and enforced primarily by the planning enforcement regime;

  • Biodiversity units: it is anticipated that a biodiversity unit market will develop, whereby any landowners will be able to sell biodiversity units (subject to meeting the relevant requirements) - see Government guidance for more information. If a development delivers a BNG of more than 10%, the excess units can be sold on the market;

  • Biodiversity Gain Site Register: this will be operated by Natural England and will record all off-site gains. Registration of off-site units will be mandatory, and will require a binding legal agreement with Habitat Management and Monitoring Plan (HMMP) to qualify. We are yet to see the register, however it is expected to be up and running by November;

  • Government credits: these will be sold by Natural England, the price will be set intentionally high to discourage their use, and they will be phased out once the biodiversity unit market has matured. The initial price will be published in May 2023;

  • Stacking: you can sell biodiversity units and nutrient credits from the same parcel of land relying on the same enhancements, however there are restriction on combining sale of biodiversity unit with other land management schemes. See guidance for info.

 

What don’t we know?

Whilst the recent guidance and response to the consultation is helpful and provides some much needed clarity, there is still a way to go to get the system up and running smoothly by November. In the consultation response there is acknowledgement that secondary legislation and further guidance is required in relation to a range of topics, and that the Government are working to resolve some issues raised. The key outstanding items are:

  • Biodiversity information: A Biodiversity Gain Statement must be submitted with the planning application, and a Biodiversity Gain Plan must be approved to discharge the BNG condition, however, we still haven’t seen templates for these documents. We are also still waiting on a HMMP template (which will be required for registration of off-site gains);

  • Outline and phased permissions: Secondary legislation and guidance is required to clarify and formalise processes for applying the BNG requirement;

  • Off-Site Gains: further guidance is required to clarify what constitutes “appropriate off-site biodiversity gains for a particular development”. The price of registering off-site gains is yet to be determined – a range of £100 to £1,000 is given. Secondary legislation is required in relation to processes for making and determining applications to the register;

  • On-Site Gains: there are uncertainties around timescales for provision and what threshold would trigger a requirement for a formal mechanism to secure gains

  • Exemptions: Secondary legislation is required to implement exemptions, including for impacts on ‘irreplaceable habitats’. Further consideration is being given to how to exempt ‘small scale self build plots’, whilst avoiding unintended consequences;

  • The long term: biodiversity gains must be maintained for at least 30 years, but what happens after that? The consultation response is clear that the intention is for the vast majority of gain sites to remain in some sort of “conservation management”, and suggests that landowners should take this into account. The mechanics of how this may be controlled are yet to be determined.

Will the new system work?

BNG is already being applied across large parts of the country at varying percentages so we know that a system can work. But will the system due to come into force on permissions for major development submitted from England in November work or is it over-designed and overly prescriptive? The key to its smooth running will be an early launch of the Biodiversity Gain Site Register, which is specified in the Environment Act as being necessary for the use of off-site biodiversity gains.
Get it touch if you’d like to discuss how to navigate your way through the BNG system

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