Towards a Regenerative Design Project Delivery Workflow: A Critical Review

Abstract

Regenerative design (RD) is an approach to creating positive change in the built environment rather than reducing its negative impacts. RD focuses its design work on improving the relationship between humans, places, and ecosystems. It also proposes fundamental paradigm shifts that promise to address the urgent climatic and biodiversity crises. While it presents a systemic, holistic method of understanding the place and the interrelationships between economic, social, and natural systems with a participatory and collaborative approach to design, its design methodology needs a detailed definition of tools to help new practitioners and students develop RD projects successfully and promote its widespread implementation. In particular, a general project delivery workflow is needed. This paper undertook a comprehensive review to fill this gap, examining 150 references, including articles, books, reports, and theses related to RD. It selected and analysed 19 sources from 1994 to 2024 to analyse and extract their content referencing project delivery steps. This paper proposes a novel six-step project delivery workflow and a workflow diagram that creatively synthesises the proposed RD project delivery workflow. These practical and applicable contributions are helpful for design and building practitioners willing to start a regenerative project. Additionally, this research found links and overlaps between RD and circular building (CB), suggesting opportunities for mutual further development of RD and CB.

1. Introduction

The built environment is the sector that drives the highest energy use, resource consumption, and waste generation in many countries [1,2,3]. However, if building design, construction, and operation are changed comprehensively, buildings may produce positive outcomes for a low-carbon and low-resource future [4]. Low-carbon and low-resource buildings are possible if a systems change process is applied to the building industry [5]. Regenerative design (RD) proposes such systemic change. It aims to enhance ecosystems’ ability to thrive with and because of human participation by shifting to an eco-centric view, systems thinking, and open collaboration with communities [6]. It fosters resilience through community collaboration and social cohesion, developing the ability to respond to and enhance ecological and social systems’ health, diversity, and resilience [7,8].

RD understands collaboration as an ongoing process of co-creation and co-evolution [7,9] in which designers become transformation agents [10] by promoting a regenerative mindset in the community [11]. The iterative process of group facilitation, team building, and actively listening to identify shared values, new relationships, and opportunities requires designers to acquire new skill sets, flexibility, and adaptability. However, as designers are usually expected to have all the answers, facilitation and flexibility are not skills commonly taught to them [7]. As [12] points out, RD is a practice-based movement. The participatory design processes and the strategies for acquiring place-based ecological knowledge are still emergent [13,14], so step-by-step guidance is suggested for developing an RD project effectively.

This paper fills this gap by creating an RD project delivery methodology through a critical literature review. It proposes an RD project delivery workflow by distilling project delivery processes from the literature. It also creatively synthesises the content into a summarised six-step process and develops a graphical representation. This workflow represents much-needed guidance for students or design practitioners willing to start an RD project. No single source of advice exists for them yet.

2. Research Methods

This paper critically analyses the RD literature to develop a project delivery framework to guide new RD practitioners and students. The essential components to fill this gap were distilled from the RD literature, presented and discussed critically. The distillation of the essential components was then organised, combined, and creatively synthesised through a diagram to develop graphical aids to help improve RD’s understanding and practical application.

This paper’s critical review methodology followed the typologies identified by [15]. As such, it differs from systematic and other review typologies required to formally present their search and analysis methods. It reviews and analyses the availability and readiness of the tools included in them for applying RD and then strives to propose conceptual innovations to address the gaps.

The applied literature search included a thorough search of ‘Regenerative Design’ and ‘Regenerative Construction’ on SCOPUS, WOS, and Google Scholar databases. The references were screened to exclude articles unrelated to regenerative design or construction in the built environment. A ‘snowballing’ technique was applied to find more related sources. A total of 150 sources were found, including 28 books, 9 book chapters, 90 journal and 8 conference articles, 7 reports, 3 standards, and 5 theses. From the selected sources, the content related to project development processes was analysed. Texts mentioning various methodologies associated with developing a regenerative building were coded and included in the analysis.

The analysis consisted of the following:

• Coding the texts related to RD project development, from inception to post-construction activities.
• Grouping the project development stages that emerged from the previous coding involved assigning a name consisting of a single-word concept summarising the project stage’s activities. This name sometimes corresponded to the chronologically first-named concept or the name most commonly used.
• Developing a table summarising which source mentions which project stage (see

  Table 1. A literature review of the regenerative project delivery processes.

  References	i. Place	ii. Vision	iii. Design	iv. Plan	v. Build	vi. Co-evolution
  Lyle, J. T. [16]	Yes
  Reed, B. [10]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
  Mang, P. and Reed, B. [7]	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes
  Hoxie, C. et al. [12]	Yes			Yes
  Plaut, J. et al. [17]	Yes
  Cole, R. J. [18]	Yes				Yes
  Cole, R. J. et al. [19]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
  Hes, D. and du Plessis, C. [20]	Yes	Yes				Yes
  Mang, P. [21]	Yes	Yes				Yes
  Wahl, D. C. [22]	Yes	Yes				Yes
  Sertyesilisik [11]	Yes				Yes	Yes
  Attia [8]			Yes*	Yes*	Yes*
  Peretti, G. et al. [14]	Yes		Yes*	Yes	Yes*	Yes
  Roös [23]	Yes	Yes
  Craft, W. et al. [24]	Yes	Yes
  Persson, U. [25]	Yes		Yes*	Yes	Yes*	Yes
  Toner, J. et al. [13]	Yes					Yes
  De Wolf, C. et al. [6]			Yes		Yes*
  Nagle, K. et al. [9]	Yes	Yes*	Yes

  ).
• Synthesising the contents related to each project development stage to provide a process guidance summary.
• Developing a graphical creative synthesis to summarise the findings into an RD project delivery workflow.

3. Results

The literature search screening found 19 references containing process-related information on RD project development. Each reference’s content related to project delivery processes was coded and then grouped into one of the six emerging stages. Table 1 presents the list of references and relates them to the project delivery stages mentioned in each. Every ‘Yes’ shown in the table corresponds to data collected and analysed for each stage of RD project development.

One relevant finding is that there is no single source of guidance for students or new practitioners to get started on an RD project in the built environment. Thirty years after Lyle’s [16] book introduced the concept of RD, the project delivery workflow is still scattered. Reed’s [10] 2007 article is the only reference mentioning all processes, but so shortly that design and construction are explained in the same paragraph—with no indication about how to build regeneratively. The literature builds a comprehensive body of knowledge around RD’s fundamental principles and aspirations. However, its practical application is still unclear, emergent [14,19], and a practice-based movement [12].

One emergent finding, marked with an asterisk (‘Yes*’) and a darker-coloured cell, is the increased relationship between RD and circular building (CB) since 2018. As shown in the table, some authors relate the regenerative design, planning, and building processes to the CB field of study. The following section will summarise the six-stage RD project delivery process.

3.1. The Six-Stage RD Project Delivery Process

This section develops the six-step RD project delivery workflow. Because RD requires a mental model shift from the technological or mechanistic approach to one that understands how ecosystems work, it is dangerous to understand this workflow in a mechanistic, box-ticking way. The systemic change proposed by RD requires challenging assumptions and shifting away from prescriptive sustainable design tools towards a more flexible, reflective, and responsive design process that anticipates scenarios without preconceived ideas or formulas [12]. This responsive design process implies shifting away from the anthropocentric worldview that treats nature as instrumental to human needs. Instead, it aligns with the ecological or eco-centric worldview, which acknowledges that humans are an integral part of nature with a positive and mutually beneficial role [26,27]. Thus, designers no longer see themselves as separate from or above nature but as co-creative contributors to and belonging to the biosphere [24]. Design processes need to follow a whole-system worldview in which humans participate and contribute to the co-evolution of ecological and social systems [23] through a deeper understanding of the ecological systems and interrelationships that sustain life [19].

The six-stage RD project delivery workflow comprises i. place, ii. vision, iii. design, iv. plan, v. build, and vi. co-evolution. These are presented below in detail.

• Place

The starting point of an RD project is to develop a holistic understanding of the site’s geographic, cultural, economic, climatic, and ecological dynamic relationships. This understanding consists of a narrative named ‘story of place’. The ‘story of place’ is a narrative and science-based framework explaining a project’s distinctive essence, character, and potential.

Since RD aims to contribute to the ability of all the natural, cultural, and economic systems it affects in a place to grow and evolve in their continued health and viability, ‘place’ is understood as the complex interactions in a unique, multilayered network of living systems in a geographic region. However, complex differs from complicated and should not rely on quantitative measurements of the parts [7]. Visual aids help discover and represent the mapped flows in layers of ‘distinctive core patterns’—the intertwined geological, natural, and human history and culture through time [7,9].

Because RD requires understanding the social (historical, cultural, and economic) and ecological systems as one complex and dynamic social–ecological system [13,28], RD requires applying systems thinking. Systems thinking implies understanding that the whole is always different from the sum of the parts because of the relationships within components and how they influence each other [26]. The whole cannot be explained through an analytical, sequential approach that connects parts as in a mechanical system but by analysing its parts carefully and intuitively through a combination of thinking, feeling, and perception [23].

This stage is the most comprehensively developed, and almost every author mentions it as the starting point of RD.

ii.

Vision

RD develops a shared vision or ‘fundamental aim’ [10] in which designers and communities develop higher-order aspirations through understanding and collaborative open dialogue or facilitated community reflective charrettes. These charrettes identify the project’s full potential, aims, and aspirations and enable new potential in social and ecological systems [24]. Instead of a mechanical approach that examines parts separately, the RD approach examines whole systems integrally [23]. Plaut [17] suggests using a visual context to present the mapped flows to discover and view layers of patterns and relationships of present and historical elements.

The entire design team needs to shift to an ecological worldview. Because building stakeholders are usually unfamiliar with ecological principles and strategies, biologists and ecologists are invited to participate in RD teams and integrate ecological research into the design process [13]. Organisations, too, are considered evolving, structured, and interrelated living systems rather than things [7].

Some helpful methods to build a collective vision of the place’s potential include asking challenging questions to encourage divergent and whole systems thinking to expand potential outcomes and avoid dualistic thinking (right versus wrong) to promote multiple design pathways [24]. Those questions may include the following principles: place and nature, energy, carbon, water, materials and resources, waste, health and well-being, social equity, economy, culture and community, education, environment, and mobility. The reviewed literature did not guide which principles to prioritise or how to combine or conceptualise their interrelationships.

Nagle [9] suggests that achieving a systemic, regenerative vision involves creating a ‘circular infrastructure,’ which means “creating a system that enables materials, products and resources to be reused and remain in circulation.” However, this author does not provide further guidance on the topic.

The authors disagree on which stakeholders should be included in developing the vision. Reed [10] indicates that group dialogue should include the client and the design team. Other authors [20] suggest including at least three stakeholders who should work closely with the design team: the community, the natural systems directly related to the project, and the people responsible for carrying the vision into the future. Hoxie [12] argues that the approach should always be tailored to the project’s context, but this does not help identify which variables to consider and according to which criteria to tailor it.

iii.

Design

This process is different from what is traditionally understood by design professionals. It comprises a conceptual design and design guidelines as a framework for later decisions [10]. This design translates the vision into goals and strategies for harmonising the relationship between the built environment and the ecosystems that nurture it. Most authors agree that building consensus and community ownership to align and verify goals, setting targets, and prioritising strategies, patterns of relationships, keystone species, and key systems are critical for project success.

Again, these decisions are made participative through design charettes [10]. The design team should include ecologists, artists, sociologists, regulatory authorities, and other community members [24] to collaborate in an intuitive, synthetic, holistic, and nonlinear decision-making process [11]. An integrative design process linked through a design-and-build contract enables the team’s creativity to achieve a high-performance design to meet the project requirements [8]. Although only some authors mention the need for open community dialogue, others only mention the client and design team.

An RD concept design comprises the development concept, appropriate green material and technology selection, construction, operations, and long-term operation and maintenance. The project must aim for maximum efficiency and produce a positive outcome by applying the Passivhaus, Minergie, or Active House Standard and adding enough onsite renewable energy to generate surplus energy. It must also enhance indoor environmental quality and occupants’ health, comfort, and well-being [21]. RD tools such as REGEN support RD in the design phase but do not propose a specific development process [11].

According to Wahl [22], an RD project must deeply question how components were made, from what materials, and what the work conditions of the people producing them are. Thus, the regenerative impacts are related to the construction site and every other place where the materials and components come from. Therefore, designing buildings as a material bank to be cycled infinitely through design for disassembly, reversibility, and modularity without mixing or gluing them brings RD close to the circular building (CB) approach. Materials should be sustainability certified, bio-based, reused, recycled, local, and low carbon when possible [11]. Preference for locally extracted and manufactured materials whose production process produces no contamination excludes concrete, aluminium, and steel. Life cycle assessment is a valuable tool for assessing the embodied carbon of materials [8]. Awareness of the materials’ health hazards and occupant well-being, the use of the local workforce, skills, and craftsmanship, and their impact on biodiversity is recommended [14].

Using computational tools like BIM and digital twins allows designers to optimise building designs for circularity and regeneration by centralising building information and creating a database for materials passports [6,8].

The RD toolkit includes CB principles, such as design for disassembly. These include documenting materials and methods for deconstruction, selecting materials using the precautionary principle, designing accessible connections, preferring bolted, screwed, and nailed connections instead of chemical connections, separating mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems, simplicity of structure and form, modularity, independence, standardisation, and easy and safe deconstruction [8,14,25].

iv.

Plan

Having a design does not lead directly to execution in RD. First, a method for monitoring the ecosystem functions and providing feedback to support the engagement of people and the place must be implemented [10]. Indicators and metrics are set to monitor progress and provide ongoing feedback to the community for iterative roadmap setting. According to [11], metrics should shift away from focusing on rules and regulations and the rational, analytical, reductionist, and linear mindset towards an integrative, intuitive, synthetic, holistic, and nonlinear mindset.

RD certification tools such as Living Building Challenge, Living Community Challenge, SITES, and EcoQuartier have received criticism due to their compartmentalised categorisation and listing of environmental performance metrics. According to [13], a more holistic approach to ecology is required to integrate place-based environmental knowledge into regenerative design projects. Other criticisms include a lack of clarity regarding what is deemed regenerative and how it can be assessed, imposing too ambitious aims to designers unskilled in ecological systems, and the scale of projects usually too small to deliver clear ecological benefits to the larger contexts [25].

Attia [8] suggests assessing the CO₂ balance (which should be negative, including operational and embodied emissions) and circularity (which comprises design for disassembly, prefabrication, and material tracking through material passports) as metrics to assess RD projects.

Planning consists mainly of setting indicators, monitoring methods, and feedback mechanisms. However, the planning processes and how to implement the feedback mechanisms are scarcely mentioned in RD literature.

v.

Build

Building in a regenerative way is meant to enhance the health of human and natural systems, replenishing the resource flows of energy, water, and materials—this entails sourcing, recycling, and reusing [18]. An integrated design-to-construction process is preferred [10]. Integrated project delivery is a standard practice in sustainable-oriented or high-performance buildings, explained in detail in [29,30]. Integrated projects are described as highly effective collaboration between the owner, the prime designer, and the prime constructor, commencing with early design and continuing through to project handover.

Sertyesilisik [11] suggests a regenerative supply chain management approach that comprises partnering, lean, and agile construction project management. A product-as-a-service business model in which producers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product and are incentivised to implement circular building (CB) strategies and design material so that it can be dismantled, decomposed, reused again, or sold to other parties is proposed [8,14,25]. Applying performance-based contracting incentivises the design team to collaborate effectively to achieve pre-defined KPIs for energy, materials, water, and air quality and extends the supplier’s and producer’s responsibility over their products [8].

An entire building lifecycle tendering (including building operation and maintenance) based on capability instead of the lowest cost is proposed by [14]. Thus, the contractor and suppliers should be appointed based on their carbon management performance, the firm’s code of conduct, and the effective implementation of lean and agile project management practices [11].

Some suggested mechanisms for regenerative construction are site waste management, lean tools such as the Last Planner System for reducing fluctuations and stabilising operations, avoiding overproduction and reducing inventories, and Kaizen principles for reducing defective work risk [11]. Material passports (a CB tool) are proposed to maximise the ability to track, maintain, and repurpose materials by simplifying the search for suitable replacements or performing repairs when needed [6].

The literature does not address the material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and construction processes.

vi.

Co-evolution

Regenerative projects are designed as adaptive systems capable of self-correcting and adapting using feedback mechanisms [23]. Thus, building is not the end of the RD project delivery processes but the start of the co-evolutionary partnership of communities and nature. Regeneration is a dynamic and evolving evolutionary process oriented to incorporate a system that can continue improving its performance over time [7]. Thus, the final RD project delivery process engages the community in iterative cycles of action, monitoring, and feedback after project implementation [10], which requires the project team to focus on community capacity building to bring the place to realise its potential [24]. Creating a culture of co-evolution around the project is critical [7]. In work environments, indoor environmental quality, worker well-being, and the psychosocial environment must be continuously improved [14].

Recommendations for RD projects include adding the facility management team from the initial procurement phase [11] and considering a mid-life modernisation process for each equipment and system [14].

Previous RD development process frameworks have considered co-evolution a final, open-ended spiral that opens up indefinitely [7]. However, the previously mentioned framework combines concepts and processes and comprises only three stages (understand place, design for harmony, and co-evolution). This research argues that, as the cycles of action–monitoring–improvement are iterative and potentially endless, the co-evolution processes must be circled back into the project development processes. Thus, a closed-loop approach is proposed. On the other hand, it was found that the RD project development must comprise six stages instead of three stages.

3.2. Graphical Summary of RD Project Delivery

From the literature reviewed and the lack of a clear and comprehensive workflow for RD project delivery for the building industry, Figure 1 has emerged to understand and guide new practitioners in the RD process. This diagram acknowledges the six steps of the RD project delivery process identified in Table 1, including the closed loop required for co-evolution. It is worth noting that RD’s project workflow is not linear nor circular but could be described as a closed-loop spiral. This geometry represents the regenerative concept of place-based design and the ongoing co-evolution process that comes back to planning after the project is built.

4. Discussion

Buildings can and must move towards a low-carbon buildings future. RD proposes a paradigm shift that has the potential to radically change how the understanding of nature, the built environment, society, and the economy interrelate and inspire positive change. It addresses the main shortcomings of current sustainable design and rating tools’ practices by looking at the patterns of interrelationships between all the parts involved holistically—instead of analysing the parts separately. This may disruptively change how buildings are designed, procured, built, operated, and decommissioned to achieve that aim. However, RD literature does not address the whole building lifecycle emissions associated with materials and construction processes that UNEP [31] proposes.

While RD’s fundamental principles and aspirations are clearly expressed, its practical application is unclear, still emergent, and practice based. RD literature provides scattered sources of guidance on project development processes. For newcomers and students willing to start applying RD, there is no single source of advice on RD project delivery methodology. A complete set of tools and methods needs to be developed. This paper develops a general RD project delivery methodology by critically examining and distilling knowledge from the literature. This constitutes a contribution with immediate practical application. The proposed RD project delivery workflow should not be used as a prescribed method for developing an RD project but as a helpful guide to aid students and new practitioners.

The RD project delivery workflow was created through a comprehensive critical literature review that identified a six-stage process. Since previous work has identified RD as a three-stage process or has not identified any workflow processes, this paper originates a necessary theoretical discussion around this subject.

A comprehensive critical literature review identified six fundamental stages and created an RD project delivery workflow. The name of each process was selected according to a methodology identified in Section 2. The proposed workflow comprises a novel project delivery process summary and a diagram representing the entire workflow. There are previous intents to generate process diagrams but with a more conceptual than process-based intention.

It is worth noting the overlaps between RD and CB, which suggest they may be complementary and mutually reinforcing approaches to regeneration in the built environment. The link between RD and CB brings new questions to be studied in future research. Are their definitions, aims, and processes complementary or mutually supporting? Some authors consider regeneration a key circular economy strategy, and the findings of this study suggest the reverse is also true. However, the RD literature has not addressed topics included in CB literature, such as material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, construction, deconstruction processes, or strategies to ensure a larger project life (although it proposes strategies for continuous co-evolution). From this discussion, it seems that the building process RD literature needs to address these processes to be genuinely and comprehensively regenerative.

One of the tools required for the practical application of RD is an assessment tool to help determine whether a project is genuinely regenerative. Certifications aim to do that, but they have received criticism due to their compartmentalised categorisation of environmental performance metrics. These criticisms call for holistically integrating place-based environmental knowledge and greater clarity regarding what is deemed regenerative and how it can be assessed in small-scale building projects with limited ecological potential. This topic needs to be addressed in future research.

5. Conclusions

As a practice-based and still-emergent movement, RD project development requires step-by-step guidance for students or practitioners willing to start working on a regenerative project in the built environment. This paper proposes a novel six-step project delivery workflow and a workflow diagram that creatively synthesises the proposed RD project delivery workflow. These contributions are helpful for design and building practitioners willing to start a regenerative project.

This paper summarises the available knowledge and discusses how to develop a new, more comprehensive approach to RD project delivery. Some topics are unaddressed in the literature, and there is plenty of room for further development of RD. Some topics needing further development are the planning processes and the implementation of feedback mechanisms, material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and construction processes.

Additionally, this research found links and overlaps between RD and circular building (CB), suggesting opportunities for mutual further development of RD and CB.