Unpacking the ‘Regenerative Built Environment’: Circular Material Practices in Africa and Asia

Abstract

The presentation aims to critically reflect the concept of a regenerative built environment (RBE) by developing a comparative perspective between three case studies: the Western Cape Region, the island of Bali, and Bhutan. Moving beyond current sustainability approaches and their alleged ineffectiveness, the idea of regeneration offers novel conceptual pathways for construction that go past mere mitigation towards storing CO2 in the building stock and therefore contributing to repairing the climate emergency. It aims to overcome the sector’s current status as an exploitative and inequitable driver of anthropogenic climate change and transform it into a force for positive environmental and societal impact by incorporating principles of systems thinking, nature integration, circular economy, and just transition. A RBE is important because a significant source of carbon emissions will continue to be global building stocks, which are expected to double by 2050. Since all the cases are rich in natural material stocks for construction, the presentation shares insights about innovative examples of regenerative architecture and their supply chains and empirical evidence about the governance dynamics towards a more sustainable construction sector. Although there are best practices in each of the cases, the systematisation of the taken approaches is lacking and the consequent links between all the stages of the supply chains are missing. Examples are wood in Bhutan, bamboo in Indonesia, and reuse/recycling in South Africa. Furthermore, the targeted transition will be a generational effort requiring multi-contextual educational formats. Finally, locally embedded practices and materials will be contextualised for alternative futures.