Author: Oliver Broadbent

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Three tests for regenerative infrastructure

Pulling together the threads from this week’s posts so far on infrastructure, discussions about regenerative infrastructure often confuse three distinct factors: 

  • Metabolim
  • Ecological participation
  • Resilience 

Untangling these questions can help us gain clarity in what we are trying to design, so that we can then look for solutions that are win-win-win on all three counts. 

Metabolism.

The first question is about ecological metabolism, which we looked at yesterday.

In other words, what kind of economy does this infrastructure enable?  

Is it an economy of high energy and high material throughput? Or is it one that enables the economy to operate within its ecosystem limits? Or does it enable a metabolism that demands every increasing energy and materials? 

This question is the most contentious as it challenges fundamental assumptions about our economy. 

When we are discussing regenerative design in the context of buildings, this challenge is easier to side step because the scale is smaller. But when we get to talking about infrastructure, we are talking about the plumbing of the economy itself. 

Ecological participation

The second question is about how does the infrastructure engage with the living world itself. 

Some infrastructure depletes ecosystems as it passes through, for example by fragmenting habitats, disrupting water cycles or creating pollution.

Other infrastructure systems seek to minimise damage or contribute to ecosystem enhancement, for example, by creating wildlife bridges, protected nature reserves,or blue-green corridors alongside transport routes. 

Some infrastructure is actually created to support ecological processes for the wider benefit of humans and the rest of the living world — for example wetland restoration integrated into flood management systems.

The question here is: does the infrastructure damage the ecosystem, try to minimise harm or play an active part in enhancing life systems.

Resilience

The third question comes down to system design. Is the proposed system resilient? Is it decentralised, modular and capable of adapting and evolving? 

When conditions are stable, highly centralised systems can work very efficiently. But when conditions are unstable then modular, distributed networks are more effective.

This is where the writing of Donella Meadows and David Fleming is so helpful in understanding how complex systems can be made resilient.

Getting in a knot

When these three factors get tangled together, debates about infrastructure can get into a knot. 

For example, we can be building a wildlife corridor along a piece of infrastructure. That may be good from an ecosystem participation point of view. But if that infrastructure intensifies the metabolic rate of the economy beyond what the ecosystem can support, then the overall effect is still damage. 

Without separating these questions, it becomes difficult to see what we are designing for.

Three tests for regenerative infrastructure

Any proposal for infrastructure should pass three regenerative tests. Does it:

  • Support an economy operating within ecological limits?
  • Enhance the living systems it participates in?
  • Remain structurally resilient?

If we can design infrastructure that performs well across all three, then we are building the backbone of a system that can create thriving rather than exhausting the ecosystems our lives depend on.

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Infrastructure for the sprint or the long run

In yesterday’s post I said good system design in infrastructure is not enough. 

We can have an efficient, well structured and resilient system that still contributes to life destruction rather than creating thriving. 

To understand why, we need to consider what the infrastructure does. 

We can think of infrastructure as neutral: a set of pipes, wires, roads, channels and rails that move things around. 

But infrastructure is not neutral. 

Rather, it is the arteries and veins that determine the metabolism of the economy — the scale and speed at which energy and materials are pumped around and consumed. 

Some types of infrastructure enable a very high metabolic rate:

  • Motorways enable high-speed movement of energy intensive vehicles.
  • Shipping container infrastructure allows the fast movement of materials and goods around the world.
  • Global finance networks allow the astonishingly fast transfer of wealth from one place to another.

From an engineering perspective, these systems can be design to be very efficient and resilient. 

But if they are contributing to an economy whose metabolic rate exceeds its ecosystem limits, then the systems is going to run into trouble.

Just as for an athlete, a high metabolic rate can sustain a greater power only for so long before the negative side effects take over: fatigue, injury and build up of lactic acid, which is effectively a poison.

The same is true for our economies. 

If the flow of energy and materials through the system exceeds what the ecosystem can sustain, the consequences will catch up: climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse and resource instability. 

So this raises important questions for infrastructure designers: are we building systems that push the metabolic rate beyond what the ecosystem can support? Or are we building systems that enable us to thrive within our ecosystem limits?

The transport corridor revisited

Let’s return to the example yesterday of the transport corridor connecting neighbouring cities. 

From a traditional engineering perspective we might aim to increase the speed of connection, the capacity and the reliability. These moves all increase the metabolic rate of the economy — in other words, how intensively it can operate.

But what if we were designing infrastructure for an economy that lived within its ecological ceiling? What kind of systems would we build? What pattens would we adopt? 

Would we still be trying to maximise speed, throughput and reliability? 

Or would be trying to design a different kind of economic metabolism altogether?

Instead of concentrating flows through a few giant nodes, systems might be more distributed. Instead of bypassing places in the pursuit of speed, routes might pass through them, allowing exchange to happen along the way. Instead of friction being treated as a failure of the system, some forms of friction can allow local economies and ecosystems to interact.

These kinds of systems often move materials and people more slowly. But they also tend to operate at a lower metabolic intensity, offering the potential of living well, well within our limits.

The sprint or the long run

Perhaps the difference is something like the metabolism of a sprinter compared to that of a long-distance runner.

A sprinter’s body produces extraordinary bursts of power, but only for short periods before metabolic limits appear.

Endurance athletes operate at a lower intensity but can sustain activity for much longer.

Our infrastructure choices raise a similar question for the economy.

Are we building the metabolism of a sprinter economy — high throughput, high energy and short bursts of performance?

Or the metabolism of an endurance economy — one that can sustain prosperity over the long run?

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Good system design is not enough

Good system design is not enough

In regenerative design we spend a lot of time thinking about systems.

What is the system of construction? How does it work? What are the feedback loops that keep the show on the road? Which loops reinforce the outcomes we already have, and which might enable the more life-giving outcomes we want?

The living world is our template. Life is our best example of how to create thriving within ecosystem limits. Whether that’s through the systems of forests, wetlands, under-ocean reefs – in all of these contexts, the living system of life manages resources and energy while creating thriving. 

So we can ask, what are the characteristics of living systems that enable them to thrive? Could our economy work in a similar way – we live on the same planet and are subject to the same laws of physics, after all. How would our economy be organised? What would our supply chains look like? How would our infrastructure function?

But watch out! There is a banana skin here. 

It is possible to create systems that function really well — systems that are resilient, adaptable, efficient and well structured — and yet fail to create life-enabling conditions.

The potential slip is that good system design is not enough. Regenerative systems must be engaged with the system of life itself. They must participate in the living systems they are part of.

This is the key shift. 

  • Systems design asks, is the system well designed?
  • Regenerative design adds on the next layer: how is the system working with the living world. 

The transport corridor

Imagine we are designing a transport corridor to link connecting cities. From a systems perspective, we might aim for a system that is:

  • Resilient – able to adapt to shocks
  • Efficient – uses minimum resources to deliver its goal
  • Modular – made of semi-independent parts so failures or changes in one part do not collapse the whole system.
  • Adaptable – able to be configured in different ways. 

From a systems perspective, that could be a great design. 

But then we ask the additional regenerative question: what is this system doing to the living world?

Is the corridor slicing up habitats? Is the corridor severing communities? Is the corridor causing pollution? Is the corridor contributing to a wider system of ecological decline? Because on these counts, human and living world thriving is reduced. 

Interestingly, landscapes themselves are a patchwork of different ecosystem types linked by their own corridors: waterways, hedgerows, continuous tree-cover, that allow exchange of species, nutrients and water.

So the question is, does the addition of an extra corridor, built by humans for transport, enhance these connections or cut them off?

It is not enough for systems to function well. They have to participate in and positively contribute to the living world. 

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A new cohort for Lab alumni

Next week we begin a new experiment at the Regenerative Design Lab: we are starting our first alumni cohort. 

Cohort 7 will be for returning practitioners — engineers (and other humans) who have been through the Lab before. Some applied as long ago as 2022. 

That wasn’t so long ago in terms of building design ago, but in the field of regenerative design, which is emerging quite quickly, it feels like an age away. 

In those first discussions, we had a strong pedagogy of enquiry, but the language was still forming and the frameworks emerging. 

Since then the field has moved on and so have we. We have much better models and clearer patterns to work with. The connection between regenerative practice and day-to-day business can be more clearly articulated.

But more importantly the participants have moved on.

They’ve been in practice. They’ve tested ideas. They’ve discovered where the limits really sit and where they have been able to push.

And the operating conditions have changed too. The urgency has deepened. The need for thinking that is life-enabling rather than life-depleting is more acute. 

So while Cohort 7 is a second journey, it is not a repeat because we return with more experience, new questions and opportunities. 

This year we are also running Cohort 6 – our latest open cohort – in parallel. There’s something powerful I n this too: two groups moving through similar terrain but at different stages in their path. We’re curious to see what synergies develop between them, especially as we bring the two cohorts together for our final even in November.

Regenerative design is rooted in loops and cycles. I’m looking forward to seeing what this second cycle yields for our Cohort 7 participants. 

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Regenerative Design Lab reading list updated

As we prepare to receive Cohorts 6&7 into the Lab next week, I have been revisiting and updating our reading list. 

This year I’ve added four books: 

Some of these I read a while ago, one I am still reading, but I’m including them to make explicit something that has been strengthening in the Lab: the role of play, attention and emergence. 

Not just in how we facilitate. But in how we design. And how we show up.

Regenerative design isn’t just about feedback loops and systems levers. It is also about attention, tuning in, humility and sensing the audience — whether that’s a client, a colleague, a community or an ecosystem. 

Of all the established books on the reading list, one remains an old friend: the Dictionary of Lean Logic. 

It is a whole world imagined of living within ecological limits. It is where I return to for grounding and new challenge.

Updating the list each year feels like a good spring ritual. 

Regenerative practice is a vast field and this list represents just my intellectual journey, and not the whole cannon. I’d love to carry on widening this list, and I  welcome recommendations… but as I am very slow reader (it only seems to go in if I write things down)… it may take me a while to get to them. 

You can read the list here.

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The goal of regenerative design is largely irrelevant…

In a live project context, the goal of regenerative design is largely irrelevant. 

Not because it is not important, but because it is too big.

The goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve. This is too lofty for most projects. 

Most project daily project decisions are dealing with deliverables, budgets, deadlines and risks.

And yet, the future is built from daily decisions.

So instead, keep the goal in your back pocket, and use it every so often as a compass to ask, are we still roughly heading in the right direction.

If we get diverted along the way, we can course correct when we get the chance. But if we don’t know where we are heading, we don’t know if we are heading off track.

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Strategy says no

If your strategy doesn’t tell you what not to do, it is not an effective strategy.

Because saying yes to things is the easy part. In fact I believe it has never been easier for businesses to think they can take on more and more.

But the amount of human attention we have is finite. Switching focus takes cognitive effort. Increasing stakeholders has a quadratic impact on the number of new relationships to manage.

Straddling strategies (doing both, or many things) doesn’t evenly reduce the time for each. It fragments it, the overhead multiplies disproportionately and the depth decreases.  

So if we want to have impact in our work then we have to choose. 

And so that we don’t have to do the hard work of choosing each time, we write a strategy. It saves us from having to renegotiate our priority every week.

Which means, if your strategy isn’t clearly telling you what not to do, it isn’t doing its job. Instead, it’s pushing that hard work downstream, forcing you to decide every day, creating extra effort and reducing impact.

Strategy does the hard work of saying no to make it easier for you to focus on having impact every day. 

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Aiming Higher in the System

When we try to apply regenerative design at a project level, it can feel like our hands are tied.

The building regs won’t allow it.

I’ll never get insurance for that.

This project is too small to create that sort of change. 

These constraints are real, but they are also information that the leverage need may not sit at the level of the project itself. 

This is why we talk about aiming higher in the system. 

To aim higher in the system is to look at the system of constraints that surround a project — the operating rules, procurement processes, risk appetite and supply chains — and work to change those. 

This work may look different to the work we normally do. It might involve creating new relationships, developing new processes, challenging big assumptions. 

It may not look like regular design. 

Which is why ‘aim higher in the system’ sits at the top of the Brief for Thriving. If we can influence over the higher shelves on the Systems Bookcase — the operating rules, mindsets and goals — then we can begin to change what gets built, and critically, the impact of building stuff.

Regenerative design is systems change. We have to work higher in the system to ensure that what we build actually makes the world better.

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Green shoots emerge: it’s time to start writing again

Regular followers of the blog will noticed that the daily(ish) blog has been somewhat dormant over the winter. And maybe that is appropriate. Winter is after all the time when living systems reset, process, regroup and do the quiet work that gets them ready for growth in the spring. 

The thing about this winter work is it doesn’t look like much while it is happening. In the wood it is quiet; on the allotment the winter days were very still… and very wet. But underground the stage is being set, slowly, gradually, for all the growth of spring. And when that growth comes, it comes suddenly. 

For us at the Regenerative Design Lab, the invisible winter work has been to recruit two cohorts for Labs in 2026. This has involved lots of interviews during short days and dark afternoons with the many people who applied. We have also been thinking carefully about how we evolve our pedagogy based on everything we have learnt so far. 

For me personally it has been a time during which I formally ended and wrote up my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design. The Fellowship helped us grow the Lab from a seedling (the pilot phase), through the sapling stage (where it needed the support) to the young tree that it is this year, fully self supporting.

And quietly, almost every day, someone has bought a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, which means that the seeds of this work are travelling further than I can see.

And so, the stage is set for spring, and springing into more visible action. 

Next week is the kick-off for Cohort 6 and 7. For Cohort 6 we have a fascinating group of engineers (and other humans) from different disciplines, including a new interest from the infrastructure sector. Cohort 7 welcomes back alumni returning to deepen their regenerative practice.

We are also running regenerative design workshops directly for organisations, looking at business strategy, culture change and skills for facilitation and persuasion. 

So plenty to be writing about. 

Standby for spring. 

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When a group of learners becomes a living system

All week we’ve been interviewing candidates for Cohort 6 of the Regenerative Design Lab. With such a strong range of applicants, it’s been a real privilege to spend time with so many thoughtful, committed humans.

And it’s not just us asking the questions.

Candidates ask us questions too, as they decide whether they want to commit to this journey. One question, in particular, keeps coming up, what does a good outcome for a cohort look like?

Over the week, my answer has been converging on a clear image.

The Lab is a facilitated, carefully scaffolded process. We design the conditions, hold the space, and guide the learning. But that’s not the end goal.

Over time, something else begins to happen.

Cohorts start to form their own connections.
People rely on one another, not just on the facilitators.
Support, challenge and learning begin to circulate within the group.

The process starts to become mutual.

Participants bring energy, insight and care — and receive it in return. The cohort starts to function less like a programme and more like a living system, sustained by the quality of its relationships.

As confidence grows, the group becomes more able to respond to what emerges. New questions surface. Directions shift. The cohort adapts — not because it was pre-designed to do so, but because the conditions allow it.

Our hope is that, over time, a cohort develops enough of its own energy to sustain itself. That it unlocks the abundance already present in the group, rather than relying on continued external input.

When that happens, the role of facilitation begins to fall away.

The cohort can fly on its own.

Not dependent on us.
Not dependent on funding.
Sustained by what participants create, share and renew together.

Interconnection.
Symbiosis.
Capacity to adapt.

A system that draws on renewing, abundant resources rather than depletion — and continues because it wants to, not because it is being held in place.

For me, that is a deeply regenerative outcome.

Living Systems Blueprint