Author: Oliver Broadbent

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A conversation with Hazel Hill Wood

At Hazel Hill Wood, we treat the place not just as a setting but an active participant in the work. A practice I learnt there is, on arrival, to tell the wood what I have come to do.

What follows is a reflection on that practice (first published on the Hazel Hill site) and a question that is an underlying motivation in my work on regenerative design.

A practice I learnt from Alan Heeks, the founder of Hazel Hill Trust, is, on arrival, to tell the wood what I had come here to do. And so I sat down this morning, by the Gatekeeper tree to share a fairy ordinary to-do list. But as I started, something else came out. 

The following is a transcript of that conversation with the wood.

It is hard to know if you want us here. All the people that come. Would it be better off if we stayed away? I am not attuned enough to the signals from the wood to be able to sense the answer. 

So I come at the question from a different angle. 

Ecosystems show us that every component evolves to play a part. Not survival of the fittest but survival of the whole. The system evolves to maximise the life-fullness that is possible within those limits. 

Humans have evolved as part of ecosystems, have evolved to play a part. To live well, even, in harmony with the rest of life. 

And yet, in much of the Global North, we seem to have drifted away from that relationship. At a societal level, we no-longer live in strong relation with or pay much attention to this wider pattern of life. So that our collective actions serve to deplete rather than enhance the ecosystems of which we are part. 

You are a place to help restore that relationship. A small node in a much wider movement of people who want to establish and mainstream a different relationship between humans and the rest of the living world. A relationship of attention, care and mutual thriving. 

At Hazel Hill Wood people can come to discover or rediscover their relationship with the living world. And can find healing and wellbeing through connecting with this wider web of life. 

When we are here we will treat you with respect. 

We will play an active part in seeking to grow the life-fullness of this place. 

And we will bring people under the boughs of your canopy, so that they can take what they learn here and create wider influence wherever they come from. 

To return to where I started, I cannot tell what you think of all of this, but I hope that our intrusion on the peace and tranquility of this place can have a positive impact here, and on ecosystems further afield. 

And I hope that you feel this is worthwhile. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to listen out for an answer.

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Spotting people spotting kingfishers

My workshop today is in an office along the same river catchment as the one I live on, so my commute takes me deep into the Frome valley.

I know kingfishers nest here but I almost never spot them.

Luckily, I’ve found a hack. Look for someone with a massive telephoto lens. Stand nearby. Follow their gaze.

Today’s kingfisher was much closer than I expected, right on the near bank of the river.

A recurring theme in my posts over the last couple of weeks has been this idea of ecological participation.

Not just reducing harm. Not just “less bad”. But actively playing a part in enhancing the living systems we are part of.

That feels like a leap. And it is. And I think the first step is to start noticing differently.

Seeing that we are surrounded by life. Remembering that it’s there. Recognising that it’s the container for all that we do. I see it as a pathway on the mindset shift from separation to interdependence.

Because when we notice, we start to care. And when we care, we start to make different decisions.

Even as I write this, it’s easy to take the life that surrounds us for granted.

I’m fortunate to have a river like this running through my corner of the city.

And still, most days, I cycle past without really seeing it.

Maybe I’m not very good at spotting kingfishers.

So for now I will start with spotting kingfisher spotters.

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Repair as an ambition loop

In my previous post I wrote about how United Repair Centre are creating the infrastructure that is renewing repair in the fashion sector. 

I think their work is a great example of an ambition loop beginning to form. 

An ambition loop is a simple model for system change that connects three drivers:

  • Community need
  • Business opportunity
  • Political priority 

When these align, they can reinforce each other and allow a system intervention to scale. 

In the case of United Repair Centre, we can see all three drivers in place and beginning to reinforce each other. 

Community need

There is a need for meaningful work. 

Repair offers:

  • skilled employment
  • a route into employment 
  • the revaluing of craft that is at risk of disappearing. 

Business opportunity

Brands are under pressure to reduce waste, particularly in countries like France where the imperative for company take-back of waste is so high. 

Businesses also the opportunity to see repair as a valuable differentiator. 

There’s a chance to build stronger, longer-term customer relationships. 

Government priority

  • Reduce waste 
  • Create employment opportunities
  • Growing interest in onshoring work. 

–

Repair brings these drivers together into a reinforcing loop.

By training repairers through their academy, United Repair Centre creates a workforce that can reliably deliver repair services.

Businesses can then offer repair, building customer loyalty while diverting materials from landfill.

Government gains confidence that industry can respond to circular economy legislation.

This, in turn, drives more businesses to adopt repair, and more people into these roles.

What’s interesting is that change here depends on two things:

  • the existence of the mechanism
  • the confidence that grows from seeing it work

Once the system operates at a minimum viable level, the loop can begin to reinforce itself.

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Steel reuse: writing a new blue book

Structural steel reuse is on the rise, as this month’s Structural Engineer articles show.

But what might be seen as a material innovation is actually a shift in something more fundamental.

I see this work as our industry writing a new “blue book” on the operations shelf of the systems bookcase.

In other words, we are building the system that makes it possible for a designer to specify reused steel.

Because to make reuse work, the industry is having to create:

  • toolkits for recovery
  • processes for pre-demolition audits
  • new ways of coordinating demolition and new construction
  • infrastructure for holding and processing stock

None of this is visible in the final building.

But without it, reuse doesn’t happen.

In the systems bookcase, the operations shelf contains the factors that constrain or enable design decisions.

Everything listed above sits there.

In terms of transition, this is Horizon 2 (which we colour blue) — the in-between space where new practices can emerge that are both viable in the existing system but are a significant step towards the system we want to create. 

Let’s be clear: steel reuse is still a long way from being a process that is life-giving.

But it can significantly reduce the embodied impact of construction —

which is, at least, ecological-adjacent.

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Set design for a training room

If your brief is to design the set for a theatre piece set in a construction industry training room, then make sure it includes the following:

White boards. Spare furniture. A clock that doesn’t work. 

Security blinds, locked shut to keep intruders out, as well as the sunshine. 

White board fluid.  Extension leads. TV on a stand. 

Unconnected audio equipment. Post-it notes. Antibacterial fluid. 

Green cables. Red cables. Blue cables. Yellow cables. 

Archive boxes. Abandoned teleconference equipment. 

Laminated instruction sheets. 

Flip chart architecture. Highlighters. Slips of paper with the wifi code. Speakers. Panel heater.

And a hat stand. 

Arguably (I am sure I have argued this before) learning should be the objective of a high-functioning company. We don’t just do a thing: each we do it, we learn from it and do it better. (Otherwise lessons learnt become lessons lost.)

If learning were the organisational objective,, then the training room wouldn’t look like this. 

It wouldn’t be a storage space for forgotten equipment and excess furniture. 

It would be the nerve centre of learning. A place that celebrates learning rather than treats the experience as second rate. 

Just imagine what that room would look like.

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Fuelling the Regenerative Design Lab

This March we are holding the Spring Residential workshops for Cohort 6 and Cohort 7 of the Regenerative Design Lab. Appropriately I was down at Hazel Hill Wood this weekend for the wood’s Wood Chop Challenge — the annual event that provides firewood for that heats the retreat buildings used by many groups who come to the wood to learn, including the Lab.

For me this process captures something of the essence of regenerative practice.

The firewood is both product and process.

It both meets a human need — staying warm and comfortable while in the wood. And it meets the wider need of the ecosystem through careful management of the woodland. And, what’s more, the work of producing it — felling, chopping, transporting and stacking — becomes part of the experience of that place.

In that sense the Wood Chop Challenge is a small example of what regenerative practice can look like: meeting our needs while strengthening the living systems we depend on.

You can read more about it on the Hazel Hill website here.

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A flow for thinking about regenerative infrastructure

A final post this week to draw together the long form posts into a simple flow. 

Across these posts I’ve explored how infrastructure shapes the metabolism of the economy, the insufficiency of system resilience on its own, and how mindsets shape our view of infrastructure.

Taken together they suggest a simple flow for thinking about regenerative infrastructure. 

Mindset>Brief>Ideas>Tests>Iterate

Mindset

We start by using the Changing Mindsets motif to challenge our assumptions about infrastructure

Brief

We create a brief that moves beyond delivering infrastructure efficiently to seeing infrastructure as part of what enables humans and the living world to thrive together.

Ideas

We fill our Kalideacope with two libraries:

  • Resilient systems architecture
  • Ecological participation patterns

And we turn our Kalideascope with an additional library:

  • Regenerative mindset prompts

Different combinations generate new possibilities for infrastructure design

Tests

We test the ideas against three criteria for regenerative infrastructure:

  • Metabolism — does the system operate within ecological limits?
  • Ecological participation — does it strengthen living systems?
  • Resilience — is the system well structured?

Iterate

Keep going until the idea meets the brief.

Or we change the brief to a better brief because the brief we first thought of is almost certainly not the right one.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise because regenerative infrastructure is not the conventional way of thinking about infrastructure. We should expect the thinking process to be hard. 

These tools are here to help.

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Turning the Kalideascope — generating ideas for regenerative infrastructure

In yesterday’s post we looked at mindsets that might shape a brief for regenerative infrastructure. 

But once we have the brief established, the next challenge is to have ideas. This where we use our Kalideascope model for idea generation. 

The Kalideascope is protocol engineers (and other humans) can use to develop ideas. The concept is to gather fragments of information that will inform the process (filling the Kalideascope) and then trying different combinations of these fragments (turning the Kalideascope).

For regenerative infrastructure, I see three libraries as useful inputs to the process. 

Library 1 – resilient system architectures

This first library contains examples of patterns of resilient systems. These are about how systems are structured.

In my work I draw heavily on the systems patterns described by Donella Meadows and David Fleming in their respective books, but you can build your own. 

Recurring patterns include: 

They say nothing about how they interact with the living world — this library is about form. But they give us clues about how regenerative infrastructure would need to operate. 

The job of the regenerative infrastructure designer is to fill their scrapbook with examples of these systems in order to feed them in to their idea generation process

Library 2 – systems of ecological participation

This second library contains ways for working with and enhancing ecological systems. These say little about system form.

Recurring patterns include: 

  • Nature corridors
  • Wetland restoration
  • Continuous-cover forestry
  • Patchwork landscapes
  • Ocean reforestation
  • Re-naturalising river channels

These are ways that engineers work with living systems to improve them as nodes, networks and entire ecological systems. 

Alongside Library 1, Library 2 fills our creative process with ways to intervene.

Library 3 – mindset prompts

The first two libraries help fill our Kalideascope. This third Library is a set of prompts to help us turn it — recombining patterns in different ways to create new ideas. 

This library of prompts comes from the mindset shifts in yesterday’s post.

  • What if the living world were the primary infrastructure?
  • What if everything could emerge from the living systems here?
  • What if we allowed this system to evolve?
  • What if mutual thriving were the goal?
  • What if 90% of resources had to stay in the bioregion?

These questions trip us out the rut of conventional thinking. The first responses to these questions are often not usable, but in the kernel of the ridiculous might be something that is possible.

Turning and testing

We can start to generate new ideas by combining patterns from Libraries 1 and 2 and using Library 3 to provoke further variations. 

Of course, not every idea will be good. But that is not the point. We need to generate a wide range of options to see what is possible. 

Earlier in this series, I introduced three tests for regenerative infrastructure:

  • Metabolism – does the infrastructure contribute to a system that operates within ecological limits?
  • Ecological participation – does it support living systems?
  • Resilience – is it will structured?

We can test our ideas against these criteria, and keep on turning the Kalideascope until we find something that passes.

Designer’s Paradox

The concept of regenerative infrastructure is probably unfamiliar to most of us, which makes it hard to define a brief in the first place. 

But remember the Designer’s Paradox. You don’t know what you want until you know what you can have. 

Turning the Kalieascope provokes to think about what is possible so that we can start to think about what we can have.

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Is infrastructure alive? — Three mindsets shifts for regenerative infrastructure design

One of my favourite books of 2025 was Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive? and it has been at the forefront of my mind as I try to do the mental work of climbing out of my conventional thinking to imagine what regenerative infrastructure might mean.

Ultimately, it comes down to mindset.

Before we get into the design brief for regenerative infrastructure, it is important to think about the mindset we are bringing to the whole process. 

In the Systems Bookcase, mindsets sit above operational requirements and designs. They shape those requirements, from which everything else follows. The mindsets in turn follow from our goals. 

In regenerative design our goal is for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve. 

The trouble with mindsets is they can be hard to see. They are often implicit in the operational requirements that we derive and the designs that follow.

For example, if we can have sustainable add-ons to a project that is inherently not sustainable — like a low-carbon airport terminal — it suggests that the overarching mindsets and goals are not aligned with creating thriving. 

But if we can ask questions that challenge our mindsets right at the start of the project, we can make those mindsets visible before anyone has even realised they are shaping the design.

The Pattern Book proposes three mindset shifts that support a transition to a regenerative economy: 

  • From separation to interdependence
  • From scarcity to abundance
  • From control to emergence

Each of these shifts can be turned into a provocative design question for infrastructure. These questions come before we establish the design brief. They help establish the big questions about what we should be designing and why.

Interdependence – the living world as infrastructure.

Instead of asking, how do we make this infrastructure more sustainable, we ask:
What if the living world were the primary infrastructure?

Rivers, oceans, wetlands, mycelium networks, woodland canopy and the air that surrounds us. These are the nodes and connections of our living planet’s circulatory system.

Instead of designing human infrastructure first and then off-setting its effects, we could start by understanding what ecological processes sustain a place. How do rivers, wetland and coastal systems need to evolve? How do habitats need to adapt. What is needed to enable circulation of water, materials and nutrients?

We then design human systems to be nested within these living systems, and not the other way round.

Abundance – thriving living systems creating wealth

Many industrial systems are occupied with extracting increasingly scarce resources. But living systems have the potential to create huge abundance.

When they function well, living systems create huge wealth:

  • Natural cooling from tree canopies
  • Rich and diverse plant and animal life on land
  • Diverse and plentiful life in the seas
  • A microbial environment that supports our own microbiome
  • Vast amounts of materials that can be harvested
  • Natural cleaning of air and water
  • And ultimately the a complex system of interacting processes that maintain a balanced climate on earth.

Our greatest preoccupation should be how do we enable these living process to function well so that we can live well.

The design question is then not how do we create infrastructure that maximises the extraction and transport of these resources, but rather how do we create infrastructure that supports living systems to create abundance?

Emergence – living infrastructure that evolves.

Conventional engineering assumes infrastructure to be fixed, but the infrastructure of the living world behaves differently – it is alive, it shifts, it adapts to changing environmental conditions.

Rivers shift course. Wetlands expand and contract. Forests shift their make up over a cycle of many decades. Migration routes divert when they need to.

These circulatory systems are a dynamic web that shift across and shape the landscape.

Rather than attempt to control and pin down these systems, the design question becomes how do we restore the capacity of these systems to organise themselves?

Because when these systems function well, we can live well.

Questions to unlock design

These questions are deliberately provocative. The don’t have easy answers we can point to.

That’s the point of design. If we knew the answer before we started, we wouldn’t be doing design — we’d be shopping.

Regenerative infrastructure is, ultimately, the wiring of an economy that creates thriving. If we go into infrastructure design with the assumptions of an extraction-based economy, we will reproduce that system.

But if we question our mindsets, we change assumptions and open the possibility of designing something fundamentally different.

So is infrastructure alive? 

Obviously the concrete, steal and mineral structures that we traditionally build are not. 

But if we step back and ask what broader systems actually enable us to live well, the answer is very different. 

Regenerative design begins by recognising that humans and the rest of the living world must survive, thrive and evolve together. Ours and nature’s systems are not separate — they are interdependent.

That is not how infrastructure is traditionally imagined.

But the first step in designing a viable alternative to is to imagine it. 

Seeing infrastructure as alive, and part of a much wider web of life, is an invitation to imagine things differently, so we can start designing differently.

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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.