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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.

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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.