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.
