Evaluating the Practice and Outcomes of Applying Regenerative Development to a Large-Scale Project in Victoria, Australia

Dominique Hes,Sareh Moosavi,André Stephan

doi:10.3390/su10020460

Abstract

Regenerative development is one of the critical pathways or processes towards an ecological worldview and a built environment in synergy with the natural environment. This vision aims to restore and support environmental, social and economic flows from a systems perspective. While regenerative development has been discussed in theory and applied to some projects, very few studies have analysed the processes that support its emergence. Our study investigates the design process of an ongoing development project, “Seacombe West” in Victoria, Australia. It evaluates the design outputs, using the LENSES Framework (Living Environments in Natural, Social, and Economic Systems) which is specifically designed to facilitate the emergence of regenerative development thinking. The project included a series of four workshops that led to a set of guidelines that in turn were used to design a masterplan. We evaluate the resulting guidelines, the masterplan, and the experience of the participants through an online survey (70% response rate) and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. Our results show that using LENSES encouraged systems thinking and helps facilitate a transdisciplinary approach towards regenerative development. This evaluation provides insights into how regenerative development can emerge in projects and how the potential for net benefit can be embedded.

Highlights

There has been a call from many areas of research and practice for a different approach to sustainable development in the built environment
The aim of this paper is to assess the process of applying regenerative thinking and reflect on the outcomes for the participants and the design of the masterplan of a 680-hectare project, “Seacombe West”, in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, 217 km southeast of Melbourne
We present the main two analyses of the regenerative process: (1) the effect of the LENSES Framework on the design process; and (2) how this process was perceived among the stakeholders

Summary

Introduction

There has been a call from many areas of research and practice for a different approach to sustainable development in the built environment. This has occurred because many of the social and ecological indicators that underpin our civilisation are being eroded. Led by thinkers in the built environment such as Lyle [1], McDonough and Braungart [2], Birkeland [3], Cole [4], Mang and Reed [5] and du Plessis [6,7], the call has gone out for approaches that facilitate built environment outcomes that move beyond marginal improvements and shift our focus towards creating vitality and net benefit. Regenerative development can be seen as a process to facilitate this type of approach to contributive development [5,8,9,10,11]

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