Regenerative Landscape Development: A Transformational Methodology for Thrivability of Landscapes

Abstract

Although the integration of science, practice, culture, and spirituality is recognized as necessary to move toward sustainability, most transdisciplinary frameworks are not inclusive of the necessary worldviews, paradigms, aims, processes, and components. Landscape sustainability science focuses on a pivotal level for scientific, practitioner, and stakeholder efforts toward sustainability, yet collaboration and progress have been slow. Regenerative development, a development and design methodology based on a holistic worldview, has potential as an integrating and transformational methodology to fill these gaps. A new paradigm of regenerative landscape development could shift the aim from sustainable social–ecological systems to thriving living systems in which health, well-being, and happiness increase continually across scales. This potential of regenerative landscape development in practice is with two case studies of projects in Vina del Mar, Chile and Juluchuca, Guerrero, Mexico. Finally, recommendations moving forward in constructing regenerative landscape development as a new paradigm are proposed. If fully understood, embraced, and realized, regenerative development holds incredible potential for a future that is not just sustainable but is thriving (This text is adapted with permission from Gibbons et al. in Sustainability 10:1910, 2018).