Introduction

Multiple drivers of change such as climate change, global biodiversity loss, and urbanisation are converging and causing unexpected, rapid, and difficult changes to human society. There is a need to design to mitigate causes of these issues and ensure adaption to rapidly changing world. While many designers seek to be more sustainable, there are those that push these boundaries and go beyond reducing negative ecological impacts to designing places for humans that actually become contributors to living networks of local and global ecologies, and have benefits in terms of human wellbeing. Several important themes emerge from the essays and case studies in this book. We are already quite good at getting our buildings to shelter us from the heat of a hot sun, from rain, and wind, but our buildings and cities could be doing so much more. We lack a coordinated sense that the breadth of regenerative performance is what we should aim for with built environment design.