Within the practice of regenerative development, you are called to hold a lot of things at once with a focus on life, wholeness, and harmony.

It works in the opposite direction of the scientific method of reducing everything into small parts to deal with them in manageable silos and then putting all the parts back together and calling it a whole… If you took Schrodinger’s cat apart and put it back together, yes it would still be a cat, but maybe not so helpful for his next experiment 

To work on true wholeness it has to be held in wholeness, in its natural order of complexity, though that doesn’t mean you can’t cycle through levels of design and work on these, understanding the layers through relationships

As an example, you have a large greenfield site just outside a town. It has been mostly cleared through logging or grazing or through soil and ecosystem degradation over decades or centuries. It is ripe for an extractive development process of subdivision of land, and building of monoculture housing to a standard that is only one step above illegal building, with all the profits being extracted out of the community into the city-based developers pockets 

Instead, you use regenerative development techniques to understand the essence of place and its unique character, the wholeness of place that is greater than the sum of its social, ecological, economic, cultural, and historical characteristics

You work with the community to find its higher calling and a tangible mechanism to work with them to achieve that higher order of being for the site. Everyone is pumped and you have captured the imagination of the people…  now what? how do we design that? Where do we start?

Ideally either you or members of your team have a deeper understanding of whole-of-system, life-centred design, permaculture being one of the best anchors. During the regenerative design discovery phase this would have already started through understanding the land and its potential

If you hand the site over now and leave it to the standard market practice and design teams of architects, landscape architects, and engineers, you have lost its wholeness, particularly without the right key design principles and the use of the integrative design process. The development will be dismantled into silos, with the parts being designed separately and then put back together… and you will be left with a Frankenstein, together and kind of working, yet not quite alive and definitely not in harmony 

The critical element of regenerative design and development is being able to see and flow through nested systems of fractal patterns. Holding and understanding the characteristics and relationships between human nature and settlement patterns, order through the complexity of life, and the mainframe of matter and energy through universal patterns 

You need to walk, smell, feel, see, and experience a site in its living condition. Observe its nested place in community. Watch and understand the patterns and cycles of weather, seasons, flows of life, and the elements of water, sun, wind, and fire through its system. 

While holding the goal of the project towards its regenerative capability you need to create a mainframe design for the site that captures, directs and/or excludes the natural life-supporting elements in line with these cycles. 

This universal matter/energy mainframe has a deep understanding of the relationships needed for the succession of the life layer of design.  

From succession rewinding to harnessing speciation to realise the potential of the site, the use of pioneer species of plants and trees to rehabilitate the soils, which have now been hydrated through the element design, helps further terraform the site, creating ecosystems and collapsing time through yearly cycles for the establishment of biodiversity rich forests and resilient food systems 

Understanding the relationships and utilising the powerful activating force of human settlement as another nested whole in the design, catalyzes more abundance and collapses time in the system further

The design and development of the built environment on the site is a functioning part of the whole system, being a place for settlement of one of the key activating forces, while being a nucleus of activity in the site, while being part of the elemental mainframe, while being an active part of the living system cycles

And this living whole in harmony project site is nested in the community it sits and provides a nodal point of activity that releases sufficient energy in the system to perpetuate change in line with the regenerative project goals of this larger nested proximate whole 

And this proximate whole with the internal nested site, has a dynamic relationship with the larger whole of the bioregion. All actively exchanging energy and value, teaming with abundance, and developing order through deeper and deeper connections through complexity. developing and building new fields of energy and life in a reinforcing system of evolutionary resilience 

Which model of development would you like to see scaled across your country?