People are often curious about our work at Dark Matter Labs. From a distance, it can look intriguing — ambitious, even inspiring — but also abstract, complex and hard to grasp. That reaction is understandable. This book is an invitation into the day-to-day practicalities work.

The Third Horizon

Much of our work touches what is often called the third horizon: the space beyond incremental improvement or reform, where entirely new ways of organizing economies, institutions and relationships are being explored. This is work that looks past today’s dominant, extractive systems and asks a more fundamental question: what might come next, if we were serious about designing economies that enable life to flourish?

Reaching into this horizon requires experimentation, new forms of practice, new perspectives and often new language. The unintended consequence is that our work can feel distant or unrelatable, making it harder for people to engage, to see what is possible, or even to believe that meaningful change is already underway. The exploration contained in this document is meant to make our practice accessible without making it simplistic and precise without being exclusionary. Rather than explaining our ideas in the abstract, we tell stories — of projects, places, people and moments where new economic logics are being tested in the real world. These stories offer a way to understand not just what we do, but how change actually happens when working with complex living systems.

The book is also an exercise in connecting the dots. In systems change, impact is rarely linear or easy to attribute. Outcomes emerge over time, across contexts, through relationships and feedback loops. Here, we ask some simple but demanding questions: what does impact actually mean in this context? Acknowledging that we are part of wider ecosystems of change, how have we contributed and what is our future role?

The Underlying Threads

We enter this inquiry with a hypothesis: that our work is grounded in a new economic narrative — one oriented toward what we call Life-Ennobling Economics — and that a set of recurring shifts (introduced in chapter 84) underpin much of what we do. But is that really the case? Are these patterns truly coherent across our work? And if so, what does that tell us about how economies might move beyond extraction, narrow notions of capital and labour and inherited models of governance?

We do not often speak about our work in this way. Not because it is unimportant — quite the opposite — but because the work itself has always come first. This book creates a pause: a moment to reflect, to sense-make and to share.

A Network of Practitioners

We hope these stories invite you to imagine the world a little differently. Perhaps they will help you recognize similar threads in your own work, or inspire you to reach out to one of the people mentioned here. Because this is not just a collection of projects — it is a network of agents of change, connected through practice, trust and a shared belief that something else is possible. Every name in this book represents someone already involved, in one way or another, in shaping that possibility.

You can read all the stories online but we really recommend downloading the book and reading them when you have time and energy. We hope you enjoy them as invitation to live firmly in the present whilst building towards next economic futures.

Dm Threads was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Challenge

Councils across the UK must act now to ensure their communities are resilient to climate-change. But while local authorities are facing growing climate risks, they are also sitting on vast amounts of data. The challenge? This data, while rich, is often not disaggregated or synthesised in a way that supports actionable decision-making.

How we got here

At Trees As Infrastructure, we understand that data alone won’t drive change. It’s the starting point, but the next step is turning it into something useful for local authorities — actionable insights that can guide adaptation measures and build political momentum. We’ve had the opportunity to help cities like Songpa, Seoul and Stuttgart (read more here about how we implemented location-based scoring in Stuttgart) develop risk-based vulnerability assessments, and with that experience in mind, we set out to link these insights directly to adaptation actions. Thanks to some Innovate UK funding, we were able to explore how vulnerability assessments could be linked to adaptation pathways, read more here about our Heat Sensing Collaboration, which we could then test in place thanks to a recent partnership with Croydon.

With Croydon we’ve been working to build the first steps of their climate adaptation evidence base, blending geospatial analysis with local data to provide a framework for resilience. This project is an exciting and essential step towards creating adaptable, scalable solutions that can be used across London’s diverse boroughs. See the analysis here by navigating to Climate Risk.

What We Did: Data-Driven Adaptation Planning

Croydon, like many other councils, faces a range of climate-related challenges. From increasing flooding risks to rising temperatures and poor air quality. To tackle this Croydon also has a wealth of data at its disposal, much of it collected by the Greater London Authority, but it lacked the tools to turn that data into a clear, actionable strategy for adaptation.

To tackle these challenges, we used a locational approach, which means we looked at Croydon on a very granular level, breaking it down into Output Areas (OAs). This allowed us to get very precise about where the highest risks were, and where adaptation measures would be most effective.

The Methodology: Making Data Actionable

We used a combination of Python programming and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to create tailored maps that help us visually represent the data. Here’s how it worked:

1. Data Integration: We started by collecting and integrating a wide range of data, including demographic information (e.g., income levels, age distribution, and ethnicity), hazard data (e.g., flood risks, heat risks, air quality), and local green and built infrastructure (e.g., parks, tree canopy, schools, railways, building typologies etc.). This data was processed and analysed to create a profile for each OA in Croydon.
2. Adaptation Measures: We developed a locally tailored set of 50 adaptation measures, 20 of which were spatial interventions. We then created a matrix to match the spatial adaptation measures with the different data points — matching an OA’s profile with relevant measures. For example, areas with high heat risks and a high percentage of elderly people could benefit from social interventions such as community check-ins, while areas with high heat risks but a high share of flat roofs might benefit from initiatives to green rooftops.
3. Tailored Maps: With all this data, we created maps showing the areas most at risk and the recommended adaptation measures for each area. This process was made repeatable and flexible, so Croydon can update the maps in the future as new data becomes available or priorities change.

Vivina Vincent, Carbon Neutral Programme Manager at Croydon Council, said: “This tool can be used to determine where, and what, work needs to be done. For instance, when we’re developing a new strategy, we can use this data to provide a quick estimation of which neighbourhoods should be prioritised, with which measures. As the tool is adaptable, we can develop new maps quickly if environmental priorities change.”

Key Lessons Learned: Flexibility and Collaboration are Key

Through this work, we learned that adaptability is essential. The framework we’ve developed can be continuously updated with new data and measures, making it a tool that evolves alongside changing risks. This adaptability ensures that the adaptation strategy remains responsive to the borough’s evolving needs, whether that’s from new data or shifting political priorities.

However, as we know data alone won’t build political momentum. It’s not enough to just create useful tools, we must engage the people who will use these tools and ensure their buy-in across departments. We found that cross-departmental collaboration was key to moving from planning to action, and we now recognise that building this collaboration into the early stages of a project can help avoid challenges later on.

What’s Next: Scaling Up and Expanding

Now that we’ve developed the tool and methodology, we’d love to work with other councils to explore how it could be used to break down departmental silos, overcome resource limitations, and generate the political will needed to implement adaptation measures.

While these tools are essential, the real work lies in ensuring that stakeholders across departments collaborate, and that the solutions we propose are politically viable and community-supported. The challenge of turning data into action remains daunting, but we believe that with the right tools, collaboration, and engagement, councils can take meaningful steps towards climate resilience.

So with that we humbly say, we know our approach is not the full picture, but we’re hoping it’s a useful step and are eager to continue refining our methodology, testing it in other areas, and working closely with councils to co-create long-term solutions.

Here is the link for anyone keen to dive into the data and outputs. If you’re a local authority looking to begin your own adaptation journey or if you’d like to learn more about our data-driven approach, we’d love to hear from you — email us at treesai@darkmatterlabs.org

Building Climate Resilience in Croydon: A Data-Driven Approach to Adaptation was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This has been a nine-month journey of turning abstract ideas into a living system. Now that it’s out there, we wanted to pause and reflect on the final push. In this post, we — Gurden, Michelle, and Arianna — share our key learnings on the process of getting to a full launch.

Michelle: So, it’s time for our final blog of this phase. We’ve launched the first full version of the Many-to-Many System website, with all its documents, tools, examples, and case studies. What did we learn? What was most important in getting us over the finish line?

Gurden: I’ll start with the usability testing sessions. In my experience, testing often comes last, like a quick check just before release. But I loved that we gave it real importance in our schedule, giving us time to actually act on the feedback. If you don’t do that, the insights just get pushed to a hypothetical “version 2.0.” We were brave enough to show something incomplete, which came with a few cringe-worthy moments seeing small issues with the website live, but it was so valuable.

We could see what was working and what wasn’t. We heard people say, “The ‘Navigate Challenges’ page is so important, why isn’t it live yet?” or, “Who is it for? section is at the bottom — I might miss it!” Just as important as what they said was observing how they used it. We asked people to share their screens and give first impressions, which puts them on the spot, but it gave us the honest validation and critique we needed for the final push.

Arianna: For me, one of the most important parts of this phase was the structure around our work. We kept two sets of tasks: our internal ones, which helped us manage priorities throughout the build, and the separate tasks created during the usability sessions. Keeping them apart gave us a clearer view of what we had planned and what people genuinely needed.

After testing, we sorted the feedback into three groups: essential fixes, ideas for a later version, and topics that required more reflection before deciding. This helped us stay grounded. Instead of reacting instantly, we moved carefully through what could realistically be done before release.

Throughout the journey, we created well over nine prototypes, one after the other. Each explored a different way of entering or navigating the system, similar to what we described in the first blog. They showed the range of possibilities before committing to a final shape. The task board supported this by keeping everything efficient. It gave us a shared sense of priorities, so when we reached the final stretch we already knew which changes mattered and which ones could wait.

Gurden: That’s a great point, and it connects to our scope management. In the tech and design field, it’s very easy to get distracted by a shiny new idea, like building a complex interactive tool before the foundation is solid. We were good at saying no, not just for the sake of it, but because we knew we had to validate the core of version 1 first. We stayed true to our scope and our release date, which is much easier said than done.

Michelle: I don’t have much to add to that, you’ve both said it perfectly. We had to work hard to balance between what was possible, and there was a lot that was possible, and what was ultimately desirable for potential users and for us. We were able to make really practical decisions about what to say yes or no to. I just kept saying, “first we need version 1 in the world.” We already have ideas for version 2, but we were disciplined enough to not start building it.

Gurden: Can you talk a bit about the ‘Learning from the Field’ page? It wasn’t in our original plan, and to be honest, I was a bit skeptical when you first suggested it. But now that it’s live, I’ve seen how many people go there first. A lawyer friend of mine went straight to the case studies to understand the project, and then worked backwards from there. It gives the whole system legitimacy.

Michelle: That’s such an interesting example and I remember your skepticism! At that time, we had three significant changes on the table, and we debated all of them. We knocked out two but agreed to get that one in. It shows a lot about our team dynamic, we could all use our experience to put our honest opinions on the table and end up with a combination that worked for the website, but also for us as a team. We didn’t put ourselves under unnecessary pressure by continually expanding the scope, which gave us more time to refine the parts we did include.

Gurden: The whole launch ended up being surprisingly smooth, without the usual last-minute panic. I think a big part of that backend success was the Content Management System (CMS). A huge shoutout to you, Michelle, and to Annette for getting in there and working so easily with it. It freed me up from managing content and all the dynamic changes.

Arianna: I also want to acknowledge the clarity of the CMS. Its structure followed the same logic we had been using all along, so translating decisions from Notion into the CMS felt natural. The tagging system made relations visible without creating complexity. This is what will allow the system to grow beyond us.

Gurden: I have to give credit back to both of you for that, because the CMS structure is just a copy of the Field Guide’s structure. The layers, the challenges, the tools — it’s all a reflection of that logic. It’s a testament to the fact that the Many-to-Many System is working on the inside, too.

Michelle: We did have that intuition after writing the Field Guide, didn’t we, Arianna? We knew we needed a database. If we didn’t do that, the manual lift would have killed the website and meant it would have been out of date five minutes after it went live. And huge kudos to Annette, who just got in there and smashed through building the content.

Gurden: So, final question for you both. How does it feel now that it’s launched? For context, we’ve had over 2,400 unique visitors, 5,400 page views and 200+ detailed tool views within the first three weeks of being live. The main launch post had 50 reposts, which to me is a huge indicator that people find it valuable enough to share on their own. It’s safe to say it’s been a good response. How are you both sitting with it?

Arianna: Now that the website is live, it feels like the beginning of a new phase. I am curious to see how people move through it, where they start, which tools they stay with, and which paths they create that we did not imagine.

Thinking back to all the prototypes we developed (we talked about this in blog 1), I can see how many directions this work could have taken. The current version is only one of them. Now the interesting part is observing how others use it and letting that shape what comes next.

Michelle: How do I feel? The whole process has felt like wrestling a monster underwater — trying to build something when you have no idea what its final form will be. So, just trusting the process, especially in the early days with you, Arianna, turning concepts into visuals and information layers, was a huge leap of faith. Seeing it come to life with you, Gurden, outside of Figma sketches was the next step. I feel quite humbled by what we’ve been able to share.

For me, there was the “serious business” of being committed enough to create it, despite thinking many times that we should just quit. Now that it’s in the world, it feels like “playful business.” I don’t mind if people break it or reimagine it. It would be fascinating if they said, “This is good, but I would add X, Y, and Z.” I’m excited to see what people do with it, even if that’s throwing it in the bin — that’s also interesting data!

This launch marks the end of a significant chapter, but as Arianna said, it’s also a new beginning. Our goal has always been to learn out loud, and now, with the system living in the world, a new phase of listening and learning begins. Thank you for following along with us.

You can explore the full system at manytomany.systems or join our Sharing Session tomorrow at 12.30pm CET.

And a big thanks, as always, to the other members of our team — especially Annette — who are key stewards of this work.

From a Question to a Living Library: Reflections on the Many-to-Many Launch was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Belém, Brazil, 11 November 2025. Viable Cities, in collaboration with UN-Habitat and Dark Matter Labs, is inviting urban and funding partners — including governments, development donors, philanthropies, foundations and investors — to co-design a new grant call for climate-neutral, resilient, and future-ready cities.

Following the successful 2021 Climate Smart Cities Challenge, developed in collaboration with UN Habitat, Viable Cities has implemented a programme of system demonstrators in Sweden as part of its mission to support cities in becoming climate neutral by 2030. Exploring multi-actor climate city contracts, integrated action and investment plans, as well as national-local collaboration, this initiative provided the building blocks for the current European 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities Mission. Combining breakthrough actions across key emission sectors, Swedish cities have started demonstrating how building portfolio approaches and public-private ecosystems can scale game changing interventions and create the conditions for a new climate neutral normal.

System demonstrators, accelerating and scaling the transition

System demonstrators are designed to test how whole-systems approaches across governance, finance, infrastructure, data, and citizen engagement can accelerate the transition to climate neutral and resilient cities that are futureproof. They also explore how to create an agile and derisked operating framework for public and private actors to design and implement viable businesses and value cases at scale. Using key societal priorities such as the energy transition, affordable housing, and aggregated purchasing power to help launch new innovations, technologies and markets as initial wedges, they start a transition journey building momentum, partnerships, and long term impact. Early examples include CoAction in Lund and STOLT in Stockholm, which focus on the nexus of energy, housing, and mobility and the realisation of emission-free inner cities, while also exploring new ways of organising collaboration and investment to achieve climate-neutrality at city scale.

Building on this work, Viable Cities, Dark Matter Labs, and UN-Habitat have since 2021 been collaborating with cities in Brazil, Uganda, Colombia, and the UK to apply and adapt the system demonstrator approach. The partnership works with cities including Curitiba, Makindye Ssabagabo, Bogotá, and Bristol to explore how systemic innovation can help them transition. Together, these efforts aim to generate practical learning about how cities can transform toward climate neutrality and resilience through coordinated, system-wide action.

Game changers, driven by local leadership

In Lund, Sweden, a game changer approach was set up as part of the system demonstrator: With EnergyNet connecting deregulation to deployable infrastructure, the green transition becomes commercially possible.

EnergyNet is a new way to manage the distribution of electricity. This is important because today’s electricity grids have major challenges in managing local production, storage and sharing. The system is suitable for use in energy communities, but can also be used outside. EnergyNet makes it possible to connect an unlimited amount of local energy resources, which creates completely new conditions for low electricity prices for large quantities of green electricity. How does it work? EnergyNet is developed according to the same principles as the Internet. It is therefore decentralized, which makes it significantly more resistant to disruptions. Through new types of power electronics, electricity distribution can now be completely controlled by software. Classic challenges for the electricity grid such as frequency and balance are no longer blocking. The new networks are not only decentralized but also distributed, which makes it easier to solve electricity needs as close to the consumer as possible.

The EnergyNet in Lund, driven by the CoAction initiative, represents a breakthrough in integrating multiple energy solutions into a unified, city-wide system. It was set up as a collaborative multi-stakeholder platform bringing together public authorities, businesses, and citizens to co-design a sustainable energy network. The approach integrates local renewable energy sources, smart grids, and demand-side management to optimize energy use across districts. This collaborative governance model fosters cross-sector partnerships and supports a data-driven approach to managing energy efficiency, helping Lund meet its climate targets while offering a model for scalable urban energy transitions globally.

Bristol’s Affordable Housing Initiative, driven by the Housing Festival, represents a game-changing approach to addressing the city’s housing crisis, combining climate-smart and social rent housing solutions. In response to a chronic social housing deficit, with 18,000 people on the waiting list and over 1,000 families in temporary accommodation, the initiative focused on aggregating small brownfield sites across the city to enhance housing viability using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC). The initiative’s main goal was to demonstrate how aggregation of these sites could help create net-zero social homes on small plots that are often seen as unviable for traditional housing projects.

The housing system demonstrator aims to test this aggregation model by building 25 zero-carbon social rent homes across six small sites in Bristol, which would not have been feasible individually. A digital tool was developed to help identify these sites and assess their viability, while a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach — involving Bristol City Council, Atkins Realis, Edaroth, and Lloyds Banking Group — was key to moving from concept to implementation. The project’s unique approach also includes a redefined notion of ‘viability’, integrating social infrastructure investments alongside traditional capital repayment models.

The initiative’s innovative approach has garnered support for scaling through the Small Sites Aggregator program, which aims to unlock thousands of small, underutilized brownfield sites across the UK. This strategy is seen as a path towards building 10,000 homes annually and addressing wider housing shortages, with ongoing testing in cities such as Bristol, Sheffield, and London’s Lewisham Borough. Through this work, the Housing Festival has created the Social Housing at Pace Playbook, which outlines a replicable ecosystem solution to deliver affordable, climate-smart housing at scale. This initiative has demonstrated the potential for collaboration across sectors, innovative financing, and climate-conscious design to provide a pathway for cities worldwide facing similar housing challenges.Bristol’s Affordable Housing Initiative, driven by the Housing Festival, is an innovative model for tackling housing affordability through community-led co-design and collaborative financing. The initiative brought together local authorities, housing developers, social enterprises, and citizens to explore new ways of creating affordable, sustainable homes. The Housing Festival served as a platform for crowdsourcing ideas, testing alternative financial models, and showcasing eco-friendly building techniques. By blending public, private, and philanthropic investment, the initiative created a dynamic ecosystem that accelerates the delivery of affordable housing, prioritizing local engagement and long-term sustainability. This approach is revolutionizing how cities can rethink housing challenges by embedding innovation into the policy framework.

Looking forward: launching a global and distributed system demonstrator initiative

The first step in program alignment is the development of a System Demonstrator Grant Call, as part of the new Viability Fund for Cities. Building on the experiences of system demonstrators in Europe, Latin America and Africa, the ambition is to develop a new standard system demonstrator global grant call The first phase will prioritise Brazil, California, India, Sweden, Ukraine and selected global programmes. The goal is to create a shared practical framework that funders can adapt and apply in their own contexts to support system demonstrator initiatives, but which at the same time allows for joint learning, implementation, and demand side aggregation.

Between January and March 2026, three co-design meetings will be held, with drafting and review work taking place in between. Through this process, participating organisations will jointly develop a general, open source, call text and an operating and fundraising structure that can be used to launch coordinated calls for proposals in multiple countries. In April 2026, Viable Cities, Dark Matter Labs, UN-Habitat and other partners will reflect and deliberate on the outcomes of the dialogues to decide on the launch of an international call for system demonstrators.

Organisations interested in taking part in this collaborative process are invited to submit an expression of interest. Participation is flexible, and actors can step in or out at any time before March 2026.

Submit your expression of interest to join the co-design process and help shape the future of system demonstrator funding.

https://form.typeform.com/to/JOGXlMai

For more information, contact systemdemo@viabilityfund.org

Today, we’re taking a step back to look at the foundational methodology behind this entire initiative. How do you go about creating new models for collaboration when no blueprint exists? Our approach has been a “proof of possibility” — a live experiment where we, along with our ecosystem of partners, served as the primary test subjects.

In this post, the initiative’s co-stewards, Michelle and Annette, discuss the profound challenges and unique learnings that come from trying to build the plane while flying it.

Michelle: We wanted to reflect on the “proof of possibility” we ran, where we essentially decided to live prototype on ourselves with a small group of partners in a Learning Network. While it sounds simple, we learned it’s incredibly complex. You’re making decisions and sense-making within a specific prototype, but you’re also constantly trying to translate those learnings into something more generalised and applicable for others. In many ways, it’s a cool, experimental way of working, but it was also a bit of a nightmare.

Annette: It was very meta. In this proof of possibility, one of the things we were testing was a learning infrastructure for the ecosystem itself. So you’re testing learning within the experiment, while also prototyping the experiment, and then you have to step back and ask: what did we learn from this specific context versus what is context-agnostic and applicable elsewhere? Then there’s another layer: what did we learn about the wider external landscape and its readiness for this work? And finally, what did we learn about the process of learning about all of that? There’s this feeling of learning about learning about learning.

It’s representative of the fractal nature of this work. For instance, we were a core team working on our own governance while simultaneously orchestrating and supporting the ecosystem’s governance. The ecosystem itself was then focused on building capabilities of the system for many-to-many governance. It was navigating so many layers. On one hand, this has immense value because you’re looking at one question from multiple angles at once. On the other hand, it has been incredibly cognitively challenging.

Michelle: It’s that old adage of trying to build the plane whilst flying it — except there are no blueprints for the plane. I think the complexity we bumped into is probably present for anyone trying to do this kind of work, because everyone has to work at fractals all the time. So I was thinking, what are some things we bumped into, and how did we overcome them? The first breakthrough that comes to my mind was when we started to explicitly ask, “Are we talking about this specific prototype right now, or are we talking about the generalised model?” Just having that clear distinction, a shared vocabulary that the whole learning network could use, was a huge moment of alignment for us. It gave people a way to see we were working on at least two layers at the same time.

Annette: Yes and we found that the difference in thinking required for each of those layers was huge. Thinking through the specifics of what we did in one context versus pulling out principles applicable across all/any contexts was such a massive gear shift. Turning a specific example — “here’s something we tried” — into a generalised tool — “here’s something useful for others” — was probably a five-fold increase in workload, if not more. The amount of planning and thinking required was significantly different.

Michelle: What else comes up for you from this experience of prototyping on ourselves?

If nothing comes to mind, I can jump in. For me it was the dynamic of being the initiators. We were the ones who convened the group and set the mission. In these complex collaborations, the initiator tends to hold a lot of relational capital, power, and responsibility. This was exacerbated because we were managing all these different layers of learning. It centralised the knowledge and the relational dynamics back to us. If one of us was missing from a budget conversation, for example, it was difficult for others to proceed. For me, the bigger point is that to do good demonstration work, it has to be experimental and emergent. But that doesn’t come for free; it has downsides. This re-centralisation was one of them, and it was a lot for us to hold.

Annette: That makes me wonder if a certain degree of that centralisation is inevitable in organising for these kind of ‘proof of possibilities’. When something is this complex and emergent, you can only distribute so much, so early. To meet the real-time needs of the collaboration, you need an agile core team. This is where it gets interesting — we were operating in the thin space between a sandbox environment and a live context. It had to be a genuine live context for people to want to participate, but it was also a sandbox for testing the general model. You have to meet the timelines of the live context; you can’t just pause for six months to work out team dynamics, or the collaboration collapses. So you almost need a team providing strong leadership to hold both realities at once.

Michelle: So, would you do it the same way again?

Annette: I think if we did it again, the things we’ve learned would make it smoother. We’d be more explicit from the start about which layer we’re discussing. We’d have a better sense of how to capture live learning and translate it into a model as we go. When we started, most of our attention was on hosting the live context, and a lot of the synthesis happened afterwards. Having done it once, I’d be more conscious of doing that synthesis in real-time — though the cognitive lift to switch between those modes is still immense.

Michelle: I agree, I would do it again with those additions. The other thing is that when we started, we didn’t even really have the process that we wanted to go through. Now we do. We’ve learned more about what works. Starting fresh, we would have a decent sketch of a process to begin with. Not perfect, and you still have to wing it, but it’s a good start. I’d be interested to do it again and see what happens.

This meta-reflective process — learning about learning while doing — has been a central part of the Many-to-Many initiative creating a ‘Proof of Possibility’ as a way to learn about what’s possible at a system level. While navigating these fractal layers is cognitively demanding, it’s what allows for true emergence, distinguishing this deep, systemic work from simple chaos. It is a messy, challenging, and ultimately fruitful way to discover what’s possible.

In the Many-to-Many website [coming soon] you will find some resources based on what we did in the Proof of Possibility (Experimenter’s Logs and example methods and artefacts like the Contract) and some based on what might be applicable across contexts (a Field Guide, some tools and an overview of System Blockers we’ve encountered) along with case studies and top tips from other contexts in the learning network.

Thanks for following our journey. You can find our previous posts [here], [here] and [here] and stay updated by joining the Beyond the Rules newsletter [here].

Visual concept by Arianna Smaron & Anahat Kaur.

Many-to-Many: The Messy, Meta-Process of Prototyping on Ourselves was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Possibilities for the Built Environment, part 2 of 3

This is the second in a series of three provocations, which mark the cumulation of a collaborative exploration between Dark Matter Labs and Bauhaus Earth to consider a regenerative future for the built environment as part of the ReBuilt project.

In this piece, we share five pathways toward regenerative practice in the built environment from Dark Matter Labs’ ongoing mission X0 (Extraction Zero). First outlined in the A New Economy for Europe’s Built Environment, these pathways are currently being developed by X0 in partnerships with cities across Europe.

In the first piece, we suggested how six guiding principles for a regenerative built environment could redirect our focus. In this piece, we lay out six pathways toward regeneration, with suggested benchmarks and possible demonstrators, as a means of starting conversations, and identifying allies and tensions. The final piece in the series uses the configuration of the cement industry to explore the idea of nested economies and possible regenerative indicators.

Toward a process-based definition of regeneration

This piece leans into the friction between today’s extractive norms and the regenerative futures we have yet to realise.

We propose five pathways to establish regenerative practices throughout the built environment: these will span scales and sectors while driving change aligned with the principles laid out in the previous provocation. These pathways represent five modes for developing a multiplicity of new metrics, as well as creating the conditions for further progress to be taken on by future generations. Embedded in this logic are multiple and diverse systemic entry points for various actors to engage along the way.

These pathways are directions of travel that can be launched within the current economic system, without adopting a solution mindset. However, there are still real challenges to progress because of today’s political economy and scale of the polycrisis. While these pathways can be initiated within the current economic system, to be fully realised they must transform the system itself along the way.

One aspiration for these pathways is that they can capture the imagination and energies of a range of stakeholders, by creating containers for the changes it will take to bring us to a regenerative built environment. If we assume that to reach this future we will need both paradigm-shifting ‘impossible’ ideas and real demonstrations of best practices within our current contexts, then these pathways can hold together the different strands of effort, from the more feasible to the boundary-pushing, in one directional container. In each pathway, we ourselves look toward collaborators across geographies and disciplines to imagine, visualise and orient ourselves toward where these shifts could take us, in 2030, 2050 and beyond.

On a pragmatic level, structures to support initiation and governance of these pathways already exist and can be further fostered. Ownership for pathways can sit at the city or municipal level, supported by city networks such as Net Zero Cities, C40 cities and others, and further enabled through multi-municipal or regional coalitions to reach national scales. This type of multi-scalar, integrated approaches to the pathways can create the conditions for bottom-up schemes and ideas in communities and allow these to grow. The scale and pace of the transition we need requires governing decision-makers to have visibility over exceptional ideas that can push at the edges of the Overton window.

These pathways are not wholesale solutions to the problem, but rather provocative visions to incite discussion, draw out coalitions, grow a sense of responsibility and build momentum. It’s not that if we do these five things that a regenerative future will be reached. Rather, these are components of a re-envisioning.

For further exploration of these pathways, please see the white paper A New Economy for Europe’s Built Environment, associated with Dark Matter Labs’ X0 (Extraction Zero) mission.

Pathway 1: Maximising utilisation

Maximising the utilisation of our existing resources, spaces and infrastructures is one of the most transformative actions we can undertake in a context of resource shortage, carbon emissions crisis and labour crisis. That is especially relevant in the European context where our resource and space use inefficiencies are massive. Unlocking this latent capacity promises significant advancements in social justice and decoupling space and use creation from extraction and pollution. This develops a range of strategies from full utilisation of existing building stock, sharing models, flexible space use, with instruments such as open digital registries, smart space use platforms, smart contracts, and the like.

Deep structural changes in mechanisms to challenge speculative land markets and reform regulatory frameworks will be needed to embed redistributive and democratic principles into the governance of urban space.

Potential challenges:

The implementation of maximal utilisation is severely constrained by today’s profit-driven development logic, which prioritises profit through new development and property speculation over efficient or shared use. Institutional inertia, entrenched ownership regimes and the financialisation of housing all work against such a shift, while digital tools like registries and smart contracts risk reinforcing existing inequalities if not democratically governed.

System demonstrator: reprogramming office buildings from 35% to a 90% use, increasing financial flows of the building

What could this look like in 2050?

• Multi-actor spatial governance frameworks and use-based permissions
• Dynamic pricing structures for building use based on occupancy and social value creation
• Highly durable building structures with adaptable multi-use internal spaces
• Outcomes-based financing models tied to social and ecological impacts
• Mixed use public-private-NGO partnerships
• Public digital booking platforms for maximised utilisation of spaces

Pathway 2: Next-generation typologies

Next typologies are no longer governed by the principle that form follows function. Instead, they transcend traditional asset classes based on programmatic use, as a new asset class valued for the optionality, flexibility, use efficiency and value creation they provide. Decoupling value creation from extraction, systemic inefficiencies and carbon emissions here happens through focusing on social capital–for instance, radical sharing and cooperation models, as well as intellectual capital–as new innovation models and new design typologies.

Without directly challenging speculative land markets, financialisation, and the classed and racialised histories embedded in built form, next-generation typologies may risk becoming a greenwashed evolution of the status quo rather than a transformative departure from it.

Potential challenges:

In capitalist urban systems, typologies and asset classes are produced through financial logics, property relations and commodification. Reframing buildings as flexible, innovation-driven assets may simply reproduce these dynamics in a new guise, reinforcing speculative value creation and market discipline under the banner of sustainability.

System demonstrator: Community living rooms–lightweight extensions on existing buildings, providing amenities with the right to use

What could this look like in 2050?

• Building public awareness in benefits of social time in relation to mental health
• New standards and codes for shared spaces and assets
• Tax reductions linked to carbon reduction impact of maximising efficiency
• Shared kitchens, living rooms, laundry rooms, appliances, tools and workshops
• Policy innovation enabling categorisation of shared spaces
• Increased cross-generational support, decreased loneliness, depression, stress levels

Pathway 3: Systems for full circularity

Even though we have comprehensive knowledge on circularity, current levels in Europe are extremely low, and globally its rate is declining, thus this work focuses on the systems unlocking it and instruments driving its advancement on the ground. Apart from a comprehensive understanding of the craft (design for disassembly, development of city-scale material components networks, use of non-composite materials), we need the institutional economy and systems enabling circularity. That includes instruments such as material registries, material passports, financing mechanisms, design regulations, all developed simultaneously to unlock the new systems for circularity.

For circularity to be genuinely transformative, it must be accompanied by political and economic restructuring — challenging the growth imperative, redistributing material control, and embedding democratic governance into how urban resources are managed and reused.

Potential challenges

Structural barriers hinder circularity. Extraction, planned obsolescence and short-term profit maximisation, which are the main imperatives in the current system, actively disincentivise long-term material stewardship. Circular practices often require slower, more localised and collaborative modes of production, which clash with the logics of global supply chains, speculative development and financialised real estate.

Moreover, without addressing issues of ownership, labour relations and uneven access to materials and technologies, circular systems risk being implemented in ways that benefit private actors while offloading costs onto public bodies or marginalised communities.

System demonstrator: City-scale architectural components bank, with developers’ right-to-use models

What could this look like in 2050?

• Material data registries and warranties for secondary materials
• Lightweight extensions, maximising utilisation and reuse of existing buildings
• City-scale material balance sheets and data registries for localised material cycles
• Civic material hubs for storage and distribution, zero carbon transport and logistics networks
• Demountable and highly adaptable building design
• Sinking funds for facilitating material reuse during deconstruction

Pathway 4: Biogenerative material economy

The long-term future of our material economy must be bioregenerative. This transition needs deep understanding of systems impacts, avoiding further global biodiversity and land degeneration through green growth. This shift requires a transformation in land use for materials, moving from “green belts’’ to permaculture and regenerative methods, from supply chains to local supply loops. This requires developing new local material forests, zero-carbon local transport, non-polluting construction methods, as well as the policy, operational and financial innovation for a successful implementation of a fully biocompatible material economy.

True transformation will involve challenging capitalist land markets, redistributing land and decision-making power and centering indigenous and community-led stewardship practices within the material economy.

Potential challenges:

We must not underestimate how global capitalism — through land commodification, agribusiness and extractive supply chains — actively undermines regenerative potential. Transforming green belts into permaculture zones, or establishing local material forests, requires not just technical and policy innovation, but a fundamental shift in land ownership, governance and power relations. Without addressing who controls land and resources, and whose interests are served by current material economies, there is a danger that biogenerative strategies become niche or elite enclaves, rather than systemic solutions.

System demonstrator: Neighbourhood gardens of biomaterials for insulation panels components for on site retrofitting

What could this look like in 2050?

• Regenerative agriculture & forestry practices and open education programs
• Certification for regenerative agriculture & carbon storage
• Macro-investments in bioregional forests & urban farms
• Civic biomaterial experimentation workshops & micro-factories
• Land restoration & rewilding sinking funds
• Regional, regenerative biomaterial supply chains, zero-carbon logistics networks

Pathway 5: Shifting comfort, increasing contact

The ways we live in buildings today alienates us from our environmental and earthly context. Today’s built environment is designed to optimise for sterilisation through conditioned environments, separating us from the biomatter that is both input and output to our livelihoods. In providing comfort, we have been depending on extraction of resources, other species, biodiversity and ironically ourselves. We need to decouple the economy of comfort, which is here a shorthand for human-optimised environmental conditions, from extraction and externalisation. Pathways in driving this shift include participation and care models, increasing social values, shifting human relation to nature, a shift from technological to ecological services providing comfort, an increase in social and physical activity, a shift from the building scale to other scales, such as city-scale nature-based infrastructures and micro-scale furniture or clothing.

Real progress will involve confronting the socio-economic systems that produce uneven access to comfort, land and energy, and reconfiguring them through justice-oriented redistribution, democratic urban governance and decommodified approaches to housing and care.

Potential challenges:

In this pathway, we must not romanticise behavioural or cultural change without sufficiently addressing the structural conditions that produce and maintain the current ‘economy of comfort’. The alienation it describes is not simply the result of misplaced design priorities or cultural habits, but of a capitalist system that commodifies comfort, standardises it through global construction norms, and externalises its costs onto ecosystems and marginalised communities. Some people experience the comfort constructed by today’s systems much more than others.

Shifting toward ecological and participatory models of comfort is valuable, but without challenging the political economy that privileges resource-intensive, climate-controlled lifestyles for some while denying basic shelter or agency to others, such shifts may remain symbolic or limited in scope.

System demonstrator: Retrofitting a neighbourhood to new comfort standards to increase this area’s economic resilience to changing energy landscape.

What could this look like in 2050?

• New standards and codes for comfort
• Tax reductions linked to shifts in investments from mechanical towards ecological services
• Curriculum rethinking lifestyles in relation to health impacts
• Investments in extending ecological services and permeable surfaces for flood mitigation, indoor and outdoor comfort through passive climatisation
• Infrastructures for integral value accounting
• Capturing and measuring physical and mental health impacts
• More community and individual knowledge about how to deal with the material world, ranging from biomatter to biodegradable consumer goods
• Local biowaste sorting and utilisation in industry/agriculture

From a static to a process-based definition of a regenerative future

In viewing our transition to a regenerative built environment through these core shifts, we look toward a process-based definition of what is regenerative. A process-based definition would be an understanding of the regenerative that is calculated not by fixed, profit-driven metrics, determined on the basis of isolated data-points, or tied to particular policy benchmarks, but rather something dynamic, intuitive, and assembled from across knowledge-spheres and perspectives, with their associated means of measurement.

A process-based definition might adapt to the changing data landscape, material reality, technopolitical ground conditions and Overton windows of different contexts. Whereas absolute metrics like embodied carbon are difficult to attain with accuracy, and fail to capture the whole picture, targets pegged to individual points in time and specific standards can quickly become obsolete. A process-based approach is inspired by DML’s Cornerstone Indicators [more information at this link], a methodology which creates composite, intuitive indicators for assessing change over time, co-developed and governed in place.

Originally co-designed with Dr Katherine Trebeck, the Cornerstone Indicators were initiated in the city of Västerås in Sweden to support citizens to co-design simple, intuitively understandable indicators that encapsulate what thriving means to the people of the Skultana district. The indicators, which align with overall goals like ‘health & wellbeing’ and ‘strong future opportunities’, can facilitate greater understanding of a place, enable further conversation, and guide future decisions. The initial 9-month workshop process to design this first iteration of the Cornerstone Indicators, resulted in indicators such as ‘the number of households who enjoy not owning a car’, and ‘regularly doing a leisure activity with people you don’t cohabit with’ which were analysed and offered to local policymakers. The success of this process has led to explorations of the Cornerstone Indicator process across Europe and North America. Initiatives like the Cornerstone Indicators present a model of how momentum toward a regenerative future for the built environment can be built. It’s urgent that we begin using process-based definitions and practices to bring more people to the table and increase the potential for transition pathways to gain traction.

Conclusion

In the first two pieces in this series, we have explored the idea of a regenerative future in the built environment by examining how our current frameworks for regeneration fall short of meeting the demands of the present moment. We outline principles and pathways for charting a course toward genuine transformation.

In providing examples of leading-edge organisations making progress toward a regenerative future, these pieces are intended to invite conversation, feelings of agency and reflection, even in the face of prevailing systemic constraints. Rather than offering neat solutions, this piece seeks to open doors to new possibilities.

The context and projections offered here raise a number of questions. For a wholesale transition, it will be important to understand what will indicate progress toward regeneration, as well as how decisions will be made in order to resist the co-opting of regenerative principles into status quo ways of operating.

The remaining piece in this series will explore:

• How configurations of material extraction, labour and monetary capital entrench nested economies and particular power relations, using the example of the cement industry
• Possible indicators of progress toward a regenerative built environment, and of the limitations encountered

Together these pieces aspire to introduce the idea of a regenerative built environment and associated promises and challenges, to inspire a sense of direction and to sketch the broader systemic shifts to which we must commit.

This publication is part of the project ReBuilt “Transformation Pathways Toward a Regenerative Built Environment — Übergangspfade zu einer regenerativen gebauten Umwelt” and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.

The five pathways in this provocation provocation are based on the white paper A New Economy for Europe’s Built Environment and ongoing work by Ivana Stancic and Indy Johar, as part of the X0 (Extraction Zero) mission at Dark Matter Labs.

In addition, this piece represents the views of the team, including, from Dark Matter Labs, Emma Pfeiffer and Aleksander Nowak, and from Bauhaus Earth, Gediminas Lesutis and Georg Hubmann, among other collaborators within and beyond our organisations.

Where to? Five pathways for a regenerative built environment was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Possibilities for the Built Environment, part 1 of 3

This is the first in a series of three provocations, which mark the cumulation of a collaborative effort between Dark Matter Labs and Bauhaus Earth to consider a regenerative future for the built environment as part of the ReBuilt project.

In this publication, we lay out the historical, professional and theoretical context for the contemporary push toward regenerative practice, and offer six guiding principles for a regenerative built environment, looking beyond profit tunnel-vision. In the second and third pieces, we propose pathways, configurations and indicators of the transformation our team envisions.

What isn’t regenerative? Debunking a misconception

When it was completed in 2014, Bosco Verticale, a pair of 40-story residential towers on Milan’s outskirts, was celebrated as an example of leading-edge regenerative building design for the 800 or so trees cascading from its balconies. In describing the project, its architect Stefano Boeri sketches the figure of the “biological architect”, who is driven by biophilia and prizes sustainability above other design concerns. Praise for Bosco Verticale, in the architectural press and beyond, implies that the development’s vegetal adornments represent a meaningful substitution of traditional building materials with bio-based ones, and further that measures supporting biodiversity constitute climate-positive architecture.

The list of green credentials associated with the project ignores other characteristics of Bosco Verticale that don’t align with this vision. The steel-reinforced concrete structure was designed with unusually substantial 28cm deep slabs to support the vegetation’s weight (which totals an estimated 675 metric tons) and associated dynamic loads. Considering that this slab depth is about twice that of comparable buildings without the green facade, the embodied carbon associated with the project’s 30,000m² floor slabs alone is approximately double that of a standard building.

In tandem, an existing workspace for local artists and artisans based in a former industrial building was demolished to make space for the premium residential units accessible only to the few. Although a replacement workspace was eventually built nearby, the structure’s regenerative aspirations are weighed down by profound contradictions beneath the leafy surface.

Certainly, Bosco Verticale is significant as an exceptional investment in urban greening on the part of the developer, and as a leading-edge demonstration of innovations that enhance the multiple benefits of green infrastructure. Bosco Verticale contributed to the viability of future developments that extend the geographic reach of urban greening discourse into new geographies: copy-cat schemes have been built in East Asia and elsewhere. However, it’s clear that Bosco Verticale fails to stand up to a holistic consideration of what regenerative building looks like. Many voices overlooked the social and material impacts of the project, instead dazzled by the urban greening.

Puzzle pieces of the regenerative

In recent years, societies worldwide have become familiar with weather events and political shifts that were unprecedented or previously unthinkable. Six of the nine planetary boundaries that demarcate the safe operating space for humanity were crossed as of 2023. There is now a strong case for the idea that our entangled human and planetary systems exist in a state of polycrisis. Bearing this in mind, what do we mean when we refer to a built environment that is regenerative?

This piece aims to add nuance and system-scale perspective to our working definitions. As examples like Bosco Verticale show, it’s possible to be green in the public eye while counteracting what is regenerative. Perhaps we need new methods to help us understand:

• How long a building will last,
• How its materials will be stewarded,
• Whether it is built in a context that enables low-carbon living,
• And what its end of life might involve.

System-scale perspective is needed because the built environment cannot be disentangled from systemic needs like the demand for affordable housing and the reality of physical, material constraints. Although we do need initial demonstrations to spark change, a single, locally-sourced timber building constructed with ethical labour does not define wholly regenerative practice in itself.

What is regenerative?

Regenerative is the term of the moment, yet it remains loosely defined in public discourse: we rely on examples, implicit understandings, and theoretical frameworks to give it meaning. How, then, is it used in particular contexts?

Beyond ‘green’

Regeneration refers to approaches that seek to balance human and natural systems, allowing for coexistence, repair and self-regulation over time.

The regenerative paradigm seeks to look beyond what’s merely ‘green’, and to do net good. A broader lineage of thinking around the term spans agriculture, biology and ecology, medicine, urbanism and design: disciplines and industries that connect to the health and wellbeing of biomes, bodies and buildings. Variation in definition can be observed in different contexts, sectors and aims.

‘Regenerative’: a brief history of the term

The term regenerative began to gain traction in fields including agriculture and development to outline a new paradigm from the 1980s. The US’ Rodale Institute popularised the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ to describe farming systems that go beyond sustainability by improving soil, biodiversity and ecosystem health. The practices invoked are ancient, with precedents across the globe, and rooted in Indigenous land management. However, this specific application of the term ‘regenerative’ articulated an emergent attitude in this period that focused on renewal and improvement of ecological and social systems. The Rodale Institute advanced this concept through research, advocacy, farmer training, publications and consumer education geared toward regenerative organic agriculture, laying the groundwork for its integration into mainstream agricultural discourse and integration into other disciplines.

From the early 2000s, the work of Bill Reed and the Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice has anchored the application of regeneration to design fields and the built environment in particular. With a focus on ecosystem renewal and coevolution of human and natural systems, Reed’s framework implies that regenerative design goes beyond sustainability by restoring and renewing ecosystems, integrating humans and nature in a symbiotic relationship. Expanding this idea beyond ecology, many architects and urbanists have adapted Reed’s model to their own corners of their fields, looking for design that doesn’t simply do less harm, but does more good. Bauhaus Earth maps Reed’s familiar bowtie-shaped diagram onto four basic categories for the built environment: from conventional, to green, to restorative and finally regenerative–that which has the greatest positive environmental and social impact.

Across applications, several elements of a core meaning of what is regenerative exist: a focus on supporting systems of different scales to recover from loss, to take on new life, to grow responsively. The evocative nature of this idea, easily applied across different disciplines, has inspired a range of permutations and schools of thought.

Other key references on the regenerative:

1 Regenerative Development, Regenesis Group, 2016.

2 Regenerative Development and Design, Bill Reed and Pamela Mang, 2012.

3 Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration, Bill Reed, 2007.

4 Towards a regenerative paradigm for the built environment, Chrisna du Plessis, 2011.

5 Doughnut for Urban Development, Home.Earth, 2023.

6 The Regenerative Design Reading List, Constructivist, 2024.

The term’s uses have gained traction and proliferated within the particular historical context of the last half-century, during which concepts like the anthropocene and the full extent of human impact on the planet have been evidenced. As technology has enabled our understanding of the ways in which humanity has degraded our environments — at scales from the cellular to whole earth systems — to grow, so too has our desire for models that point to possible ways to repair this damage. Conceptualising the regenerative across scales and disciplines opens the door to alternative futures in which planetary demise at the hands of humans is not inevitable. The application of the core elements of regenerative theory to fields like architecture has spurred a range of generative and planet-benefitting practices. However, these individual actions, and even the rise of the sustainability paradigm across design fields, cannot override the prevailing limitations of capitalism that continue to increase rates of extraction, social inequality and environmental degradation. As it stands, regenerative approaches continue to be exceptions working against the odds.

The main limitation: political economy

These frameworks were written within academic and industrial contexts, largely from a Western, wealthy nations’ perspective. While regenerative thinking has inspired thinkers across the planet and across fields, attempts to translate these concepts into a global, political economic scale fails to account for deep-seated inequalities. We are limited by the systems and power imbalances in which we’re working. Capitalism, in particular, compounds these blindspots, limiting attempts to translate regenerative thinking into other spaces such as the built environment. As such, while trailblazing organisations, communities and individuals are offering proofs of possibilities in regenerative infrastructure and urbanism, these are currently exceptional cases. It is not yet evident how these ideas can be instantiated at scale to benefit all people and meaningfully address systemic inequalities.

The role for and responsibilities of professionals

The interconnected challenges of this moment invoke new layers of complexity. But if professionals can’t understand or deploy the idea of regeneration, then it won’t guide their decisions and actions.

Extractive activities led by the industrialised global North continue to irreversibly alter our planet at pace, while the transition to renewable energy will involve even higher rates of extraction of critical minerals than those of today. As such, the earth’s systems’ ability to regenerate is stressed more than ever. The built environment, with its outsized responsibility for global carbon emissions associated with construction, building operations and demolition, must admit these impacts and face up to its epoch-defining responsibility. So how do we get off the one-way road of identifying problems without solutions?

There is a separation between perceived responsibility and power in today’s professional landscape. This moment necessitates a shift from individual to collective agency in taking on advocacy for the regenerative potential of the built environment.

Imagine this: you are an architect today, trying to answer the client’s brief by maximising the use of responsibly-sourced bio-based materials, embedding social justice in your design processes and objectives, and considering carbon-storage potential and place stewardship for future generations, while accepting that your brief is to create market-rate apartments. This is nearly impossible in the context of today’s imperative to maximise profits and commodify housing. Architects in the current professional environment are profoundly limited in means to meaningfully address these intersecting priorities, whether one at a time or in concert. Our current economic system simply does not position architects to be the core innovators, as much as Stefano Boeri’s reflections on the Bosco Verticale boast otherwise.

These professional limitations are an indirect signal of the political economy of real estate development and the power relations underpinning the construction industry. Only a systemic shift can address the limitations facing individuals operating within a design scope. To genuinely take on the intersections of ecology, social justice and the built environment, architects need to see their work for all its entanglement with the broader political, economic and social forces, using the tools of the profession and connections, bolstered by connections with aligned collaborators, and their collective power to dismantle the systems of power that limit transformation at across scales.

We’re orienting ourselves toward a future in which there is more latitude for these crucial priorities to be addressed. This future will hold an altered scope for decisions made by architects and other built environment professionals in the course of development processes, and a transition to a regenerative built environment driven by collective commitment.

A growing field: precedents and trailblazers

A range of contemporary initiatives, programmes and projects aim to establish frameworks to define the idea of a regenerative built environment. Drawing on advancements in circular economic thinking, increasing recognition of the significance of embodied carbon in addition to operational carbon in buildings, and as the industry’s understanding of indicators like biodiversity and water use that are tied to planetary boundaries grows, these programmes help experts and the general public to move beyond misconceptions.

Bauhaus Earth emerged in 2021 as an initiative around the use of timber and other bio-based materials for construction and their ability to store carbon. Today, Bauhaus Earth is a research and advocacy organization dedicated to transforming the built environment into a regenerative force for ecological restoration. It brings together experts from architecture, planning, arts, science, governance, and industry to promote systemic change in construction practices.

Index of aligned enquiries

A global range of community-led and grassroots organisations focusing on the work and needs of underserved groups receive grant funding from and can be discovered via the Re:arc Institute.

Non-Extractive Architecture(s)’ directory gathers a global index of projects that rethink the relationship between human and natural landscapes, alongside questions about the role of technology and politics in future material economies. The directory is an ongoing project itself.

A range of related organisations and initiatives in the working ecosystem of Europe can be found in the table below. The range in types of these enquiries represents the broad coalition of stakeholders and types of activity that will be required to activate transformation toward a regenerative built environment.

Bio-based building materials are an important nexus of social and material relations. These materials, which bridge human and earth-based capacities for creation, urge an expanded view of stewardship. Understanding this will enable us to move past a paradigmatic dichotomy between the human and the natural, which enables humans to exploit planetary resources. Bio-based building materials were humans’ first building materials, and over millennia the practices, most notably agricultural and indigenous ones, that created the materials we work with today, have developed in concert with human civilisations and material realities. Holding these strands together, it’s evident why a maintained focus upon bioregionally-sourced and bio-based materiality is crucial for a regenerative future.

For a contemporary design and research practice that focuses on this intersection of agendas, see Material Cultures.

Regeneration across time horizons: shortsightedness and the Capitalocene

As Reed’s Trajectory of Ecological Design diagram and the examples above indicate, regeneration of ecosystems and societies are continuous, open-ended processes that occur over time, at scales from the cellular, to the neighbourhood, and to the planetary. As the repair and balancing of regenerative processes have occurred in many contexts across eons, we need to understand regeneration across multiple accordant time horizons. Within this complex and extensive landscape, time horizons can act as organising units that help make sense of interconnections and nested scales of action.

In construction, key processes take place across different timescales. These range from time needed for a regenerative resource such as a forest to grow, to the lifespan of a building, to the longer time periods associated with meaningful carbon sequestration. In each of these cases, regenerative interventions involving acts of maintenance and design directly modulate the temporal register of the built environment. For example, extending a building’s lifespan through processes of care and preventing demolition impacts the future form of its locale and pushes back against the conceptualisation of buildings strictly as sources of profit within capitalist logic–that is, viewing buildings primarily in terms of their capacity to generate immediate economic returns through cycles of development, exploitation and obsolescence. By this means, it is within the medium of time that a regenerative lens on the built environment can be most revealing.

Regeneration in deep time and at the timescale of ecosystems has been disrupted by human processes. We are accustomed to the idea of the Anthropocene, in which an epoch defined by human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, which was initiated by the industrial revolution. However, recent discussions by Jason W Moore, Andreas Malm and others offer a critique of this concept in making the case for the Capitalocene as a more precise term. Rather than treating humanity as a homogenous force as Anthropocene theory does, the Capitalocene examines how differences in responsibility, power and agency within societies have been compounded in the context of the capitalist system, and how this system has driven ecological crisis. Rather than humanity as a whole, Moore argues that we should examine how the social, economic and political processes that have shaped recent centuries, and which reach back to the early modern period, provide a better basis for understanding the relationship between human activity and planetary wellbeing, and how this dynamic produces ecological crises. Using this focus on the un-natural and political origins of the crisis we face today, it’s possible to see how shifting senses of responsibility, agency and relationships, operating against capitalist logics, are essential for developing effective pathways toward planetary regeneration. In the predominant logic of the Capitalocene, short-term profits, increases in productivity, and optimisation around flawed ideas of efficiency are necessitated–and regeneration could be mistaken for a loss, an indicator of inefficacy, a concession to the ineffable–and as such, unwarranted. This is the systemic logic that must be resisted.

The prevalence of demolition today is one example of how this systemic short-sightedness is bad for people and the planet. The UK is now facing the consequences of the prevalent use of reinforced aerated autoclave concrete (‘RAAC’), in municipal buildings nationwide during the 1980s. With a material lifespan of only 30 years, many hospitals and schools built of RAAC are now being demolished. Indeed, the lifespan of many of the structures that are most viable in our current urban development models are steadily decreasing in spite of increasing awareness of the embodied carbon impacts of demolition.

We would do well, in looking toward a regenerative future for the built environment, to retune our time horizons. This might involve syncing carbon sequestration time with lifecycles for construction that create value over time, taking into account things like municipal land leases and emerging whole life carbon regulations. What if we had a way to see the long-term impact of decisions made today?

In this effort to hold more timescales in mind when we consider processes of regeneration, we can learn a great deal from indigenous cultures from across the world, many of whom have developed, over the course of millennia, methods and ideologies supporting the human ability to connect with scales of time beyond our species-specific and news-cycle dependent parameters. Some of these examples are evidenced in the above Index of enquiries.

Theoretical underpinnings: what constitutes a regenerative built environment?

The built environment is both a physical and a social construct: it’s not fitting in this moment of polycrisis to continue to abstract the physical materials that shelter us from the labour that built them, the livelihoods that maintain them, the design processes that make them fit for purpose, and the policies or decisions that keep them standing.

To identify ways to directly address the injustices to people and the planet engendered by the Capitalocene, we need to look to historical and political decisions that have driven the crises in housing affordability and race-based inequality that are defining features of cities today. In recent years, there has been a greater focus on how the built environment can benefit from the application of lenses that focus on the distribution of power and agency within societies, including critical theory and urban political ecology. These approaches can help us to articulate how the built environment and natural resources can be viewed in the context of human struggles to meet their needs in the context of today’s critical conditions.

David Harvey, most notably in Social Justice and the City, points to how a purely quantitative or spatial design-based approach to understanding urban space consistently fails to engage socioeconomic phenomena like inequality and urban poverty, while arguing for the necessity of approaches that integrate the spatial with the social. Harvey’s reading, grounded in radical geography, makes clear how spatial development processes are driven by financial capital, which keeps governments, civil society, communities and individuals in predetermined roles, ill-equipped to resist the calcification of capitalised space. Recently, climate justice movements like the Climate Justice Alliance (on the grassroots side) have formed alliances with decision-makers and activists in the built environment around causes like health and buildings, retrofit poverty and feminist approaches to building, under banners like a Global Green New Deal, in which a spatialised social justice lens can be directly applied.

Harvey’s work is a key influence on urban political ecology approaches, which assist us in understanding of how cities are hybrids of natural and social processes, rejecting a dichotomy between people and nature. Similarly, Marxist political economic thinkers like Raymond Williams have pointed to how capitalism organises space and produces environmental inequalities, as analysed using multiscalar analysis, among other techniques. Through a political ecology lens, we see that developers and investors, not communities or ecological needs, shape the built environment, often through speculative real estate practices that exploit labour and resources. These critiques of the built environment emphasise that urban development is driven primarily by capitalist interests, prioritising profit over social and environmental well-being, leading to inequality, displacement, and environmental degradation. Theory can support an analysis of exclusion in planning, and advocacy for participatory processes that could support socially regenerative places.

In sum, focusing exclusively on buildings misses the point that cities are fluid, open, contested multivocal landscapes. At scales from the individual building, to the neighbourhood, including infrastructure like street systems, as well as cities and regions, the built environment is a negotiation between matter, human behaviour and social systems over time.

As we look to the future, how will our urban environments be produced? Who will benefit from them? And how can we challenge the environmental injustices inherent to the systems we live in?

Guiding principles for regenerative practice

Six layered principles for a regenerative built environment

Expanding our definition of what’s regenerative in the built environment calls for clear ways to speak to the material, economic and social dimensions of cities. We need ways of accessing and assessing regeneration that cut across disciplinary boundaries, invite broader participation in these conversations, and account for future risks and technological developments.

What layers and principles might expand and deepen our understanding of systemic interactions as we work toward more holistic indicators? Below are six suggestions to focus our gaze.

Time horizons and generational preparedness

Future indicators of a regenerative built environment must take a long-term view. If the built environment is to form a matrix in support of human life for generations to come, it should fundamentally be building material preparedness for the future. This means the way we measure and quantify what the built environment does ought to speak to this extended time horizon, for example by considering how much carbon is stored for three generations to come, how much of our timber is sourced in a way that will allow for replanted trees that will mature over decades, or how much of a building’s material stock can be disassembled and reused within the same settlement.

Today we have standard metrics like Floor Area Ratio (FAR) that are aligned with present development models and profit-driven logics requiring maximum saleable use of space, fundamentally constraining possibilities for the built environment. Foregrounding time horizons for change enables retooling of these ways of measuring cities, focusing not on short-term, singular profits and benefits, but rather on the future generations and our planetary resources.

Geopolitical resilience and security

Future indicators for a regenerative built environment should address the geopolitical stakes of decisions.This is especially relevant now in Europe, with regard to geopolitical dynamics within and between the US, Russia and China, in light of multipolarity and the EU Strategic Autonomy conversation. Can we refashion the socioeconomic and material dependencies in cities so that they are resilient to the crises that may face future generations, while supporting enhanced responses to geopolitical dangers? We should look to modes of resilience that address the political and economic systems that exacerbate geopolitical precarity, such as the extractive nature of global trade, and the ongoing influence of multinational corporations in shaping environments across scales. The status quo propositions toward resilience often fall short of addressing geopolitical power structures.

Place-based and planetary approaches

Future policies and indicators should adopt a multiscalar view that takes into account the unique local context to which it’s applied, as well as the transformative potential and influence interventions may leverage across scales (e.g. throughout the value chain). Contextual specificity is associated with direct impact in regenerative efforts, but these must be connected to transformative change that fundamentally alters the properties and functions of systems.

Living systems approach

Actions should help to shift thinking towards more holistic and ecocentric worldviews, in which non-capitalistic, nature-centred systems of values are given primacy. This layer considers interventions as part of dynamic social-ecological systems rather than isolated components. It is crucial to see these social-ecological systems for their complex adaptive qualities, in which people and nature are inextricably linked.

A living systems approach supports biogenerative thinking, in which processes, systems, or designs that actively promote, support, and regenerate life — both biological and ecological — create conditions for continuous growth, renewal, and self-sustaining ecosystems.

Co-evolutionary and community-led

Interventions should structurally empower communities to act and evolve in line with their ecosystems. Structural empowerment means building systems and resources to make communities stronger and self-sufficient and allowing nature to flourish in tandem. This approach foregrounds the utility of feedback mechanisms from nature, like soil health indicators, phenological changes, and biodiversity and species presence, to support the co-evolution and improvement of social-ecological systems.

Supporting holistic value creation

A regenerative built environment should operate on the basis of a broad definition of value, from economic, to ecological and social. As the theoretical approaches discussed previously indicate, the built environment is a hybrid of natural and social processes occurring in the constraints of systems that thrive on extraction and inequality. A holistic approach that combines material, interpersonal and spatial integrators to consider what is regenerative generates cascading value across multiple scales.

“Measuring the impact of regenerative practices on living systems must therefore recognise entangled systemic value flows. Current economic approaches fail to account for this complexity.”

— Dark Matter Labs, A New Economy for Europe’s Built Environment, white paper, 2024

Conclusion

In the context of the polycrisis, we need to move beyond notions of sustainability, toward, as Bill Reed’s diagram suggests, creating healthy, counter-extractive communities and bioregions that can scale from exceptions to define new norms.

Embracing a broadened definition of regenerative practice — one which is informed by the historical and contemporary context of such practices — will evidence the potential contradictions and tensions in the current system. Deploying multimodal metrics and indicators, of the type that the principles introduced in this piece imply, will enable new thinking for net-regenerative outcomes in our cities. Without redirecting our points of orientation toward these six principles, even motivated actors will be limited by today’s system, which allows only for shifting of blame and incremental, localised improvements in the status quo. We will never reach a regenerative built environment without transformational change.

Further pieces in this series will explore in more detail the systemic shifts we envision, pathways toward regenerative practice, and possible indicators for recognising progress.

This publication is part of the project ReBuilt “Transformation Pathways Toward a Regenerative Built Environment — Übergangspfade zu einer regenerativen gebauten Umwelt” and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.

This piece represents the views of its authors, including, from Dark Matter Labs, Emma Pfeiffer, Aleksander Nowak, and Ivana Stancic, and from Bauhaus Earth, Gediminas Lesutis and Georg Hubmann.

We extend our thanks to additional collaborators within and beyond our organisations who informed this discussion.

Additional links:

• Built By Nature
• Material Cultures
• Ecococon
• LUMA Arles / Le Magasin Électrique
• HouseEurope!
• Rotor
• Gleis 21
• Home Silk Road
• Kalkbreite
• La Borda
• Living for Future
• Habitat for Humanity Poland

What’s guiding our Regenerative Futures? was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past three months, that abstract idea has become a tangible reality. We have been working in parallel on two major outputs: a linear, narrative-driven Field Guide and a modular, interactive website. These two pieces have been in constant conversation, shaping each other as they evolve. In this post, we, Arianna, Gurden, and Michelle, share our reflections on bringing this part of the system to life, the power of a good design process, and what it feels like to see emergence in action.

Arianna: Maybe I can start. The last three months have been a back-and-forth conversation between our two major outputs: the Field Guide and the website. We were working on them in parallel, so every new page or piece of content for the Field Guide would influence the website, and the website would influence the Field Guide. A really interesting part was categorising all the tools. For you too, Michelle, I imagine writing in the Field Guide and then seeing the first draft of the website that Gurden built really helped clarify what should remain in a linear format and what could become an interactive element.

This double narration is key. The Field Guide is linear, so people can follow page by page, and we’ve put a lot of effort into diagrams that synthesise and distinguish each section clearly. On the website, we’re trying to simplify the experience with shortcuts and modular recalls so that everything is interconnected. That has been our core challenge and focus these last months.

Gurden: Yeah, listening to you, Arianna, it’s really cool to watch this flow of content between the Field Guide and the website. We made these structural decisions months ago, sitting in a park during our workshop, and it’s a great feeling to see them validated now. We were a bit unsure at the time because we’re dealing with so much complexity: many, many, many things, as the name suggests! But we made a conscious decision to have both a linear and an interactive flow, and the process has proven that was the right call.

As the Field Guide grew, the website structure grew with it. To make sure the website is structurally sound, I set up a skeleton database in Notion for the main content. To be honest, my expectations were a bit low when I asked Michelle and Annette to fill it, but big shoutout to Annette, her mind works just so quickly. She immediately got the object-oriented structure and filled it up, making the connections brilliantly. That gave me a distilled version of the content to populate our website via the Content Management System.

I’m glad we didn’t try to perfect everything at once. We moved fast, built a rough first version, and brought it to life, which is now live internally. We’ve already done a few quick user tests. If we had just stayed in Figma, we’d still be there six months from now.

Michelle: I have so little to add because you’ve both covered most of it! My main addition is to highlight how everything has informed everything else. You’ve talked about the Field Guide and website, but they, in turn, provided enough structure for the database so Annette could go in and finish it. That process gave all of us a deeper understanding of our tools, examples, case studies and other assets we needed to create.

It’s a good example of real emergence. A lot of people talk about emergence when they’re really just describing chaos without enough boundaries. But here, we had pieces that genuinely formed the next piece, that formed the next piece. What was supposed to come out and what would be useful for other people was illuminated by going through this process. It gave birth to key assets we hadn’t yet imagined, like Angela’s “Experimenter’s Logbook”, which will be available soon on the website. I’m not sure that would have been conceived in the same way without this interplay. It’s a testament to what a good design process does, and even though we didn’t invent the design process, it was nice to be part of one that was so fruitful.

Gurden: I agree. The process exists, but I’ve seen so many teams not follow it well. And credit to you, Arianna, the interconnected diagrams you created are now coming to life. When you navigate the website, you see a problem and the related tools linked directly to it. These interlinkages are what make it a living system, not just a static page.

Of course, that’s also our next challenge: making sure the user experience works, that people don’t get lost. A website is a living organism, and new ideas will constantly come in. The hard part now is making conscious decisions about what we need to fix before launch versus what can wait for the next version.

Arianna: That brings me to another point: how we are all holding many hats. We aren’t a typical product team where each person has one defined role. The core team is tiny, and each of us holds three or four different roles. This has positives, we can communicate rapidly, and as designers and coders, we are deeply embedded in the content, thanks to the time Michelle and Annette took to teach us. But on the other side, by holding many roles, we have to compromise. We can’t excel at everything. So, for this first version, we might focus less on perfecting accessibility, for example, because our goal is to launch an alpha or beta version. When we have more time to focus, we can scale it and do it better.

Michelle: That’s a super good reflection on the human side of the process. So, to wrap up, we’ve now asked a set of close collaborators to give us feedback over the next month. Our hope is that the website, the core tools, and the Field Guide will be ready to share more widely in late September or mid-October. Then we’ll put it out into the world, get a wider set of feedback, and see what people think.

Our next step is to incorporate feedback from our close network before sharing it with all of you.

Thanks for following our journey. You can find our previous posts here and here and stay updated by joining the Beyond the Rules newsletter here.

And a big thanks, as always, to the other members of our team — Annette and Angela — who are key stewards of this work.

Many-to-Many: From Abstract Ideas to a Living System was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Valuing the Ecosystem Services of street trees in Berlin to inform the strategic development of the extension of the M10 tram line

This blog article provides an overview of the joint efforts undertaken in partnership with the District Office Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf of Berlin, The Nature Conservancy in Europe gGmbH, DorfwerkStadt e.V., and Politics for Tomorrow / nextlearning e.V.

Nature often has to pave the way for the expansion of the city’s urban infrastructure. But what if we could more accurately understand the value tree, so we can make a stronger case for decisions that reduce tree removal?

Tram route options and baseline canopy cover

This map shows two tram route options in the urban area, overlaid with baseline canopy cover data:

• A red dotted line represents planned Tram Line M10 (New Tram Extension). It spans from Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee through Mierendorffplatz, Osnabrücker Straße, and ends at Tegeler Weg.
• The alternative tram route is shown as a magenta dashed line, running through Gaußstraße and Obersstraße.

As Berlin advances its commitment to sustainable mobility, the planned extension of tram line M10 between Turmstraße and S+U Jungfernheide illustrates a familiar urban dilemma: progress at the cost of nature, the tram extension risks removing over a hundred mature street trees. Trees constantly provide a variety of benefits to the citizens around them. As built infrastructure expands, it’s easy to forget the invisible nature systems already at work: cooling our streets, cleaning our air, managing stormwater, and supporting our mental and physical health.

This is where ecosystem services valuation comes in, by quantifying the benefits trees provide, we can integrate ecological assets into infrastructure planning, allowing decision-makers to balance new infrastructure with the natural capital we already have.

A tool to value urban nature

To address this gap, the district council of Berlin Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and The Nature Conservancy in Europe commissioned our Trees as Infrastructure team to develop and deploy an Ecosystem Services Valuation Tool for the affected Mierendorff Island sites in Berlin. This tool translates ecological functions into benefits and, consequently, into economic metrics, thereby assigning a value to nature within financial and planning systems.

The model assessed ecosystem services within a 50-meter buffer along the tram route, focusing on quantifiable benefits in three key areas:

1. Climate Adaptation & Mitigation: shelter from wind, temperature moderation and carbon sequestration
2. Water Management & Flood Alleviation: rainfall interception and stormwater reduction
3. Health & Well-being: stress reduction, air quality improvements, and support for active lifestyles

To calculate these values, our model leveraged a combination of diverse local data, including high-resolution tree canopy data, detailed meteorological information, and socioeconomic demographics for Berlin. The economic value was derived by applying established valuation methods such as avoided damages (e.g. quantifying the benefits of climate regulation and flood mitigation), market prices (e.g. for carbon credits), and replacement costs (e.g. for water quality improvements). To support these calculations, we use established tools and frameworks, including GI-VAL, B£ST, and InVEST.

We also developed a web interface for this tool so that the results could be easily shareable and accessible to a broad audience. Designed to reflect the transparency of traditional financial asset dashboards, the Ecosystem Services Dashboard enables users to explore the data in depth: they can adjust scenarios, compare outcomes, and zoom in or out on the map, encouraging a hands-on, investigative approach.

Risks and model limitations

Our model offers valuable insights into the economic contributions of urban trees and their ecosystem services. Like any innovative tool, it has boundaries, best understood as invitations for further exploration rather than flaws.

Its accuracy depends on data quality; incomplete inputs can lead to misestimations, underscoring the need for robust local data. As with many valuation tools, our model simplifies complex natural systems to yield actionable insights, though it may not capture site-specific nuances such as microclimates or tree placement. It currently assumes a linear relationship between services and benefits, while real ecosystems often exhibit non-linear dynamics and tipping points — areas for future refinement.

Then there’s the challenge of putting a price tag on nature. Valuing public commons like clean air or carbon storage remains challenging without standard market prices. Even so, indicative estimates help make the benefits of healthy ecosystems visible in policy and planning. While individual trees generate limited carbon credits, their collective impact and co-benefits are significant at scale.

Systemic shifts such as climate change, policy changes, or technological disruption, are not yet modeled but represent critical frontiers. While we focus on economic benefits, the model does not yet capture social and cultural values that communities attribute to urban green spaces or account for social vulnerability, such as how the loss of trees might disproportionately affect low-income or elderly residents.

In this light, the model is best used as one valuable piece in a broader puzzle — most powerful when combined with local expertise and qualitative insights to establish a more responsible, evidence-informed decision-making approach for urban resilience.

Our key findings

When considering the three benefit groups on climate regulation, water management and health, the main findings for the baseline situation of the standing trees as they are today were:

• Baseline value: At the baseline scenario site, the total value of ecosystem services provided by all currently standing trees located within 50 metres of the road over a 10-year period is estimated at €10.5 million. This equates to an average economic value of €29,440 from ecosystem services per tree over the same period.

Our model was then used to explore three distinct scenarios to compare the potential impact of tree removal:

• ‘Optimistic’ scenario: Relates to the removal of the 35 trees identified in a technical survey commissioned by the BVG (Berlin’s public transport agency) were removed, the projected ecosystem services loss would be approximately €1 million over a decade.
• ‘Realistic’ scenario: Relates to the removal of 131 trees, which are those at risk of being felled as their crown diameter overlaps a certain buffer distance from the future tram line, leading to an estimated loss of approximately €4.2 million in value over a decade.
• ‘Alternative’ route scenario: Relates to the removal of 45 trees if the tramline was built along an alternative route, resulting in a projected loss of approximately €300,000.

Although the alternative route maintains a canopy cover similar to the optimistic scenario, its economic impact on ecosystem services is notably lower. This difference largely comes down to a few important factors. The trees along the alternative path tend to be smaller, so they naturally provide fewer benefits like carbon capture, cooling, and air purification. Secondly, this route passes through an area with much fewer residents, meaning trees contribute less to direct health benefits such as stress relief, improved air quality and encouraging outdoor activity. Also, with fewer buildings and residents exposed to wind currents, the climate regulation benefits per tree are less relevant.

This highlights a key insight for planning: the impact of a tree in a city is highly dependent on its specific context, what surrounds it, how many people it benefits, the local environmental risks, and how much the urban system relies on it to cope with those risks. Not all trees have the same value, and understanding their place within the urban fabric is key to making decisions around preserving urban nature and maximising ecosystem services.

What does this mean for city stakeholders?

The numbers in this study reveal a critical opportunity: urban trees are not just passive greenery but invaluable infrastructure delivering vital ecosystem services — carbon capture, air purification, cooling, stormwater management, and community well-being — that currently go unpriced and underleveraged. This structural blind spot means cities miss a chance to unlock new financing pathways that could transform how living ecosystems are maintained and expanded.

Imagine innovative financing frameworks that monetise the ecosystem value of existing trees to directly funnel resources into city households. The beneficiaries of these ecosystem services include municipal enterprises managing energy and rainwater systems, municipal housing associations, and private companies seeking to improve their sustainability profiles and creditworthiness with banks. These stakeholders could contribute to a new funding mechanism, reflecting the shared value trees provide across urban sectors. These funds could then be allocated to enhance tree maintenance, ensuring the health and longevity of the urban canopy, while simultaneously financing targeted climate adaptation measures in vulnerable areas of the district.

To support this vision, city policies must evolve:

1. Empower subsidiarity and support local initiatives by formally recognising the community’s active stewardship role in caring for and maintaining urban nature.
2. Strengthen tree protection ordinances by setting stricter tree replanting ratios (e.g. 1:5 or 1:10) and fines proportional to the projected ecosystem service losses over 10–20 years, using our study — which translates these services into monetary value — as the foundation for accurately accounting the time lag and diminished benefits between a felled mature tree and its young replacement.
3. Redesign compensation frameworks to go beyond tree replacement, enabling funds to be channeled into additional appropriate interventions (e.g. unsealing, rain gardens) that respond to site-specific adaptation needs.

This case in Berlin reinforces a critical insight on the need for coordinated urban planning: housing and urban development, climate adaptation, and transport transitions must be designed as interconnected systems. Without such integration, we risk implementing climate solutions that deliberately undermine the very resilience we aim to build.

On March 22 2025, our findings were formally presented by one of our team member Sebastian Klemm, to a broad audience, including the public, political representatives, and notably, district council leads from civil engineering, green space and climate adaptation. As a result of this engagement, our tree ecosystem valuation study is being used by the district councillor to support the renegotiation of all elements of the project, including the tram line extension, its planning alternatives, proposed route, the calculation basis for compensation measures, and their intended purpose.

Looking ahead

The results of this study reveals the significant, long-term societal losses that would result from removing these mature trees to extend the M10 tram line. This local tension of transport infrastructure developing versus the protection of nature that regulates our microclimate, mirrors a wider urban planning dilemma faced by cities across Europe and beyond on how to align societal development with ecological and societal resilience.

This case points to a larger strategic question:

How can infrastructure planning be reoriented to systematically reflect public health, climate resilience, and the long-term well-being of communities in legal and fiscal decisions?

This question shaped the expert dialogue on June 20th 2025, curated and convened by Politics for Tomorrow / nextlearning.eu in collaboration with the Trees as Infrastructure team, DorfwerkStadt e.V., and the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district office. The working session marked a critical step in turning the study’s findings into actionable governance frameworks. Building on the earlier public presentation, this closed session provided a platform for cross-sector reflection and collaborative policy design. By integrating ecological, health, and economic insights with legal and administrative expertise, the session enabled a shared understanding of trees as living infrastructure, emphasizing their value not just in compensation terms but within proactive planning and investment strategies.

Most importantly, this dialogue laid the foundation for systemic change, shifting from fragmented responsibilities to cooperative governance, and from isolated environmental mitigation to integrated, health-oriented resilience policies. Ideas for a coordinated collaboration strategy emerged, including piloting new planning and financing models on Mierendorff Island, embedding the valuation approach into Berlin’s compensation guidelines, and developing governance tools like a Commons Index and local operating models to unlock cross-sector investment.

The outcomes of this dialogue offer immediate policy relevance:

• Proposals for adapting the M10 route planning based on comprehensive ecological and social valuation;
• A replicable citywide model for integrating ecological and health data into infrastructure decisions;
• A framework for embedding green infrastructure value into the planning and budgeting strategies of the district, Senate, and both public and private institutions;
• An alternative to outdated cost-benefit tools like the Koch method, which continues to treat trees as depreciable assets, instead recognising their full ecological, social, and economic value as resilient, multi-solving elements.

If you are working to build cities that are equitable and ecologically sound, this is your invitation: Join us in advancing a movement for living infrastructure — where urban trees and nature are not obstacles to progress but essential infrastructure for urban resilience and liveable cities.

Full Report: Dive into the complete findings, data, and methodology in the ecosystem services valuation report > Link to PDF

Interactive Dashboard: Explore the spatial distribution and value of Berlin’s tree canopy via our Ecosystem Services Dashboard.

Partners: District Office Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf of Berlin, The Nature Conservancy in Europe gGmbH, DorfwerkStadt e.V., and Politics for Tomorrow / nextlearning.eu

Team: Sofia Valentini, Sebastian Klemm, Chloe Treger, Gurden Batra, Caroline Paulick-Thiel

TreesAI identity created by Arianna Smaron

Unlocking the Value for Urban Nature: An Economic Case for Street Tree Preservation in Berlin was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reflecting on ReBuilders and what we learnt

The ReBuilders programme was a collaboration between Dark Matter Labs, CIVIC SQUARE, Material Cultures, and Fircroft College, supported by Innovate UK. This is our first reflection on the programme’s initial iteration; more documentation and resources will be shared by our partner organisations in the coming weeks.

In this piece, we will outline 5 ways we learnt over the course of the programme:

1. The retrofit design hack

2. In-person visits

3. The maintenance perspective

4. Sites as classrooms

5. Leadership with longevity

Between September 2024 and October 2025, we came together with a group of ten construction business leaders in the West Midlands to consider pathways toward regenerative ways of building. Over those six months, we visited leading-edge socially- and ecologically-regenerative buildings across England and Wales, met with the trailblazers involved in realising these projects, engaged in hands-on sessions working with natural building materials and assemblies, and thought deeply about organisational design as a cohort. In so doing, the group took steps toward modelling the transition we envisioned — both as individual practitioners and as a collective.

Programme highlights:

Four site visits, to WeCanMake (Bristol), UEA Enterprise Centre (Norwich), Wolves Lane Centre (London), Down To Earth Project (Gower Peninsula)

Hands-on demonstrations: Ecococon, lime rendering, Blokbuild, hempcrete, thatching, clay plastering, earth and light earth, closed-panel timber framing

One-to-one sessions and group talks with mentors and partner organisations in support of individual participants’ action plans, hosted by Fircroft College

ReBuilders was established with Bill Reed’s vision of regenerative practice in mind: that which goes beyond what’s deemed green, sustainable or restorative, to do not only less bad but to do more good, using whole systems thinking. Together with our partner organisations, CIVIC SQUARE and Material Cultures, we sought to curate a programme that negotiated the tensions of our aspirations:

• Working with locally-embedded practitioners in the West Midlands while acknowledging the wider scale of entanglements in our supply chains, and the planetary-scale impacts of the construction sector
• Acknowledging and enabling the idiosyncratic specificities of small-business operations, many of which are driven by personal priorities, while at the same time encouraging networks and identifying commonalities
• Growing clarity and agency around the small actions and positions that this group of business leaders could take in the near-term, while keeping an eye on the bigger systemic shifts that are necessary for a just transition in the built environment

Ultimately, we aimed to show how outstanding regenerative buildings can catalyse changes in their eco-regions and beyond, and how individual businesses working regeneratively can similarly scale their impact to play an integral role in transitions from the neighbourhood-scale upwards.

While the programme offered opportunities for direct knowledge transfer across generations, perspectives, and areas of expertise, the transformative qualities of ReBuilders can be seen for their full expansiveness only in retrospect. Over the course of our time with the ReBuilders, in the range of planned and unplanned ways in which we came together, evidence of new ways of learning and working together emerged. These modes and methods sit within the ecosystem of reimagined civic infrastructures that define the area of our ongoing collaboration with CIVIC SQUARE, as laid out in our recent collaborative initiative around 3º Neighbourhoods.

3ºC Neighbourhood

In this piece, we will lay out five ways we learnt and explored regenerative building practices in the collective setting of ReBuilders. These ways of learning posed important questions and pointed to possibilities around how we might move toward a self-sustaining ecosystem of regenerative practices and practitioners. In asking not just what but how we learnt, we hope to sketch possible methods for future coalition-building around a regenerative future for the built environment.

1. The retrofit design hack

How can we approach novel problems differently?

WeCanMake hosted a quick-fire ‘retrofit detail hack’; a thirty minute session that brought together small groups of ReBuilders to think through a particular design issue they’ve come across in their work. Armed with printout detail sections and pencils, the ReBuilders came up with possible solutions to the problem that drew on their different areas of expertise. Having previously presented this same detail to researchers and engineers from the University of Bath, WeCanMake noted that the builders came up with different solutions.

The nature of the exercise — quick, non-rivalrous and yet still competitive — pointed to new ways to think about solving retrofit problems of seemingly overwhelming scale. By reframing how we collate different types of knowledge and expertise together, the exercise reimagined how we could solve repetitive problems at the scale of a street or a neighbourhood.

The ideas formulated in these small groups were greater than the sum of individual approaches to the detail. The hack format created space for productive disagreement and collaborative feedback, building coherence across viewpoints and supporting a collaborative spirit in the room.

2. In-person visits

What can we gain from seeing evidence of the possible?

A key part of the programme was a series of site visits to existing examples of regenerative buildings and projects across England and Wales. Across the sites we visited we met with architects, builders, groundskeepers, community leaders and volunteers, as well as the people who call those buildings their workplaces.

Seeing the built examples and hearing from different perspectives was beneficial in and of itself, but there was a much more important aspect to these site visits that’s often overlooked in climate and economic transition thinking. The visits made it possible to imagine alternative future lives and livelihoods. Seeing these buildings in real life and meeting the practitioners not only presented evidence of alternative ways of building, but also led us toward a more visceral appreciation of what the ‘work’ looks like that brings these types of construction methods and practices to life.

Alongside this, we experienced for ourselves the palpable differences in the qualities of spaces created by bio-based buildings such as more comfortable temperatures and improved internal air quality, while hearing how people who lived and worked in these environments felt longer-term impacts on their mental wellbeing and functioning.

These site visits and discussions opened up different avenues of thought for the group, making the shift we’re working towards more tangible and more enticing.

3. The maintenance perspective

Who and what is in our regenerative building coalition?

As part of our session with ReBuilders mentor Irena Bauman, we met with Lisa, a member of Fircroft College’s cleaning team. In telling us what her team has to consider in planning the college’s maintenance, and giving us a tour of the spaces she works in and things she pays attention to, Lisa widened our view of the processes involved in making a building that’s fit for purpose over time.

Meeting Lisa raised the question of how we can better design and build in ways that can be regenerative past the point when architects and construction teams leave the site. What constitutes stewardship, when the building is in the hands of those who live in and maintain these structures?How can designers and builders align their work with the maintenance and care work that comes after they hand over the building?

Our ‘maintenance tour’ showed Fircroft’s building in relation to time. As an historic structure, we saw ways in which the building’s contemporary use doesn’t align with its original design, so Lisa’s team has to fit their large stores of equipment into tiny closets, but we also saw how materials like stone stand the test of time. Equally, Lisa’s work highlighted how important cleaners and other behind-the-scenes workers are to making places habitable through work that happens on cycles from daily to annual.

The time we spent speaking with cleaners and groundskeepers at Fircroft showed how we need to bring more voices in the room around regenerative building practices. Could we make more progress toward our goal of regenerative building if we better understood how construction workers and those who will later work in these spaces have many of the same priorities? Our cohort was excited by the idea of this continuum of stewardship and knowledge.

4. Sites as classrooms

What pathways does construction open up?

Community building processes at Wolves Lane and Down to Earth have been actively designed with a long-term vision of distributive, place-based regeneration in mind. Teams in both of these places drew us into their ambition to bring communities into the building process, and showed us how this can amplify the benefits of regenerative construction.

Community-led construction reframes stewardship of the building and moves beyond the logic of direct monetisation of places. We witnessed how regenerative architecture is defined by the pathways that are opened up over the course of decades, rather than being defined solely by what a building is worth or what it costs to build.

At Down to Earth, construction is positioned as a form of therapy that benefits health, while at the same time providing affordable, low-carbon homes to local residents in the Gower Peninsula — and they’ve done the quantitative research to back up these outcomes and share them with a wider audience. At Wolves Lane, the Ubele Initiative has co-designed the construction process with Material Cultures so that nearly everyone who’s likely to use the building has had a hand in its making, supporting the organisation’s aims of empowerment and social change. When we visited Wolves Lane (and got involved in clay plastering), we saw how this approach to construction maximises different benefits that can come from its component processes, treating construction as a durational resource for regeneration rather than just a thing to get done as cheaply and quickly as possible.

The pathways opened by regenerative building practices show us how it’s not just about the finished building, but about what doors can be opened on the way.

5. Seeing leadership with longevity

What comes after the stubborn trailblazers?

Barbara Jones of the School of Natural Building and Ecococon, and Mark McKenna of Down to Earth, represent examples of amazing leadership in this field by committed experts who, by their own account, have been told that their ideas were impossible or couldn’t be done countless times. In McKenna’s own words, “the established construction industry is determined, well funded and resolute in how it currently operates”, a challenge that calls for a large dose of stubbornness and belief that change is possible. The tenacity of leaders like McKenna and Jones has made headway for the next generation of practitioners, but it’s taken commitment over decades of learning difficult lessons to get to this point.

This points to the necessity of working in coalition, building relationships across disciplines and career stages, and fostering mentorship for building tacit knowledge of these practices.

Networks and forums (like ACAN) need to be enabled and seen as a key part of the ecosystem that will enable dissemination of knowledge and opportunity while building momentum and supporting longevity.

What’s next?

ReBuilders offered us a glimpse of what a 21st century, regenerative construction sector looks like. For this sector to be a part of neighbourhood-led, climate and eco-social transitions, there is a need for reimagined roles for construction workers and allied built environment practitioners. We are invested in reimagining and redesigning what future skills training and learning programmes look like, to create genuine routes into these lives and livelihoods. With our partner organisations, Dark Matter Labs is committed to exploring how to realise the emergent networks and initiatives that ReBuilders programme planted as seeds. Please reach out if you have aligned endeavours that we could work toward together.

For us at Dark Matter Labs, the programme strongly underscored the importance of working in alliance, identifying shared intent, and maintaining momentum toward change. With this in mind, we’ll soon share the collective resource database, initiated during ReBuilders, which we are transforming into a live index for the public.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that the ReBuilders programme will be returning later in 2025. This second iteration of ReBuilders will focus on retrofit and embed the principles of Retrofit Reimagined, while further integrating the programme within CIVIC SQUARE’s work at neighbourhood level.

If you’re a leader of a small or medium-sized construction business in the West Midlands and interested in taking part, please keep an eye out for further news in the weeks to come by following CIVIC SQUARE, Material Cultures, and Dark Matter Labs on social channels.

• CIVIC SQUARE: Instagram, LinkedIn, Eventbrite
• Material Cultures: Instagram, LinkedIn
• Dark Matter Labs: Linkedin, Instagram

Routes to Regenerative Construction was originally published in Dark Matter Laboratories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.