Regenerative Design in the Latin-Mediterranean context
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Today we are immersed in an unprecedented socio-environmental crisis on a planetary scale, consequence of unsustainable human behaviors (Camrass, 2020), where the urban growth model indisputably tends to privilege functionality and economy (Gómez, 2012), and of modernity and its epistemological novelty: anthropocentrism (Senet de Frutos, 2016). We are facing an unprecedented and uncertain future (Roggema, 2022). The imbalance of the natural system brought devastating scenarios, affecting the economic, social, cultural, political and environmental development of every country (Segundo,2019). Humanity uses nature as if it were a factory from which to obtain the greatest possible profit for an economy based on unlimited growth, on a planet with well-defined physical limits and a deficit in terms of ecological footprint.
A fundamental rethinking of the way we develop our cities and landscapes is needed. (Roggema, 2022). The impacts of climatic change necessitate a particularly urgent and collective response (Camrass, 2020).
Sustainable development was popularized by the promise of being the answer to environmental problems, a “solution” that bases its principles according to the techno-centric and environmentalist perspective (De Vincentiis, 2012), with the objective of not compromising the needs of future generations (Brundtland, 1987).But, although sustainability promises not to affect future humanity, it does not contemplate the possibility of contributing and co-evolving with nature (Wahl, 2016).
The radical changes required for Earth to ‘remain fit for human habitation’ require a change in worldviews from ‘mechanistic’ to ‘ecological’ (Mang and Reed, 2012) that has emerged from living systems sciences over the last century (Benne and Mang, 2015). We need a hopeful response to the often frightening changes and challenges we face; arguing that we can actively create a positive and abundant future through mindful, contributive engagement that is rooted in a living-systems-based worldview (Hes and Du Plessis, 2015).
With the 21st century a new concept emerges, a new paradigm, and with it, the search for new design processes, development and regenerative design. Regenerative development proposes a path to understanding the multiplicity of sustainability approaches as a coherent phenomenon that is genuinely able to match the complexity of today’s global problems (Mang, 2016). Since the origins of regenerative sustainability and regenerative design lie primarily in the social and ecological domains respectively, understanding their relationship is of importance in formulating approaches for the successful co-evolution of human and natural systems (Robinson and Cole, 2015).
Regenerative development is based on a methodology that bets on human activity as a source of health and regeneration (Mang & Reed, 2016) and on strategies based on understanding the inner workings of ecosystems (living systems) to “shape” processes that can generate new and healthier patterns in a place (Lyle, 1984).
Currently, different approaches are being developed, in continuous evolution, to find meaning and identify appropriate actions and solutions to the global situation, but from the local, from the uniqueness of the place. These paradigms provide useful tools and strategies, they also evolve as their shortcomings and limitations are revealed, they come up against their own limitations and are exposed to different worldviews (Du Plessis, 2022).
How have these paradigms evolved in the Latin-Mediterranean context, is there a different evolution of this approach in these contexts taking into account the uniqueness of the place?
Radical thinking and solutions are required, capable of stopping the current paradigms (Roggema, 2022), from an ecological responsibility that understands that man is part of nature.
How does this ecological responsibility emerge from this understanding of man as part of nature in the Latin-Mediterranean context and its realities?
In this book, we invite for chapter proposals that critically address and analyze the adoption of new visions, emerging practices based on a regenerative approach, projects and proposal in different fields of application in the Latin-Mediterranean context, always under a global perspective.