OPEN TO PUBLIC// Transition Pathways Toward a Regenerative Built Environment

Wednesday, 21.09.2022, 11:30 - 13:00 at H0104

Building construction and operation represent the most significant source of anthropogenic environmental disturbance accounting for 37% of total global energy-related CO2 emissions (UNEP, 2021) and for two-fifths of the global carbon material footprint (Hertwich, 2021). By 2050, an additional 2.5 billion humans will live in cities – mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (UN DESA, 2019). The unprecedented scale and pace of this urban growth will create an enormous demand for housing and urban infrastructure, which will double both the world’s building stock and floor area in the coming decades. If we continue to build using the strategies, practices, and technologies prevalent across the globe today, the environmental and social impacts will be devastating. Therefore, we urgently need to develop new building practices, together with a systematic rethinking of our cities - of urban life, urban form and structural organization - in order to address the climate and biodiversity crises and secure dignified living conditions for all species. Fundamental to these systemic transformation processes are also a contemporary perspective on local knowledge production and ways of networking and exchanging this knowledge globally. Minimizing harm in the sense of decarbonizing the building sector will thereby not suffice. We need to work towards a regenerative built environment that contributes to the restoration of our natural habitats and ecosystems – placing humans and nature at the center (Schurig & Turan, 2021). This would require not only to rethink materiality and form of buildings and cities, but also to acknowledge the embeddedness of urban densities within their regional ecosystems. Considering cities and nature as symbiotic elements of a regenerative built environment would allow for creating regionally based, closed-loop systems and circular flows and moving from extractive, mineral-based practices toward the use of biobased resources while improving quality of life of people. This session, featuring speakers from different regions, will discuss systemic issues that arise in shaping the transition to a regenerative built environment and explore the potential of a global cross-regional learning network. Speakers will share examples and discuss the use of bio-based building materials within regional boundaries, ways to strengthen regional value chains and create new employment opportunities, the spatial implications of reconciling nature and the built environment, and how to create favorable framework conditions. The EU-funded panel in cooperation with Bauhaus Earth wants to focus on the international perspective on local systems, material flows and processes within the framework of the New European Bauhaus, also with the intention to counteract a possible Eurocentrism of the NEB. Questions to be discussed with the international guests will focus on possible ways to make local knowledge globally available or to what extent an international building lab or similar institutionalized approaches would be needed to promote the necessity of a global systemic change of the building sector through an international exchange and distribution of knowledge.