Chapter 2: Strategies for Regenerative Cities

While nature is vital to sustaining the well-being of a city, only 37% of the most populous cities globally have a dedicated strategy to nature or biodiversity preservation.

To harness the co-benefits of nature-based and biomimetic solutions, policymakers and city planners must move beyond conventional thinking about the built environment to consider how it can support ecological health. Cities can designate space for more green-blue-grey infrastructure—this ranges from soft ecological engineering, such as enhancing mangrove habitats for coastal protection, to ecosystem-based adaptation that involves hybridised solutions, such as creating rain gardens and green corridors that capture and retain stormwater.

When deployed district-wide, nature-based and biomimetic solutions alleviate heat, manage flooding and water runoff, strengthen connectivity for biodiversity, and reduce vulnerability to climate risks. They can also create more equitable cities by securing socio-economic co-benefits, benefiting the most vulnerable. Such solutions may not be just environmental imperatives, but social ones that embed resilience where it is needed most.

As cities race to accommodate growing urban populations, planning struggles to keep pace, giving rise to urban sprawl, at the expense of liveability and the environment. The alternative lies in compactness as denser urban forms inherently produce lower emissions. 

Integrated developments reimagine urban functions as interconnected parts of a living system, maximising co-benefits across functions, creating productive interdependence through proximity, and lowering carbon emissions. 

At the building level, mixed-use buildings tap on shared, circular systems and multi-purpose spaces to ensure energy and land efficiency, enhancing liveability by improving accessibility. 

At the district scale, mixed-use and well-integrated districts offer high connectivity and access to all essential amenities. By prioritising sustainable mobility networks and transit-oriented developments, the carbon footprint from commuting is kept low, while compact and integrated districts minimise land use, freeing up space for social or green infrastructure.

Globally, only 6.9% of materials are recovered and returned to the economy. Circular and closed-loop systems activate the untapped potential of resources, transforming linear consumption into restorative flows and reducing extraction demand.

Buildings can be converted into resource banks rather than viewed as resource consumers. Planners and designers can adopt techniques of design for disassembly to allow future adaptive reuse and flexibility. In fact, cities like New York City and Boston are already considering the conversion of underused office buildings into residential use to alleviate the housing crisis.

At the municipal scale, resources can be coordinated and catalogued, systematically matching waste streams with material inputs to reduce the demand for new resources. When applied across urban systems, these synergies enable circularity—waste from one industry can become inputs for another, as seen in some cities which harness the nexus of food, energy and water to optimise resource use.