The Story of Place: An Approach to Place-Based Regeneration

The Story of Place applies nested systems-thinking to spatial and temporal reality, reorienting a place towards a trajectory that catalyses systemic regeneration at multiple scales.

— Marianne Amores

The importance of “place” has long been acknowledged in regenerative design, yet it is often reduced to placemaking, honouring cultural heritage, or integrating local context. While valuable, these approaches miss a critical opportunity. When done well, understanding place becomes a complete framework for managing the complexity of regenerative design and development while simultaneously addressing place-specific challenges and crises.

What is the Story of Place?

The Story of Place articulates a location's unique identity, essence, potential and role by tracing its evolution through interconnected ecological, socio-cultural, economic and infrastructural systems. It examines a city or site as a nested living system across space and time, revealing its trajectory and potential evolution.

In essence, it applies nested systems-thinking to spatial and temporal reality, reorienting a place towards a trajectory that catalyses systemic regeneration at multiple scales.

How It Works: Three Levers of Change

The story of place goes beyond mapping history. It allows practitioners to articulate a place's highest trajectory, guide design in the present, and create the systems needed to ensure it continues on that path. (The Regenesis Project)

1. Articulate a Clear Vision: Highest Unique Potential

Rather than working from deficits or importing generic solutions, the Story of Place reveals what regeneration uniquely means for each location. It identifies specific drivers across design, physical systems, industry, economy and socio-culture, giving each place its own DNA for transformation. The result is a clear north star that defines exactly what regeneration looks like there, moving beyond vague aspirations of "doing more good" to articulating the specific good that only place can achieve.

2. Guide Design: Patterns Aligned with Life

The framework exposes patterns that guide regenerative interventions, aligning new configurations with the life patterns already functioning in that place. It calibrates strategies across water, ecology, energy, mobility and other systems to harmonise with how the land actually operates. The mainframe design follows a clear logic: landform and geology determine water patterns; water patterns shape blue-green infrastructure (the resilience backbone); and infrastructure organises public space, mobility networks and neighbourhoods. Each layer builds on the previous, with natural systems considered first, creating integrated systems unique to that place. When executed well, the design emerges organically from the place's own patterns.

3. Enable Evolution: Creating an Operating System for Co-Evolution

Beyond physical design, the Story of Place creates an operating system that tips the scale and builds lasting capacity for regeneration. It identifies new economies and industries unique to that place and its patterns, where impact and regeneration literally become the reason for economic viability, not just a value-add. This extends to policy influence, particularly land use zoning and ordinances that support regenerative patterns. It also becomes the basis for education across all stakeholders—students, professionals, business people and residents—aligning everyone with the capacity to practice and live in accordance with their place's patterns of life. The goal is a fundamental mindset shift enabling the system to organically evolve beyond the designer's direct role.

Bohol's Story of Place

Home to iconic “chocolate” hills, ancient churches and a predominantly karst landscape, Bohol in the Philippines represents a rare convergence—a compact island where distinctive geology, hill-to-reef connectivity, syncretic culture and vibrant tourism operate as one integrated living system. Yet tourism, a key part of Bohol's economy and once an asset, has become extractive.

Mass tourism has driven up costs while degrading the very nature that draws visitors in the first place. Rather than abandoning tourism altogether, the Story of Place reframes it as a catalytic tool: a decentralised network of nodes across Bohol's towns that makes tourism an enabler of ecological and community regeneration, not a threat to it.

For instance, Inabanga, one of Bohol's towns known for its estuarine identity, has been progressively degraded through decades of extraction. Understanding Inabanga's natural landscape becomes the key to regenerating ecological and ecotone patterns across every estuarine zone, while reconnecting the diverse industries (fishing, aquaculture, fibre and bamboo weaving) that are both the product of a healthy estuary and the means of sustaining it. The result is an emergence of a circular eco-economic model that restores livelihoods and builds resilience against climate change.

Pattern maps and design guide for Inabanga, Bohol. (The Regenesis Project)

Meanwhile, Cebu City's Story of Place exposes a disconnect between its natural eco-hydrological patterns (such as parallel rivers that run from a mountain range to the coast) and its current urban reality. Designing from this story involves upward layering—from an eco-hydrological zoning underlay as its resiliency backbone, to integrated blue-green riverine systems, to walkable self-sufficient riverine neighborhoods supported by multi-modal transport, and to a closed-loop urban to peri-urban food system. (The Regenesis Project)

Place as Source

Applying the three levers of change shifts regeneration from "doing more good" to creating the highest good unique to each place. It reveals a blueprint sourced entirely from within—demonstrating that each place already holds what it needs to regenerate; we need only learn its language.