Regenerative Urban Development: a Roadmap to the City we need

Abstract

Human impacts on the world’s landscapes are dominated by the ecological footprints of urban areas that now stretch across much of the globe. The World Future Council’s Regenerative Cities programme seeks to identify concepts and policies that help cities to harness their own regenerative capacity in order to reconcile the their ecological footprints with their geographical magnitude. The planning and management of new cities as well as the retrofitting of existing ones needs to undergo a profound paradigm shift. The urban metabolism must be transformed from its current operation as an inefficient and wasteful linear system into a resource-efficient and circular system.