Make kin, not Buildings: towards a world-systems understanding of regenerative design

Abstract

Sustainable design is often touted as the answer to the climatic crises threatening our collective future. However, the previously utopian ideals of sustainability have largely been supplanted by business interests building and selling ‘sustainable’ things. Regenerative design proposes that the crises may be solved by pursuing a deeper partnership with the natural world, but the same forces that have bent sustainability to business ends now threaten to render regeneration toothless. This project proposes that the architect is responsible for pursuing regeneration and rebuilding the relationship between humanity and nature. I argue that this relationship between the human and the more-than-human is the soul of regeneration: that is, if anyone is to participate in regeneration, we are to make kin, not buildings. “Make kin” means to rebuild the aforementioned relationships rather than to treat nature and the more-than-human as external objects. “Not buildings” means not that buildings will not be made, but that the priority of the designer is not on the quality of the building, but on the quality of the relationship. This requires an understanding of not simply regenerative design theory, but system and world-systems theory, alongside an understanding of alternative forms of ethics towards the environment. This paper compares the relationships of the existing paradigm of the built environment’s food metabolism, and the world-system of food production it is embedded within; to what the relationships may be under a regenerative paradigm. With an understanding of the process and relationship of making kin, this paper makes proposals for how the design of buildings can change based on this proposed regenerative ethic. “Make kin, not Buildings” makes the case that the design of future environments will be fundamentally different from the design of today: centered not on the optimization of energy numbers, but the building of kin relationships.