Next Steps: Opportunities and Challenges
Buildings and infrastructure are long-term assets with the typical design life for buildings in New Zealand being 80 years and 100 years for infrastructure. If our move towards a sustainable built environment simply follows an eco-efficient approach, we may miss significant opportunities to positively influence our built environment for many decades to come. This also applies to the redevelopment/retrofitting of the existing built environment that typically undergoes a number of upgrades over its useful life.
A number of challenges are associated with implementing regenerative development. Primarily, these are the current lack of an integrated approach to government development, and few real-life examples to provide quantifiable evidence of its benefits. In addition, because regenerative development looks at the built environment as a holistic system, it poses challenges to our current methods for dividing land into discrete parcels that do not relate to each other – examples that could challenge traditional boundaries include shared services, generating renewable energy, and restoring ecological features such as streams, wetlands, watersheds and so on.
There are, however, considerable opportunities for central government organisations and others to lead by example and help develop momentum for adopting a regenerative approach. The early adoption of regenerative design principles is vital to produce New Zealand examples and to allow long-term benefits to accrue and be quantified.
The opportunity to foster increased understanding between tangata whenua and tauiwi (non-Māori) communities in New Zealand may also arise from adopting a positive approach that emphasises better health, and values local participation and knowledge. These aspects of regenerative development could also deliver greater public acceptance of change and new development, which may translate into faster transformation of the built environment.
