Net Positive: Designing a regenerative future with Prof Janis Birkeland

How do we design our built environment to be more than just 'sustainable' (doing things slightly less badly) and instead to be genuinely regenerative where all we build and make heals people and the planet?

Professor. Janis Birkeland is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in the University of Melbourne. Janis has dedicated her personal, professional and academic life to figuring out what is genuine sustainability - how to plan for a built environment that is not just 'less bad' than the alternatives, but actually returns more to the land and the people who live in and around it thn whatever went before. 

Throughout her professional career, she has been drawn to figuring out how cities and buildings, despite their huge impacts, can transform society and save the planet. First, she became an architect and urban designer, transferring into city planning. Later, she became a lawyer to better understand the barriers to systems change. Now she is an academic, author of many dozens of papers and a number of books, of which the most recent is ‘Net- Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development’. She is a clear and consistent advocate for the design of human settlements that are socially and ecologically ‘net positive’ and has just published "Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development" (Routledge) which provides methods, models and metrics to enable practitioners and students to create eco-positive environments. It also includes a free computer app to facilitate net-positive design

In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the myriad ways we could choose to design our buildings differently - and the many practical ways we could upgrade what exists as well as creating new models for what might arise. 

Janis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janis-birkeland-84135120/
Net Positive Design Website
Algae-Tecture: https://carloratti.com/project/algaetecture/
Mycelial Bricks: https://wasterush.info/mycelium-construction/
https://whitneyfungifun.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/sustainability-of-mycelium-bricks/
https://happho.com/an-emerging-sustainable-construction-material-mycelium-bricks/
https://www.certifiedenergy.com.au/emerging-materials/emerging-materials-mycelium-brick