Bioregional design: What is it and what will it mean for climate and planet?

In the span of human history, it wasn’t so long ago that “bioregional design” was the only way humans built their habitats. But the globalization of industrial materials – such as concrete, glass and steel – supplanted artisanal building practices, particularly as modernism became a signifier of wealth and progress.

Today, bioregional design is a niche but growing approach to planning and design that aligns human habitat development, such as architecture, landscapes and infrastructure, with regional materials, culturally relevant applications and climate-appropriate strategies.

While traditional bioregional design practices have endured in some places out of necessity or commitment to artistry, a more contemporary version has gained currency as a solution to carbon reduction and, even more recently, as a way to improve self-reliance due to global instability.

Scaling up the nearly lost art of bioregional design, paradoxically, requires global knowledge exchange of traditional practices and innovations combined with local applications and policies.

Mass timber provides several key learnings to understand how bioregional design can be developed and scaled.

In the early 1990s, cross-laminated timber was invented in Austria, primarily driven by efforts to add value to softwood timber. The process involves glueing layered boards together to create strong, stable panels.

Canada was an early adopter in North America, supported by knowledge-sharing with Europe and government-funded projects like the Wood Innovation and Design Centre in British Columbia.

The US followed with key projects such as the Framework Building in Portland and T3 in Minneapolis, demonstrating that mass timber is viable for mid-rise and even high-rise buildings.

The Canadian National Building Code was updated in 2020 and the American International Building Code was updated in 2021 to allow mass timber buildings up to 18 stories in certain conditions based on these pilot projects.

1. Global knowledge is key.

Bioregional building practices depend on global knowledge exchange, especially between bioregions with similar climate conditions and material resources. For example, transferring the process of developing a mass timber ecosystem from Europe to North America is relatively straightforward, as production and material performance remain the same.

2. Regional applications require robust policy.

Regional applications, however, require customized policies and building codes to ensure quality and trust in construction practices. For example, the Framework Building underwent rigorous fire, blast and seismic tests to gain approval in 2016, which informed building codes in other US regions. Still unbuilt, Framework is an example of project prototypes creating approval pathways.

3. Diversity in materials.

While mass timber is arguably the most commercialized and engineered bioregional material, a similar trajectory is underway with stone. Like mass timber, this is now happening through international knowledge transfer of traditional masonry skills, local experimentation to prove viability and technological innovations that enable further advancement.

This pattern will continue with other bio-based materials as we push towards lower-impact construction methods.

Belgian brick buildings, particularly of Gothic style, are a significant part of the country’s architectural heritage. Brick buildings in Bruges are so ubiquitous that it is known as the “brick city.”

As an established material, Belgium has maintained a robust pathway for brick production. The problem, however, is that the brick-making process has a relatively high embodied carbon footprint – almost as much as concrete.

To address this, Belgian material researchers invented low-carbon bricks. Instead of being fired in a kiln, requiring a lot of energy, they are “cured” using a lime binder in a process known as carbonation; the bricks gain strength by reacting with carbon dioxide in the air.

What started as small-scale prototype production is now being considerably scaled. As Brussels has embarked on expanding its underground metro, the Metro3 project looked to earth blocks as a building material for the new metro stations to reduce excavation construction waste by turning it into bricks.

To meet the demand of building out seven new stations, new partnerships were formed to bring innovative material breakthroughs to commercial scale.

Such significant projects (as well as an expansion of the Gent art museum) stimulated demand and catalyzed new relationships with the established brick production industry, which offered timesharing in their factories, thereby allowing low-carbon brick production to scale up.

The first carbon-positive university in the world is the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, a 3,400-acre campus created by MASS Design Group. This nonprofit architecture firm has pioneered a workforce and economic development approach to building social infrastructure using bioregional design.

All buildings on campus were constructed using low-carbon materials, including stone foundations, earth walls and timber. Ninety percent of the project’s $75 million budget was spent within 500 miles of the campus.

MASS trained 300 workers (16% of them women) in sustainable construction methods to deliver the project.

This became an opportunity for experimentation and the development of local markets for these newly acquired skills, working with materials such as terra-cotta and timber.

In addition to the use of regionally sourced materials, the campus restores a biodiverse ecosystem with native species and wetlands. This project created a local economy of bio-regional sustainable construction knowledge and has sparked a rethink of how to build with local bio-materials and re-skilled local workers.

An obvious thread throughout the bioregional design approach is the power of biophilia – the innate human affinity for natural materials and how that has driven the use of biomorphic patterns in architecture and design.

While our attraction to nature is intuitively understood, recent research into cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology demonstrates how impactful the built environment can be on our physical and emotional well-being, for better or worse.

It is critical that we marshal the technical, social and cultural will to update regulations, economies and frameworks to allow us to incorporate natural materials to meet the current moment.

As social ecology professor Stephen R Kellert – a pioneer of biophilia theory – stated in his book Birthright: “We will never be truly healthy, satisfied or fulfilled if we live apart and alienated from the environment from which we evolved.”