Sustainability Is Not Enough: Towards AI Supported Regenerative Design

Sustainability, to describe it in simpler words, is a process of making things less bad. It is not a long-term solution even if it limits the destruction of the environment to a manageable level. Nevertheless, by just becoming sustainable, one cannot bring back what has been lost. The restoration approach is immediately required to fixing what has been broken by using renewable energy, reforestation and creating biodiversity gains. Redesigning our industrial system of production and consumption around the circular patterns of resource and energy use that we observe in mature ecosystems is a must and a complex endeavour. To create a truly regenerative economy challenges us to work with huge amounts of data. New techniques of data science and artificial intelligence are required in each step of the ecological design. This paper presents some examples of biomimicry in circular design and proposes techniques that integrate data science and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools to accelerate the transition towards the regenerative approach. AI, as an emergent ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ technology, can support and accelerate the pace of human innovation to design the future urban developments, to enable innovation in cities. AI has the capability to create a step change, to support an effective economic system that is regenerative by design.