Most basic sustainable design concepts promoted today were around by the 1970s or before. When such things are re-invented, they receive renewed attention, but do not advance the field substantively. To progress, therefore, essential for people to engage in critical analysis of the impediments to change, not just advocacy. Recognizing that few people have time to read, this section provides some short open-source articles, abstracts, and a synopsis of two textbooks: Positive Development (2008) and Net-Positive Design (2020). Critique and debate are more than welcome via [email protected]. For free copies of books or papers use the website contact box.

Short biography of author

Before entering academia, Dr. Birkeland was an architect, urban designer, city planner and lawyer in San Francisco. She has been a Professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Auckland, and Professor of Architecture at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She also taught at the University of Canberra, University of Tasmania and the Australian National University, and has been a sustainability consultant. These educational and professional choices were in furtherance of a lifelong interest in unravelling and resolving the systemic impediments to ecological sustainability and, in particular, exploring how urban design and development can generate net gains in both ecological and social sustainability. Her publications on sustainable urban design, planning and architecture include Design for Sustainability (2002) and Positive Development (2008), and Net-Positive Design (2020) along with many papers in academic journals. She is currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne.

Short open-source articles about net-positive design

Research Features (2022) STARfish App: New sustainable design tool. https://researchfeatures.com/starfish-app-new-sustainable-design-tool-aid-net-positive-sustainability-outcomes/
Total Prestige Magazine (2021) Dr. Janis Birkeland. https://www.totalprestigemagazine.com/dr-janis-birkeland/2021
Green Economy Coalition (2021) Nature Positive. https://www.greeneconomycoalition.org/news-and-resources/nature-positive-must-mean-more-than-just-slowing-down-natures-extermination
Sourceable (2020) What is Net-Positive Design. https://sourceable.net/what-is-net-positive-design-and-how-to-create-eco-positive-cities/
The 5th Estate (2020) A Paradigm Shift (https://www.thefifthestate.com.au/articles/are-green-building-rating-tools-ready-for-a paradigm-shift/
Research Features (2018) Eco-positive Design. https://researchfeatures.com/2018/08/22/eco-positive-design-moving-beyond-ecological-restoration/

Abstracts of selected academic articles

Birkeland, J. (2022) Nature Positive: Interrogating Sustainable Design Frameworks for Their Potential to Deliver Eco-Positive Outcomes, Urban Science 6(35).
https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/6/2/35

Built environment design is implicated in virtually all socio-ecological sustainability problems. Nonetheless, paradoxically, construction will be essential to creating sustainability by increasing social and natural life-support systems. Given the rates of land, resource, water, and biodiversity depletion, urban development must do more than restore what is left of nature. It must increase nature and environmental justice in real, not relative, terms. The necessary technologies and design concepts for nature-positive development already exist. However, most sustainable building regulations, design criteria, and performance standards only aim to regenerate landscapes and integrate more nature into cities. This cannot sustain nature or society. This paper canvasses contemporary sustainable design and development thinking and finds that a progression toward ‘nature positive’ is occurring. However, so-called ‘sustainable buildings’ still do not compensate for past inequities or nature degradation, let alone the material flows, pollution, or biodiversity losses they themselves cause. This is partly because current standards and measurements are based on existing conditions, not sustainability standards, and do not distinguish net-positive from regenerative outcomes. Positive Development (PD) theory provides a comprehensive alternative to conventional sustainability frameworks, planning analyses, decision-making structures, design paradigms, and assessment tools. This paper provides criteria for evaluating the potential of conventional and alternative methods for achieving nature-positive outcomes.

Birkeland, J. (2022) A software tool for net-positive urban design and architecture. In Droege, P. editor, Intelligent Environments: Advanced Systems for a Healthy Planet (2nd Ed.) Elsevier, India. pp. 449-529.
http://elsevier-books-eproof.tnq.co.in/ECOMPS/5ead642d7e6795181c862adf4d8683fd/?token=520511d30976b5f13b086712eb01c3d4

Given present existential threats to society and nature, urban development must now create ‘net-positive’ socioecological impacts. ‘Net’, by definition, includes project lifecycles, supply chains, and cumulative impacts everywhere. This requires a paradigm shift, as circular (recycling) systems or regenerative design outcomes seldom create net (beyond zero) public gains. Positive Development aims to expand positive future options by increasing the public estate and ecological base in real terms. Among the means this theory has generated to facilitate institutional and intellectual transformation in urban development (e.g., new models of governance, planning analyses, decision-making methods, and design concepts) is ‘STARfish’. STARfish is an open-source app that creates a canvas for designing multifunctional, adaptable, nature-positive, and equitable environments. This paper outlines fundamental ways that STARfish up-ends the many features of building assessment and rating tools that reinforce the old paradigm. Operating instructions are found on the website and within the app itself (http://netpositivedesign.org).

Birkeland, J. (2018) Challenging policy barriers in sustainable development. In Dymitrow, M. and Halfacree, K. editors, Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series, No. 40, Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University, pp. 41–56. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2478/bog2018-0013
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326014414_Challenging_policy_barriers_in_sustainable_urban_design

In built environment design, codes set minimum health and safety requirements, policies set aspirational targets, and incentives such as green building rating schemes set design standards. These approaches have failed to provide universal wellbeing and environmental justice (i.e. intra-generational equity) or increase the natural life-support system to exceed depletion rates (i.e. inter-generational equity). Governments that do not ensure all citizens can obtain basic needs, life quality and resource security fail to meet their basic responsibilities. Two recent documents, one representing sustainable urban policy and principles, the other representing urban biodiversity standards, are examined against the Positive Development Test (whether the development increases the public estate, ecological base, and future public options). The discussion suggests that contemporary policies and incentive schemes, as presently conceived, cannot provide the basic physical preconditions for sustainability, let alone address socio-economic inequities. An alternative design-based approach is presented to address the issues the paper identified.

Birkeland, Janis (2018) Eco-Positive Cities, in Ashish Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A. Demaria, F. and Acosta A. (eds) Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. Delhi, Authors Up Front and Tulika. pp.169-171.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334051449_Pluriverse_A_Post-Development_Dictionary_AUF_2019_NEW_BOOK_edited_by_Ashish_Kothari_Ariel_Salleh_Arturo_Escobar_Federico_Demaria_and_Alberto_Acosta_Download_full_ebook

It is possible to design ‘sustainable’ buildings with zero carbon or energy impact, but assessment tools do not really count embodied energy use or the ecological destruction that happens during construction. That is, these buildings do not give even back to nature more than they take and are hardly sustainable. Buildings can contribute to sustainability if they provide more benefits than no building at all, and if existing cities are retrofitted to turn their ecological and social deficits into gains. Eco-positive design applies open system thinking to redesign both built environment design and development control and assessment in urban planning. Seeing ‘buildings as landscapes’ (instead of a set of component products), reveals opportunities to use structure and surface to create new ecological spaces. ‘Design for eco-services’ is one such approach: it increases the multiple free ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘eco-services’ (ecological functions) that nature provides.

Birkeland, J. (2017) Net-positive Design and Development, in Landscape Review 17:2, Special issue on integrated urban grey and green infrastructure, pp. 83–87.
https://journals.lincoln.ac.nz/index.php/lr/issue/view/85

The burgeoning interest in urban green-grey infrastructure is bringing together many disciplines, ranging from urban ecology to sociology. This convergence of views promises to direct attention toward basic sustainability issues that have fallen between professional boundaries. In the past, the built-environment design fields (urban, building and landscape design) tended to regard the others as black boxes. Despite collaborative practices, professional territories contributed to ‘closed-system thinking’. For example, sometimes architects do not think outside the building envelope, landscape architects do not think outside property lines, or planners do not think outside urban borders. One illustration of gaps that occur due to conceptual boundaries is where landscaping fails to offset the impacts of the structures that support it. Another is that some green-building rating tools count indoor air quality as an ‘ecological gain’. To be an ecological gain when the human population and consumption are growing, design must increase space for nature, ecosystems and biodiversity habitats beyond pre-settlement conditions.

Birkeland, J. and Knight Lenihan, S. (2016) Biodiversity Offsetting and Net Positive Design, in Journal of Urban Design, 21(1), pp. 50-66. DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2015.1129891
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13574809.2015.1129891

Biodiversity offsetting is used in both urban development and regional resource consent processes to compensate for unavoidable environmental impacts. Using North American, Australian and New Zealand examples, the limitations, opportunities and contradictions of the conventional approach in biodiversity offsetting schemes relevant to the built urban environment were reviewed. It was found that there is not adequate accounting for incremental and cumulative effects over time and space, especially given ecological uncertainty. Benchmarking against current conditions has sanctioned a gradual loss of ecological carrying capacity and biodiversity. Net biodiversity gains are possible, but this will require a net-positive design framework for assessing both buildings and biodiversity offsets.

Birkeland, J. (2016) Net Positive Biophilic Urbanism, in Smart and Sustainable Built Environment 5(1) pp. 9-14.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/SASBE-10-2015-0034

Positive Development and Biophilic Urbanism appear to be grounded in a different human-nature relationship. Biophilic Urbanism builds on the theory that humans have an innate need to feel connected with nature and explores ways to amplify its psychological and physiological benefits. Positive Development contends that development must proactively increase nature in absolute terms (beyond pre-industrial conditions). Hence it proposes a radical reconstruction of development design and decision making. Are these positions compatible? A literature review revealed many similarities and differences between the two theories, and the views and visions among individual proponents of sustainability paradigms vary. Therefore, the comparison focused on the respective role of nature, a foundational element in each theory. It concludes that biophilic urbanism stresses the individual’s experience of nature and its importance to human life quality. If urban development does not increase the ecological base and public estate well beyond past/ongoing depletion and damage, the natural life-support system will collapse.

Birkeland, J. (2015) Prospects for Nature in Proposals for Urban Growth, in Smart and Sustainable Built Environments, 4(3), pp. 310-314.
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/SASBE-10-2015-0033/full/html

Proposals for changing city-nature relationships are currently dominated by geographical approaches about urban form. They arguably lack a sufficient appreciation of design issues and opportunities. The knowledge bases and skill sets of urban designers and architects could improve the level of public debate. This discussion evaluates two opposing radical proposals for urban growth. These and most other proposals for future human settlements can be located on a densification-dispersal axis. They are reviewed in terms of their ability to address the fundamental social and ecological prerequisites of sustainability. Neither model of urban form is sustainable without a new kind of built environment design that can address rapidly depleting ecological carrying capacity and social equity. Current models of urban growth in green urbanism and design fields cannot adequately protect or increase the remaining natural life support system, which should be the foundation for any sustainability plan. These problems need to be resolved by design which can entertain a much broader range of sustainability criteria than past formulas.

Renger, C., Birkeland, J. and Midmore, D. (2015) Net Positive Building Carbon Sequestration: A Case Study in Brisbane, in Building Research and Information: Special issue on net positive design, 43:1, pp. 11-24.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09613218.2015.961001

A greater appreciation of architecture as a means to drive social, economic and environmental sustainability is emerging around the world. Practices are beginning to adopt closed-loop and cradle-to-cradle strategies, and some are even aiming toward net-positive design. However, life cycle assessment (LCA) tools do not measure ‘beyond zero’. The question of how net-positive carbon sequestration (i.e. impacts beyond net-zero) can be assessed within LCA is explored through a proposed carbon amortization performance (CAP) method. CAP overlays energy-related carbon and biomass sequestration over the building life cycle. CO2 equivalence (CO2e) is used to combine both positive and negative impacts from different sources. Net-positive contributions are deﬁned as those exceeding ‘zero operational carbon’ – after the embodied carbon is paid back during the life cycle. The CAP method was tested on a building design with the technical support of multidisciplinary experts. The results indicate that a building can sequester more carbon over its life cycle than it emits by using on-site current renewable energy technology and extensive building-integrated vegetation. Buildings designed on net-positive development principles can potentially reverse their carbon impact and begin to regenerate their bioregions, while providing multiple eco-services.

Birkeland, J. (2012), Design Blindness in Sustainable Development: From closed to open systems design thinking, Journal of Urban Design 17(2), pp. 163-187.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2012.666209

The ﬁelds of urban ecology, ecological design and environmental ethics are essential elements of sustainable urbanism. Thus far, however, these ﬁelds really only contemplate eco-restoration, regeneration and resilience. To achieve sustainability, urban areas must be retroﬁtted to be net positive; that is, to expand future options, diversity and ecology relative to pre-industrial conditions. It is contended that the failure to do so is because the methods and metrics of sustainable urbanism were inﬂuenced by decision theory. Decision theory is ‘bounded’ systems thinking as it is designed to choose among alternatives or pathways. The resulting analyses and tools are negative as, for example, they allow social gains to balance out ecological losses. Design, in the sense of ‘open’ systems thinking, is needed to increase future options and add multiple beneﬁts across many dimensions and scales. Key sustainability strategies in urban ecology, ecological design and environmental ethics, such as eco-efﬁciency, interest balancing and closing resource loops, reﬂect closed systems thinking. ‘Positive Development’ would require eco-positive design as well as eco-efﬁciency, an eco-positive ethic as well as procedural fairness or equity, and open systems thinking as well as closed loop systems. A tool is provided to illustrate how eco-positive design can be assessed.

Abstracts of books

Birkeland, J. (2020) Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development, London, UK: Earthscan/Routledge
https://www.routledge.com/Net-Positive-Design-and-Sustainable-Urban-Development/Birkeland/p/book/9780367258566

‘Sustainable’ urban planning, decision making and design continues to underwrite most sustainability problems. In the last half century, for example, development has destroyed over half of global biodiversity while concentrating wealth and concretizing social disparities. This is entirely unnecessary. Positive Development posits that development could create more net socio-ecological gains than no construction at all. Urban environments can be designed to increase our natural and social life support systems. To that end, the book provides and explains a net-positive design app that can guide and assess ‘genuine’ net-positive development: built environments that reverse the overshoot of planetary boundaries. The app is open source and pro bono assistance is available on the website http://netpositivedesign.org.

Birkeland, J. (2008) Positive Development: From Vicious Circles to Virtuous Cycles through Built Environment Design, London, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
https://www.routledge.com/Positive-Development-From-Vicious-Circles-to-Virtuous-Cycles-through-Built/Birkeland/p/book/9781844075799

This book challenged ‘best practice’ environmental management, planning and design and outlined sustainable alternatives. It showed how sustainability problems are still shaped by ‘negative’ institutional and intellectual frameworks. It suggested ways to replace/supplement linear-reductionist ‘decision’ systems with a design-based approach aimed at expanding future public options, rather than just dividing up resources efficiently. Development must go beyond reversing past ecological and social impacts or regenerating the environment and revitalizing the community to increasing the total social and natural life-support system and future options. Given the ecological and social deficit, development must increase nature beyond pre-industrial conditions just to provide for existing populations.

Birkeland, J. and Schooneveldt (2003) Mapping Regional Metabolism: A Decision-Support Tool for Natural Resource Management, ACT, Land and Water Australia. https://library.dbca.wa.gov.au/static/FullTextFiles/070622.pdf

This was initially a Report for Land and Water Australia (LWA), a federal government agency, in 2002, but it was selected by LWA for publication in book form for wider distribution. It traced the transformations of selected resources in the region (eg. wood, energy, soil and water) to investigate how to develop positive urban-rural synergies. It argued for a bioregional approach but critiqued some premises of bioregional planning. The outcome was a management framework for mapping the interdependencies of urban and rural systems as a basis for reducing resource consumption and increasing environmental flows. This was updated in later publications.

Birkeland, J. (2002) Design for Sustainability: a Sourcebook of Eco-logical Solutions, London, Earthscan.
https://www.routledge.com/Design-for-Sustainability-A-Sourcebook-of-Integrated-Ecological-Solutions/Birkeland/p/book/9781853838972

With radical and innovative design solutions, everyone could be living in buildings and settlements that are more like gardens than cargo containers, and that purify air and water, generate energy, treat sewage and produce food – at lower cost. Birkeland introduces systems design thinking that cuts across academic and professional boundaries and the divide between social and physical sciences to move towards a trans-disciplinary approach to environmental and social problem-solving. This sourcebook is useful for teaching, as each topic within the field of environmental management and social change has pairs of short readings providing diverse perspectives to compare, contrast and debate. Design for Sustainability presents examples of integrated systems design based on ecological principles and concepts and drawn from the foremost designers in the fields of industrial design, materials, housing design, urban planning and transport, landscape and permaculture, and energy and resource management.

Synopses of the two textbooks

Birkeland, J. (2008) Positive Development: From vicious circles to virtuous cycles through built environment design London, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
https://www.routledge.com/Positive-Development-From-Vicious-Circles-to-Virtuous-Cycles-through-Built/Birkeland/p/book/9781844075799

Nature has provided for the infrastructure and basic services to support human life and has even subsidized our profligate Western lifestyles. Now, however, we have exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity. We have also exhausted the cultural and social viability of many resource-rich, but impoverished countries and colonies around the world. This unilateral relationship between humans and nature must be reversed. Fortunately, urban design and architecture could undo much of the damage of past policies, actions and developments. However, genuine sustainability will require more than social change and ecological ‘restoration’. It will require increasing the total amount of ecosystem goods and services, as well as increasing the health and resilience of the natural environment. This book contends that the built environment can create the infrastructure, conditions and space for nature to continue its life-support services and self-maintenance functions. Development can provide greater life quality, health, amenity, conviviality and safety for all – without sacrificing resources, money or comfort. For it to do so, however, we need a new approach to the planning, design and management of our built environment. What we will call ‘Positive Development’ would actually expand the ‘ecological base’, meaning ecosystem goods and services, natural capital, biodiversity and habitats, ecological health and resilience, and bio-security. It would also expand the ‘public estate’, meaning the substantive democracy that ultimately depends on equitable access to, and expansion of, the ecological base – the means of survival.
Our current methods for addressing sustainability challenges are shaped by institutional and intellectual frameworks that reflect negative, defensive attitudes towards the environment. Negative impacts are seen as inevitable, so we only aim to slow the pace of environmental destruction. The belief that we have no option but to ‘trade off’ nature for social and economic gain is deeply engrained. We assume the best that sustainable development can do is provide (short-term) social benefits that compensate for long-term ecological losses. Traditionally, policymakers and environmental managers have thought they were dealing with sustainable development issues by merely monitoring, measuring, managing and mitigating the predicted negative impacts of future plans, policies and designs. However, creating environments that are socially and ecologically productive requires breaking out of our mental cubicles and undoing what has already been done. Towards that end, this book provides:

New paradigms and design concepts that enable us to expand future options, increase resource security, increase human and ecological health, and improve life quality for all.
New design criteria, review processes, assessment tools and design methods that shift from narrow ‘input–output thinking’ to design that supports natural systems and communities.
New approaches to analysis, assessment and management systems that move from mitigating negative impacts to multiplying positive ecological and social synergies.
New approaches to futures planning methods, strategies and incentives that do not just prepare for a grim future but increase the means of survival and meaningful life choices.

Birkeland, J. (2020) Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development London, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
https://www.routledge.com/Net-Positive-Design-and-Sustainable-Urban-Development/Birkeland/p/book/9780367258566

This book poses a challenge to academics and professionals who still believe in the capacity of current decision-making processes to solve sustainability issues. ‘Sustainable’ urban planning, decision making and design continues to underwrite most sustainability problems. About half of global biodiversity and coral reefs have been destroyed in under fifty years. Development has perpetuated the degradation of resources and ecosystems while concentrating wealth and concretizing social disparities. Roughly eight people on the planet now have the combined wealth of half its population. This is entirely unnecessary. Urban environments can be designed to increase nature and advance society.
Positive Development posits that development could create more net socio-ecological gains than no construction at all. The urban environment could become generators of eco-positive sustainability. This book attempts to explain how current conceptual, physical and institutional structures are inherently biased against the protection and expansion of social and natural life-support systems. It then suggests how development can improve universal life quality and increase nature and public options beyond any damage caused during building manufacturing, construction and operation. Debate is always welcome. Any reader may contact the author via email to dispute or discuss any of the propositions in the book.

Essential design and decision-making principles and standards are still missing from all dimensions of sustainability theory and practice in urban design and architecture.

Many proponents of sustainability have argued that efficiency is not enough, and that systems change is needed at all levels of society. However, it has largely been assumed that a change of values and public policy would trickle through the interstices of governance and urban planning would automatically transform the built environment. Yet urban theory and practice has not addressed the basic sustainability dilemmas. Omissions are found at all levels of urban planning: planning analyses, development controls, decision methods, design processes and building rating tools. This book explores each dimension and suggests means to make the transition to eco-positive cities.

To have socio-ecological gains without adverse economic impacts, urban planning, decision making and design need to be reconceptualized and restructured for net-positive outcomes.

The sustainability crisis is a whole-system problem, requiring the redesign of development, yet circuitous arguments over policy plans persist. This is partly because design has been marginalized in the culture. It is portrayed as a subset of decision making, concerned mainly with communication, but it is a different way of thinking. Both decision making (choosing solutions) and design (opportunity-creating) are necessary and, ideally, complementary. However, neither processes nor practices evolved with sustainability in mind. Both need to be reconceived upon ethics-based and positive principles. This book therefore proposes a reconceptualization of both biophysical design (built structures) and institutional design (decision-making structures).

Part I concerns biophysical design concepts and processes, and proposes paradigm shifts:

From negative/fatalistic mindsets that assume development must be ecologically-terminal – to reconceiving development as a means to increase socio-ecological sustainability [Chaps. 1-2].
From closed/bounded system models – to open-system paradigms that enable design that externalizes public impacts and expands positive future options [Chaps. 3-4].
From efficient innovations that create more products and material flows – to structural and spatial design solutions that reduce inequities and increase public gains [Chaps. 5-6].
From analyses that share the same conceptual roots as neo-classical economics – to whole-system analyses that prioritize the correction of socio-ecological deficits [Chaps. 7-8].

Part II concerns institutional or decision-making structures, and proposes paradigm shifts:

From reductionist decision-making – to design-based ‘methods’ that can create synergies and multiply public benefits [Chaps. 9-10].
From numerical standards for green building assessment tools that only reduce the project’s damage – to design tools based on whole-system sustainability [Chaps. 11-12].
From either top-down or bottom-up but ineffective consultation processes – to new community-based collaborative processes for developing design criteria [Chaps. 13-14].
From ‘metrics’ that assess design outcomes relative to typical projects – to measurements that allow for net-positive impacts by using stationary benchmarks standards [Chaps. 15-16].

The specific outcomes from a critical examination of sustainable planning and design methods are a community planning process, a design review process, and a design tool (with a computer app).
The book blurb is available here.