How Net-Positive started, got coopted and how it relates to regeneration - Janis Birkeland & DCW
Channel: Daniel Christian Wahl
Date: 2023-04-21

On March 20th, 2023, I finally managed to have a conversation with Prof. Janis Birkeland. A book she edited and curated in 2002 entitled 'Design for Sustainability' in which the worked with a framework called 'scales of design' was very influential on my own research masters and PhD research.

I did not follow her more recent work during the decade after stepping out of academia and into eco village based education and practice. So was amazed to learn how about how aligned an exciting her way of working and life story is with the rise of the ReGeneration. Sacles of design and the notion of scale -linking design offers a way of making sense and appropriately participating in dynamic nested wholeness - or the way living complexity manifests in place and at different scales.

Janis books include:

Design for Sustainability (2002)
Positive Development (2008)
Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development (2019)

A short bio of Janis:

"Dr Birkeland, currently Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne, has devoted her personal, professional, and academic life to socio-ecological sustainability. Believing early on that built environment design was a key to sustainability, Janis became an architect and urban designer in San Francisco. Later, to better understand the barriers to sustainability, she became a city planner and lawyer.

After moving to Australia, she completed a PhD, Planning for Sustainability (1993) while contributing to many sustainability organizations. She then taught sustainable architecture in several universities, including as professor of sustainable architecture at QUT and the University of Auckland. On the premise that buildings cannot be sustainable if they do more damage than no building at all, she originated the increasingly popular concept of Net-Positive Design almost two decades ago."

Link to an interview with Janis:
https://www.totalprestigemagazine.com/dr-janis-birkeland/

I personally felt like I was speaking to an elder of the movement who has been in service to people and planet in place for decades. While terminologies and adjectives can be argued about, I took away that what I sensed was behind the net-positive approach as Janis proposed it is very different from how many people now use and understand that term, ... sounds familiar? The same thing is happening with regeneration. So these conversations matter.

Thank you Janis!