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A scheme to regenerate Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul resulted in cooler temperatures and less traffic congestion. Credit: Loop Images/UIG via Getty

People spend most of their time in buildings, and these shelters are meant to support life. But how they are constructed and managed now means that the opposite is true — they emit carbon, pollute water bodies, create waste and spread toxic compounds that harm human health as well as the planet.

These problems reflect the increasing separation of societies from nature. Most economies function as though the living world is an externality — something distinct from people that can be plundered for resources and used as a dumping ground. In 2024–25, buildings accounted for one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions and around one-third of total waste1.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Over the past few decades, researchers, designers and companies have been developing strategies that go beyond conventional sustainability and into the realm of regenerative design, whereby buildings actively restore and revitalize ecological, water and energy systems. Many of the best solutions are inspired by nature itself.

For example, by mimicking the interconnected nature of ecosystems, buildings can operate in ways that produce little or no waste. By studying how materials and structures are assembled in living organisms, designers can learn how to make buildings in which nearly all the materials used are non-toxic, made with minimal energy and able to sequester carbon.

Here, I outline some of the areas in which biomimicry is influencing the built environment, and call on researchers, designers, urban planners and policymakers to rethink old, damaging practices so that buildings, cities and the use of materials are aligned with living processes on Earth.

Rethink cities as living systems

The first step in building a sustainable city or building is to look at how the natural world operates in that location. The nature-inspired consultancy Biomimicry 3.8 in Missoula, Montana, recommends that urban designers start a project by analysing how much oxygen is produced, water filtered, carbon sequestered, food grown and wildlife accommodated in a reference ecosystem at a particular location, for example.

Human constructions should match those performance criteria if they are to function sustainably there. For example, a city in a temperate climate might include swathes of forest planted with native trees and sustained by rainwater to sequester carbon, clean the air and support biodiversity in ways that mimic surrounding landscapes. Designers of a city in a hot, arid region might look instead to desert species for tips on how to harvest water or cool the air. The cactus Opuntia microdasys, for instance, which is found in Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert, uses clusters of very fine conical spines to suck moisture out of the air and funnel it into the body.

Combinations of naturally inspired approaches can be more effective than conventional engineered solutions. For example, as part of a restoration project of the Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul, between 2003 and 2005, a six-lane elevated motorway was removed and the river underneath restored from a lifeless culvert to a lushly planted park. Confounding its critics, the scheme resulted in cooler summer temperatures and less congestion because more people chose to walk, cycle and use public transport instead of cars.

Energy-efficient design has been incorporated into buildings in Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm.Credit: Carlos Sanchez Pereyra/Getty

Similarly, China has moved towards ‘sponge city’ planning strategies and away from using concrete pipes and culverts to manage urban water flows. Such strategies draw on ancient Daoist philosophy principles of living in harmony with nature and natural solutions: retaining water at its source by reforesting upland areas, slowing its flow through re-naturalized riverbeds and establishing large areas of soft landscaping to absorb large influxes of water.

By increasing the capacity of built environments to retain water and restore biodiversity naturally, the worst impacts of droughts and floods can be avoided, while providing benefits to the people who live there. For example, sponge-city measures implemented in Wuhan, China, in 2015 cost US$600 million less than a heavy infrastructure approach would have, delivered large areas of green space for citizens and, by storing 70% of rainfall, saved $220,000 each year in irrigation costs during the first few years of operation2.

Flows of other resources should mirror those in ecosystems, too. Currently, industrial processes for water, energy and materials tend to be linear, disconnected, wasteful, extractive and engineered to maximize a single goal. Most energy generation is fossil-fuel dominated and disconnected from where food is grown, water is treated and building mate

How buildings and cities can be aligned with life