Regenerative Homes for London: From housing crisis to housing justice, safe, affordable, ecologically sound homes for every Londoner.
Regenerative goes beyond carbon reduction. Regenerative systems in the built environment are grounded in three commitments: being a good ancestor, co-evolving with nature, and creating a just space for people. It is a shift from buildings that deplete to buildings and places that replenish, ecologically, socially and economically for current Londoners and for those who will inherit the city.
London holds over eight million trees and substantial areas of parkland, wetland and green corridor. These are not amenities; they are infrastructure. They cool the city, absorb flood water, support biodiversity and sustain the mental and physical health of Londoners. Yet access to green space remains deeply unequal, and too much of what is built continues to erode rather than restore the natural systems the city depends on.
LDEC's Built Environment workstream is both a platform and a programme. It convenes architects, planners, developers, policymakers, universities, businesses and communities around a shared ambition: to apply the four lenses of Doughnut Economics to how London is designed, retrofitted and planned. It runs pilot projects that test regenerative, distributive and community-led approaches at neighbourhood scale - solutions that can be measured, learned from and scaled across the city.
By reimagining how we build, retrofit and plan, we can create homes and neighbourhoods that are affordable, safe and resilient, embedded in living landscapes rather than set against them, meeting the needs of every Londoner while respecting the health of our planet. Our intention is long-term transformation: reducing London's ecological overshoot, closing its social gaps, and proving that a built environment that is fair, resilient and ecologically honest is not an ideal but a practical possibility.
