Author: Lewis Lo, University of Melbourne, Master of Environment
Supervisor: Cris Hernandez-Santin & Dominique Hes

Why do we build? What are we building towards? Is it to make meaning out of stone and mortar? To heal the harm we have wrought? To keep adapting a changing world? To create benefits for the wider world beyond the boundaries of the development?

These questions have risen to prominence in the built environment space. Regenerative development and placemaking are two schools of thought addressing them. However, practitioners and thinkers on either side do not necessarily interact with each other. The two schools of thought differ in many aspects, from their goals, their treatment of humans’ role in place, their attitude towards long-term development and their engagement with scale. Nevertheless, these two schools of thought can be rigorously merged into a new conceptual understanding and framework. This project aims to develop such a new framework and suggest practical implications for developing design, planning and management methodologies that better account for long-term sustainability and evolution of placemaking and regenerative initiatives.