This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.
Cities are never truly complete and done; instead they are always changing, always evolving. One positive change is the rise of regenerative cities—urban centers designed to have a restorative relationship with the environment that protects and enhances local ecosystems.
WIRED Japan collaborated with the urban design studio For Cities to highlight some of the world’s best sustainable urban developments, which are harbingers of what is to come. From using local materials and construction methods to restoring ecosystems, these projects go beyond merely making green spaces and provide hints of how cities of the future will function as well as how they will be built. Here are some places where the future is now.
Pan Pacific Orchard
In this era of megacities, the Singaporean architectural firm WOHA, founded in 1994, has searched for the best way to make a high-rise green city. The luxury hotel Pan Pacific Orchard was completed by the firm in 2023. Despite being in the midst of a high-density city, it features four landscaped terraces that cover an area equivalent to 200 percent of the hotel’s lot size. Thanks to its use of both active and passive strategies to reduce energy and water use, the hotel received Singapore’s highest environmental certification, Green Mark Platinum. The firm has also developed its own WOHA Rating System, which uses five indicators (Green Plot Ratio, Community Plot Ratio, Civic Generosity Index, Ecosystem Contribution Index, and the Self-Sufficiency Index) to measure how its buildings impact the environment and society around them.
The Nursery at Public Records
When a greenhouse and a dance club meet, what kind of building do they make? The answer is found in Brooklyn: The Nursery, a new fusion of nature and music.
The Nursery is part of Public Records, a multifunction space and platform founded in New York in 2017. Public Records is home to the Atrium, a vegan restaurant/music lounge; Upstairs, a listening lounge/cocktail bar; and other venues. The Nursery was added in 2023.
The goal is to promote a connection between nature and urban life through events and plant-focused exhibitions. The facility uses recycled materials, and its functions change according to the season—it’s a multi-use space in summer and a greenhouse in winter. For many New Yorkers, The Nursery has become a place to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and experience a moment of bucolic peace.
Brooklyn Grange
First opened in 2010, the famed Brooklyn Grange continues to broaden its environmental mission. The vegetables grown on its rooftop garden are sold at farmers’ markets, with 60 percent of the harvest offered at no or low cost through the organization’s Equitable Distribution Program. This green space goes beyond providing food; it also collects rainwater to reduce the burden on sewers and mitigate the effects of the urban heat-island effect. New Yorkers can get involved with the garden through workshops and volunteering. It’s also available as an event or wedding venue.
BlueCity
In 2015, Rotterdam’s indoor pool complex the Tropicana was reborn as the incubator BlueCity, housing startups that are working on the transition to a circular economy. At the facility’s BlueCity Lab, research is being done on fungi and microorganisms. The lineup of entrepreneurs is extensive, from Rotterzwam, which grows mushrooms using a substrate of coffee grounds, to Superuse Studios, an architectural firm that specializes in circular and sustainable design and oversaw the renovation of the BlueCity office area. More than 50 companies are based in the facility.
Pizza 4P’s
The Pizza 4P’s restaurant group was established in Vietnam in 2011. It attracted further interest when it opened its first Japanese location in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills in 2023. The company, which also operates in India and Cambodia, has become known for its contributions to sustainability. It publishes a sustainability report focused on its various efforts, from its use of recycled materials and local resources in the construction of its restaurants to its food and packaging procurement process and the reuse of waste materials. With its innovative approach to communicating its environmental goals to customers, vendors, and stakeholders, Pizza 4P’s is presenting a new image of restaurants.
Regenerative Community Tokyo
Regenerative Community Tokyo opened in 2024 in the Marunouchi neighborhood of Tokyo. The organization includes a community of corporations focused on addressing complex urban problems, with Japanese firms that work on sustainability and regenerative programs participating as members. Through their collaboration, these companies come up with new solutions for problems related to urbanization. The design of the workspace was entrusted to the architectural firm Open A, led by Masataka Baba.
Comoris
Vacant and unused lots in cities can provide opportunities for people to get involved in regenerative efforts. This is what the Tokyo forestation service Comoris—which cultivates small forests inside cities—hopes to foster. The service runs a concept model in the Yoyogi-Uehara area of Tokyo. Members receive an NFT membership card and embrace the challenges of forest conservation through activities such as tree planting and soil enrichment training.
Stormwater Pond at Exercisfältet
Architectural firm White Arkitekter, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, was founded in 1951. The firm’s mission is to realize a sustainable life through climate-neutral architecture and to achieve its goal of building all of its own buildings by 2030. One of the company’s projects is the stormwater pond at Exercisfältet, a rehabilitation of a former military training site in Uppsala, Sweden. This new stormwater pond is designed to clean up sewage and prevent flooding in the city. The park also has a small pathway along the water, where visitors can walk and enjoy the scenery.
Marineterrein
Amsterdam has incorporated the concept of doughnut economics into its policies—a economic model for living within planetary boundaries—and the city has attracted attention as a leading player in the circular economy. Marineterrein is an innovation center based in a former military shipyard that has been open to the public since 2015. The district has been involved in a variety of projects, ranging from recycling human urine to building with old materials. The AMS Institute, based in the area, has hosted AI for regenerative cities events in the past.
Super Limbo
The spatial design studio Limbo Accra, based in Ghana, created the Super Limbo installation for the second Sharjah Architecture Triennial in the United Arab Emirates. To inspire people’s imaginations and provoke debates about what can be done with unfinished development projects in the global south, the studio draped an impressive fabric design across the roughly 64,000-square-meter Sharjah Mall, a complex abandoned midway through its construction.
The Super Limbo installation was designed by Limbo Accra in collaboration with architect Anne-Lise Agossa and Rym Beydoun, founder of the textile brand Super Yaya.
Think Playgrounds
Think Playgrounds is a Vietnamese venture that aims to increase the number of public playgrounds. Vietnam’s capital Hanoi has a high population density, and the city offers too few play areas for children. By creating playgrounds using environmentally friendly design and upcycled materials, the organization is contributing to improving the environment and providing support for community initiatives in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Kamwokya Community Centre
The architect Francis Kéré, born in Burkina Faso and known for reviving traditional construction methods and the use of local materials, won the Pritzker Prize, often called the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 2022. That same year, he completed the Kamwokya Community Centre in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The facility is used for a range of activities, including sports, dance, workshops, and community events. It features an innovative drainage system that protects the building from flooding even during torrential downpours. Kéré is also known for designing many public projects in his homeland, including a number of schools and the master plan for the new National Assembly.
HAUT
Haut is a 21-story timber-hybrid high-rise completed in Amsterdam in 2022. It was designed by the British engineering collective Arup and Team V, a Dutch architecture firm. Haut has 55 apartments, a bicycle parking area, an underground parking garage, and an urban garden. It was the first residential building in the Netherlands to receive certification from the sustainability rating system BREEAM. The fusion of timber and hybrid technology has minimized the building’s ecological impact. Timber-hybrid high-rises have increased in number around the world and offer a model for construction with a lower carbon footprint. Port Plus, a high-rise made entirely of wood, was constructed in Yokohama, Japan, in March 2022.
Tokyo Bay eSG Project
The development of Tokyo Bay is essential to the city’s future. In 2021, the Office of the Governor for Policy Planning announced the Tokyo Bay eSG Project, an urban development scheme in the Tokyo Waterfront City and Central Breakwater areas. The project envisions a sustainable city that combines nature and convenience. Every year, the project organizers appeal to the public for projects based on themes such as “environmental improvement and resource circulation” and “cutting-edge renewable energy.” To date, they have chosen projects from companies working on cultivating microalgae and producing hydrogen from seawater. Tokyo Bay promises to be an incubation site for the future of regenerative cities.
The Regenerative City
In July 2024, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a global organization that promotes a circular economy, published its Building Prosperity report. It described the shift to a circular economy in European architecture and cities and presented six strategies that will be crucial for creating circular cities: redeveloping brownfield sites (land that was once used for industry but, due to soil contamination, cannot be redeveloped or sold); converting vacant commercial buildings; employing material-efficient design; using low-impact materials; expanding green-blue spaces; and increasing tree canopies. The report also presents examples of these strategies being deployed, such as by the investment firm Ginkgo, which specializes in the restoration and redevelopment of brownfield sites in Europe, and the timber-hybrid high-rise Haut, described above.
Another area of focus, in addition to these six strategies, is making use of the ecosystems found in cities. The engineering collective Arup, which was involved in the construction of Haut and also contributed to the Building Prosperity report, released another report on the theme of urban rewilding in 2023 and focused on regenerative design. Arup’s report uses the Billion Oyster Project as an example of urban rewilding. That project’s goal is to restore 1 billion oysters to New York harbor by 2035 as part of an effort to reduce the impact of erosion from torrential rains and to protect the coastline from high tides and storm surges. Another example from New York is Brooklyn Grange, featured above, which aims to lower the impact of rainwater on New York’s sewer system through a network of rooftop green spaces.
The circular city movement is not limited to North America and Europe; it is also attracting interest in Asia. Kongjian Yu, the founder of the Chinese architecture and landscaping firm Turenscape, has proposed the idea of sponge cities, an approach to urban planning that involves increasing green spaces to collect rainwater to prepare for water shortages due to climate change. In an interview with WIRED, Yu said, “The sponge city is an urgent, immediate solution that can adapt cities to climate change, to heat, to floods, and to drought.”
All these examples illustrate how to use existing ecosystems and incorporate nonhuman species into efforts to create regenerative cities.
While Europe and North America have been working toward developing regenerative cities, it may be impossible to implement some of their successful approaches in Asia, Africa, and other regions. Being regenerative requires understanding and addressing the unique characteristics of a region and not imposing the same solution everywhere. When it comes to an approach to development that is rooted in an area’s native species and local culture, Francis Kéré of Kéré Architecture provides a helpful model. His design approach fuses new technology and environmental awareness with construction methods that use indigenous materials.
The central challenge to creating regenerative cities is that regenerative efforts on large urban scales don’t exist yet outside of plans and concepts. Innovative financing and collaboration between stakeholders in various areas will be necessary to increase the size and number of these projects. In recent years, blended finance, in which public funds and private capital are combined to increase the resources available for large projects, has been a successful approach for a number of clean-energy projects. With the development of a variety of approaches to maximizing the potential of various locations, regenerative cities are slowly coming into view.
