Masterplan #1: RIBA Futures 'What If?' to What Now: Seventeen Years of Regenerative Thinking

This is the first of three thought pieces, exploring the evolution of masterplanning and public realm design in the education sector, with a focus on the emergent practice of regenerative design.

In 2009, in the aftermath of the global financial crash, Rupert Cook contributed two essays to the RIBA's Building Futures publication Growing by Degrees. The provocation was deliberately simple: what if the buildings and landscapes of campuses became living laboratories, teaching through their performance? What if universities responded to economic and ecological crisis not by retreating into institutional self-preservation, but by reimagining their role in the wider world?

Those questions felt speculative at the time. Seventeen years on, they feel urgent.

We have been returning to these questions since — through project work, through the 2016 RIBA Future Campus masterplanning chapter co-authored with Emeritus Professor Philip Ogden, and through the regenerative masterplanning practice we are now developing with clients across higher and further education. Looking back, through a deep dive here — the trajectory is not an exercise in self-congratulation, or a claim of ‘we told you so’. It is an attempt to understand how a set of ideas mature, evolve and develop: how provocation formed through horizon scanning, becomes an emergent framework, and a framework becomes embedded in day-to-day practice.

The 2009 provocation

The What If? essays were written at a moment of genuine rupture. The financial crash had exposed the fragility of growth as an operating assumption. Universities, which had spent the previous decade competing through capital investment — an ‘arms race’  of new buildings, new campuses, new amenities — suddenly found themselves in a world where that model looked vulnerable, dislocated from place or mission and self-obsessed.

The essays asked a different set of questions. What if the curriculum itself were reshaped around planetary realities, producing graduates capable of addressing climate breakdown and resource scarcity rather than simply studying them? What if universities acted as civic anchors — stable, long-term partners in the regeneration of their cities and regions — rather than competitors for prestige? And what if the estate stopped being a backdrop to academic life and became an active participant in demonstrating the futures that universities claimed to be preparing students for?

Strictly speaking, these were not architectural questions. They were questions about institutional purpose. But they had profound spatial implications. If the campus was to teach through its day-to-day life, through lived experience, then every building, every landscape, every space between buildings became pedagogical. The masterplan was no longer just an estate strategy. It was a statement of values, made physical.

The 2016 framework

By 2016, when Rupert contributed the masterplanning chapter to the RIBA's Future Campus volume, the sector had moved on — but not as far as the 2009 essays had imagined. Sustainability was now embedded in estates thinking, but primarily as efficiency and mitigation: reducing carbon, improving energy ratings, meeting regulatory targets — being ‘less-bad’. The deeper transformation — the campus as active ecological and civic agent — remained largely aspirational.

The Future Campus chapter attempted to provide the governance and procedural framework that any serious regenerative approach would need. It described how masterplans work as strategic tools over fifteen to twenty year horizons: how they align estate strategy with institutional vision, how they create the structures for public engagement, how they manage the tension between long-term ambition and short-term financial pressure. It was, necessarily, a more measured document than the What If? essays. Less about provocation, and an imagined future more about pragmatism and process.

What it could not yet do, was articulate what lay beyond sustainability — perhaps as the sector was not ready, and perhaps because we were not ready. The Future Campus chapter described what excellence in masterplanning practice looks like. It did not yet describe regenerative masterplanning.

The leap we have taken since

The difference between sustainable and regenerative is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of direction.

Sustainable design asks: how do we do less harm? Regenerative design asks: how do we actively restore? Better than neutral buildings, or net-zero, we look at net-positive ones. Not managed landscapes but working ecosystems. Not just efficient estates, but campuses that sequester carbon, restore habitats, harvest more water than they consume, and return more ecological value to their bio-region than they extract.

Reframing changes the masterplan fundamentally. Traditional masterplanning has focused on accommodating growth and organising space. Regenerative masterplanning begins from a different question: how might the land and place function if restored to health? How do water flows, carbon cycles, soil regeneration and biodiversity interact across this particular site, in this particular place, within this particular bio-region? The campus is no longer a container dropped into a landscape. It is a participant in living systems that extend far beyond the boundary fence, defined by water catchment areas, bio-diverse interconnected habitats and systems thinking.

This conception of place also changes the time horizon. Conventional masterplans think fifteen to twenty years ahead. Regenerative planning asks what we have come to call seventh-generation questions: how will today's decisions affect the people, species and places of this bio-region a century from now? This requires institutional courage. It means measuring success not only in space efficiency and financial return, but in ecological performance, social equity and intergenerational justice.

Why it has taken this long

The honest answer is that the ideas were always ahead of the conditions that could receive them. In 2009, the financial crash had opened a window of genuine imaginative possibility — but it closed again relatively quickly, as universities returned to growth and capital investment as the default response to competitive pressure. In 2016, sustainability was becoming mainstream, but regenerative design remained a niche concern — and the word itself required careful handling. “Regeneration” had been colonised a decade earlier by the Blair government's Urban Renaissance agenda: Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force, Housing Market Renewal, the language of giving new life to former industrial areas through development and inward investment. That was a spatial and economic programme, not an ecological one. Regenerative masterplanning, in the sense we mean — restoring living systems, thinking in bio-regional cycles, measuring success in ecological and intergenerational terms — needed to be distinguished from it, and the sector was not yet ready to hold that distinction clearly.

What has changed is the accumulation of pressure. Ecological breakdown is no longer a future risk to be managed; it is a present condition to be responded to. Financial constraint in the higher education sector is forcing a fundamental rethinking of what estates are for. And a generation of students and staff are asking universities to demonstrate, not just describe, the values they claim to hold.

The What If? questions of 2009 have not been answered. But the conditions for answering them are, at last, beginning to arrive.

In the pieces that follow, we explore what regenerative masterplanning looks like in practice — in the landscape and bio-region, and in the spaces between buildings where campus life is actually lived.

The 2009 essays 'What If? The Curriculum Responds to Environmental Sustainability' and 'What If? Community Engagement' were published in RIBA Building Futures, Growing by Degrees, 2009. The Future Campus: Masterplanning chapter was co-authored with Emeritus Professor Philip Ogden and published by RIBA/HEDQF, 2016.