Masterplan #2: The Campus as Ecological Agent: Co-Evolving with Place

This is the second 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.

There is a question we now ask at the start of every campus masterplanning commission that we did not ask ten years ago. Not just “how much space do you need?” or “where should the new buildings go?” but a series of more fundamental questions: how does water move across this site? Where do soils need to recover? What species are already here, and what could return if given the conditions to do so? Where are the ecological corridors that connect this campus to the wider landscape beyond its boundary fence? What does the wider bio-region require from the campus?

These are not supplementary questions, added once the real planning is done. They are the starting point.

That shift — from organising space to restoring systems — is what distinguishes regenerative masterplanning from everything that preceded it. And it is a shift that changes not just the outputs of a masterplan, but the entire frame through which a university or college understands its relationship to the place it occupies. This is a particular challenge in our urban environments.

From container to participant

Traditional campus masterplanning has operated, largely unconsciously, on a single assumption: that the institution and its estate are separate from the landscape and wider eco-system around them. The campus is planned, managed, and improved as a discrete entity. The surrounding city, the river catchment, the soils and habitats and microclimates that extend in every direction — these are context, not content. They inform the design but are not part of it.

Regenerative masterplanning begins from the opposite premise. The campus is not separate from its bio-region. It is embedded within it, draws resources from it, affects it through every decision made about drainage, permeability, planting, materials, eco-toxicity, energy, movement and land use. The question is not whether the campus participates in its local ecological systems — it already does, whether it chooses to or not. The question is whether that participation is extractive, exploitative or restorative.

At Solent University, developing the 2035-2045 Campus Vision, this reframing shaped the entire strategic approach. The masterplan that emerged is not just a spatial strategy in the conventional sense — a map of where buildings will go and what spaces will be created between them. It is a whole-systems framework that asks how the Southampton estate can become a net-positive participant in its urban bio-region: sequestering carbon, managing surface water, supporting and reconnecting biodiversity, and reducing its ecological footprint over a generation rather than simply offsetting it.

The difference sounds abstract. In practice, it means that decisions about hard landscaping are also decisions about water infiltration. Decisions about planting are also decisions about habitat connectivity. Decisions about building materials are also decisions about embodied carbon and the long-term material cycles of the city. Nothing is treated in isolation, because nothing is isolated.

Co-evolution, not control

The language of masterplanning has always implied control: a plan, a vision, a framework imposed on a site and realised over time. Regenerative masterplanning requires a different disposition — one we have come to describe as co-evolution.

Living systems do not respond to plans. They respond to conditions. If you create the right conditions — improved soil health, reduced surface sealing, connected habitat corridors, reduced chemical inputs (run-off), diversified planting, improved microclimate — the system begins to recover in ways that no plan could fully predict or prescribe. The role of the masterplan is not to determine outcomes but to create the conditions in which good outcomes become possible, and then to remain responsive as those conditions change.

This is a genuinely different relationship between the institution and its estate. It asks universities and colleges to think of themselves not as owners of land who manage it for institutional purposes, but as stewards of a place who hold it in trust — for the communities around them, for the species that share it, and for the generations who will inherit it.

At Portsmouth University, this stewardship framing has informed how we have approached the relationship between campus development and the wider Portsea Island. The university's estate does not end at its buildings. It extends into the public realm, and realised through the difference between the urban, civic heart and parkland settings, through the movement networks, and where the campus margins form ecological connections, across the coastal bio-region to where land meets water. Treating those edges as opportunities for ecological restoration rather than simply as boundaries to be managed produces a fundamentally different kind of campus — one that gives more back to its city than it takes.

The bio-region as brief

One of the most practically useful shifts that regenerative thinking produces is in how the brief itself is constructed. Conventional masterplanning briefs are institutional documents: they describe the university's space needs, its growth projections, its financial parameters, its academic priorities. The site is the medium through which those needs will be met.

A regenerative brief adds a second set of questions, drawn not from the institution but from the place. What is the ecological character of this site and its wider landscape? What has been lost, and what could be recovered? What does this bio-region need from this institution, not just what does the institution need from this site?

These questions do not override institutional needs — universities must remain viable, and viable institutions need functional, safe and secure estates. But they change the conversation in productive ways. They bring to the surface opportunities that a purely institutional brief would miss: the possibility of a campus wetland that manages surface water and creates habitat simultaneously; the potential of planted roofs, perlogas and walls that cool buildings, support pollinators, and for roofs to extend the life of the membrane below; the value of a campus farm or growing space that connects students to food systems, reduces the heat island effect, and provides a genuine living laboratory for sustainability education.

Across our eleven-site masterplan for Capital City College, the dispersed nature of the estate — spread across a wide area of central, north and east London (Westminster, Camden, Islington, Tottenham and Enfield) — made bio-regional thinking both more complex and more interesting. There is no single campus landscape to restore. Instead there is a network of sites, each embedded in its own local ecological and social context, each with its own opportunities and constraints. The masterplan became a framework for thinking about each site in relation to its immediate neighbourhood — its street trees, its surface water, its community green spaces — rather than solely in relation to the institution's internal requirements. Eleven sites became eleven opportunities to make a positive ecological contribution to eleven different parts of the city.

Net positive, not net zero

The shift from net zero to net positive is not merely rhetorical. It represents a fundamentally different ambition — and a different relationship to failure.

Net zero thinking is essentially defensive: it asks how we can eliminate or offset the harm we do. It is important and necessary. But it treats the environment as a constraint to be managed rather than a system to be restored. The goal is to stop making things worse and be 100% less bad!

Regenerative design thinking asks how the campus can actively improve the ecological health of its bio-region. Not to offset carbon but to sequester it, and actively draw it down. Not to manage surface water but to restore the hydrological function of the site. Not to provide token biodiversity enhancements but to create functioning, connected habitat that supports species recovery at a meaningful scale, over generations.

This requires a shift in how performance is measured. Carbon and energy remain important metrics, but they are insufficient on their own. Soil health, biodiversity net gain, water retention, heat island reduction, air quality, and the ecological connectivity of the site within its wider landscape all need to be tracked over time — not as compliance exercises, but as genuine indicators of whether the campus is becoming a better participant in its bio-region.

Governance for seven generations

None of this is achievable within conventional masterplan time horizons. A ten-to-twenty year framework is long by institutional standards, but it is short by ecological ones. Ecological recovery takes decades. Habitats establish over generations. The hydrological character of a site changes slowly, through the accumulation of many small decisions made consistently over a long period.

This is why we have come to think of regenerative masterplanning as requiring what we call seventh-generation thinking and governance: a framework of decision-making that asks, at every significant choice point, how this decision will affect the people, species and places of this bio-region not in twenty years but in a hundred. It is a question borrowed from indigenous traditions of long-term stewardship, and it sits uncomfortably with the short cycles of institutional planning, political pressure and financial constraint. But it is the right question. And asking it consistently — even when the answer cannot be fully known — changes the quality of the decisions that follow.

The university and college campus have always been places where long-term thinking happens. Regenerative masterplanning is an invitation to make that long-term thinking spatial and restorative — to inscribe it in the land itself, and to hold it there across the generations of students, staff and communities who will inherit what we build today.

Solent University 2035-2045 Campus Vision is by Miltiadou Cook Mitzman, and the Capital City College eleven-site masterplan was a joint project in collaboration with Peter Marsh Consulting and AtkinsRealis.

The concept of seventh-generation decision-making draws on the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which held that chiefs should consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation to come.