‘Net positive’, from Positive Development theory, is a new paradigm in sustainable development and design. PD theory was first detailed in Positive Development. A net positive system/structure would ‘give back to nature and society more than it takes’ over its life cycle. In contrast, ‘sustainable development’ - in the real-world context of population growth, biodiversity losses, cumulative pollution, wealth disparities and social inequities - closes off future options. To reverse direction, development must, among other sustainability criteria, increase nature beyond pre-human conditions. PD develops the tools to enable net positive design and development.
According to PD, the original precepts of sustainability require increasing future options. This, in turn, requires that development increase the life support system. Green design always aimed for ecological restoration, social regeneration and economic revitalization. However, these essentially ‘add value’ relative to current sites, buildings or practices. They do not increase nature in absolute terms. Positive development is defined as structures that increase universal life quality and future options by expanding the ‘ecological base’ and the ‘public estate’.
Terminology Clarification
The term net positive is increasingly used by green designers, developers and businesses. However, in context, it usually means just ‘giving back’ - that is, without fixed baselines - by optimizing material resources, energy and stakeholder benefits, etc. This was the aim of 20th Century green building design. Although environmental ethics and social justice remain central concerns in PD, therefore, ‘eco-positive’ is increasingly used to underscore the ecological dimension. The term ‘net’ also causes some confusion. In PD, ‘net’ means public benefits beyond neutral impacts - not just reducing the total negative impacts to zero by, for example, making tradeoffs.
Theory Origins
PD theory built on eco-philosophies that emerged in the 1980s. Calling for social transformation, they deconstructed the hierarchical cultures, dualistic thought patterns and linear-reductionist analyses of modernity. PD added a positive/negative overlay to explain why these theories did not contemplate increasing nature to offset consumption. Later, sustainability was absorbed into the dominant paradigm which assumed that current institutions could resolve the problems they fostered. According to PD, existing institutional and physical structures reduce future options and are thus terminal. The hypothesis was that, by converting negative systems into positive ones, genuinely sustainable planning, decision and design frameworks would materialize.
Design-decision Distinction
The distinction between decision-making and design is central to PD. Decision-making processes/tools divide, compare and choose. They use bounded or ‘closed system’ thinking which excludes considerations that are difficult to quantify. Essentially, decision methods simplify issues and options to facilitate finding the best path from the present position or desired future. Back-casting and scenario planning, while powerful tools, presume the future can be predicted and selected. Such methods decide now how future citizens must live. They also reduce future options by narrowing resources, adaptability, space and biodiversity over time. Sustainability therefore requires rethinking decision-making and design tools from first principles.
Decision-making (reducing costs)
The reduction of the ecological base and public estate continues, PD argues, because new sustainability goals were spliced onto the old closed system models, methods and metrics of the DP. Given escalating human consumption, even global depopulation and ecological regeneration would not counterbalance total negative resource flows and ecological impacts. PD maintains that closed system models created and institutionalized zero-sum decision and measurement frameworks such as cost-benefit/risk-benefit analyses. It identifies and ‘reverses’ over a hundred systemic biases in governance, planning, decision and design frameworks by converting them into open system and design-based frameworks to facilitate eco-positive planning and design.
Design (multiplying benefits)
Whereas the internal logic of decision frameworks tend to diminish ecosystems and land eco-productivity, eco-logical design can multiply functions and public benefits synergistically. Eco-positive design involves open systems thinking. For example, building rating tools are based on limits or thresholds and do not contemplate net public gains. Perhaps because of the deeply-embedded historic elevation of rationalist decision-making over design, green building design templates and rating tools are decision-based. Being reductionist, they encourage tradeoffs between costs and benefits or nature and society in physical development. Hence they tend to reduce adaptability, diversity and reversibility.
Governance
Decision systems in governance resolve conflict by allocating rights and resources - not by increasing the ecological base and/or public estate. Hence PD suggests different frameworks for environmental governance. These include a modified constitution with a new decision sphere to deal with the unique ethical dimensions of biophysical development, planning and design. Given real-world political barriers to change, PD also suggests default strategies to enable incremental reform by changing institutions from within. PD contends that gaps can be avoided in new governance and planning systems by simply reversing each ecologically terminal convention into eco-positive ones.
Planning
SMARTmode is a PD planning process that includes two dozen environment gap analyses to highlight sustainability issues that are almost never assessed in planning or design. Some of these are forensic ‘flows analyses’ that identify social and ecological deficits that developments could ameliorate by design. They can be undertaken scientifically using emerging multi-dimensional digital mapping tools, more pragmatically by design teams, or more subjectively in community ‘charrettes’ for workshopping planning criteria and design briefs. Until planners perform these analyses routinely, therefore, they can serve as design thinking exercises, guidelines and/or criteria.
Design
While improved systems of governance, decision-making and planning can assist, biophysical sustainability is ultimately a design problem. To compensate for past system design errors, fundamental reforms of design methods and processes are required. PD proposes means to reduce material flows without tradeoffs by, for example, creating mutual gains and ‘low-impact luxury’ environments. PD contends that eco-positive design is already possible, partly through the integration of natural systems with building structures, spaces and surfaces. PD contributes other design concepts.
Design for Eco-services
The term ‘ecosystem services’ generally applies only to human benefits, which are usually valued by units values like ecosystem goods and services, but its intrinsic and ‘biophilic’ values. PD considers the value of nature to be ‘infinite’ as it is not only the basis of the economy, but essential to human existence itself. To counteract the ecological footprint of existing development, ‘surplus’ natural and social capital - assessed from fixed biophysical baselines - must be created both off-site and on-site by design.
Carbon-neutral Design
Net positive energy is barred by the laws of physics. Moreover, calculations of ‘net energy’ seldom include the embodied energy - let alone ecological impacts incurred during resource extraction, production and transportation. With substantial passive solar design and renewable energy, buildings can send unused energy back to the grid, but it might be used for unsustainable purposes elsewhere. Nonetheless, a building could sequester more carbon than it emits over its life cycle with substantial building-integrated vegetation, using PD design principles. A case study showed this would within under twelve years, well under its life span.
Design Reporting
The PD eco-positive design reporting process aims to avoid many shortcomings of decision-based approaches to design. In contrast to green building rating tools, the EDR aims to uncover opportunities to create net public gains. Design teams answer questions based on PD design criteria and SMARTmode analyses. This forces education, collaboration and ‘frontloading’ design. Exposing the research and reasoning behind decision and design concepts facilitates input from community, assessors and independent experts, and should therefore occur be undertaken in development project. Being affordable and flexible, it is also easily adapted to developing nations.
Design Strategies
Eco-positive retrofitting is a priority PD strategy. Due to the massive ongoing impacts of buildings, biophysical sustainability is impossible without retrofitting cities. Replacing buildings with greener ones costs too much in materials, money, energy and time, as new buildings represent only 1-3% of the building stock. It is now accepted that retrofitting can be profitable in resource, energy, health savings and worker productivity. It can happen quickly and simultaneously, or when buildings are repurposed or refurbished anyway. Green buildings may last a hundred years but few are designed for upgrading/adaptability, so they will soon need retrofitting to a higher standard.
Design Assessment
Most rating tools prioritize resource efficiency and treat ‘reductions in negative impacts’ as if positive. Their baselines and benchmarks preclude net-positive impacts. Some provisions consider respective rights/responsibilities, but not broader ethical issues like improving human-nature relationships, reducing total resource flows or increasing social capital in the vicinity. Also, innovation is often valued for its own sake, not outcomes, and eco-efficiency saves owners money anyway. PD's ‘hierarchy of eco-innovation’ analysis instead prioritizes positive system-wide outcomes and net public benefits. Being non-numerical, it allows self-assessment during design when scientific data is unavailable, time and ego has vested or irreversible decisions are made.
PD Starfish
The PD ‘starfish’ design and rating tool enables quantification while assisting designers to consider more dimensions of sustainability. It is a modified radar diagram with added layers and satellite diagrams. Since most life cycle assessment tools estimate impacts between ‘-1’ to ‘0’ or zero impact, eco-positive public benefits are excluded. Unlike rating tools, benchmarks for different sustainability factors are based on fixed biophysical conditions - not typical buildings, sites or practices. The starfish uses one scale to assess impacts in relation to fixed benchmarks and a linear scale on another layer for scoring/comparison purposes.
