Biophilic Living and Design
Biophilia is a fast growing concept and innovative endeavour to revolutionise 21st century living.
Biophilia is a fast growing concept and innovative endeavour to revolutionise 21st century living.
Biophilic living and design integrates direct and indirect elements of the natural world into our built environment in support of human health and wellbeing.
Reimagining Wales Through Nature
Wales was once at the forefront of the industrial revolution. Today, it can lead a different transformation. One rooted in ecological resilience and social wellbeing.
With pioneering legislation such as the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, Wales has created a policy landscape that supports long-term, integrated and preventative approaches to sustainability.
Biophilic Wales works at the intersection of design, governance and community to translate these ambitions into practice.
Project REPAIR: Retrofitting for the Future: Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Adaptation
Project REPAIR explores how biophilic design can transform existing buildings and communities into spaces that support biodiversity, climate resilience and human wellbeing.
Through transdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaboration, REPAIR develops practical approaches to embedding nature into retrofit, policy and place-based regeneration.
Learn more about Project REPAIR https://biophilic.wales/repair
REPAIR at a glance
As the effects of climate change become rapidly more pronounced humanity must adapt to meet these challenges. Not only should these be met and addressed at national and international policy levels, but at the grassroots in our society in how we live and interact with our environment day-to-day.
It is our vision that the projects and work we produce will both develop initiatives and raise awareness about how biophilic living and design can benefit society and help tackle climate change through greater interactions and incorporation of the natural environment around us.
By starting here in the city of Swansea and surrounding communities in South Wales, we seek to explore how we can effectively embrace our natural surroundings to enhance clean and sustainable urban building designs.
With this we seek to forge constructive relationships with partner organisations and residents to help in these endeavours and better-connect people to nature.
From this we plan to use our work with current projects as springboards to lead to greater investment, engagement and development in biophilic living designing in Swansea, Wales and beyond.
Overarching research questions:
- How can biophilic design and user experience be enhanced within the local landscape?
- How can co-creation and arts/humanities methodologies be used to improve engagement with and understanding of biophilic design and construction.
- How can Wales become a ‘biophilic nation’?
Aims:
- Provide and nurture transdisciplinary expertise in biophilic living: including design, construction, planning, retrofitting, cultural and social practices.
- Co-create with businesses, authorities and communities.
- Collaborate with business and authorities to build biophilic capacity.
- Work with diverse local communities to develop shared visions of their locality (urban, rural, post-industrial, coastal) as part of a biophilic nation.
- Identify and understand local and wider barriers to the adoption of green technologies and behaviours, and ways to overcome those barriers.
- Drive culture change in planning, policy and design from the ground up to accelerate the adoption and enhancement of biophilic principles and design.
- Understand how the principles of successful biophilic design may be translated successfully to different localities and scaled up to inform policy and commercial practice at a national (Wales) level.
Why Wales?
Biophilic design is global, but Wales provides an excellent case study for several reasons. Once the cradle of the industrial revolution that created the current climate crisis, the south of Wales has struggled with the transition to a post-industrial economy.
The south and west region is one of the most socio-economically deprived areas of Britain and the legacy of industry includes swathes of polluted and decaying industrial sites lying unused in the centre of communities.
Biophilic design and other elements of the green transition offer the opportunity of a second industrial revolution for the region, but one that embeds community and nature at its heart. With pressure to act on climate change mounting, local councils across south-west Wales have declared a climate emergency, as has the Welsh Government.
The legal landscape in Wales is ground-breaking in its approach to sustainability. The WBFG Act represents pioneering legal innovation in this cause, as recognised by the UN. The Act promotes a systemic approach to the long term, cross-cutting and complex problems of delivering sustainable governance including seeking to inculcate profound culture change in the way that local government and the public sector operate in Wales. This project is partnered with the Future Generations Office and contributes to its aims of multi-scalar and co-operative ways of working that can address complex cross-cutting risks and concerns central to the WBFG Act’s agenda.
This commitment to long-term thinking, integration, prevention, collaboration and involvement is supported by the approach of the Environment (Wales) Act 2016 to sustainably manage Wales’s natural resources and ecosystems. Wales’s approach to the ‘30x30’ Biodiversity Deep Dive, in addition to increasing public land and sea areas designated for conservation, highlights the importance of a society-wide approach, emphasising the need for public engagement and empowerment, skills training and education, and enabling the private sector to invest and aid nature recovery.
This project links biophilic design principles with the policy and legislative innovation of Wales, and builds towards Wales becoming a biophilic nation.
Get Involved
We welcome collaboration across sectors.
Whether you are a policymaker, practitioner, researcher or community organisation, we are keen to connect.
- Partner with us
- Attend events
- Collaborate on research
- Subscribe for updates
Together, we can shape Wales’s transition toward a more resilient, regenerative and biophilic future.