About the event
On the path toward the Reframing Urban Resilience Conference 2028, the Urban Resilience Research Network is launching thematic Unconferences in 2026 and 2027 to explore which emerging concepts can offer resilience, and the synergies pushing toward the transformative capacities it missed in past years and agendas.
This Unconference responds to rising interest in regenerative development, thinking, and design, emerging from both practice and science. A recent call to shift “from adaptation to regeneration on the road to 2050” has just been made in a recent editorial of Nature’s Urban Sustainability, along with the special collection titled “Regenerative Development: Design Applications in the Urban Environment”. From the other end, consultancies like Arup and organisations such as Future of London or Regen Melbourne are increasingly starting to use regenerative concepts and principles in their work; some research institutions have built frameworks, like Building a Regenerative Future for Our Cities by the Centre for Livable Cities in Singapore, and we’re seeing more events and courses addressing related topics.
This growing interest poses the transdisciplinary challenge of translating and integrating regenerative thinking into current urban theories and practices, spanning from the institutional to sector-specific or community domains. The unconference is an invitation to think about these integrations and mainstreaming potential, identifying gaps and ways forward to translate regenerative ideas into architecture, urban planning, community work, placemaking, governance and other related fields.
The event is an unstructured conference (“unconference”) where the agenda is created by the attendees, as a collective sensing exercise to map and discuss pathways for regenerative thinking for urban systems, proposing research lines, and topics and sessions for the URNet Reframing Urban Resilience Conference 2028.
Participation in the unconference is limited to 20 applicants, who will have the event fee waived by the Urban Resilience Research Network. Details of the event and application process can be found HERE