FRESH: Future REgenerative production for Sustainable Housing and buildings

Research Project, 2025 – 2029

This project aims at investigating how Swedish building production can become regenerative. Regeneration expands on sustainable and circular measures for harm mitigation (e.g., reducing CO emissions) by also focusing on repairing environmental, social, and economic damage and improving well-being. Despite efforts in regenerative building design, there is no such focus in building production – where regeneration could enable structural shifts in spatial planning and community building by improving building practices, businesses, and skills towards circularity and resource efficiency, and even going beyond climate neutrality towards climate positivity. Regenerative building production could thus reflect, e.g., net-positive supply chains, renewable energy made on-site, and upskilling construction crews. The project will explore what the fundamentals (concepts, drivers, skills) of regenerative building production are and how to contextualise and practically implement those in Sweden. We will work with several social and professional groups (e.g., clients, contractors, policymakers) through quantitative (e.g., surveys) and qualitative (e.g., interviews) methods and engage in action research (feat. both high-level conceptualisations and on-site field research). The goal is to advance the state-of-knowledge in Swedish building production towards regeneration and propose policies, guidelines, and action plans on transforming building practices, businesses, and skills.