COST RESTORE‘s third working group kicked off in Koper, Slovenia in June, continuing the regenerative themes of working groups 1 and 2, seeking to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we approach construction and building operations.
Working group one addressed concepts of regenerative built environment within the language we use, through our social and ecological relationships (from Eco, to Ego to Seva), through new build and existing heritage buildings that leads to a regenerative economy. This work has been captured with the Sustainability, Restorative to Regenerative publication available for free download.
Working group two picked up these themes and applied to regenerative design.
One of the inspiring and light bulb discussions entered around building users, facilitated by facilities management … as prosumers, not consumers. And those who design and deliver buildings as prostructors not constructors.
This thinking allows us to further develop the ‘less bad to more good’ diagram that has come to illustrate the work of RESTORE
We may never change construction to prostruction, however language is important and the wider the term is used, the better awareness of where our sector, organisations, projects and products are on the regenerative spectrum from consumption to prosumption.
Prostruction Using Natures Technology to Grow Buildings – Eric Corey Freed
A prosumer is a person who consumes and produces a product. It is derived from “prosumption“, a dot-com era business term meaning “production by consumers”. These terms were coined in 1980 by American futurist Alvin Toffler. Wikipedia
An early paper exploring facilities management as community prosumers CbFM Community Based FM.
Fairsnape 
I didn’t know that Freed was an architect when I walked into Art Talk last week… And the video playing before his talk didn’t make me think he was an architect, either, because it was so fluid and organic. I think that says a lot about how different his approach to architecture is. After hearing his talk, the video makes a lot more sense, since he’s trying to combine two normally incompatible things: biology and architecture.
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