Restorative Development / Revitalization

Research, Curricula, & Degrees Needed

With almost $2 trillion per year of restorative development taking place annually worldwide, the research underpinning this massive, fast-growing, vitally-important activity is shockingly thin.  We'll aggregate areas of research and curriculum development needed by the restoration economy on this page until we've created a proper database to hold them (unless your school would like to take on that project!).

Once we have general agreement on the categories, we will create an online database, which will enable us to achieve our Academic Network's four purposes: 1) Networking existing research, 2) Identifying and plugging the gaps, 3) Connecting this research with the creation of new curricula and degree programs, and 4) Facilitating related technology transfer. 

The overarching purpose of all four of these activities is to encourage and enable greater integration.  Integration can greatly increase the effectiveness and/or profitability of individual projects, but it's still seen as optional.  At the program level (such as community revitalization initiatives) however, there's nothing optional about it: Only by integrating restoration of the built and natural environments can the desired goal of socioeconomic revitalization be achieved.

Pure research is certainly welcome (especially as relates to creating a rigorous theoretical basis for integrated revitalization), but--whenever practical--we encourage research efforts to be focused on one of the following two categories of application, so as to be more immediately useful:

1. Integrated Restoration (project-focused): Each of the twelve sectors of restorable assets, and various combinations of them: Ecosystem, watershed, fishery, agriculture, brownfield, infrastructure, heritage, and disaster/war.  This research will be primarily (certainly not exclusively) useful to companies and non-profits that design and/or execute restorative projects, usually focused on specific structures / tracts of land.

2. Integrated Revitalization (program-focused): Initiatives at the eight most common levels of focus: Rural communities, town/small city, metropolitan area, county, state/province, region (multi-community, multi-county, multi-state, multi-nation, bioregions, etc.), nation, and global.  This research will be primarily (again, not exclusively, by any means) to government agencies responsible for socioeconomic development of jurisdictions. The best "guide" to specific areas of research needed is probably the standard format/content areas of our Integrated Revitalization Initiative.  The metrics that drive those plans derive directly from our Asset Integration Guide and our Stakeholder Integration Guide.

We encourage restorative research in the following areas.  The development paradigm worldwide is shifting from new development to restorative development, so the following disciplines, tools, policies, etc. fall into two general categories: Those that are completely new, and those that are well-established, but need to be flipped from "frontier" mode to restorative mode.

1. Design & planning: Restorative approaches to disciplines that have traditionally been primarily focused on new development, such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban/rural planning, civil (and other) engineering, etc.

2. Technology: Biological, chemical (such as for restoring metal bridges, masonry buildings, selective herbicides, etc.), information (such as GIS), equipment (such as heavy land-imprinting machinery, manual invasive species removal tools, etc.).

3. Legal/Policy/Legislative/Public financial tools: This can include both new and recent tools (TDRs, TIFs, etc.), and finding restorative uses for established tools that currently encourage new development/sprawl (such as municipal bonds, taxes, direct/indirect subsidies, etc.). 

   • Restorative fines (recovering economic damages based on cost of restoration, in addition to loss of ecosystem services, plus punitive fines) offer great potential, as they are much more justifiable than arbitrary fines. 

   • A variation on mitigation also has potential: Rather than just focusing on wetlands (the traditional mitigation program), greenfield developers would be required to contribute to a restorative development fund at a ratio that would discourage unnecessary greenfield development (such as restoring 3 damaged/contaminated acres for every 1 acre of greenfields developed).

   • In Central America and some other developing areas, virgin forest and jungle land is traditionally given to citizens free of charge

4. Private financial tools: Again, this can focus on new tools (such as landpooling, ecosystem service trading, etc.) and on finding restorative uses for financial tools and business forms that are currently used to underwrite destructive, frontier-style development (REITs, stocks, bonds, options, LLCs/LLPs, etc.)

5. Quality metrics. The current development of our Asset Integration Guide and our Stakeholder Integration Guide needs academic support, as do each of the twelve sectors of restorative development in general.

6. Quantity metrics and economics.  Simply getting up-to-date, hard numbers on restorative activities would be a great achievement: Being able to analyze them in useful ways would be wonderfully useful.

7. "Soft" sciences/disciplines: History, sociology, management, restorative justice, environmental justice, etc.

8. The established scientific, architectural/engineering, and planning disciplines comprising the twelve sectors of restorative development: Each of the twelve sectors already has significant ongoing research, and we certainly encourage expansion of that activity. 

   • Simply networking these restorative research facilities should add significant value to current efforts, since most of this activity currently takes place within relatively isolated silos of learning.  In the real world, separation of the twelve sectors does not exist.  Restoring the fisheries of an estuary, for instance, usually cannot be accomplished without first restoring the infrastructure, agricultural lands, watersheds, brownfields, ecosystems, etc. that impact that estuary. 

   • The "13th sector" is thus integration: The critically-important, largely-unaddressed new area of research is in the interstitial spaces among those twelve sectors.  Integrating two or more sectors (such as restoring a property with an historic building connected to decrepit infrastructure on contaminated land at a river's edge, which could integrate at least four sectors), can produce tremendous value-adding synergies and cost savings.

   • But examples of integrated restoration and integrated revitalization--when they do occur--are generally accomplished in a learn-as-you-go manner.  If nothing else, properly documenting and analyzing these ad hoc efforts would be of tremendous value, and would be much less costly than funding a restoration effort for purely research purposes.

Until the Academic Network is more formally established with its own advisory council, please direct feedback concerning the contents of this page--or the structure/membership/mission of the network in general--to Storm Cunningham. Email him at storm@revitalization.org or call him at 703-348-7878.