As the smart-city model hits its limits, a new paradigm — regenerative urbanism — is redefining how developers, investors, and civic leaders measure value, linking livability, resilience, and long-term returns.
For two decades, smart cities built on sensors and data dominated how governments and developers imagined the urban future. But as populations surge, the model’s limits are becoming clear: technology alone won’t solved inequality, resource scarcity, or social disconnection.
“We’ve reached the limits of optimization,” says Sara Roversi, founder of the Future Food Institute told me in an interview. “Regeneration is about creating the conditions for life to thrive again.” Instead of optimizing systems, regenerative urbanism aims to restore them, treating cities as living ecosystems that can heal nature, rebuild communities, and sustain long-term value.
That principle underpins the new Regenerative Cities Manifesto, launched by the Future Food Institute and Tokyo Tatemono, Japan’s oldest real-estate company, part of a broader global shift from efficiency to reciprocity.
Regeneration is also beginning to guide how capital flows and how value is defined. The built environment accounts for nearly 40% of global emissions and more than $300 trillion in asset value, making livability and resilience financially material. Lendlease, for example, is embedding regenerative design into its development frameworks, treating ecosystem restoration and community well-being as long-term value drivers rather than externalities, a signal that regeneration is becoming part of real-estate economics.
The Smart City Promise Under Strain
Research underscores the fatigue with purely technological solutions. The 2025 Urban Readiness Report reported that city leaders feel “stretched between addressing immediate needs and future-proofing their cities,” warning that infrastructure upgrades alone are not enough to maintain livability.
A 2025 study in Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found that China’s smart-city policy improved efficiency but had mixed effects on livability and equity, a pattern echoed by the World Economic Forum, which concluded that the next wave of urban innovation must focus on regeneration and resilience, not automation. Roversi summarized the shift succinctly saying, “Smart made us faster, but not wiser.”
From Sustainability To Regeneration
The distinction may sound semantic, but it represents a philosophical break. Sustainability aims to minimize damage; regeneration aims to reverse it. Roversi said, “It’s not just sustainable, it’s restorative, it’s about reciprocity between people and place.”
For Toshikazu Sawa, director of urban development at Tokyo Tatemono, this change reflects a new realism. “Simply sustaining the status quo is no longer enough,” he said in an interview. “Regeneration restores and enhances the ecological, cultural, and social vitality of urban life.”
The approach is gaining ground as climate shocks, biodiversity loss, and social fragmentation converge in cities. By 2050, over two-thirds of humanity will live in urban areas that already consume more than 70% of global energy and emit three-quarters of carbon (UN DESA). UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2024 estimated cities will need $4.5–5.4 trillion annually through 2030 to build or upgrade climate-resilient infrastructure.
For investors and city leaders, that signals both risk and opportunity: the task is to create value in systems designed to regenerate, not just optimize. As Roversi put it, “Cities are where the future will be won or lost.”
Tokyo’s Regenerative Experiment
In central Tokyo, regeneration is no longer theoretical. Tokyo Tatemono has spent more than a century shaping Japan’s capital, from commercial districts to residential towers. But its latest project, developed with the Future Food Institute, looks nothing like a traditional real-estate venture.
The Kyobashi Living Lab, a pilot project near Tokyo Station built on FFI’s model, reimagines a business district as a living ecosystem. “Buildings and urban hardware are difficult to update quickly,” Sawa said. “So we must also invest in the software of better living, designing experiences, services, and ecosystems that adapt and regenerate over time.”
The partnership uses food as a connector between ecology, culture, and community, turning public food events into a test bed for civic participation and trust-building. The idea, Roversi explained, is not to impose a new master plan but to experiment, learn, and adapt. The Living Lab’s research teams study how food sourcing, design, and social participation influence well-being and resilience. “Regeneration is not a fixed solution, it’s a process,” Roversi said.
The Regenerative Cities Manifesto
Presented at Climate Week NYC and expanded at RegenerAction Japan, a two-day Unconference co-organised by FFI and Tokyo Tatemoni, the Regenerative Cities Manifesto calls for cities to unite urban and rural systems across six domains of renewal: political, ecological, social, cultural, human, and economic. It is also inspired by the FAO’s 1.5 °C Roadmap, integrating food sovereignty, planetary health, and civic resilience into a coherent policy framework.
Roversi described the approach as both systemic and deeply human. She said of the event, “This Unconference encourages intentional dialogue, creating a space for personal responsibility toward global issues. It allows policymakers, business leaders, and citizens to redefine prosperity and regenerate our common home starting from our cities.”
Tokyo Tatemono and FFI are now implementing early projects on regenerative agriculture and urban-rural partnerships, promoting collaboration among existing activists and supporting new innovators. Global appetite for such a change is already visible. More than 50 local governments have joined the Doughnut Economics Action Lab’s network, adapting circular and regenerative principles into city strategies, from Amsterdam to Portland.
Governance And Trust
Turning that vision into practice remains a challenge. Most cities remain trapped in departmental silos across transport, housing, environment, even culture, each with separate mandates and metrics. Regeneration cuts across all of them. “Urban policy tends to be fragmented across sectors,” Sawa said. “That’s a major barrier.”
Tokyo Tatemono and FFI are testing partnership models to bridge those divides. Instead of competing for contracts, stakeholders join shared learning platforms where outcomes are co-designed and data is open. “Trust is not built through transactions, but through shared values, transparency, and long-term commitment,” Sawa said.
Roversi calls this cultural work saying, “Regeneration starts with relationships. If we want resilient systems, we need cultures of trust.” Cities are already translating that idea into policy: Amsterdam aligns spatial, food, and circular strategies through the Doughnut model while Milan’s school-meal procurement now favors local, circular food chains.
The shift is visible beyond city halls. IKEA’s Do More project in Helsingborg turned a struggling neighborhood into a circular food ecosystem employing marginalized women and local farmers, an early prototype of a regenerative district. Lendlease’s Milan Innovation District applies Arup’s Regenerative Design Toolkit to restore soil health and community cohesion, while C40 Cities scale similar approaches from Amsterdam to Barcelona.
Long-term Value
For Tokyo Tatemono, regeneration is also sound business logic. The company plans investments on century-scale horizons, rare in real estate. “We are not merely espousing an abstract timeframe of looking ahead 100 years,” Sawa said. “Decisions regarding investment and governance must look beyond short-term profitability to consider future social and cultural value.”
That mindset is increasingly relevant to global investors. Sustainable-finance instruments such as green and social bonds now total over $6 trillion globally, a move that’s opening space for truly regenerative finance. Roversi believes this will define competitiveness in the coming decade. “The companies that will thrive are those that regenerate the contexts they depend on,” she said. “It’s not philanthropy, it’s resilience.”
Analysts value the global urban-regeneration market at about $2.3 trillion by 2033, suggesting that restorative, community-focused redevelopment is emerging as a major growth sector. The smart city isn’t disappearing, but being reframed: digital efficiency is now one layer in a broader regenerative model that measures success not by output, but by renewal, whether growth leaves a place, and its balance sheet, stronger than it found it.
Lessons For A Crowded Planet
“We aim to accelerate regeneration by sharing best practices from cities around the world and fostering an ecosystem for innovation,” Sawa said. For Roversi, the next step is scale. “You cannot be regenerative alone,” she said. “It’s based on reciprocity and mutual growth.” Her team at FFI is building partnerships among cities, universities, and companies to co-design pilots in food systems, materials, and education, a model focused on adaptation rather than replication, since “each place must regenerate according to its own culture and ecology.”
Two decades after the smart-city boom promised efficiency through code, regeneration is rewriting the urban playbook. From Tokyo to Helsingborg to Milan, forward-looking developers are learning that cities thrive not simply when optimized, but when they give back more than they take. “Regeneration is a new story for humanity,” Roversi said. “It’s about creating conditions where both people and places can flourish.” Sawa agreed saying, “The choices we make today will decide whether cities continue to thrive a century from now.