Water Resources Management in a Regenerative Design Approach

Increasingly scarce and less affordable, water is taking on the characteristics of a precious resource able to increase marked inequalities. The issue of water resources management at the micro-scale (building) stands as a priority field of investigation, and as a central approach in the transition to sustainable architecture, recognizable as ‘Regenerative Design’. Water scarcity represents a pending risk, derived from multilayer interferences that threaten consequences on the availability and affordability of resources, especially in the urban built environment. The proposed contribution offers an original method for building-scale water management, developed as a strategic framework encompassing mitigation and adaptation strategies. The research adopts a mixed-methodology for data collection and analysis, articulated in three phases, and widens the scope of analysis to all the components that contribute, even indirectly, to water consumption along all phases of the building’s life-cycle. A set of 11 key performance indicators is proposed, as instruments for the model-based testing as well as for the design process benchmarking. The outcome is a replicable design support tool to come up with sensible functional choices thus preventing water scarcity risk, as a catalyst for progressing UN SDG 6 in synergy with SDGs 11, 12, 13 and while reducing trade-offs with SDG 3.