Around 120 very enthusiastic architects and fellow built environment professionals - many of them resplendent in a wild variety of regenerative hats! - joined us for an evening at The Bottle Factory in Peckham to celebrate the results of the inaugural Regenerative Architecture Index (RAI), launched by UK Architects Declare and Architecture Today. Many thanks to our special guest, pioneering musician and producer, visual artist and activist, Brian Eno, to Fabrix for providing our venue and to our event sponsors, Interface, and all our speakers - and RAI entrants.

As AD co-founder Michael Pawlyn said "This celebration event is deliberately the opposite of the formulaic ‘Park Lane ballroom, black tie event’ and, yes, even the hat competition is part of our strategy for change! As futurist and writer Ed Gillespie said, 'If you want to subvert the dominant paradigm, you need to have more fun than they are… and let them know while you’re doing it', which roughly translates as ‘throw a better party’!” As a special introduction to the theme of the evening and our focus on regenerative design, Michael recorded a live discussion on stage with Brian Eno for the Flourish Systems Change podcast Michael co-hosts with Sarah Ichioka.  

Their wide-ranging discussion - with short Q&A with our audience - covered aspects of Brian's work on projects such as The Long Now Foundation, the central importance of imagination and creativity to addressing our planetary problems, how change happens and making this real for all of us at the level of feelings and not just knowledge. You can hear the full podcast in this Special Episode (Imagining Futures with Brian Eno). Previous episodes include Long Time with Roman Krznaric, another speaker at the RAI event and one of our three RAI Ambassadors.

Architecture Today have published this summary of the evening - and a dedicated issue of their journal featuring the results of this inaugural Index, with examples of how entrants demonstrated our regenerative principles of Being a good ancestor, Co-creating with nature and Creating a just space for people in their projects and practices.

As well as the regenerative hat competition, our Brian Eno conversation, talks from the RAI team and guest Laurence Bates, the CEO of Wildheart Animal Sanctuary on the Isle of Wight who has undertaken to source future designers for their estate from the RAI, and a DJ session to close the evening, we also had illustrator Pheeb Robinson with us to capture the evening in a special graphical animation - which you can enjoy below.