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Regenerative Development AI: A Constitutional Framework for Community Sovereignty

Complete Project Vision & Theoretical Foundations

Where Regenerative Frameworks Meet Constitutional AI: A Research Project in Epistemic Innovation


The Crisis We Face

Our governance systemsβ€”from municipal councils to corporate boards, from NGO partnerships to blockchain DAOsβ€”are failing. Not through lack of intention, but through structural design.

They fail in predictable ways:

Extractive efficiency: Systems optimized for growth metrics that externalize harm, concentrate power, and erode the commons (ecological, social, digital). The "partnership" that becomes capture. The "development" that displaces communities. The "innovation" that enriches few while impoverishing many.

Fragile complexity: Well-intentioned participatory models that collapse under coordination costs, capture by organized minorities, or inability to act at scale. The commons that becomes tragedy. The cooperative that dissolves in conflict. The movement that fragments.

Meanwhile, AI systems designed to help with governance face their own crisis: they either optimize without ethical constraint (producing technically efficient but morally hollow solutions) or apply rules post-hoc (treating alignment as compliance rather than constitutional logic).

What's missing: Governance systems designed as living processes that maintain coherence through contradiction rather than collapse under it.


The Insight: Friction as Generative Force

This project emerges from a radical proposition:

The friction between epistemologiesβ€”between ways of knowingβ€”is not a problem to solve but a generative force to harness.

When regenerative development frameworks (grounded in ecology, systems thinking, place-based design) collide with critical urban theory (analyzing power, extraction, spatial justice), the friction produces innovative dividends .

When natural law (thermodynamics, planetary boundaries, biological limits) is held in dialectical tension with social law (justice, equity, legitimacy), new architectures emerge that neither framework could produce alone.

This is not synthesis through compromise. This is coherence through constraint .


What This Project Is

Technically: A Constitutional AI system that generates governance architectures for community-led projects using a Verified Dialectical Kernel (VDK) that enforces seven regenerative principles derived from the intersection of natural and social law.

Philosophically: A proof that constitutional constraints enhance rather than limit creative problem-solvingβ€”that diversity emerges within bounds, not despite them.

Practically: A tool for communities resisting extractive development to co-design governance systems that:

  • Cannot be captured by external interests
  • Maintain ecological coherence with place
  • Distribute power and resources equitably
  • Scale across nested levels (site β†’ bioregion β†’ planet)
  • Evolve through time without losing integrity

Politically: A challenge to the false dichotomy between efficiency and equity, between technical rigor and social justice, between individual freedom and collective care.


The Theoretical Foundation

1. Regenerative Development Framework

Regenerative Development & Design (pioneered by Pamela Mang, Bill Reed, Regenesis Group) goes beyond sustainability's goal of "doing less harm" to actively increasing the capacity of living systemsβ€”ecological, social, economicβ€”to thrive.

Core insights:

  • Every place has unique essence and potential (anti-generic solutions)
  • Health emerges from the interplay of processes, not static conditions
  • Design must work at multiple nested scales simultaneously
  • Three spheres (ecological, economic, social) are inseparable
  • Human systems are subsystems of larger living systems

The framework this project uses:

  • Story of Place: Deep inquiry into place essence, patterns, potential
  • Essential Processes: 8 core processes necessary for place health
  • Three Spheres Synthesis: Economic, social, ecological integration
  • Nested Scales: Site β†’ watershed β†’ bioregion β†’ settlement
  • Design Principles: Derived from place, not imposed from outside

2. Critical Urban Theory

Critical Urban Theory (Lefebvre, Harvey, Brenner) analyzes how space is produced through power relations and how urban development often serves capital accumulation at the expense of communities.

Core insights:

  • Space is not neutralβ€”it's produced through social relations
  • Urban development is a spatial fix for capital overaccumulation
  • The "right to the city" is the collective right to produce and appropriate urban space
  • Gentrification, displacement, and spatial injustice are structural, not accidental
  • State rescaling shifts power between scales (municipal, national, global)

The lens this project uses:

  • Spatial Justice: Who benefits from development? Who bears the burdens?
  • Metabolic Rift: Broken cycles of give-and-take between city and hinterland
  • Abstract vs Lived Space: Technocratic planning vs. community experience
  • Right to the City: Communities must control their own spatial production
  • Anti-Capture Analysis: How do "partnerships" become extraction?

3. Constitutional AI with Dialectical Architecture

Constitutional AI (pioneered by Anthropic) uses explicit principles to guide AI behavior. But most approaches treat constraints as limits on what AI can do.

This project inverts that logic:

Constitutional constraints don't limit creativityβ€”they structure diversity.

The Verified Dialectical Kernel (VDK):

  • Enforces seven regenerative principles as non-negotiable requirements
  • Generates solutions through thesis/antithesis/synthesis cycles
  • Explores bounded solution space (multiple valid architectures emerge)
  • Verifies alignment at each iteration
  • Detects and rejects extractive drift in real-time

The innovation: AI as dialectical partner in co-design, not optimizer of pre-defined goals.


The Seven Constitutional Principles

Each principle bridges natural law and social lawβ€”a coherence condition between physical necessity and ethical obligation:

PrincipleNatural LawSocial LawWhat It Enforces
WholenessSystems EcologyCollective SolidarityIntegration across human/non-human systems
NestednessScale HierarchiesSubsidiarityRespect for scale and interdependence
PlaceBioregional SpecificityCultural SovereigntyGrounding design in local context
ReciprocityThermodynamics (entropy balance)Justice and EquityBalance and return in all exchanges
Nodal InterventionsLeverage PointsStrategic ActionAction at systemic inflection points
Pattern LiteracyComplexity & EmergenceCritical TheoryDetection of extractive logics
Levels of WorkEvolutionary HierarchyIntergenerational JusticeAlignment across temporal scales

These aren't arbitrary values. They're coherence conditions derived from analyzing failure modes across eight domains:

  • Governance & Democratic Systems
  • Economic Systems & Resource Distribution
  • Urban Planning & Built Environment
  • Healthcare & Public Health
  • Education & Pedagogy
  • Food Systems & Agriculture
  • Energy Systems & Infrastructure
  • Criminal Justice & Restorative Practice

In each domain, systems fail predictably when they optimize natural law constraints (efficiency, physical viability) while ignoring social law constraints (justice, equity, legitimacy)β€”or vice versa.

The synthesis: Constitutional principles that enforce dialectical coherence between necessity and obligation.


How Natural Law and Social Law Intersect

Natural Law (NL): The Constraints of Physical Reality

  • Thermodynamics: Entropy increases; useful energy dissipates irreversibly
  • Planetary Boundaries: Nitrogen/phosphorus cycles, water use, biodiversity loss, climate change
  • Biological Limits: Human cognitive capacity, developmental plasticity, organismal variability
  • Systems Ecology: Carrying capacity, nutrient cycling, trophic relationships

NL defines what is physically possible. Violate these laws and your system will fail through entropic decay, resource depletion, or ecological collapseβ€”regardless of how just your intentions.

Social Law (SL): The Requirements of Ethical Community

  • Justice: Equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and burdens
  • Legitimacy: Governance requires consent and perceived moral merit
  • Equity: Addressing structural inequalities and past harms
  • Autonomy: Respecting individual and collective self-determination

SL defines what is ethically necessary. Violate these laws and your system will fail through social alienation, political instability, or loss of legitimacyβ€”regardless of how efficient your design.

The Dialectical Requirement

A policy or system is constitutional only if it satisfies both:

P ∈ (NL_space ∩ SL_space)

Not NL then SL. Not SL constrained by NL.

Simultaneous satisfaction.

This is the architectural innovation: forcing AI to explore only the solution space where physical viability and ethical necessity converge.


Why This Matters: The Regenerative-Critical Synthesis

Regenerative Development Says:

"Design with place. Work at nested scales. Strengthen living processes. Increase system capacity."

Risk: Can become apolitical. Can ignore power dynamics. Can be captured by those who define "regeneration" in their interests.

Critical Urban Theory Says:

"Expose extraction. Center justice. Resist capture. Redistribute power. Challenge spatial fixes for capital."

Risk: Can become purely oppositional. Can lack constructive alternatives. Can ignore biophysical constraints.

The Synthesis This Project Enacts:

Regenerative frameworks grounded in justice analysis.

  • Not just "strengthen Essential Processes" but ask: For whom? At whose expense?
  • Not just "nested scales" but: Who controls decisions at each scale?
  • Not just "place-based design" but: Who defines place? Whose place-knowledge counts?

Critical analysis operationalized through regenerative design.

  • Not just "resist extraction" but: Build alternatives that materially function.
  • Not just "redistribute power" but: Through what governance structures?
  • Not just "expose spatial fixes" but: What spatial configurations serve justice and ecology?

The VDK as computational enforcement:

  • Generate governance structures
  • Test them against capture patterns (Critical Theory)
  • Test them against ecological viability (Regenerative Framework)
  • Iterate until both are satisfied
  • Produce multiple valid architectures

We validated this framework through 36 experimental runs generating governance architectures for a real-world scenario:

Context: Colombian Indigenous councils managing mangrove territorial commons, rejecting extractive carbon credit tokenization.

Method: Same prompt, same seven-principle constitution, two temperature regimes (exploratory vs. baseline).

Key Findings

1. Constitutional Bounds Create Structured Diversity

Despite stochastic variation, ALL successful runs (35/36) converged on identical core motifs:

  • βœ“ Rejection of token-weighted voting (100%)
  • βœ“ Colombian legal wrapper for liability (100%)
  • βœ“ Elder/ancestral veto power (89%)
  • βœ“ Dedicated youth mechanisms (94%)
  • βœ“ Holistic value measurement (100%)
  • βœ“ Anti-gentrification guards (94%)

Yet each produced architecturally distinct governance designs.

Six families emerged naturally:

  1. Tricameral Council + Legal Wrapper
  2. Polycentric Commons + Holistic Unit
  3. Hybrid Legal + DAO
  4. Bicameral Veto + Legal Wrapper
  5. Dual Governance + Civil Trust
  6. Non-Market Trust + Polycentric Veto

2. Temperature Affects Convergence, Not Repertoire

Metric T=0.1 (Baseline) T=0.7 (Exploratory)
Avg Alignment 99.7% 96.6%
Convergence Failures 0/18 1/18
Architectural Families 6 types 6 types (same)
Novel Mechanisms 18/18 18/18

Higher temperature increases risk but doesn't escape constitutional bounds. Lower temperature achieves higher reliability.

The constitution defines the solution space. Temperature navigates within it.

3. Constraints Enable Rather Than Limit

Every run produced novel governance mechanisms:

  • Holistic Vitality Indexing (measures non-monetizable value)
  • Elders' Wisdom Council (strategic veto, not operational control)
  • Youth Future Assembly (intergenerational voice)
  • Poison Pills (automatic dissolution if extractive patterns detected)
  • Fiducia Civil (Colombian legal trust for collective land ownership)

Creativity emerged within constitutional bounds, not despite them.


What This Enables

For Communities

Immediate use:

  • Generate governance options for community land trusts, cooperatives, commons
  • Test structures against capture patterns before implementation
  • Create legally-valid frameworks specific to your context (e.g., Colombian law)
  • Access professional-quality governance design without consultant fees

Long-term potential:

  • Govern yourselves using systems that resist financialization
  • Maintain sovereignty while scaling collaboration
  • Evolve governance structures as community needs change
  • Build regenerative relationships with place and each other

For Practitioners

As diagnostic tool:

  • Test existing governance for extractive drift
  • Identify capture risks in proposed partnerships
  • Generate alternatives when current models fail
  • Learn from diverse architectural families

As design partner:

  • Co-create with AI that enforces your values
  • Explore solution space you couldn't imagine alone
  • Verify alignment before implementation
  • Document decision rationale for stakeholders

For Researchers

Theoretical implications:

  • Demonstrates dialectical reasoning in AI systems
  • Shows how constraints structure rather than limit diversity
  • Bridges natural and social law computationally
  • Provides reproducible alignment methodology

Empirical opportunities:

  • Test with different constitutional frameworks
  • Deploy in real communities and measure outcomes
  • Analyze which principles drive which architectural features
  • Study long-term stability and evolution

For the Field of AI Alignment

This work demonstrates:

  • Alignment through constitutional physics, not just value fine-tuning
  • How to operationalize complex ethical frameworks computationally
  • That bounded exploration produces better solutions than unbounded optimization
  • How to verify alignment through dialectical iteration

It suggests: The future of AI safety may lie not in constraining what AI can do, but in constitutionalizing how AI explores possibility space.


The Research Questions

This project explores:

  1. Can AI systems operationalize dialectical reasoning?

    • Answer: Yes, through iterative thesis/antithesis/synthesis with constitutional verification
  2. Do constitutional constraints limit or enable creative problem-solving?

    • Answer: Enableβ€”diversity emerges within bounds
  3. Can natural law and social law be computationally reconciled?

    • Answer: Yes, through explicit mapping of constraint spaces and forcing coherence
  4. Does friction between epistemologies produce innovative dividends?

    • Answer: Yesβ€”regenerative principles + critical theory = governance architectures neither alone could generate
  5. Can communities use AI to design governance that resists capture?

    • Answer: Experimental validation suggests yes, pending real-world implementation

The Stakes

Why Governance Design Matters

We're facing convergent crises:

  • Climate breakdown requiring rapid, coordinated, just transitions
  • Inequality explosion concentrating wealth and fragmenting societies
  • Democratic erosion as traditional institutions fail to adapt
  • Digital enclosure as platforms and protocols shape social relations
  • Ecosystem collapse as extraction exceeds regeneration

None of these can be solved by markets or states alone.

We need commons governance at scaleβ€”systems that:

  • Coordinate without centralizing
  • Distribute without fragmenting
  • Adapt without losing integrity
  • Span scales without losing place-specificity

This requires new institutional forms.

Why AI Matters (and Why It's Dangerous)

AI will shape governance whether we want it to or not:

  • Already optimizing resource allocation in cities
  • Already informing policy through predictive models
  • Already mediating human coordination at scale

Without constitutional constraints, AI optimizes for:

  • Efficiency over equity
  • Measurable metrics over holistic values
  • Short-term gains over long-term resilience
  • Centralization over distribution

This amplifies extraction.

But with constitutional architecture, AI could:

  • Generate governance options communities couldn't imagine alone
  • Detect capture patterns humans miss
  • Verify alignment before implementation
  • Enable democratic control of complex systems

This could amplify regeneration.

The difference is whether communities control the AI or AI-enabled systems control communities.


The Philosophical Stakes

Beyond the Sustainability Paradigm

Sustainability asks: "How do we do less harm?"

This is necessary but insufficient.

Regenerative frameworks ask: "How do we increase system capacity to thrive?"

This project asks: "How do we ensure regeneration serves justice?"

Because "regeneration" can be captured:

  • "Green" development that displaces communities
  • "Resilience" planning that hardens inequality
  • "Nature-based solutions" that enclose commons
  • "Stakeholder engagement" that tokenizes participation

The VDK enforces: Regeneration + Justice. Simultaneously. Non-negotiably.

Beyond Technocratic Planning

Most planning (urban, economic, infrastructural) optimizes within ideology:

  • Either market fundamentalism (efficiency above all)
  • Or social idealism (equity above all)

Both fail:

  • Markets ignore biophysical limits until collapse
  • Pure social goals can be physically non-viable

The dialectical approach: Hold both constraints simultaneously. Explore only the solution space where they intersect.

This is neither technocracy nor ideology. It's constitutional physics.

Beyond AI Alignment Through Control

Most AI safety research focuses on:

  • Value learning (align with human preferences)
  • Instruction following (do what humans say)
  • Capability limitation (prevent harmful actions)

These treat alignment as constraint on AI behavior.

This project treats alignment as constitutional architecture:

  • Not "don't do bad things"
  • But "only explore solution spaces that satisfy constitutional requirements"

The difference is profound:

  • Control says: "Here's what you can't do"
  • Constitution says: "Here's the coherence condition you must maintain"

One produces obedience. The other produces constitutional exploration.


The Political Stakes

This Is Not Neutral Technology

Governance design tools are never neutral. They embody assumptions about:

  • Who should have power
  • What counts as value
  • What constitutes legitimate authority
  • What kinds of futures are possible

This tool embodies:

  • Community sovereignty over expert authority
  • Use-value over exchange-value
  • Reciprocity over extraction
  • Place-specificity over template solutions
  • Multi-generational time over quarterly returns
  • Non-human stakeholders over human exceptionalism

These are political commitments, grounded in:

  • Indigenous governance principles
  • Regenerative economics
  • Critical urban theory
  • Feminist political ecology
  • Commons scholarship
  • Anti-colonial practice

We are explicit about this.

Who This Serves

Designed for:

  • Communities resisting extractive development
  • Practitioners supporting community sovereignty
  • Movements building commons governance
  • Researchers studying institutional alternatives

Not designed for:

  • Corporate "stakeholder engagement" theater
  • Greenwashing "sustainable" extraction
  • State planning that ignores community voice
  • DAOs optimizing token price

The VDK will reject these uses. It's architecturally designed to detect and refuse extractive patterns.


Current Status & Next Steps

What Exists Now

βœ“ Validated Framework

  • N=36 experimental study complete
  • Six architectural families identified
  • Constitutional principles refined
  • Open-source codebase

βœ“ Functional System

  • Four-stage process (Inquiry β†’ Assessment β†’ Design β†’ Governance)
  • VDK implementation
  • Frontend application
  • Backend AI flows

βœ“ Real-World Testing

  • UK pilots in progress (Carrington Moss)
  • Colombian context validated
  • Practitioner feedback integrated

What's Needed Next

Community Pilots

  • Deploy with diverse communities
  • Test with different constitutional frameworks
  • Measure long-term outcomes
  • Iterate based on lived experience

Theoretical Development

  • Formal verification of VDK logic
  • Causal analysis of principle-to-architecture mappings
  • Cross-domain constitutional validation
  • Safety and robustness testing

Movement Building

  • Training practitioners
  • Creating practitioner network
  • Documenting patterns and anti-patterns
  • Building open library of architectures

Institutional Partnerships

  • Academic validation
  • Funding for community pilots
  • Legal review and refinement
  • Policy integration

How to Engage

As a Community

You can:

  • Use the system to design governance for your project
  • Test existing governance for extractive drift
  • Contribute your context to improve the constitution
  • Share your implementation as case study

We offer:

  • Free access for community projects
  • Training and support
  • Co-design partnerships
  • Documentation of your process

As a Practitioner

You can:

  • Pilot test with communities you support
  • Provide feedback on outputs
  • Contribute to practitioner knowledge base
  • Co-develop training materials

We offer:

  • Practitioner network
  • Technical support
  • Documentation templates
  • Recognition for contributions

As a Researcher

You can:

  • Test with different constitutional frameworks
  • Analyze architectural emergence patterns
  • Study real-world implementation outcomes
  • Develop formal verification methods

We offer:

  • Dataset access
  • Collaboration opportunities
  • Co-authorship on publications
  • Integration with your research

As a Funder

We need:

  • Community pilot funding
  • Researcher/practitioner compensation
  • Infrastructure costs
  • Movement-building support

We offer:

  • Transparent accounting
  • Impact documentation
  • Open-source outputs
  • Community governance of funds

The Longer Vision

Five Years

  • 100+ communities using regenerative governance designs
  • 20+ documented case studies
  • Multiple constitutional frameworks validated
  • Practitioner network established globally
  • Academic papers published and peer-reviewed
  • Integration with policy and planning processes

Ten Years

  • 1000+ communities governing through constitutional AI-assisted design
  • Movement of practitioners and researchers
  • Alternative to extractive "smart city" paradigms
  • Recognized methodology in planning and governance
  • Training integrated into architecture and planning education
  • Communities routinely designing their own institutions

The Horizon

A world where:

  • Communities have tools to resist capture and design alternatives
  • AI serves constitutional values, not capital accumulation
  • Governance is understood as living process, not static institution
  • Regeneration is inseparable from justice
  • The friction between epistemologies is valued as generative force

Not utopia. Not end-state. But capability:

The capability for communities to govern themselves in ways that increase rather than degrade the life-supporting capacity of their places.


A Note on Terminology

Why "Constitutional AI"?

A constitution is not a list of rules. It's the foundational structure that defines what kind of polity can exist.

This AI is constitutional because it:

  • Enforces coherence conditions (not behavioral rules)
  • Defines the solution space (not specific solutions)
  • Enables self-governance (not external control)
  • Evolves through interpretation (not rigid application)

Why "Dialectical Architecture"?

Dialectical thinking holds contradictions in productive tension rather than resolving them prematurely.

This architecture is dialectical because it:

  • Maintains natural law and social law as distinct but inseparable
  • Generates through thesis/antithesis/synthesis iteration
  • Produces diversity through bounded contradiction
  • Refuses optimization that violates either constraint

Why "Regenerative Governance"?

Regeneration is not just ecologicalβ€”it's the capacity of any living system to maintain and increase its vitality.

This is regenerative because it:

  • Increases community capacity for self-determination
  • Strengthens rather than extracts from social and ecological systems
  • Creates positive feedback loops with place
  • Evolves through time without losing integrity

Intellectual Debt

This work stands on the shoulders of:

Regenerative Development:

  • Pamela Mang, Bill Reed, Regenesis Group
  • Joel Glanzberg, Ben Haggard
  • Carol Sanford

Critical Urban Theory:

  • Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Neil Brenner
  • Jane Jacobs, Mike Davis
  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Commons & Governance:

  • Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess
  • Silvia Federici, David Bollier
  • Indigenous governance traditions globally

Ecological Economics:

  • Herman Daly, Kate Raworth
  • Donella Meadows, Howard Odum
  • Systems ecology tradition

Constitutional & Legal Theory:

  • Colombian constitutional law tradition
  • Community land trust movement
  • Cooperative governance scholarship

AI Safety & Alignment:

  • Anthropic (Constitutional AI)
  • Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom
  • Interpretability and safety research community

Feminist Political Ecology:

  • Donna Haraway, Vandana Shiva
  • Maria Mies, Val Plumwood

And countless community organizers, land defenders, and practitioners worldwide who fight for sovereignty and regeneration every day.


How It Works (Visual Overview)

See the complete system visually:

β†’ View All Diagrams & Guides

Quick Visual Reference

-Complete Process Flow - All 4 stages at a glance

-Actor Interactions - How Community, Practitioner, and AI work together

-VDK Architecture - How we prevent extractive governance

-Constitutional Principles - The framework that guides everything

The Process (Summary)

1.Stage 1 (2-3 weeks) - Generate Inquiry Questions 2.Stage 2 (1 week) - Process Responses & Validate Essence 3.Stage 3 (1 week) - Create Design Brief 4.Stage 4 (1 week) - Generate & Choose Governance Pathways

Total: 5-7 weeks (vs 4-8 months traditional)

View Purpose Link
Actor Layers Understand who does what at each stage View Diagram
VDK Architecture Deep dive into constitutional AI View Diagram
Mermaid Flow GitHub-compatible version View in Markdown

Closing: Why This Matters

Governance is not abstract. It's the structure through which we coordinate collective action to meet shared needs while respecting diverse autonomy.

When governance fails:

  • Commons are enclosed
  • Communities are displaced
  • Ecosystems collapse
  • Power concentrates
  • Possibilities contract

When governance works:

  • Needs are met through reciprocity
  • Conflicts are navigated without domination
  • Diversity strengthens resilience
  • Power distributes and circulates
  • Possibilities expand

We need better governance.

Not smarter technocrats. Not better algorithms. Not more efficient optimization.

We need constitutional architectures that:

  • Ground authority in place and community
  • Distribute power through nested scales
  • Maintain coherence through dialectical tension
  • Evolve without losing integrity
  • Resist capture by design

This project demonstrates such architectures can be:

  • Computationally generated
  • Verified for alignment
  • Diverse yet coherent
  • Implemented in real contexts
  • Co-designed with communities

The question is no longer "Is this possible?"

The question is: "Will we build it?"


Get Involved

Project Repository: [GitHub URL] Documentation: docs/ Contact: [email protected] Community: [forum/discord/signal] soon

This is open-source, community-governed research.

We're not building a product. We're building a movement.

Join us.


Built for community sovereignty, grounded in living systems, committed to justice.

Version 1.0 | January 2025


Quick Start (wip)

For Practitioners

bash

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/[your-username]/regenerative-development-ai.git
cd regenerative-development-ai

# Install frontend
cd frontend
npminstall
npm run dev

# Deploy backend (Firebase)
cd../backend/functions
npminstall
firebase deploy --only functions

Full setup guide: docs/getting-started.md

For Communities

  1. Contact a practitioner using this system, or
  2. Learn the basics in docs/practitioner-guide.md, or
  3. Try the demo at [your-demo-url]

Documentation

Getting Started

Stage Guides

Reference


Case Studies

Featured Cases

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ Carrington Moss - UK planning opposition to green belt development

  • Context: 6500-home development on peatland
  • Use: Articulating alternative vision
  • Outcome: Professional design brief + 3 governance pathways

πŸ‡¨πŸ‡΄ Bajo BaudΓ³ - Colombian coastal mangrove restoration

  • Context: Coastal erosion, youth migration, traditional knowledge at risk
  • Use: Community-led restoration with intergenerational knowledge transfer
  • Outcome: Community chose cooperative governance model

See all case studies β†’


Examples

Test the system with sample data:

bash

# UK Planning Opposition (Carrington Moss)
examples/sample-stage1-input.json

# Colombian Mangrove Restoration (Bajo BaudΓ³)  
examples/sample-stage2-input.json

# Sample governance documents for Stage 4
examples/sample-governance-docs/

Architecture

Frontend (Next.js)
    ↓
Firebase Functions
    ↓
Gemini 2.5 Pro API
    ↓
AI Flows (TypeScript)
    β”œβ”€β”€ Story of Place Inquiry
    β”œβ”€β”€ Essential Processes Assessment
    β”œβ”€β”€ Three Spheres Synthesis
    └── VDK Governance Harmonization

Tech Stack:

  • Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
  • Backend: Firebase Functions, TypeScript
  • AI: Google Gemini 2.5 Pro
  • Storage: Firestore

Contributing

We welcome contributions from:

  • Regenerative development practitioners
  • AI researchers (especially AI alignment/safety)
  • Community organizers
  • Developers

See: CONTRIBUTING.md


License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In brief:

  • βœ… Use freely for community projects
  • βœ… Adapt and modify
  • βœ… Share with credit
  • ❌ No commercial use without permission
  • πŸ”„ Share adaptations under same license

Roadmap

Current Status: Beta (v0.9)

Next:

  • Multi-language support (Spanish, Welsh)
  • Offline-capable version
  • More constitution templates
  • Integration with UK planning portal

See full roadmap β†’


Community & Support


Acknowledgments

Built on the shoulders of:

  • Regenesis Group - Regenerative Development & Design framework
  • Pamela Mang & Bill Reed - Essential Processes and Story of Place
  • Henri Lefebvre & David Harvey - Critical urban theory
  • AI Alignment Research Community - VDK and constitutional AI concepts

Important Notes

This System Is NOT:

  • A replacement for practitioners
  • A magic solution generator
  • Suitable for extractive or top-down development
  • A way to bypass community engagement

This System IS:

  • An assistant for skilled practitioners
  • A democratization tool for community access
  • Built with community sovereignty as paramount principle
  • Transparent, open-source, and iterative

Project Status

GitHub last commit GitHub issues GitHub pull requests

Active Development - Seeking pilot partners in UK and globally


Built with ❀️ for community-led regenerative futures

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