Bioplanning V.01 - A New Design Discipline #1012768

Look closely at how life organizes itself.

Neural networks, river systems, forests, and living tissues grow through interconnected, branching, and cellular patterns. Yet the places we build are still organized through linear grids and infrastructure inherited from an industrial age.

What if human settlements were organized according to the principles of living systems?

For generations, we have accepted that as cities grow denser, nature must give way. Bioplanning challenges that assumption with a simple but consequential proposition: hold development capacity constant, reorganize the system to reduce infrastructure, and recover more land for life.

Buildings and density can remain conventional. What changes is the system around them: how buildings aggregate, how people and infrastructure move, and how land, water, and nature connect.

Through five principles, Oneness, Grounding, Flowing, Belonging, and Flourishing, and sixteen practical imperatives, the book introduces cellular urban aggregation as an alternative to the grid and a working framework for planners, architects, developers, and policymakers.

Led by designer and inventor Dror Benshetrit, founder of Supernature Labs, in collaboration with Bruce Mau, Dr. Christine Wacta, Daniel Knott, David van der Leer, Dr. Eric Montgomery, Fergus Anderson, Greg Otto, Dr. Hila Oren, Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri, John Eleoterio, Dr. Marian Stuiver, Dr. Mike Wells, Robert Muggah, Sergio Fernández de Córdova, Taehyun Jeon, Thomas Ermacora, and Timothy Papandreou.

Bioplanning V.01 – A New Design Discipline is a first version, not a final word. Through the Bioplanning Independent Research Collaborative, the Institute invites universities, researchers, firms, and municipalities to test it independently: same site, same density, same buildings, only the urban system changed. The aim is not to prove Bioplanning right, but to establish where it works, by how much, and under what conditions.