Hecht, KatharinaOrtega Reboso, Abrahamvan der Vegt, MichelleAppelman, JacoPedersen Zari, Maibritt2024-09-202024-09-202024-08-28Land, ISSN: 2073-445X (Print); 2073-445X (Online), MDPI AG, 13(9), 1375-1375. doi: 10.3390/land130913752073-445X2073-445Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10292/18029Regenerative design is being increasingly explored in urban environments to counteract and adapt to the changing climate and degradation of ecosystems. A critical success factor for the implementation of regenerative design is the evaluation of urban and building systems in relation to ecological performance and benefits. In biological ecosystems, the availability of high-quality energy, called exergy, and structural order can be used as indicators of the efficiency of on-going ecological processes. Structural order refers to the organization and systematic arrangements of biotic and abiotic elements within an ecosystem based on the available space and interactions with the goal to form a functional system. Ecological processes use the available exergy and generate ecosystem services (ESs) upon which human survival and that of other living organisms depend. In this article, structural order and ESs generation are proposed as indicators for exergy efficiency and accumulation in building systems, respectively, which can evaluate to what extent they are ecologically functional and regenerative. Based on this insight, design strategies are derived from the functioning of ecosystems that describe how buildings could become habitats that host living, non-living, and hybrid systems with optimized thermodynamic efficiency and that can generate ESs. This research suggests that when buildings improve structural order (an ecological concept) and implement ESs generating processes similar to biological ecosystems, they can facilitate regenerative processes more effectively that consume and generate resources and, with this, destroy but also accumulate exergy.© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/4102 Ecological Applications41 Environmental Sciences7 Affordable and Clean Energy0502 Environmental Science and Management3301 Architecture3304 Urban and regional planning4104 Environmental managementJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.3390/land13091375