In November 2025, I attended a gathering led by Terralupa, of architects, engineers, designers, educators, and local government, to explore how the built environment might shift toward practices that honour life, context, and community.
https://www.terralupa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Terralupa_FieldNotes_Winter2025-full.pdf
Our hosts invited us to explore the Berkana Two Loops model (using a giant floor map we could physically locate ourselves in the systems - dominant/emergent) and question how we see ourselves and our work within wider systems change — accelerating innovation, honouring and composting the old, and supporting transition.
As Commonland describes it:
“For effective and transformational landscape restoration, each role is essential, contributing to an emerging regenerative future.”
I wanted to run a variant of this workshop as a continuation of my work exploring “systems of systems” a term I encountered through the RSA - looking at how we apply holistic methods to tackling complex, interconnected real-world challenges across cities, economies and ecologies.
I’ve designed systems-thinking workshops around imagined constellations, the 3 Horizons model and systems bookcase.. and was excited to further explore the Berkana model as a full workshop, building on Terralupa’s exercise.
The first workshop was designed for Civic Square’s ReBuilders end-of-programme celebration.
The aim was to encourage participants to think about their existing, emerging and future roles as regenerative built-environment practitioners.
The ReBuilders sessions brought together a much broader spectrum of people than I had anticipated. The conversations quickly moved beyond professional roles and interests. Lived and perceived barriers and opportunities, connection, responsibility, emotion, health and stability all became things that could be located on — or related to — the systems map.
The Framing
The Berkana (Two Loops) model provides a regenerative-design lens: not just asking how we reduce harm, but how we actually create the conditions for healthier systems, practices and relationships - and new ecosystems - to emerge.
The model gives us two broad loops:
The dominant system — established ways of doing things that grow, peak and may eventually decline.
The emergent system — new practices and alternatives developing around the edges.
Within and between those loops are different roles and activities:
Pioneers test and develop new approaches.
Networks help people and ideas find one another.
Communities of Practice nourish learning and shared practice.
Systems of Influence help emerging ideas become more visible or established.
Hospicing supports people and structures as existing systems decline.
Death / Compost asks what should be allowed to end, and what knowledge or resources might be carried forward.
Transition is the shifting space between what currently exists and what might emerge.
The point is - not that everyone has one fixed place on this map. We can hold several roles at once and move between them over time. And sometimes, we have no idea we even hold those roles until something shifts.
Without over-explaining the framework, participants are guided through a set of questions to add their own ideas and experiences to the shared systems map. They can select from a growing library of physical prompt tokens, or create their own.
With each workshop, the token library grows from what participants contribute, creating a living record of the concepts, reflections and experiences people associate with different parts of the system. The same prompt may end up in very different places, stimulating different discussions and shared stories. Tokens can also be moved, duplicated or reconsidered during the session as questions and conversations develop.
Seeing the System
I further developed the workshop into Seeing the System as part of my residency exchange at The Studio in Bath (a community of values driven micro-businesses and entrepreneurs). I wanted to explore how the Two Loops model might help us think about our roles (and impact) as creatives and technologists within constantly evolving systems.
There are, of course, many overlapping systems at play across The Studio – technology, creative practice, education, care, play, enterprise and community amongst them. We may not immediately think of our work as “regenerative”.
But the workshop asks us to temporarily consider ourselves as potential regenerative practitioners, whatever our discipline.
Seeing the System is an opportunity to think more deeply about our professional – and other – roles, and how these draw us towards different parts of a system.
Through our work, interests, communities and the spaces we occupy, we connect, experiment, learn, influence and are influenced. Our engagement may be active, passive or somewhere in between.
By placing our experiences onto the map, we begin to build up a picture of:
functions and roles
feelings and lived experiences
barriers and areas of stuckness
questions and uncertainties
connections and communities
opportunities for influence or change
This is not a workshop about systems theory. It is about systems practice – using a shared model to make roles, relationships, barriers and opportunities more visible.
The aim is not to draw conclusions about where people “belong” in a system. It is to create a framing through which participants can explore their own position and agency.
Where do I already have influence?
Where do I feel stuck?
Who do I learn from?
What am I helping to grow?
What might I need to let go of?
Where might connection or collaboration change what is possible?
From individual reflection to shared networks
At the end of the workshop, residents shared some of the networks and communities they already engage with.
This introduces another possible layer to Seeing the System: understanding not only our own roles, but the networks through which we learn, connect, collaborate and exert influence.
For individuals, this reflection might lead to goal-setting, joining new communities, assessing our capacity to influence, or drawing our own roadmap through a world in constant flux.
For The Studio, there may also be value in exploring how these connections can be made more visible.
A next question could therefore be:
How are the networks and communities around us currently mapped — and what can those maps actually tell us?
For example:
How are communities or networks clustered?
Who are they for?
Are they formal or informal?
How do people join or participate?
What activities, resources or opportunities do they offer?
What influence or outcomes are they trying to create?
And, specifically for The Studio:
How might making these networks more visible help residents connect, collaborate, learn and increase their agency within the systems they are already part of?
That question remains deliberately open.