AccScience Publishing / JCAU / Volume 5 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.36922/jcau.157
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Microbial technologies: Toward a regenerative architecture

Rachel Armstrong1*
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1 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas, Ghent/Brussels, KU Leuven, Flanders, Belgium
Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism 2023, 5(1), 157 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.157
Submitted: 11 February 2023 | Accepted: 17 March 2023 | Published: 20 April 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Regenerative Architecture)
© 2023 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

This paper examines the applications of microbial technologies in regenerative architecture, which enliven the built environment and its territories by establishing a different relationship between waste, energy, human inhabitation, and microbial “life.” The specific platform discussed is centered on the microbial fuel cell (an ecologically “just” platform that provides bioelectrical energy, data, and chemical transformation from human waste streams), which are exemplified by a range of demonstrators that establish transactional systems between humans and microbes. These simultaneously “sustainable” and “smart” demonstrators establish operational principles for the wider deployment and uptake of microbial technologies in an urban context. The city-scale implementations of these regenerative systems have the potential to establish the foundations for “living cities,” which are fundamentally bioremediating, resulting in an overall increase in liveliness of our habitats and living spaces.

Keywords
Microbes
Regenerative architecture
Microbial fuel cells
Bioremediating
Bioelectricity
Microbial commons
Funding
Living Architecture is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Future Emerging Technologies Open Programme (2016 – 2019) Grant Agreement 686585; The ALICE project is funded by an EU Innovation Award; 999 years 13 sqm (the future belongs to ghosts) received Sponsorship from Personal Improvement Ltd. and Living Architecture (EU Grant Agreement no. 686585). In-Kind support provided by Andrew Hesketh; Audioviz (UK FogScreen); the Bristol BioEnergy Centre at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and their research into alternative, sustainable sources of power for the home and infrastructure.
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Conflict of interest
The author declares that there are no competing interests.
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Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, Electronic ISSN: 2717-5626 Published by AccScience Publishing