Nature-Inspired Design for Wildfire Resilience:
Pioneering Panarchistic Architecture
Panarchistic Architecture represents cutting-edge research in nature-inspired design solutions for wildfire resilience. This innovative approach redefines how we build fire-resilient architecture and design urban and peri-urban environments. By mimicking the natural adaptations of species in fire-prone ecosystems, Panarchistic Architecture incorporates principles from biomimicry, biodesign, and ecological resilience to develop sustainable, wildfire-resistant infrastructures in response to the escalating threat of wildfires.
Researched and developed by Melissa Sterry, a renowned leader in biofuturism and bioinnovation, Panarchistic Architecture offers a transformative approach to creating buildings and landscapes that not only withstand wildfires but are regenerative in their presence. By applying biomimetics and ecomimetics, the framework draws from nature's strategies—specifically, fire-adapted plants and ecological processes—to create resilient urban spaces that emulate these robust natural systems.
Recognised as a seminal contribution to wildfire-resistant architecture and sustainable urban planning, Panarchistic Architecture has been featured in international publications and presented at leading global conferences and seminars. Highlights include the World Bank’s Understanding Risk Conference in Belgrade (2018), the Canadian Institute of Planners Centenary Conference in Ottawa (2019), and the Future of Architecture and Building Conclave in Mumbai (2024). Additionally, it has been showcased at public events like the 350th Anniversary of the Great Fire of London and The Monument Masterclasses (2017), as well as the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire (2018).
As climate change accelerates the frequency, intensity, and severity of wildfires, Panarchistic Architecture's nature-based solutions are increasingly vital for building wildfire-resilient cities and settlements. By integrating biodesign and biotechnology concepts that mimic the traits, behaviours, and systems of plants and ecosystems evolved to thrive with wildfire, Panarchistic Architecture provides innovative strategies for mitigating the impacts of wildfires on urban environments, safeguarding both communities, and critically, ecosystems that have evolved to live with wildfire and of which the future depends on its continued presence.
Panarchistic Architecture
a brief synopsis
By advancing biomimicry from the level of individual species to entire systems [ecomimicry], Panarchistic Architecture rejects generic notions of Nature and instead rigorously examines the interactions between living and non-living processes from the molecular to the landscape and planetary scale, across both human and geological timescales. The paradigm introduces several original theoretical and technical concepts in architecture and urban planning, exploring their potential applications
and implications both within and beyond the wildland-urban-interface. Also drawing on insights from indigenous and ancient fire cultures that are native to Northern America, among other continents, Panarchistic Architecture proposes that reconciling human and non-human systems in fire-prone wildland-urban areas is not only possible, but also holds significant ecological, social, and technological potential, warranting further research in the years and decades to come.
How can plants that evolved to live with wildfire inspire regenerative design?
Panarchistic Architecture is thoroughly examined in an in-depth thesis, which first published in 2018, compiles research findings from an unprecedented transdisciplinary research programme spanning several years and disciplines to present the logic of biomimicry of plants that evolved to live with wildfire.
Images: [Top/Bottom] Retardant BIObark™, Melissa Sterry ©.