In collaboration with Simon Fraser University
A building already makes everything a farm needs to eat.
Waste heat, CO₂, greywater, organics — today a building throws all of it away. Regenrtiv’s Resource Circularity Engine turns those streams into food, and sizes the yield, water, energy and carbon with cited numbers — while the building is still a drawing.
Web Engine in public beta · Rhino/Grasshopper plugin in final development, waitlist open.
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Hero image — a building with integrated growing systems
Facade or interior farm in an urban setting · portrait, editorial
Why now
Cities eat in a straight line — and the line has run out of room.
Food comes in, waste goes out, and everything useful in between is lost. The system that feeds cities is already at its limit, just as the demand on it climbs.
- ~1/3
- of global greenhouse-gas emissions come from food systems
- EDGAR-FOOD, Nature Food 2021
- ~1/2
- of the world’s vegetated land is already farmed
- World Resources Institute, 2018
- +56%
- more food needed by 2050 — with no new farmland
- World Resources Institute, 2018
The idea
Stop importing food and exporting waste. Close the loop.
Building-Integrated Agriculture treats a building as one metabolism. What it discards becomes what a farm needs; what the farm produces comes back as food and as measurable offsets. Regenrtiv is the tool that sizes that loop, stream by stream.
The gap
The case for growing food on buildings is settled. The way to design it isn’t.
The research is in: buildings generate the heat, CO₂, greywater and organics a farm consumes, and integrating food production pays back in climate, food-security and resource terms. What’s missing is a way to design it.
Every tool that exists today judges a farm after it’s built, or optimises one system in isolation — none sit in the architect’s model. So the choices that decide everything — structure, daylight, services, siting — get made blind, in early design, where no tool lives.
What that costs
- Architects can’t test what to grow, or where, while the building can still change.
- Food arrives as a retrofit — structure, services and daylight already fixed, cost ballooning.
- The waste-stream synergies never get sized, so the circular case never gets made.
- Green becomes decoration instead of production.
The design timeline
Concept
Schematic
Design dev.
Construction
The window
Structure, daylight, siting and services are still fluid — the only point a farm can be designed in.
After it closes
Everything is fixed. BIA becomes a costly retrofit, or it doesn’t happen.
Regenrtiv is the only tool that lives in the early phases, where the decision is made.
How it works
We put the farm in the model, not the spreadsheet.
The engine runs a live mass balance from the building itself — geometry, occupancy, climate — and hands the architect a decision they can act on before the concrete is poured.
Resource Circularity Report
kg / m²·yr
L / yr
kWh / yr
kg CO₂e / yr
Every coefficient in the report traces back to a citation. Values shown in the live tool.
- 1
Site & building
Geometry, occupancy, typology, Open-Meteo climate, OSM geolocation.
- 2
Waste streams
Heat, CO₂, greywater, blackwater, organics — generated × capture × divert %.
- 3
Circularity Rings
Pair each stream with cited valorisation loops and matched growing systems.
- 4
Balance & KPIs
Yield, water and energy offset, carbon, spatial efficiency, synergy.
- 5
Sourced report
A PDF where every coefficient traces back to a citation.
Zero fake math. Every default is cited and graded from peer-reviewed work or multi-vendor averages. Where the number isn’t known, the engine leaves it blank rather than inventing one — a sourced blank is worth more than a confident guess.
Web Engine (Lite)
In public beta
Run it in the browser. Fast conceptual loops, spatial viability, circularity targets, an AI assistant, and a report you can export and defend.
Request accessRhino / Grasshopper plugin (Full)
Final development · waitlist open
Lives inside the architect’s model. Per-surface daylight, geometric occlusion and scenario exploration through the peer-reviewed D-SymBIA interaction model.
Join the waitlistWhat integration means
Three ways a building and a farm become one system.
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Rooftop / facade growing
Spatial integration
Roofs, facades and interiors become growing area — production designed into the envelope, not bolted on.
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Waste-to-input flow
Resource integration
A building’s waste heat, CO₂, greywater and organics become a farm’s inputs, instead of leaving the site as cost.
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Systems in sync
Operational integration
Agriculture runs in step with the building’s services — HVAC, water and energy scheduled as one system.
The moat
Easy to admire. Hard to rebuild.
The interface is the least of it. Four assets sit underneath, and each one takes years and the right partners to earn.
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The BIA research pod at UBC
Photo of the physical pod in fabrication — six crop families
A knowledge base where provenance is the product
Every growing system and valorisation conversion is drawn from peer-reviewed sources or multi-vendor averages, and graded. The data is the moat — not the interface around it.
A peer-reviewed model, not a black box
The D-SymBIA scenario framework was published at eCAADe 2026 with Simon Fraser University. The expert study is done; V2 is in build. The method is on the record.
A living farm that feeds the math back
A physical research pod — six crop families — is in fabrication at UBC. Its real harvest and resource data calibrate the engine’s coefficients, so the model keeps sharpening.
Built where the decisions actually happen
Rhino/Grasshopper is where the firms that decide already work. Living there turns the tool from a calculator you visit into a habit you design with.
Proof
Not a concept. Funded, published, and in use.
- $429K
- Agricultural Clean Technology Program (federal)
- $100K
- UBC Campus Living Lab Fund
- 3
- peer-reviewed venues — Frontiers, ASCE JAE, eCAADe
- RAIC
- award recognition
Published
Resource Circularity Report published; eCAADe 2026 paper and talk on D-SymBIA; a completed formative expert-user study.
In users’ hands
Web Engine in public beta; the Rhino/Grasshopper plugin in final development with an open waitlist.
In fabrication
The first BIA research pod is being built — six crop families — with a live data feed planned to calibrate the engine.
Backed, published and built with
The company
A research programme, grown into a company.
The work was incubated at Perkins&Will Vancouver from 2023 to 2026, on federal and UBC funding. It now stands on its own as Regenrtiv — carrying the product, the team and the roadmap forward with the academic partners who built the science.
We don’t sell farms. We sell the decision that comes first — whether a farm belongs in a building at all — to the architects and engineers who make that call while a project is still on paper.
- Partners
- Simon Fraser University · UBC · University of the Fraser Valley
- Origin
- Incubated at Perkins&Will Vancouver, 2023–2026
The team
- MI
Mohamed Imam
Founder, Regenrtiv
Led the initiative as Principal Investigator at Perkins&Will Vancouver (2023–2026). Architecture, computational design, building performance.
- HE
Halil Erhan
Simon Fraser University
Design computation, interaction models, D-SymBIA supervision.
- AG
Alesandros Glaros
University of the Fraser Valley
Urban agriculture and food systems; co-author of the carbon framework.
- ZH
Zohreh Hassanpour Kahnamouei · Esmaeil Mottaghi
Simon Fraser University
D-SymBIA lead developers and researchers.