#71 - Jennifer Koster: Resilience is the new luxury, for both built and human infrastructure

What if the most important infrastructure in any building is the people inside it?  Jennifer Koster has spent more than 25 years building companies across tech, construction and regenerative development. Along the way she reached a conclusion most engineers never get to: humans are a system too, and we need our own infrastructure to function properly. In this episode we explore both sides of that coin, the built infrastructure and the human one.  For practitioners, Jennifer explains why circularity is still what the built environment gets most wrong. Moving a light fixture into another building is not circularity. Designing a building so that none of it ends up in landfill is. She describes how WerkWell grew from an independent construction management firm (on her figures, projects run 30% over budget and schedule on average) into a building performance consultancy and an innovations group that brings market-proven European solutions into US projects. We cover low-carbon concrete, a particle board made from seaweed, power purchase agreements, aquifer recharge credits, and the (re)Building with Resilience symposium she co-organised after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, where resilience started to look like the new definition of luxury.  Underneath runs a very human story. A dot-com crash that wiped out everything overnight and sent her back to her teenage bedroom in Calgary. A chance conversation with contractors that became a construction career in Los Angeles. A growing unease at building enormous homes nobody lived in. And a family road trip through Europe that ended in a move to the Netherlands. Jennifer shares LivWell, her plan for regenerative communities inspired by blue zones, and her forthcoming book The Truth About Baggage, a journey from awareness to agency.  Chapters: 0:00 Intro 1:59 Guest Intro & the predictable unpredictability of life's journey 5:36 How would Jennifer describe herself? 13:46 Jennifer's journey into construction 23:37 Decarbonization in construction 26:36 WerkWell - A new path in construction and the pivot 42:44 Resilience, a new definition of luxury 54:03 Human Infrastructure 1:09:59 The "Truth about Baggage” 1:22:28 Jennifer's Future Plans 1:23:55 What does the built environment miss? 1:25:41 Q&A Start 1:26:03 What does innovation mean to you? 1:27:38 Key moment, book, event, person 1:33:55 Time Management 1:36:44 Favourite childhood memory 1:37:30 Advice for young professioanls 1:37:56 What would you most like to be remembered for? 1:38:11 Where can people find you? 1:39:09 Final Message 1:40:15 Outro Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode. Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world! Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from. Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience. Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:  X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach  Instagram: @petermbach87  Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/