How would you define sustainability in architecture and urbanism?
Sustainability in architecture and urbanism needs to be connected to the world in ways that not only respond to the immediate needs of the design discipline, but to become an instrument for changing the very conventions around which the discipline revolves. Correspondingly, the definition of sustainability has evolved over the decades, if only to adapt to the impact of new forms of knowledge from which it has had to benefit. Viewed from the perspective of forecasting, the emergence of data as a discipline since the 1950’s –if not, much prior– has offered many ways in which to generate, collect and document phenomena about the world around us. To this end, the emergence of sustainability as a field of inquiry has transformed a great deal. At the same time, one could have anticipated a much greater degree of impact on how the world has internalized the relationship between population growth, energy consumption, food, transportation and the development of the city, to name just some of the critical aspects that fuel architecture and urbanism. For this reason, any definition for sustainability must, at a minimum, bring the alliances between these varied contingencies into conversation in order to bring about a meaningful understanding on what role design plays in the formation of the environment in which we live. The knowledge of this data is anything but new, but it is not clear to what degree the various disciplines, and the public policies that emerged from them, have used this wealth of information to imagine an alternative from the very conventions that have made the city what it is today.
To this end, we might ask ourselves what the United States would have looked like today if the incremental political and economic forces had not, in fact, been guided into suburbanization as a de facto treatise for the expansion of the American city in the post-war period. If all the political, economic and cultural forces are not always necessarily well-coordinated, there are obvious ways in which one can see the evolving connections between the 1944 G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act and the eventual devolution of the inner cities of the 1960’s (“white flight”) as one reciprocal episode in this process. By extension, we can also see the ways in which the Reagan years have created an ever-increasing gap between wealth and poverty, the privatization of public space, the compartmentalization of city parcels into gated environments, and a range of other phenomena that have effectively compromised the public’s access to the basic infrastructure of health, education, clean water, and a range of other rights that may be considered as a Hippocratic Oath to the public.
As such, sustainability can be said to be defined by the many means we can imagine the recalibration of a world that humans have impacted beyond what nature has offered on its own terms. The delicate balance of forestation, agriculture, global and local interactions, the environmental impacts that transcend political boundaries, all bring a global perspective to the design of “geographies”, a scale often neglected in the design of urbanism. At the same time, the finer grain of the daily human existence that constitutes the evolving habits of different cultures – the use of energy for climate control, disposable waste in the airline industry, the impact of construction on the environment, the reliance on fossil fuels for cars, or even the consumption of beef—are also having a much larger footprint that is evident to the eye, as human expectations begin to transform the conventions of comfort and livability; these all challenge the very assumptions of sustainability if not seen as part of a larger framework at a global scale. How the conversation between local and global governance occurs is central to this question and the urgencies of this discussion are becoming ever more clear with the emerging political climate in the United States.