THE NEXT PARADIGM; WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The conversation appears to have stalled. Almost every student I teach or practitioner I talk to, when asked what s/he thinks is sustainable design, replies, “a Green building, right?” The conflation of Green and sustainable is unsettling. It troubles me. It should concern every designer who is alarmed by the planetary crises that we confront today.


I will start by saying that I have nothing against Green labels. Standards and metrics are useful, in principle, since they can become blueprints for change. The question we face, however, is if Green certification has done enough. The answer is self-evident: after more than 20 years since the first label emerged, only a fraction of what has been built is certified. Greening throughout the region is mostly discretionary and market-led; developers are left to decide if they want their projects to be Green and how far to go.


What is alarming here is not just the pace of adoption. It is also impact. What does a Green label oblige us to do that actually matters? And more importantly, what does Greening keep us from doing?


Author and activist Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, famously asked “(what) kind of problem the city is”1


. Each problem type, she reasoned, had to be tackled with the


appropriate “methods of analysis and discovery (and) strategies for thinking.” A task that responds to the wrong type might achieve nothing; the solution might even exacerbate the problem. Green, as a problem type, is a flawed response to the challenge of sustainability. In this essay, I discuss three reasons why, along with the thinking that has emerged from a misbegotten framing.


The first is that we must do less harm. The solace we get from this position is not to be underestimated. Incrementalism can be comforting. We take great pride in a small improvement in the energy efficiency of, say, an air-conditioning system. It keeps us from asking if cooling is needed, all the time and everywhere.


The second, perhaps more insidious belief, is that if we improve the parts, the whole will inevitably get


better. In this worldview, everything can be taken apart, repaired, put back together, much like a broken watch. We now know that this is not how a living system, say, a forest or a city, works. These systems can die.


The third relates to nature. Most agree that nature must be protected. But even the well-meaning see nature as the other, something out there, like an artefact in a museum. We cast ourselves as custodian or protector or curator. But nature is not external to our lives; it is here, where we stand. Grasping this idea changes the goal from ethical behaviour to survival.


At the end of this commentary, these three strands will converge into a new paradigm, one that breathes life into the well-trodden, now depleted, idea of sustainability.


1 Yanweizhou Park, China 2 Dense vegetated cover and biodiversity habitat at the Pioneer and Crescent Halls, NTU


28 FUTURARC


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119