Planning Sustainable Built Environments
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Other
2023
Hannah Teicher
Masters
Modern infrastructure that invisibly delivers clean water and reliable power is often held up as a norm. Yet, in reality, it often fails, or fails to exist, depending on where it is located and who it is intended to serve. In the face of accelerating climate change and inequality, disruptions to modern infrastructural systems are becoming more and more frequent. This suggests the need for a paradigm shift in how built environment practitioners envision, plan and design for sustainable settlements. This course will begin with a critical historical grounding in sustainability, interrogating what previous framings have achieved and how sustainability interfaces with the current emphasis on resilience. We will then tap into current infrastructural theory, gleaning useful concepts for thinking through infrastructural interdependencies, disparities, cascading failures and exchanges between the Global North and South. We will bring these concepts to contemporary cases of failures, from power outages to water system disruptions, examining the role of policy, technical, and physical limitations as well as underlying structural processes such as racism and colonialism. Building on this foundation, we will turn to emerging solutions, drawing from theory and case studies. We will engage with current discussions of passive survivability, safe-to-fail methods, and decentralization to envision alternative approaches to sustainable infrastructure. In the final project, students will propose a pathway for scaling up an emerging alternative of their choice. Major assignments will be individual, but we will engage in a collaborative process to develop the tools to think through alternatives and develop cross-cutting strategies to take into future work.