Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in MumbaiAt publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth asymmetries, and ecological stresses. Under these conditions, what does it mean to learn, and try to practice, so-called green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, Rademacher shows how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices and sought to make them meaningful through engaged architectural practice. The book’s focus on practitioners offers insights into the many roles that converge to produce this emergent, critically important form of urban expertise. At once activists, scientists, and designers, the environmental architects profiled in Building Green act as key agents of urban change whose efforts in practice are shaped by a complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and a calculus of when, and how, their expert skills might be operationalized in service of a global urban future. |
Contents
The Integrated Subject | 23 |
classroom | 28 |
Environmental Architecture as Good Design | 40 |
A team of RSIEA students prepare a topographical map of the Pali field | 54 |
RSIEA Design Studio students explore the Pali project site | 62 |
Imagining the New City and the Power to Create It | 65 |
An exhibitgoer ponders a map of Mumbais open spaces at the Open | 70 |
Breathing Space exhibitgoers explore signboards about open space in each | 76 |
More than Human Nature and the Open Space Predicament | 91 |
Making Design Good | 108 |
listening to their guide describe the sustainability features of one of the sites | 129 |
Ecology in Practice | 133 |
proposal for an ecoresort at Pali | 135 |
Soldiering Sustainability | 162 |
185 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Aditya architects ashram asked aspirations assessment Auroville biophysical Bombay Breathing Space builders built form challenge Charles Correa Chennai city’s complex concept context course cultural curricular curriculum Darius described development plan Doongerwadi forest eco-village ecology in practice ecosystem environment environmental architecture environmental design example exclusive experience faculty members firm future global Govardhan green building green design green expertise green spaces human Ibid ideas India Indian Institute integrated subject interview transcript invoked knowledge forms land landscape lecture LEED Maharashtra material metrics moral ecology Mumbai’s urban municipal architect nature one’s Open Mumbai open space organized Parsi political economic potential present professional projects Rachana Sansad Rademacher Ravishankar Reimagining Mumbai ronmental RSIEA faculty RSIEA students scale sense Siddharth social South Mumbai space advocacy specific structures study tour Suhasini sustainability Sustainable Habitats tion Towers of Silence transformation urban development urban ecology urban planning