Architects Discuss Balancing Sustainability, Urban Growth at Harvard GSD Panel

A panel of architects and academics discussed how architects can develop a sustainable model for their profession, balancing the need to house a growing urban population with the environmental costs of building, at a Harvard talk on Thursday.

Thursday’s panel — part of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice lecture series, established in 2010 — drew more than 100 attendees. The panelists included Northeastern University Jane Amidon, Toronto-based architect and designer Neeraj Bhatia, University of California Los Angeles professor Dana Cuff, and Harvard Kennedy School professor Mathias Risse.

GSD architecture professor Elizabeth B. Christoforetti, who moderated the discussion, said that the link between construction and greenhouse gas emissions — with buildings responsible for roughly 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — posed a challenge for architects.

“The context for 21st century design is thus a pressure cooker of external complexities that calls into question the very premise of our grand bargain with society,” Christoforetti said, “which is to improve rather than diminish the performance of the built world for the public good in exchange for professional power.”

Christoforetti also pointed to increasing urban populations as a challenge for architects and planners. According to United Nations projections, roughly 68 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050.

“Physical growth increases carbon demand and waste generation,” Risse said. “On the other hand, every generation wishes to inhabit this planet in its own way, and thus demands construction of new space. Social justice and human rights call for more affordable living space.”

Bhatia said the commodification of homes — which he said have been increasingly understood as real estate, rather than places to live — has worsened affordability issues, leading developers to focus on high-end investment markets, rather than units for low- and middle-income families.

“This transformation has led to more and more people living in precarity, particularly in dense, expensive cities,” Bhatia said.

“We often hear this referred to as the housing crisis, yet this system is working exactly as intended, which is to say it was set up to produce extractive value for those that can afford to play this game,” he added.

Bhatia said that upzoning and changing land use regulations can help cities support dense populations, but policymakers should also pursue changes that allow architects and planners to design housing around “a more collective ethos.”

Amidon praised how landscape architects have understood their work — creating everything from memorials to playing fields to parking lots — as a process of solving “complex overlapping problems,” not just pursuing linear growth.

“There’s a remarkable consistency, a collective belief in multi-layered, multi-scale propositions, a commitment to the power of human-centered, community-responsive, ecological-cultural hybrids that mediate climate, social and economic crises,” she said.

Cuff spoke about CityLAB, a multidisciplinary research center she founded at UCLA in 2006. The lab allows researchers to develop their own work and seek support on social problems, rather than depending on the requests of clients, neighborhoods, or local governments, Cuff said.

She pointed to several projects undertaken by CityLAB in recent years. One focused on designing low-cost, lightweight, and environmentally sustainable accessory dwelling units that can be placed in backyards. Another led to the creation of UCLA’s BruinHubs, spaces for students with long-distance commutes to rest and prepare food.

In pursuing what she termed “spatial justice,” CityLAB is constantly creating new work for itself and for policymakers and architects elsewhere, Cuff said.

“Each project is kind of a minor failure that sets up the next project and the next project and the next project,” she said.

Risse discussed how architects could adopt a sustainable philosophy for their profession, rather than embracing absolutist arguments for supercharged growth or enacting a moratorium on building.

“Construction ought to attend to the needs of future generations,” he said. “The rough idea is that each generation should consume only its fair share of resources.”

But he said architects should also remain flexible and pragmatic: “They look for opportunities to act on their ideas. Speak up as appropriate, make alliances where possible, spread abroad, become engaged as citizens.”

—Staff writer Ramon Moreno can be reached at ramon.moreno@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Yahir Ramirez can be reached at yahir.ramirez@thecrimson.com.