Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai

by Anne Rademacher

  We give them guidance but we make them study the topics on their own; then they

  do the presentations to their class of twenty students. If each one takes a topic, they cover lots of ground on their own, and they get presentation practice and experience . . . They also get the confidence to explain the concepts to others. They will need to be able to do this with clients, so they start here. 4

  The “environment” in environmental architecture was thus gradual y defined

  through a combination of problem-oriented field situations, such as how to derive

  local y-sourced and ecological y sound building materials in a place like Auroville, and the more conventional recitation of lecture and course material that presented a mosaic of knowledge forms from the biophysical sciences, technology and

  policy studies, and a cultural history of built forms and “sustainability” in India.

  Experiential field learning on study tours and field projects gave students a chance to try to apply their newly acquired integrated knowledge in practice.

  Throughout my fieldwork, the curriculum was structured so that students stud-

  ied these themes simultaneously; courses might emphasize specific material and

  proficiencies in science, policy, design techniques, or technology, but most felt

  deeply integrative, cross-referencing and mutual y reinforcing one another as stu-

  dents progressed through them. Two versions of the curriculum are relevant here;

  as the program was transitioning between old and new syl abi, I experienced both

  rubrics. From the student’s perspective they were fairly indistinguishable, class

  titles and topical emphases shifted slightly in the transition.

  In the original curriculum, the biophysical scientific basis of environmental

  architecture formed a foundational starting point. Instructors used a systems

  approach to living organisms, the physical environment, and the flow of energy

  to convey a basic definition of ecology across four courses—Introduction to

  Environment and Sustainability, Disturbances and Remedies, Urban Ecology &

  Environmental Management, and Environmental Services Management Systems.

  In these, terms like “ecosystem,” “ecology,” and “sustainable” signaled scaled units of human and nonhuman elements in patterned, usual y quantifiable interactions.

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  Ecology in Practice 47

  Following assumptions general y associated with mid-twentieth century models

  of, and assumptions about, ecology, these interactions were then assumed to beget

  defined trophic structures, to reproduce biotic diversity, and to host the constant exchange of materials across units and within different parts of any given unit. In tracing these exchanges, and defining the relevant scaled unit boundaries, ecosystems could be designated—either conceptual y or in the practice of engaging a site for architectural design. This approach echoes definitions grounded in Odum’s

  1953 work, Fundamentals of Ecology; its core concepts—like order, mutualism, and cooperation in nature, an assumed trajectory in the nonhuman world toward

  “balance” or homeostasis, and its focus on communities of living organisms in

  constant interaction with physical environments—resonate with the implied and

  overt definition of “ecosystem” that was formal y and informal y imparted in the

  four ecology courses and onward through the curriculum.

  A definition of ecology derived from this specific version of systems science

  mapped most directly to the lectures and readings for Introduction to Environment

  and Sustainability. Here, students read aspects of Odum’s Basic Ecology alongside several other reference texts, including Environmental Science: the Way the World Works by Nebel and Wright and Modern Concepts of Ecology by H.D. Kumar. This course introduced and defined “sustainability” as a logical counterpart to the working definition of ecology; drawing from a collection of texts that included works

  considered to be classics of the mid-twentieth century Western environmen-

  tal movement (such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Jane Jacobs’ The Nature of Economies, and The Gaia Hypothesis by James Lovelock), as well as publications by Rashmi Mayur (the figure discussed previously who had first inspired RSIEA’s

  Head, Roshni Udyavar Yehuda), the course constructed an almost seamless concep-

  tual relationship between functional, vital ecological systems, and “sustainability. ”5

  In a way that echoed the opening session, it also placed an Indian figure, Mayur, in a prominent place among North Americans often invoked when sketching the mid-twentieth century rise of Western environmentalism.

  This conceptual rubric conveyed an interrelationship between “ecology,” used

  as a frame for explaining how the environment works, and “sustainability” as a metric of its vitality and value. Human life, particularly in the concentrations and numbers we experience in the historical present, was reinforced as the source of

  inevitable environmental disturbance, and the challenge to the environmental

  architect was framed as the mitigation of adverse impact. Maximal y functional

  nature—free of human-induced disturbances—was ful y desirable, sustainable,

  and good in this framing. Here emerges a preliminary guideline for understand-

  ing the frequent use of “good design” as the aim of both the RSIEA environmental

  architecture curriculum and, once trained, its responsible practitioner.

  Fundamental biogeochemical cycles like the carbon cycle, water cycle, and

  nitrogen cycle were covered over multiple courses, and their influence on the built environment, as well as the reverse, conveyed through principles of conservation

  48 Ecology in Practice

  and efficiency as applied to space, energy, and material resources. These principles were an additional core focus of Introduction to Environment and Sustainability , and they were repeated across the curriculum in terms of ecology as a problem in

  which “disturbances” must be identified and “remedies” devised.

  To elaborate this logic, the course called Disturbances and Remedies was designed as a compliment to Introduction to Environment and Sustainability . Here, the guiding conceptual principles derived from standard environmental impact

  assessment models; core texts include Canter’s Environmental Impact Assessment, P.K. Gupta’s Methods in Environmental Analysis, and Biswas’ Environmental Impact Assessment for Third World Countries. Following Joshi’s narration of the RSIEA program’s origins, the focal disturbance for this course was pol ution, disaggregated into physical, chemical, and biological expressions. A central concept here

  was that specific social characteristics can help to maximize ecological vitality, and certain aesthetic, cultural, and social disturbances can distort it. The architect might find those social dimensions difficult to define and clearly problematize, but the physical, chemical, and biological aspects could be measured and managed as

  air, water, solid waste, and noise pol ution. The course introduced students to fairly standard—that is, international y consistent—technical procedures for remediating pol ution. By studying environmental impact assessments and disaster man-

  agement plans, students were further encouraged to consider their potential role

  as architects in mitigating pol ution, and therefore maximizing “sustainability.”

  In the following semesters, two courses built on this foundation: first, Urban

  Ecology & Environmental Management applied the concepts to urban agglomera-

  tions. In four units, students study Environmental Problems of Cities, Mobility

  and Infrastructure, Environmental Planning & Disaster Management, and Urban

  Hydrology. Reference texts
such as Integrated Land Use and Environmental

  Models, Cities for a Small Planet, and The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban Living underlined a central message that the inevitable ecological disturbances associated with human settlements in previous courses automati-

  cal y multiply in scale and intensity in cities. One of the greatest challenges to the environmental architect, then, is environmental architecture in cities. “Urban” was usual y used interchangeably with “city,” but as the program proceeded, students

  were encouraged to notice the ways that natural resource flows and movements

  of labor, capital, and information rendered an urban continuum between city and

  countryside.

  Final y, a course in Environmental Services Management Systems presents

  techniques for managing water, solid waste, and landscape flora. The emphasis

  here is a menu of international y available technologies, but also modes of assessing each technology’s appropriateness and feasibility in context. India’s specific experiences with technologies considered “appropriate” or “inappropriate” are

  underlined with reference texts such as Agarwal and Narain’s Dying Wisdom: the

  Rise, Fal , & Potential Wisdom of India’s Traditional Water Systems, and a heavy

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  Ecology in Practice 49

  emphasis is placed on decentralized, small-scale techniques like the DEWATS

  (decentralized wastewater treatment) system used in Auroville and the rainwater

  harvesting systems most commonly used in southern India.

  The reader may notice the dated nature of many of the course reference texts, as

  well as their grounding in both late twentieth century Western environmentalism

  and in some of the so-called “Global South” voices that challenged and revised its assumptions of political neutrality and universality. Some texts also mark a place in global debates between environmentalists that have played out for decades,

  such as the relative appropriateness of rubrics like the Gaia hypothesis. 6 In general, the point of the RSIEA ecology course series was not to expose students to

  the latest scientific papers on urban ecosystems, or even to elaborate their understanding of ecology principles by introducing the many significant revisions to the science that have punctuated recent decades and continue to change in real time.

  As a consequence, many basic conventions of contemporary ecology—including

  heterogeneity, patch dynamics, disturbance ecology, theories of chaos and other

  historical challenges to the very notion of homeostasis—go unstudied.

  It is thus critical to underline that the RSIEA curriculum does not profess to

  create ecologists or environmental scientists. Its curricular structure does not

  invite students to undertake rigorous scientific inquiry beyond core concepts of

  systems, interconnection, and basic energy and nutrient cycling. Instead, the ecology courses are integrated into the rubric that Dr. Joshi called “the big picture;” it organizes particular definitions of environmental stresses, impacts, and problems.

  Ecology is in this sense closely related to the paired discursive metrics of relative

  “sustainability” and “good design.” Readers should not interpret RSIEA’s ecology

  courses as a pedagogical attempt to teach what disciplinary specialists would identify as the “state of the art” in the dynamic ecology subfield of urban ecosystem

  ecology. To the contrary, the meaning and content of ecology here was rendered in

  the curricular experience itself; it signaled a modality of interconnection and unity in which anthropogenic built forms and their socionatural context were expected

  to produce particular, new socioenvironmental contexts. The goal of “good design”

  was to minimize “disturbances” and to maximize a generalized environmental

  vitality. Such an approach to ecology necessarily lifts systems science and systems thinking out of their own temporality and dynamism; in so doing, ecology for

  RSIEA environmental architects was rendered as a frame with specific diagnostic,

  relational, and functional attributes. The dynamism of those attributes followed a very different temporality and trajectory than other social renderings and practices of environmental expertise.

  The curricular transmission of ideas of a science called ecology to a technical

  practice called environmental architecture should not be understood as a linear

  progression from a domain of knowledge, in this case ecology, to its operation-

  alization, in this case environmental architecture. As social practices, or as different forms of ecology in practice, both the science and the architecture involve

  50 Ecology in Practice

  the production of specific kinds of knowledge, validated and reinforced by their

  respective audiences. In this sense, it is somewhat misguided to interpret RSIEA

  environmental architectural practice as somehow failing to incorporate “actual”

  ecology—a critique that might arise from a perspective that seeks an active oper-

  ational domain for scientific ecology that is directly connected, in real time, to the changes and innovations always happening in that field. Research in science

  and technology studies, following the foundational work of scholars like Latour

  and Jasanoff, has repeatedly shown that fields of scientific knowledge produc-

  tion are also fields of expertise, epistemological domains in which the practitio-

  ners of a given form of expertise are technicians; their work involves a constant

  negotiation between the political and technical spheres. 7 The knowledge that is legitimated in each arena is rendered for, and affirmed by, specific audiences that are deemed qualified. In the case of RSIEA, then, it was within the Institute itself, and in the social experience of training, that the specific form of green expertise called environmental architecture was made and remade, verified and re-verified.

  It is also the case, however, that the foundational assumptions and assertions

  that came to stand for ecological knowledge in RSIEA environmental architecture

  were derived from a knowledge domain regarded as authoritative and legitimate;

  the contemporary scientific ecologist might read those foundational assertions

  and contest whether they are rightly “ecological” at al . They are, undeniably, considered out of date in scientific ecology.

  The curricular content at RSIEA thus outlined its own definition of what ecol-

  ogy meant for an environmental architect, identifying the technical details through which her expertise would be assessed, and the audiences and networks to which

  that expertise would be held accountable. An impulse to distinguish clearly, or

  draw a fixed connection, between ecosystem ecologists and environmental archi-

  tects risks losing sight of the distinctly different temporalities, knowledge forms, and legitimizing audiences that shape their practices and compose the networks to

  which those practices and their agents are ultimately held accountable.8 The epistemological domain of the “environment” in RSIEA’s form of environmental archi-

  tecture was therefore produced in the social experience of the curriculum, the

  interactions through which it was conveyed and contested, and ultimately, in its

  practice as a form of green expertise. In that domain, an environmental architect

  was assessed by the extent to which she practiced good design, not her expertise as an ecologist, biologist, chemist, or any other natural science discipline.

  Of note here is not only the ways that conceptual borrowing between fields can

  also redefine or temporal y freeze the concepts themselves, but also the tempo-<
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  ral hybridity of RSIEA’s particular form of green expertise. 9 Contemporary green architecture at RSIEA built upon historical notions from ecology, but inside the

  arena itself, it was precisely those elements that helped to transform conventional architecture to a practice that could take on the challenges of the present.

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  Ecology in Practice 51

  Having worked through its key ecological content, the remaining curriculum

  addressed environmental disturbances and mitigation techniques. Ravishankar’s

  opening day assertion that “most of what we need to learn we can only know

  from visiting the building site’’ echoed through a strong curricular emphasis on

  the importance of knowing the experience and physical aspects of a given building

  site, even if a team of disciplinary specialists might be needed to ful y understand them. In specific circumstances, design considerations like building placement and orientation, climatic context, and the availability of recycled or reusable resources were shown to facilitate strategies for minimizing built form impacts; these could be combined with available technological tools to enhance an architect’s accomplishment of “good design.”

  An instructive example of RSIEA curricular treatment of architectural impact

  and mitigation can be drawn from a session called Green Home Technologies,

  which was part of the week-long course sequence our group undertook in

  Auroville. As I will describe in more detail in a later chapter, the annual RSIEA

  study trip to Auroville is by far the most popular among the several field study

  programs offered at RSIEA; it played a central role in the experiential reinforce-

  ment of many facets of the in-class curriculum.

  Auroville hosts a variety of environmental architecture experiment sites, and

  enjoys an international reputation for a certain kind of experimental architecture.

  A RSIEA faculty member described the city to me as the “epicenter of sustain-

  able architecture in India”; indeed, the popularity of the so-called sustainability science trainings it offers to visitors attests to national and international renown.