Description
Book SynopsisAt 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.
Trade Review"Will make us think in a different way about how we study cities, as well as how we live in them." * International Institute for Asian Studies *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
1. City Ascending, City Imploding
2. The Integrated Subject
3. Ecology in Practice: Environmental Architecture as Good Design
4. Rectifying Failure: Imagining the New City and the Power to Create it
5. More than Human Nature and the Open Space Predicament
6. Consciousness and Indian-ness: Making Design “Good”
7. A Vocation in Waiting: Ecology in Practice
8. Soldiering Sustainability
Notes
References
Index
