Announcements – Green Reconstruction: A Curricular Toolskit for the Built Environment

Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center of the Study of American Architecture released Power: Infrastructure in America as a part of its project. Green Reconstruction: A Curricular toolkit for the Built Environment.

Learning is the key to change. In the streets, imagination, knowledge and know-how are interdependent. Planning and designing a just and equitable built environment is difficult in these times of social and ecological turmoil. Professional focus must be anchored in intellectual ambition. Rote loyalty to orthodoxy must be reorientated toward new realities. It is essential to rethink professional education. For The arts and sciences in the built environmentTherefore, change begins in the classroom. It is a shared learning experience that rebuilds the imagination.

Green Reconstruction is a plan, an open work, to repair a world ravaged in three intersecting crises. These are mutual care, racial injustice, and climate. The Green axis is ecological transformation. The gilded, or Reconstruction, axis is material redistribution. The Green axis refers specifically to the ecological, economic and social ambitions of proposals such as the Green New DealIts counterparts around the globe, all of whom continue to be worthy of serious academic and public attention. The second axis is the continuation of W. E. B.’s unfinished project. Du Bois called, in Reconstruction of Black America(1935), Abolition Democracy and, with it, the political, economic, and organizational restructuring of a system in which the expropriation and living of Black and Brown is business as usual, while racial apartheid and ecological apartheid are global norms.

Green Reconstruction, which is more specifically aimed at the arts and sciences in the built environment, calls for a new curriculum. This is a change of direction. We recognize the critical role of professional, academically approved expertise in maintaining and building a status quo. This includes a status that is nominally dedicated to perpetual innovation. Green Reconstruction must speak from the bottom in order to mean and change anything. However, it must also find its own planners, designers, and technicians to survive. These figures, both academics and practitioners, are meant to link the powers of the lower levels with the higher powers, in order to provide technical equipment that can make things happen. We have thus tried to outline pedagogical frameworks for others to adopt and make, in order to open new conversations and bring to them the most profound knowledge and the greatest imagination.

Digitally and in print Green Reconstruction: A Curricular toolkit for the Built EnvironmentAnyone interested in the relationship between curricular change and societal change can download the PDF at no cost. The PDF can be downloaded from the Buell Center’s website. Power: Infrastructure in America websiteThe print edition can also be requested, although there are limited quantities. Here(Requests cannot be made after March 31,2022).