SG3, Decoding Sustainable Urbanism

Book excerpt: "There is growing consensus that sustainability, as an imperative, compels us to rethink what we design. How this in turn affects process and approach, the question of how we design, remains unclear. This is true in education as it is in practice. Educators struggle to reconcile the dissonance between conventions of pedagogy and emerging tools and metrics of sustainability; practitioners fall back on industry checklists for green building certification. It does not help that 'sustainability' is hard to pin down. The people-profit-planet principle -- useful as classroom rhetoric -- sheds no light on process. We are left with elemental knowledge, without tactical knowhow. This book presents the work of students and their teachers across three studios of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD) programme at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore. The students -- from varied backgrounds and disciplines -- were assigned a large site in Singapore which they had to reimagine for a distant future. Each studio began with research and mapping, culminating in a masterplan that linked multiple parts of each site into an integrated, yet differentiated, whole. The title of this book, SG3, speaks to the cumulative impact of these interventions, which is more than the sum of three sites. Each site amplifies the other, resulting in a new way of thinking and acting. The pages ahead are organised according to the stages of the studio process, prefaced by a discussion on why Dr. Nirmal Kishnani -- who taught all three studios -- offers an educator's perspective, asking what the outcome says about the teaching of sustainable design. Asma Khawatmi -- who co-taught the first studio, and helped frame a direction that was applied to all three -- examines when and how principles known to urban designers in practice are adapted to emerging imperatives of sustainability. Deepshi Bhogal and Mayank Kaushal were both students of the programme, and are now successful practitioners in Singapore with a deep interest in sustainability. In the epilogue, they reflect on how their time in the studio shaped later decisions at the practitioner's drawing board."--Page 7.