ABSTRACT
The term ‘sustainable’ is on everyone’s lips and features in almost every design proposal that wants to lay claim to contemporary relevance. The latest architecture and city plans are now almost invariably described as ‘green’. Yet the disciplines of architecture and planning lack an epistemological framework to define exactly how their practitioners are supposed to deliver sustainability and ‘green-ness’. There are plenty of articles, manuals and design courses that describe techniques and technologies for achieving sustainable solutions, but there appears to be no overarching theory that offers a rigorous means of assessing whether those solutions really work. We lack a generally agreed-upon understanding of what that ‘work’ really means. Too often, the organization of knowledge that is typical of architecture and planning offers superficial analyses and syntheses when addressing the issue of sustainability, while the natural world is regarded as an inanimate backdrop to design rather than a living system that encompasses it. Efforts to understand the built environment in properly ecological terms is muddled by the kind of revisionism that sees an architectural culture hero like Le Corbusier, who celebrated the city as ‘an assault on nature’, as a prototypical ‘green’ architect (Farmer and Richardson 1996).
