AR6015

SUSTAINBLE PLANNING
AND ARCHITECTURE

By
Ar.M.SarathKumar
 UNIT I

Concept of Sustainability – Carrying

capacity, sustainable development –
Bruntland report –
Ethics and Visions of sustainability.
 UNIT II

Eco system and food chain, natural

cycles – Ecological foot print – Climate
change and
Sustainability.
 UNIT III

Selection of materials Eco building materials

and construction – Biomimicry, Low impact
construction, and recyclable products and
embodied energy. Life cycle analysis. Energy
sources –
Renewable and non-renewable energy.
 UNIT IV

Green building design – Rating system –

LEED, GRIHA, BREEAM etc., case
studies.
 UNIT V

Urban ecology, social and economic

dimensions of sustainability, urban heat
Island effects,
sustainable communities – Case
studies.
• 1.What is sustainability
• 2.Pillars of sustainability
• 3.Carrying Capacity
• 4. Sustainable Development
-Social
-Economic
-Environmental
• 5.Bruntland Report
• 6.Ethics and Vision of sustainability
 SUSTAINABILITY

• Since the 1980s sustainability has been used

more in the sense of human sustainability on
planet Earth and this has resulted in the most
widely quoted definition of sustainability as a part
of the concept sustainable development, that of
the Bruntland Commission of the United
Nations on March 20, 1987:
• “Sustainable Development is development that
meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs”.
 WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?

Sustainability is defined as a requirement of our

generation to manage the resource base such that the
average quality of life that we ensure ourselves can
potentially be shared by all future generations.

The quality of not being harmful to the environment

or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting
long-term ecological balance.
 SUSTAINABILITY

• “Improving the quality of human life while

living within the carrying capacity of supporting
ecosystems.”

• Caring for the Earth

• Quality of all human life
• Living within the limits
• Conservation and development
THREE PILLARS OF
SUSTAINABILITY
 CARRYING CAPACITY

• The population that can be supported

indefinitely by an ecosystem without
destroying the ecosystem.
• Depends on available resources and per capita
consumption
• The carrying capacity is the number of
individuals an environment can support without
significant negative impacts to the given organism
and its environment

• The carrying capacity of an environment may

vary for different species and may change over
time due to a variety of factors including: food
availability, water supply, environmental
conditions and living space.
 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

• The Bruntland Report (Our Common

Future) defined sustainable development as
“development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.”
• It contains two key concepts:
To meet present needs without compromising
the needs of the future.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
 SOCIAL SUSTAINABLE SYSTAM
• Social: A socially sustainable system must
achieve fairness in distribution and
opportunity, adequate provision of social
services including health and education,
gender equity, and political accountability and
participation.
 ECONOMIC SUSTAINABLE SYSTAM

• Economic:
An economically sustainable system must be
able to produce goods and services on a
continuing basis, to maintain manageable levels
of government and external debt, and to avoid
extreme sectoral imbalances which damage
agricultural or industrial production
ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABLE SYSTAM

• Environmental:
An environmentally sustainable system must
maintain a stable resource base, avoiding over-
exploitation of renewable resource systems or
environmental sink functions, and depleting
nonrenewable resources only to the extent that
investment is made in adequate substitutes.
Gro Harlem Bruntland
• She was born on 20 April 1939.
• She is a doctor and she is former director
of the World Health Organization.
• A feminist, she was Prime Minister of
Norway (1981, 1986–89, 1990–96), the
first woman and youngest ever.
• She was chosen to direct the U.N. World
Commission on Environment and
Development.
• The Bruntland Report (former Norwegian
Prime Minister Gro Harlem Bruntland),
published 27 years ago.
 OUR COMMON FUTURE
• It has been successful in forming international ties between
governments and multinational corporations.

• Described sustainability as a three-legged stool with people,

planet and profit taking equal importance in the equation

• Our Common Future aimed to discuss the environment &

development as one single issue
• “The report that called for a strategy that
united development and the environment –
described by the now common term
“SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT”.

• The Bruntland report (Our Common Future)

defined sustainable development as
“development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.”
 BRUNTLAND REPORT
• The Brunt land Commission's mandate was to:

• “ re-examine the critical issues of environment and development and

to formulate innovative, concrete, and realistic action proposals to
deal with them;
• strengthen international cooperation on environment and
development and to assess and propose new forms of cooperation
that can break out of existing patterns and influence policies and
events in the direction of needed change; and
• raise the level of understanding and commitment to action on the
part of individuals, voluntary organizations, businesses, institutes,
and governments” (1987: 347). “The Commission focused its
attention in the areas of population, food security, the loss of species
and genetic resources, energy, industry, and human settlements -
realizing that all of these are connected and cannot be treated in
isolation one from another”
 KEY ISSUES
• 1.Reviving economic growth
• 2.Changing the quality of growth
• 3.Meeting essential needs for jobs, food, energy,
water and sanitation
• 4.Ensuring a sustainable level of population
• 5.Reorienting technology and managing risk
• 6.Merging environment and economics in
decision-making processes
 COMPONENTS OF
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

• Environment
We should conserve and enhance our resource base, by gradually
changing the ways in which we develop and use technologies.

• Social Equity
Developing nations must be allowed to meet their basic needs of
employment, food, energy, water and sanitation. If this is to be done in
a sustainable manner, then there is a definite need for a sustainable
level of population.

• Economic Growth
Economic growth should be revived and developing nations should be
allowed a growth of equal quality to the developed nations.
 ETHICS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

"We need a new system of values, a system of the

organic unity between mankind and nature and the
ethic of global responsibility"
-Mikhail Gorbachev

 Conserving the natural environment

 Strengthening the economy
 Improving social conditions.
The four main ideas behind the Earth Charter are:

1. Respect Earth and life in all its

diversity.

2. Care for the community of life

3. Build democratic societies

4. Secure Earth's bounty and beauty

SOURCE:
http://www.earthcharter.org
ETHICS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
 ETHICS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

• Ethics is essentially a practical matter.

• It is concerned with how we should live, how we
should treat other people and the world around us, in
short, how we should act in a moral and responsible
manner.
• ‘A city in which everyone took proper care of
himself would be a city that functioned well and
found in this the ethical principle of its permanence’
(Foucault 1997: 287).

Source: Understanding sustainable architecture.

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennets.
 The consequentialist approach

• Consequentialist approaches to ethics are commonly

followed in national policy making and in personal
decision-making.
• Consequentialist approaches contrast with the
rights/duty-based approaches, because they are
concerned with the consequences of actions rather
than with the duties of the person acting.

Source: Understanding sustainable architecture.

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennets.
 Intergenerational equity

• A problem for all approaches to sustainability ethics

concerns the issue of intergenerational equity inherent
in almost every definition of sustainable development
and sustainable design.
• With this approach when a range of alternative
decisions is open to us now, we ought to choose those
actions that on the whole would most likely lead to
the best consequences.

Source: Understanding sustainable architecture.

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennets.
 Environmental ethics
• Environmental ethics attempts to explain how human
behavior toward the natural world can and/or should be
governed by moral norms.
• The ‘new sciences’ recognize humans not as isolated,
separate objects but rather as having interconnected
relationships with everything around them.
• In analyzing the environmental movement of the time
he identified two key strands;
1.Shallow
2.Deep

Source: Understanding sustainable architecture.

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennets.
 Discourse ethics
• 1) Discursive ethics adds a contextual dimension to
the universal principle of a morality based on human
reason.
• 2) Discursive ethics adds a communal dimension to
the expression of human reason which cannot be
expressed in isolation.
• 3) Discursive ethics cannot be conceived as a purely
theoretical thought exercise and therefore adds a
practical dimension to moral decision.
(O’Hara 1998)

Source: Understanding sustainable architecture.

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennets.
VISIONS OF SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
 VISIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

1. NO POVERTY

2. ZERO HUNGER

3. GOOD HEALTH AND

WELL- BEING

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal
 4. QUALITY EDUCATION

5. GENDER EQUALITY

6. CLEAN WATER AND

SANITATION

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal
 7. AFFORDABLE AND
CLEAN ENERGY

8. DECENT WORK AND

ECONOMIC GROWTH

9. INDUSTRY,INNOVATION
AND INFRASTRUCTURE

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal
10. REDUCED INEQUALITIES

11. SUSTAINABLE CITIES

AND COMMUNITIES

12. RESPONSIBLE
CONSUMPTION AND
PRODUCTION

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal
 13.CLIMATE ACTION

14. LIFE BELOW WATER

15. CLEAN WATER AND

SANITATION

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal
 16. PEACE AND JUSTICE

17. PARTNERSHIP FOR

THE GOALS

SOURCE:
http://www.wvi.org/gallery/sustainable-development-goal