Sustainability
Being from India, and professionally an architect, I feel more inspired to learn and implement sustainable solutions and spread the awareness in my home country. In India, the need for it is alarmingly urgent. I would probably have opportunities and reasons to master the sustainable ideologies and ways of implementing it swiftly.
Sustainability is the sense of using, reusing, utilizing and recycling the resources to maintain the ecological balance, and preserve resources for future generations. In the 21st century, the term has become a basic need in every field. The need for this was realized after the industrial boom, revolution that primarily cared about inventions, progress and the mass production. The consequences of rapid deterioration of Earth’s climatic stability wasn't anticipated early on by the people. Now, the continuing damage of over utilization and exploitation of resources in some parts of the world have crossed the potential threat level for the continuum of livable conditions in those cities. Delhi, being one of the examples, a city in India, that has been experiencing worst quality of air, leading to increase in respiratory, skin and other diseases; deterioration of historical structures, shift in climatic cycles etc. Recently moving from Delhi to Boston, I, along with a lot of people have experienced the effect of improvement of daily efficiency and health then before.
What pollutes the air is not just transportation industry, but largely the buildings we live in, the energy we consume, the waste produced by households. We tend to find solutions for reducing the number of cars on the road and increasing the usage of public transport. But now, we have reached a saturation point, where we need to start doing more than that. The facts suggest that that the impact of infrastructure's design and performance contributes more to the global warming than any other industry.
Hence, there is need for having sustainable design solutions throughout the world, more than anything. The practice of just giving extra points and recognition to sustainable solutions, or just some countries having the need for designing sustainable is not sufficient anymore. We need to refurbish the existing structures to make the infrastructure more efficient and adaptable to changing climatic conditions. As architects and designers, it is our duty to enforce this changes in the society that we live in, and influence the authorities to start making it a priority. Being from the generation, who is committed to make this world a better place, we need to take extra steps to make this happen. Cities in Europe and USA have certain guidelines that comply with the growing need for sustainable solutions, but there cities in India and many other countries which don't have such strict laws to implement sustainable solutions in every new and existing buildings.
If this change is undertaken by today’s designers, then the world we live in as a whole, could be the utopia. As a young designer, I hope to see every man made surface become a living surface - covered with greens, to restore the original earth surface, full of greens, starting from a city which is often criticized of having a concentrated green space, which is definitely insufficient for the city - NYC.
