Judy Rogers

‘Sustainability’ After Disaster: Confronting the Complexities of Recovery in the Field: An Educational Experience

This paper focuses on the learning and teaching approach adopted in an undergraduate landscape architecture design studio at RMIT University that reveals some of the challenges involved when design students are asked to confront and work within the broad area of disaster response and recovery. Departing somewhat from the traditional approach often employed in design studios where students work individually or in small groups on a ‘problem’ with the aim of designing a ‘solution’ the studio approached the problem(s) of disaster recovery by focusing on collaborative ‘problem(s)’ definition. The focus of the studio was on the small township of Marysville in the state of Victoria, Australia that was almost completely destroyed in the Black Saturday fires of February 2009. Eight years on visitors to the town are delighted by the’ appearance’ of a town restored, however underneath the town remains vulnerable on a range of different fronts. The case study begins to reveal many of the pitfalls for designers and other professionals who are called on to work in post disaster environments, and the, often, narrow perspective about what constitutes ‘sustainability’ and ‘recovery’ that can lead to an overemphasis on ‘things’ at the expense of long-term processes of change towards what is an increasingly complex and unknown future.

Sustainability in Universities in the Asia-Pacific Region: An Introduction

In 2014, the Asia and Pacific Region had a population of 4.3 billion, which represented 60% of the world’s total.

Sustainability and Performativity

This chapter adopts the concepts performance, performing, and performativity to refer to the three domains of learning—cognitive, psychomotor, and affective—that are considered central to the realization of Education for Sustainability. Educating students in all three domains presents particular challenges in the higher education sector where the dominant approach to education for sustainability remains in the cognitive domain or the realm of performance (Shephard in Int J Sustain High Educ 9:87–98, 2008). Students, it is argued here, often arrive at Universities well schooled in the established ‘mantras’ of sustainability gleaned from the media and previous courses of study. These understandings are not neutral or are they value-free. Drawing on Butler’s (Bodies that matter on the discursive limits of sex. Routledge, London, 1993) employment of the concept performativity as constitutive of identities, it argues that understandings of the sustainable citizen are constructed through discourse and that these constructions need to be interrogated and challenged if education for sustainability is to lead to transformation and change for all. The chapter begins with a brief overview of sustainability—what it is and how the concept has been mobilized—before turning to a discussion of sustainability education or education for sustainability that links such education with the concepts employed here—performance, performing, and performativity. Three examples of curriculum development are then introduced and discussed within the context of this framework.