Sustainability & the Built Environment

Our Commitment to Past, Present, & Future

Upon hindsight, we honor our past heritage. With insight, we elevate the solutions hidden in the present problems. Through foresight, we foster adaptive capacity for the uncertain changes and challenges emerging from a future embedded in the seeds we plant today.

Our Interdisciplinary Approach

Our unique interdisciplinary approach branches the broad principles and practices from the DCP professions in a more generalist framework. We perceive and progress through the four dimensional lens of ecological (planet), cultural (purpose), social (people), and economical (prosperity) livelihoods. In learning, SBE students leverage the applied sustainability and resilience science, alongside the collective change frameworks, established or enhanced by institutional innovators and leaders, including (though not limited to) the following:

• BuildingGreen Knowledge Base
• Esri Geodesign
• Green Protocols
  • International Living Future Institute
  • International WELL Building Institute
  • Sustainable SITES Initiative
  • U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
  • And others…
• Project Drawdown
• Regeneration
• Stockholm Resilience Centre
• United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SBE empowers students to nurture nature’s regenerative economy and protect our planetary safe operating space (SOS). We act on behalf of our collective humanity and all of the other life forms with whom we have co-evolved. In other words…

To make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

– R. Buckminster Fuller via BFI