Applying sustainability in the built environment

UCL Bartlett School of Planning’s ‘Sustainability Suite’ postgraduate pair of modules provides students with a window into how sustainability can be ‘understood’ from an interdisciplinary perspective.

UCL Bartlett School of Planning’s ‘Sustainability Suite’ postgraduate pair of modules provides students with a window into how sustainability can be ‘understood’ from an interdisciplinary perspective and ‘applied’ to the context of the built environment.  

Through inputs from sustainability experts in industry and construction, and a city-partnering scheme, students are exposed to complex and real-life sustainability challenges, and required first to apply them to the context of their home countries and cities, and then develop long-term strategic sustainable urban plans for a large-scale urban site. “We want to provide students with a window into how sustainability can be ‘applied’ to the context of the built environment,” explains Dr Catalina Turcu (UCL Bartlett School), who developed and designed the Sustainability Suite. 

Lectures and interactive tutorials and e-assignments in Term 1 introduce sustainability-related concepts, such as main theories, models and measurement, climate change, green economy, pro-environmental behaviour, sustainable transportation, low-carbon energy, health and wellbeing. In their second term, students collaborate with a municipality or city ‘partner’ to design a long-term sustainable plan for a real-life location, while developing financial and institutional mechanisms for its implementation. 

“We created the Sustainability Suite to integrate cross-disciplinary perspectives of sustainability theory and sustainable built environment into postgraduate education,” adds Dr Turcu.  

The Sustainability Suite won Sustainable UCL’s ‘Sustainability Education’ Award in 2019–20.