Anne Rademacher, NYU | Building Green: Forging Environmental Futures in Mumbai

What does it mean to learn, and try to practice, green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, this talk explores how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices, and then sought to implement them in Mumbai. Through an ethnographic account of green design training and practice, the paper considers the many roles that converged to produce an emergent, critically important form of environmental expertise, and the complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and temporal calculus that shaped both aspiration and agency.

Anne Rademacher studies the political and cultural dimensions of sustainability in cities. Her central interest is urban ecology – its scientific contours, its application across cultural and political contexts, and its interconnection with social change. She is the author of Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai (University of California Press, 2017), and Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu (Duke University Press, 2011). Rademacher is also co-editor, with K. Sivaramakrishnan, of Ecologies of Urbanism in India (Columbia and Hong Kong University Press, 2013) and Cities, Towns, and the Places of Nature (Columbia and Hong Kong University Press, 2017.