it's quite interesting how sustainability has grown to become moralized and exploited in politics, media, economy, design, and urbanism. At all levels, it has been used as a rationale and winning argument.
In architecture it has been used by some as an applied formula of energy-efficient behaviors, reducing architecture discourse to one of reactionary causalities, corporately measured by systems such as LEED.
A seminar by Mark Jarzombek & John Fernandez, Interrogating Sustainability ( MIT, Spring 2009) attempted to decrypt the moralized paradigm of " sustainability".
While browsing MIT's course offerings last fall, i smiled at the description of another seminar by Arindam Dutta, also tackling the " Sustainability Fix". Enclosed are some amusing excerpts.
The course will examine the claim that sustainability today is in fact a new way of organizing capitalism: that the sustainable courses in English lit amount to nothing less than a new ideological formation, the hijacking of nascent elites (i.e. students) into managerialism under the phantasmagoria of global consensus – complete with “blue ball” images of the earth – connoting both a world beyond politics and the formation of a new politics.
Those seeking to dispute the general science on climate change need not apply.
This course or its participants are not expected to have the competence to test such claims.