Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World

Citation

Warren, C.M.J. (2013), "Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World", Property Management, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 273-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/02637471311321504

This book was selected for review to accompany the sustainability issue of Property Management as it promises to take an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability. Published by Cambridge University Press in Melbourne, Australia it has a solid focus on the Australian environment but also draws on many case studies from other world regions. The objective of this text is to draw on a range of specialist authors from urban planning, geography, engineering and environmental science to examine the influence of human habitation on the environment. It then seeks to present multifaceted solutions to complex environmental problems.

The editor, Helena Bender is a Senior Tutor in the School Resource Management and Geography at the University of Melbourne. Like many multi‐disciplinary publications the book draws on sixteen separate authors to contribute to the various chapters. The majority of the chapter authors are drawn from The University of Melbourne with other contributors from The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of Otago and Liverpool University.

The text is divided into three major parts each containing a number of separate chapters. Part 1 presents eight case studies which range across a broad spectrum of sustainability issues, from land transportation to river basin management and fire in the landscape. Of particular interest to Property Managers in this part is a chapter by Dominique Hes which examines the “Effective Green Learning Environment” in which architecture plays a role in reshaping schools for environmentally sustainable and effective learning. Reporting on a case study from a government funded research project that evaluated the influence of innovative and sustainable school building design on the educational outcomes for middle‐school students in Victoria. Issues relating to thermal comfort, acoustics and lighting are explored along with student perceptions of their study environment. This case study provides a very useful insight into how sustainable buildings perform in an education setting both from the perspective of building performance but also as a tool to help influence understanding of environmental issues by students.

Part 2 examines “Skills” with chapters on critical thinking, working with complex issues and research methodologies. These sections seem to largely generic in nature and less focused on the environmental issues, while still drawing on teaching and research in environmental issues to illustrate the points raised.

The third part of the book is entitled “Theory” and presents sections on managing change and what future sustainable environments might look like. It provides some useful differentiation between sustainability and sustainable development and presents a view of sustainability which embraces much more than the narrow built environment which we, as Property Managers, often see as the extent of our role in contributing to a sustainable environment. This section concludes with a chapter on conceptualising environmental systems in which a holistic approach to the environment is required in which human‐environment interactions are evaluated and how we interact with these complex systems.

The book is primarily written by environmental engineers, scientists and architects with a largely environmental science perspective. It does present some fascinating case studies across a wide range of environmental issues, however, there is limited input from a built environment perspective with this limited to the school design case study discussed above. While this is an interesting text in the wider context it is not, in my view, of particular interest to scholars of property management except in respect of the evaluation of the school building research project. It does, however, illustrate perhaps, the complexity of managing sustainable built environment outcomes and the disconnect between environmental science and the provision of sustainable buildings.