Marrying urbanisation with green goals 

THE late great American architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller famously said: “The best way to predict the future is to design it.”

Fuller’s philosophy has implications on the way forward for green urbanisation. The future, as he saw it, is anything but defined; it is created by us. In that vein, if we are to change our current trajectory towards certain climate doom, we will have to reassess the way we design, build and manage our urban settlements. And we need to do this sooner rather than later if we want to live and thrive in the cities of the future.

A new flagship UN report on climate change has made it abundantly clear that harmful carbon emissions in the past decade have never been higher. Estimates suggest that buildings and construction account for a massive 39 per cent of all carbon emissions in the world.