Today we visited the Victoria Uni of Wellington’s School for Architecture and Design where we heard from 3 great presenters associated with the uni. The first speaker made a great point about how we need to prioritize our sustainable efforts. He compared the use of plastic bags to the actual production of the food that goes in the plastic bags and concluded that the negative impact of the food production was 1300x worse. The second speaker gave great insight into architecture projects that students have done with environmental sustainability development in mind. Finally the 3rd speaker was extremely wise in the land architecture branch. He also gave great stories about how marginalized peoples lack sustainable land development and instead of forcing it on them, he realized that they just didn’t have the capacity to care about that when their basic needs were still not yet met.
We then walked to the Uni of Otago, Wellington where we met with people from the New Zealand Centre of sustainable cities. Getting to see the challenges that urban New Zealanders are facing was really eye-opening because I have been putting the country in such a high pedestal so the reality check was appreciated.
