Soldiering Sustainability

This conclusion chapter revisits the book’s core tension: the enthusiasm with which architects trained in environmental design, and the bureaucratic, political, and economic circumstances that made it virtually impossible in actual practice. Using the analytical concepts of scale, temporality, moral ecology, environmental affinity, and aspiration, it argues that architects trained at Rachana Sansad Institute for Environmental Architecture accepted their vocation as deferred, but worthwhile precisely because they foresaw imminent political economic changes that would affirm their place in a necessary future vanguard of green expertise. The RSIEA case underscores the peculiar temporality of contemporary urban sustainability as it is lived in social life: actual good design was always deferred, and yet ever-more-urgent.