12 weeks

PG: Nil

UG: 250 Credit Points

 

Nil

Graduate Certificate of Engineering (Civil) ,

Master of Technology (Civil),

Master of Engineering (Civil),

Graduate Certificate of Technology (Construction Management),

Graduate Diploma of Technology (Construction Management) and

Master of Technology Management (Construction Management).

On successful completion of this unit the student should be able to:

1. nominate key sustainability challenges in terms of environmental, economic and

    social issues at a global, national and local level.

2. critically analyse (proposed) activities for the knowledge/conceptual/epistemological

    structures they are embedded in – all the while recognising that the choice of knowledge

    structures is itself interpretation dependent.

3. propose changes to the way activities are constituted such that they are more clearly

    sustainable eg. recognising the perverse incentives (to environmental sustainability) that

    form the context within which current actions in environment proceed.

4. recognise the "instrumentation of sustainability", i.e. the measures and indicators by which

    sustainability is currently defined and acted upon, and how to critically assess it.
5. prepare a sustainability statement within a given context.
6 evaluate current practices and tools available to "sustainability practitioners" and propose

   improvements.

Lectures,

Tutorials and

Syndicate Work

One set of three short reviews (1200 words; worth 10%);

one sustainability statement (2500 words; worth 30%);

written assignment and 10 minute presentation (2500 words; worth 60%).

On completion of this unit students are expected to enhance several of their graduate attributes viz:

1. Understanding of the social and epistemological (systems and knowledge structural) bases

    of environmentally unsustainable practice.
2. Understanding of the general institutional structures necessary to facilitate, critically,

    sustainable practice.
3. Capacity to recognise and analyse for the structural bases of environmental dislocation.
4. Capacity to recognise and propose politically acceptable changes to environmentally

    damaging social structures. These changes will dissolve damage without simply displacing

    it (materially, temporally, socially or ideologically) and/or generating new damage.
5. Inter- and trans-disciplinary teamwork skills.

This unit introduces a very new and thoroughgoing approach to sustainability. It is based on the idea that by recognising that we act in the world through frameworks of thinking and of organising society (ie. institutions), leads to a circumspect and responsible approach to life. The institutional bases of our expectations of the world are investigated along with the tools used to respond and act. Examples from science and engineering are used to illustrate and extensive use is made of mini-excursions. Later in the unit, specific socio-economic tools such as the Precautionary Principle and Triple Bottom Line accounting are introduced and analysed. Their role as change agents in the process of moving to sustainable institutions is highlighted.

Prescribed texts:
Lakhoff, G. & Johnson, M., 2003, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd Edition, University of Chicago Press.
Fisher, F., 2006, Response Ability: Environment, Health & Everyday Transcendence, Vista Publishing.

Special computer skills required:
Basic computer skills