Integrating Sustainable Development Goals into the Architecture Curriculum: Experiences and Perspectives

Humans are at the center of global climate change: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are igniting sustainability with proactive, global, social goals, moving us away from the Brundtland paradigm ‘do nothing today to compromise tomorrows generation’. This promotes a regenerative shift in the sustainability concept, no longer only considering resources and energy, but also significant human-centric attributes. Despite this, precise ecological and sustainable attitudes have little prognostic value regarding final related individual human behavior. The global cultural challenge, dominated by technological innovations and business imperatives, alongside the mirroring technological fallacy and lack of ethical reasoning, makes the role of small actions, at individual and at academic scale even harder. This paper outlines the context in which universities can collaborate and contribute to triggering sustainability values, attitudes, and behavior within future regenerative societies. This contribution consists in three main areas: the first analyzes the issue of sustainability transitions at the individual scale, where influencing factors and value–behavior links are presented as reviewed from a number of multi and transdisciplinary scholars’ works. The second part enlarges the picture to the global dimension, tracing the ideological steps of our current environmental crisis, from the differences in prevailing western and eastern values, tradition, and perspectives, to the technological fallacy and the power of the narratives of changes. Finally, the task of our role as academics in the emerging ‘integrative humanities’ science is outlined with education promoted as an essential driver in moving from sustainability to regenerative paradigms.

The topic of SDG interactions is a relatively new research area with many knowledge gaps. Some of these gaps are addressed in this summary of a Special Feature of Sustainability Science, including new findings and emerging issues on (1) the characteristics of SDG interactions; (2) methods/methodology to analyse these interactions; and (3) the elaboration of drivers that influence SDG synergies. The importance of scale is clear in two emerging issues. First, there is evidence of a disconnect between national planning for SDGs and their implementation at the local scale which is leading to SDG trade-offs between these scales. Second, the concept of a “critical transition zone” is introduced where SDG trade-offs pose a particular challenge to SDG implementation. These are areas (e.g., peri-urban and forest margin areas in the Global South) undergoing rapid biophysical and/or socio-economic changes and inhabited by populations especially vulnerable to these changes. While trade-offs occur among the SDGs, there are also many examples of synergies which provide opportunities for advancing multiple goals. To distinguish between synergies and the actions that exploit them, the term “synergy driver” is introduced to refer to policies and measures that positively advance two or more goals. Several examples of synergy drivers are presented, including sustainable global supply chains, people-centred early warning systems, and joint conservation-public health programmes. To make synergy drivers relevant to the broader policy community, the research community (working with stakeholders) should first consolidate knowledge about these drivers and then evaluate their effectiveness/applicability to different policy settings.