‘Sustainability’ After Disaster: Confronting the Complexities of Recovery in the Field: An Educational Experience

Abstract

This paper focuses on the learning and teaching approach adopted in an undergraduate landscape architecture design studio at RMIT University that reveals some of the challenges involved when design students are asked to confront and work within the broad area of disaster response and recovery. Departing somewhat from the traditional approach often employed in design studios where students work individually or in small groups on a ‘problem’ with the aim of designing a ‘solution’ the studio approached the problem(s) of disaster recovery by focusing on collaborative ‘problem(s)’ definition. The focus of the studio was on the small township of Marysville in the state of Victoria, Australia that was almost completely destroyed in the Black Saturday fires of February 2009. Eight years on visitors to the town are delighted by the’ appearance’ of a town restored, however underneath the town remains vulnerable on a range of different fronts. The case study begins to reveal many of the pitfalls for designers and other professionals who are called on to work in post disaster environments, and the, often, narrow perspective about what constitutes ‘sustainability’ and ‘recovery’ that can lead to an overemphasis on ‘things’ at the expense of long-term processes of change towards what is an increasingly complex and unknown future.