Janis Birkeland

Professor Janis Birkeland is an authority on, and friendly critic of, contemporary ‘sustainable’ architecture, planning, management, and design. She began her career as a sustainable architect, city planner and lawyer in San Francisco. After relocating to Australia in 1981, she undertook a PhD on planning for sustainability. From 1992, she developed and taught sustainable development and design courses at five universities. In over 150 publications, she challenged the latest thinking in sustainability, including three textbooks: ''Design for Sustainability'' (2002), ''Positive Development'' (2008), and ''Net-Positive Design'' (2020). According to her, progressive sustainable design and development paradigms used weak goals, standards, indicators, processes, strategies, and tools. Exemplar green buildings even fail to even offset their own additional damage.

Birkeland's contributions redefined the boundaries of sustainability. Her original premise was that, paradoxically, genuine sustainability could be achieved through urban development. However, this would require the built environment to be totally re-conceived. Her ‘Positive Development’ theory explains the incapacity of current intellectual and physical constructs to achieve genuine (whole-system) sustainability, and how they could be reconstructed to do so. Her ‘net-positive design’ paradigm aimed to reverse planetary overshoot, climate change, biodiversity losses, etc., and to return global and per capita levels of consumption and pollution well below planetary limits.^[23] Among other things, this requires increasing nature relative to pre-urban conditions. She always stressed that eco-positive retrofitting (remodelling) of cities and buildings was a priority due to for example, the material flows in both ordinary and green construction. Birkeland's contributions are gradually being incorporated into sustainable design paradigms.

In a nutshell, Positive Development theory and practice prodded regenerative design to go further: to increase the ‘public estate’ (environmental security, universal access to the means of survival, etc.) and to increase the ‘ecological base’ (ecosystem functions and services, biodiversity, etc.) in order to reverse overshoot and create positive interrelationships. The logic underlying Positive Development theory led to unique proposals for sustainable forms of governance, decision-making frameworks, planning methods, architecture, design practices, participation processes, and assessment tools. Net-positive design also inspired novel design concepts such as Green Scaffolding, and building-integrated ‘eco-services’ for people, structures and nature. Birkeland devised a new design and assessment method, called ‘STARfish’ to enable design for net-positive outcomes. It is the antithesis of other sustainability assessment tools and corrects three dozen of their common defects. Provided by Wikipedia