“Rethinking Development and Sustainable Futures” is a course that takes a critical stance by scrutinizing how the fundamental concepts of “Development” and “Sustainability” are understood.

With growing concerns of climate change, loss of ecosystems, forced migration, urbanisation, and increasing social and economic disparities, these are concepts of global importance to the fields of design, architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture. These concepts are also often partially interrelated, sometimes conflicting, and exposed to sectoral or profession-based interpretations. In this course, we will be stepping outside our “defined” professions to critically rethink the future of both development and sustainability through interdisciplinary readings, discussions, and writing. The goal is to reveal and deliberate what these profession-based conceptions and discourses typically hold and what they try to sustain. The course will also explore if there are other alternatives to established discourses that could be engaged with, promoted, and acted upon.

Informed by these dialogues, students will produce articles or essays based on their reading, on a topic of interest. They will also be tasked with critiquing each other's texts as a part of the production.