In Episode 19 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Greg Keeffe of the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queens University Belfast, and currently visiting professor at Cornell, about sustainability, ecology and the city as an organism, and architecture as a tool of renewal and political resistance. The conversation builds on two of Greg’s recent pieces of work – Bin Burger, an exhibit displayed as part of the Design Museum’s recent exhibition, Waste Age: What can design do? , and Born, not Made. Designing the Productive City, written with Rob Roggema, a chapter in Designing Sustainable Cities, edited by Rob Roggema.

I met Greg as a student when he taught the bioclimatic architecture unit at Manchester School of Architecture. He was a great teacher, and the fire he had then hasn’t dimmed so much. Sustainability in architecture is still a marginal reality, fixed in a consumeristic model, although the rhetoric has mainstreamed. Greg’s approach is radical, perhaps because it needs to be, in the face of a production system that is at best indifferent to the actual price of architecture.

Greg’s QUB profile is here and his LinkedIn one is here. You can listen/ watch Greg talk online/ TU Delft on the Born, not Made chapter here. You can watch him do a TED X talk - Accelerating the decarbonisation of neighbourhoods - here. Greg can also be listened to speaking on the Slugger O’Toole podcast about How the pandemic is changing how we live.

Happy listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick