Cultivating Sustainability

CULTIVATING SUSTAINABILITY

by Chris Parry, Designer, Artist, Johor Green

My talk at Sketch JB explored the environmental problems our world is currently facing due to overconsumption, what are current ideas and solutions to these problems and how they relate to our local context.

We live in world driven by corporate messaging – to consume. Consumption is now a leisure activity normalized into modern culture and conducted in the increasing presence of air conditioned malls. Food is now heavily reliant on oil from which pesticides and fertilisers are made. It is shipped across the world, warehoused, refrigerated, boxed, and canned. To live more sustainably is to challenges these new norms. To be better informed about the hidden practises and costs behind this new economy of cheap prices and global availability.

To respond with alternative behaviours – buy ingredients that were grown locally and responsibly. To spend more time gardening, growing our own food or enjoying the outdoors. It may seem nostalgic to champion many local local traditions – shopping at wet markets (figure 2) and local sundry shops, eating heritage foods and produce from local farms and fisherman but these are in fact in tune with a global effort to reinstate these behaviours.

When we look closer at our local kopitiams(figure 1), their fan cooled environments, their locally grown and roasted coffee drunk in reuseable porcelain cups and their offerings of locally sourced foods we see a solution for sustainability already embedded in our local culture that is the antidote to high energy air conditioning, single use plastics and the carbon footprint of imported goods.When we examine the building traditions and techniques of local heritage buildings(figure 3)- verandahs, courtyard gardens, tree filled compounds we see an already established wisdom about living sustainably with a lower dependence on energy costs.

Here in Johor, we are seeing phenomenal growth and development with little reference to sustainable ideas. Cultivating sustainability requires the efforts of talents across the board, not just consumers but also farmers, chefs, designers and architects. We need sustainability to be aspirational and we need creatives and entrepeneurs to entice consumers with attractive experiences, environments and products that are more sustainable alternatives.

Cultivating sustainability is about cultivating ideas. Given adequate potency and the right cultural environment, new ideas can find viral acceptance. The new coffee culture here in Johor is a good example of that. In a short space of a couple of years, consumers have been converted to paying up to ten times for the price of an artisanal coffee to be enjoyed in a cafe converted from a heritage building. There is no reason why in every sphere from home decor to tourism the same kind of transformation cannot be achieved with inspired entrepeneurship. Combining new ideas about sustainability with reference to our heritage and local resources also gives us valuable currency in forming a more defined local identity that has more meaning in an increasingly bland global world. Finding sustainable solutions drawn from our own local heritage and resources is a powerful way forward for Johor.

The following articles showcase are extraced from Convergence ( a Raffles University Iskandar’s student publication – de.YARD ) on SKETCH Design Talks organize by renown Architect AR. Yap Tew Peng and Yvonne Yap of Y.Architect in Johor Bahru.