New York, NY – Collaboration and working across disciplines is a key to planning sustainable cities, NYIT Associate Professor Jeffrey Raven told a Chinese delegation gathered at Cambridge University last week.

Raven, a Cambridge graduate and director of NYIT's Master of Architecture in Urban and Regional Design program, presented "Sustainable Cities: Shaping Resilient Communities for the 21st Century," a half-day workshop for about 30 members of the TianJin Economic Technological Development Area, or TEDA.The TEDA is home to nearly three dozen engineering and technology research centers and a new eco-district. The area, said Raven, is "recalibrating and evolving" beyond its original role as one of China's oldest economic development zones.

Raven used case studies and focused his remarks on sustainable performance in the areas of reduced energy use, cleaner air, and enhanced civic life. Sustainable communities, he said, are those that develop "physical and institutional capacity for constant change."

Today, that might mean socio-economic changes in populations or environmental shifts such as climate change.Key to any effort, Raven said, is the need to plan and design with expertise from many sectors, including transportation, energy, and water.

"If you're in a district and you're doing a plan, you need to collaborate with the city and region to leverage the resources and skill sets from different players because you're not planning and designing in a vacuum," Raven said. "That resonated with them because they are often confined to operating within their spatial and technical silos. Breaking down those silos and looking at integrated strategies is really what I was arguing for."

Raven said the NYIT master's program, based at NYIT's Manhattan campus, will continue to touch on sustainability, community resilience, and global design issues. Raven has worked on strategic plans for several international locations, including the Masdar carbo-neutral development in Abu Dhabi and a capital city plan for Thanha Hoa in Vietnam. He was recently invited to India to participate in a design initiative in November for the capital city of a newly created state.

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