Janis Birkeland

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.

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