Nowhere is the collaborative, real-world approach to education more apparent than in the School of Sustainability’s interdisciplinary workshops. In SOS 594, Growth, Sustainability, and Arizona State Trust Lands, nine sustainability students with backgrounds in business, planning, engineering, and law tangled with issues of land-use, conservation, and land valuation in the context of a rapidly urbanizing region of Pinal County, Arizona.
The transdisciplinary workshop, led by former state government practitioner Jim Holway, is meant to provide students with professional experience producing products for a specific client, in this case, the Arizona State Land Department. This department has a legally mandated mission to manage State Trust lands and resources to enhance value and optimize economic return for the Trust beneficiaries, the citizens of Arizona.
The students filled the first month’s classes with guest lecturers from NGOs industry and government, brainstorming, and field trips, including a helicopter tour with Salt River Project of Pinal County. After these explorations, the students divided into two groups.
The first group chose to create alternative growth scenarios and analyze these scenarios for better urban planning. They explored a business-as-usual approach, a concentric-circle approach; and a scenario that would adopt a variety of best practices: sustainable materials and renewable technologies, green-building techniques, and more. Their product would be written scenarios and GIS maps illustrating these scenarios. The second group focused on portfolio management. They would explore the connection between asset-management practices and higher land values, in line with the Land Department’s mission of maximizing the economic return on the land for the public beneficiaries. This group hoped to provide empirical evidence that sustainable land-management practices would promote greater economic value. In the end, the two groups came together to integrate their assessments of conceptual theory and sustainable practices.
According to PhD student, Dan O’Neill: “There’s a growing momentum among consumers, planners, developers, that we can do a better job in building our urban infrastructure.” In this workshop, students explored all aspects of sustainability-oriented planning and saw the difficulties, be they legal, social, culture, or economic of realizing that goal. O’Neill adds: “We were able to make the case to the Land Department, that the more you build toward sustainable growth, the more people will value that use of the land. In other words, sustainable growth and higher land valuation are not mutually exclusive goals.”
