#05 Burcin Cem Arabacioglu from Istanbul: Sustainability from interior design perspective

In his lecture, Burcin Cem Arabacioglu, talks about the importance of sustainability in matters of architecture and infrastructural growth. He gives a very detailed overview about historical facts concerning sustainability, examples of former populations and give a great insight into excising organisations, practices and certificates which are used today.

In his work he focuses on the Impact of Interior design and want to highlight the importance of the user to make that change actually happen.

As an example, he takes his hometown Istanbul, which is the 26th crowded megacity on earth and holds 20 percent of the whole population of Turkish people. This fast Growth of the city, the lack of knowledge for sustainable construction solutions and the missing awareness of limited resources leads to uncontrolled and unsustainable solutions in matters of urban planning, which cause an irreversible harm to nature. 

The main problem, he detects in the gap between expert knowledge and the missing awareness of common people in matters of sustainability.  These experts, who actually could implement good solutions, are hardly never in charge when it comes to implementation or construction. So, he asks the question: “How will it to be possible to make a regular to a sustainability city, if the technical awareness of sustainability concepts is only in the head of professionals and not in the head of common people?” 

His solution and advice to us designers is to spread the idea of sustainability as easy as possible and highlight the individual impact of everyone when it comes to sustainable solutions. If common people and not only experts start again to understand, that their choices of how they live, what their interior of their home consist of and what material they are using have an impact of the whole world, sustainable solutions will be more likely become true in future.