Join the School of City & Regional Planning, the Student Planning Association, and Diana Hernández, our featured guest, as we celebrate World Town Planning Day in Georgia Tech’s new Living Building, the Kendeda Building. For more information on the Kendeda Building and the Living Building Challenge, please visit their website.

Diana Hernández is an Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is also the Director of the Community Engagement Core of the NIEHS-funded Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan.

Building Equity: Lessons in Sustainability from Community to College Campuses

Buildings represent a middle ground between high-level and small-scale infrastructure. For this reason, they embody specific factors at the intersection of equity and opportunity. For example, recent studies show a correlation between energy efficiency upgrades, usually of interest only to the landlord; and the likelihood of tenant financial burdens and disconnection notices for energy bills. Correlations such as these at the building scale can help reveal otherwise unseen implications of transitions to less environmentally impactful energy technologies. The idea of “just transitions” will be explored in this context, as will comparative approaches from different segments of the US population from college campuses to community settings.

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