Projects

The Green New Deal Superstudio was a concerted effort to give form to policy ideas by translating the core goals of decarbonization, justice, and jobs into place-specific design and planning projects.

Some 670 projects were submitted through the year-long open call, which attracted the participation of over 90 universities in 39 states and 10 countries, as well as hundreds of practitioners from across the design disciplines. These thought-provoking projects range from adaptive reuse of degraded sites to regional-scale frameworks to visualizations of speculative futures.

The full set of submissions are catalogued as part of the Green New Deal Superstudio archive in the JSTOR digital library, where they are freely accessible.

This website houses a curated set of 55 projects selected to illustrate the range of work submitted and catalyze conversation.

Review + Curation

All of the projects submitted during the year-long open call were reviewed through a two-step process conducted by the Superstudio Advisory Committee and Reviewers. The goal of this curation process was to select a set of projects that illustrate the wide variety of issues, innovation, scales, and geographic regions represented in the submissions.

The curated set is not meant to be a selection of the ‘best’ designs, but rather a selection of projects that serve to catalyze conversation. In many cases the body of work raises more questions than it answers, such as:

  • Are the Superstudio projects conceived in the name of the Green New Deal appropriate manifestations of its ethos and intent and if so, how? Or if not, then why not?

  • How can the Green New Deal be represented spatially without naïve utopianism on the one hand or underestimating the scale of its implications on the other?

  • What do these projects say about the challenges facing the implementation of a Green New Deal?

  • What do these projects say about the role of designers in relation to the Green New Deal?

  • What do these projects say about the current state of landscape architecture as a discipline?

  • What are the next steps for the built environment professions to actively promote and manifest the transition to a decarbonized world?