Aarti Dhingra recently gave an insightful talk at Haas Cook Zemmrich titled “Beyond Carbon: Designing for Social and Ecological Resilience.”
In her lecture, Aarti Dhingra takes the stance to broaden our undersanding of carbon accounting – which is an essential metric that needs to be expanded by the deeper entanglements shaping our built environment. Drawing on years of hands-on practice of building with the forest based agrarian communities in the Uttarakhand hills, Aarti speaks about how design is never confined to a site’s edge; it is embedded in wider networks of ecology, labour, community, and care. While carbon remains a critical measure, Aarti emphasized that responsible practice must also contend with the intertwined realities of social equity, ecological integrity, and local resilience. Through grounded examples from her work, she traced how architecture shifts when it listens to its landscapes and its people – pointing to pathways for design that is not only low-carbon but holistic, fair, and regenerative.