Photo credit: Florian Göpfert on Unsplash

Event Description

As climate events intensify, healthcare costs rise, and affordability pressures deepen, the built environment is where financial strain becomes visible—through damaged assets, unhealthy buildings, and communities pushed toward instability. This session reframes “place” as a systems outcome shaped upstream by policy, procurement, capital planning, and asset portfolio governance—not just by design intent.

Using a practical framework—climate risk, health burden, and economic mobility as the key drivers, with community resilience and social stability as the outcome—participants will learn how architects can lead cross-sector change and translate nature-based, culturally grounded strategies into enforceable standards, RFP language, and performance criteria. Rather than relying on finished project case studies, the session focuses on immediately usable tools: policy/procurement inserts, a portfolio triage matrix, and a starter measurement dashboard to help make high-performing places fundable, durable, and repeatable.

Speaker

Barbara Benesh, AIA, NCIDQ, WELL AP