FALL
2015
SÃO PAULO
& RESILIENCE IN REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT
São Paulo is the most populous city in the Americas and the thirteenth largest on the planet. The city has the largest GDP in Latin America, and it is cosmopolitan, boasting the largest Italian, Arab and Japanese diasporas globally. Brazil also has one of the largest Green Building Councils outside of the U.S. For the past six years, the Brasil GBC has hosted an annual conference highlighting the importance of sustainability in the building design and construction industries.
This past summer, MSRED Director Casius Pealer was invited speak at the Brasil GreenBuilding Expo on a panel discussing social and environmental resilience issues. Director Pealer spoke along with Stuart Brodsky, professor at NYU Shauck Institute of Real Estate and Chair of NYU’s annual Conference on Sustainable Real Estate, and Roberto Moris, professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Principal Investigator at the National Research Center for Integrated Disaster Management in Chile. Resilience is both a local and a global issue, and an initiative that Tulane faculty are already leading. The most
high profile example is MSRED adjunct faculty member, Jeff Hebert, who was named the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of New Orleans this past year. In collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, Jeff Hebert spearheaded the development of the city’s first Resilience Plan, issued in August 2015 (see faculty updates). New Orleans is among the first cities globally to develop such a plan. Speaking internationally, this year’s MSRED class includes two international students—Natawat Thanomsat from Chonburi, Thailand (outside Bankok) and Xichen Liang from Ningxia, China (in central China). Although