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December 12, 2014 RE: Recommendation for Swati Sachdeva To Whom It May Concern: It gives me great pleasure to offer a letter of recommendation for Swati Sachdeva. I have come to know Swati as one of my thesis students in the Master of Urban Design (MUD) program at the College of Environmental Design in the Spring of 2014. Let me say at the outset that Swati distinguished herself by her resourcefulness, creative imagination and careful attention to the fundamental needs of the people involved in the post-disaster recovery of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The skills demonstrated in her thesis exploration give every indication that she will be a superb professional and bring a unique perspective and experience to any design practice. Swati’s thesis, Re-envisioning Sustainable Growth, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, proposes a different and more profound post-disaster recovery model that goes way beyond just rebuilding homes. It addresses the fundamental needs of the residents in creating a better quality of life with much greater resistance and resiliency against future disasters. Swati grounded her design explorations by first visiting the site, documenting its physical and social problems, conducting interviews and surveys with residents and identifying the challenges and problems in the residents’ every day lives. This experience provided Swati with a much richer ‘program’ to drive her design explorations and demonstrates her initiative. The site Swati chose in Port-au-Prince faces additional disaster challenges beyond earthquakes, including floods from a bordering riverbed and storm surges from hurricanes along its shoreline. Swati ‘s design proposal starts by restoring the mangrove shoreline, relocating residents in the surge zone and creating a stepped levy that acts as a public park and movement infrastructure for the neighborhood. She then expands and restores the natural banks of the riverbed to absorb future floods and uses the space on its edges to construct neighborhood services, including toilets, showers and washing facilities where the water is treated and recycled using ‘living machines’ and all the energy is provided by renewables.

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Within this framework the design proposes a new hierarchy and structure of streets by strategically opening up new routes that allow better circulation, but also give access to community facilities that double as emergency facilities during disasters. The streets are further modified to channel and treat storm water that also provides irrigation for shade trees, greatly improving the micro-climate. One of the neighborhood facilities is proposed as a waste recycling center that creates an internal economy for the neighborhood residents. In other words the physical design provides the means to ‘close the loop’ to a more sustainable economy. In her thesis Swati demonstrates the transformative power of design to not only improve the physical experience of the public realm, but also improve the social and economic wellbeing of the neighborhood residents. It is this kind of ‘design thinking’ that makes Swati special and why I am pleased to give her my enthusiastic recommendation. I am confident she will be a valued professional colleague. Sincerely,

Harrison Fraker Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture William Wurster Dean Emeritus, College of Environmental Design Chair, Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley 2014 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion Recipient