Reflecting on the evolution of my final project
As I am preparing to submit my final project proposal/plan, I have been reading through my previous blog posts to see how my project has evolved from its initial ideas. Reflecting on this, it is really interesting to see how even the smallest ideas I had or shared from the different classes I was taking at EFI have somehow made their way into my final project.
In the blog reflective summary I submitted at the end of last semester, I talked about how I was still really struggling to synthesise a real-life project from the things I was interested in and the knowledge and skills I had developed so far throughout my masters course.
In this summary, I wrote that I was interested in the relationship between planetary health and social justice and the disconnect these have in governance, where there is a “failure to see how these issues are intrinsically linked, where a healthy population is not possible without a healthy environment, and vice versa. And since environmental justice is fundamentally social justice, this failure is preventing us from developing holistic approaches to tackling inequality”. This idea is really closely related to the framework of my final project, where I will be analysing Leith Walk’s Redevelopment through the lenses of mobility justice and urbanising degrowth, understanding these as tools to understand how sustainability approaches can often be unequally distributed and have the potential to lead to the marginalisation of certain groups. The disconnect in governance that I mentioned is also integral to my final project in its analysis of official documents to understand how ‘sustainability’ is linked with justice and equity within the community of Leith.
Throughout my blog summary, I emphasised how I wanted my project to centre or explore the intersection of social justice, planetary health, and sustainable urban planning, but recognised the need to further develop these ideas to understand where they overlap. The frameworks of mobility justice and urbanising degrowth that I have since become familiar with have really helped me conceptualise how sustainability approaches can exacerbate inequalities and marginalise certain groups. The qualitative research methods I intend to use are also really key to this, allowing me to engage with the actual community and empirically employ the idea of the embodied city to understand how the city is differently experienced by different people/groups.
Looking back, I am actually really surprised at how many of my initial ideas and interests have formed my final project to produce something I am deeply passionate about and interested in. I really have my supervisor to thank for this as her expertise in environmental justice and community-focused research has helped me land on the frameworks I have chosen and to develop the project to be what it is now. I can also identify the little nuggets of knowledge that have weaved their way into the project from each of my EFI classes – whether they were part of the Data, Inequality and Society core classes, from the planetary health and sustainable lands and cities programmes, or in data representation classes focused on engaging specific and diverse audiences. In moving forward with my project, I am really excited to continue developing this knowledge and to put it into practice.
