The laydown yard is where all the tools needed for the construction project are stored. You’ve got to make sure it’s placed smartly on the site, that it’s safe, that it doesn’t get you caught in a property loss suit, and that it does, in fact, store all the tools. The topographical survey’s still got me divisive, so I should make sure I’ve got an accessible, well-stocked laydown in the meantime, if I’m to make any headway on this thing.

Okay, in all seriousness. Needlessly extended metaphors aside. I’ve been late in my update because I was trying to draft another post. I started right after finishing the Envisioning SLC intensive on October 18th, when I caught up on the news of the day right after I was done. What I started writing may have gotten off topic for an academic blog, though, a bit more pathos to ethos/logos than what might be expected here.

So I quit that, and tried drafting a different post, this time looking at what’s been happening through the lens of evaluating sustainability and the climate crisis. I figured applying my knowledge from what I’ve learnt here would help me understand new, different aspects of this political environment that I have grown up with and known since I can remember. I ended up with 20 pages of source material – since I was collecting articles and news every day – and I’m still parsing through it, hoping that I’ll finish today, or tomorrow, or today, or tomorrow, so that’s how I’ve wound up posting a) late and b) none of that draft at all. (The little problem of my falling sick extremely frequently since the spring of this year and never properly recovering before my body gets stuck in another interesting session of incubating fresh, flourishing, Flus of the Season has also had a hand in this, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I have to write about something here though, right? So, reviews of the intensives so far, and then KIPP it is. Strictly within the boundaries of course material!

Intensive: Envisioning Sustainable Lands and Cities

I really appreciated the format of this intensive – it was mentioned at one point that we are essentially just accepting all this information that is being thrown at us – but that’s what I really liked. There was an array of different fields and applications within the scope of sustainability, and its place and methods in lands and cities, and that range of… shall I say ‘niches’? Or, that range of ‘vantage points’, different ways of looking, understanding, processing – I honestly loved it. I don’t always love information getting thrown at me for 8 hours straight, but the way this was done – resounding YES, would do it again in a heartbeat.

My favorite lectures were on the following topics:

Day 1

Urban Sustainability. I think this is quite self-explanatory; of course I’m interested in the built environment, and of course I’m interested in sustainability. But apart from the fields of what this covered, it also delved into different modes of thoughts, different attitudes towards the future of sustainability and cities, and showed me a new and wholly opposite side of sustainability in relation to what I studied in undergrad. It was enlightening. It also overlapped a little bit with literature towards the end. Delicious stuff. Truly enjoyed this. It made me think about a possible KIPP idea relating to attitudes towards architecture and sustainability in literature, and their impacts on each other, but that’s still in the air.

Sustainable Lands and REDD+. Dealing with a case study from the perspective of someone who was part of the project personally was exciting, learning about tenure, land laws, and the subject matter, was sobering. I want to know more about this work, I want to know more about how this attempt at ‘saving’ (can I call it an example of the white man’s savior complex? Imperial guilt? But then we were told REDD+ isn’t even about ‘saving’ – not on a local level – and there’s not as much guilt as there is a calculation of how to survive. A sort of, oh, well, since we’re all stuck on the blue rock together kind of attitude. But this isn’t too academic of me, and I don’t really know enough to speak, I suppose) or ‘strategy’ towards a more ‘sustainable’ collective ‘future’ comes at the cost of ‘disrupting the present’ of others. I want to understand, because it didn’t sit right with me, and I want to be able to figure out – or at least know someone’s out there doing a better job of figuring out than me – a better possibility. So I’ll be getting on that. Hopefully soon.

Day 2

Good Work and Urban Agriculture. Urban agriculture was something I admit I didn’t think of much; I just pictured vertical farms in buildings. You know, when you search up ‘biophilia’ on Pinterest in your first year of undergrad because you believe that is the architectural solution to all of the world’s problems, and those 20-storey stone buildings show up, tendrils overflowing from the facades. (They’re beautiful and sustainable in certain climates, but let’s keep it real, folks. Some of us live in the desert. Context is key!) I lumped urban agriculture together with plain old ‘agriculture’, something whose obvious significance and consequences on society/civilization I am fairly aware of – Pakistan’s an agricultural nation, after all. Designing for farming communities and learning about their work and their needs from that lens is something I welcome, but pursuing for further details, hows, and whys, as a complete subject, is not something I was very keen on. This lecture, though, and Puff Mukwaya’s focus in particular, made me realize more of urban agriculture’s immediate importance amongst people, its impact on entire communities, and how it could change trajectories of citizen lives. It was an eye-opener, and a much-needed one. I am going to be looking into urban agriculture more from now on!

More-Than-Human Urban Geographies. I was honest to goodness so excited – it was winding down near the end of day 2 and I was getting a little tired, I’ll admit, but this part fired me right back up. I love the physicality and otherness of it – it’s delightful in the context of birds, cats, and topics of biodiversity, and might be useful if looking at cities and the ecosystems they cultivate, if we’re trying to keep out ‘pests’ (and what would be considered ‘pests’? Do we stop at rats or do we consider feral cats a problem as well? Getting to the definition of things like this excites me too… but note that I am always firmly on the side of – how did Italo Calvino phrase it? The City of Cats!). But it’s also a reminder that there’s always going to be another perspective. A newcomer of any kind (and, in a pure spatial sense, of any height) is going to perceive something that may be ordinary to me, as not-so-ordinary. How would that inform their experience? And, extrapolating, how could that inform their life? Questions I believe are very important but have not had much opportunity to do much with. Loved to see them play out in this lecture! ‘Hostile architecture’ is also something I’ve read up about the past few years, and I was glad it was touched on as well. We need to be aware of accepted, systemic injustices before we can fight them! I do encourage others to explore it a little as well, if possible. Finally, the discussion of ‘narrative’ that architecture/city/urban environments can create – it’s like this lecture was just for me! These ‘narratives’ are exactly the kinds of things I want to study further, and be able to disseminate, analyse, and work with for the betterment of communities.

 

Intensive: Regenerating Places

This is one I was really looking forward to. Something with more directly creative application on a site! I had my reservations about how well-connected online students could possibly be with activities like this, but it really did end up being super inclusive, and I felt like I came away from the intensive session with friends! Which is always lovely, and I’m grateful my group experiences have been so nice in the program 🙂

Back to the intensive – the activities were well-organized and thought out. There was a little bit of a challenge at the end where one more focus on the project to be incorporated was disclosed. It would have been more helpful to be told that at the beginning, and I got a bit anxious, but our group pulled through, because of the super cool people in it, hurray! 🙂 My presentation skills still need a lot of improving, but I wasn’t completely terrible. Go me!

I was also not very confident about what my input could possibly be once I got to learn about the site – a purely personal thing: previously at school, during projects like these, I just wasn’t that intent on thinking of ‘smaller’ and more collective ‘urban’ interventions, so to speak. My regeneration ideas in undergrad stuck to building-by-building basis, and the only ‘urban’ aspect I looked at was more of a social/psychological one, in terms of community reception, reaction and interaction with changes and identity. Like it was mentioned in class, though, the Fountainbridge site required more ‘subtle’ interventions. And we looked at things more holistically/systematically. Not just at a building in a context, like I’m used to, but at a context within a context. Then there was the trajectory our group took, in realizing the heart of the location of our project was more the people than the place – and answering their needs through solutions was what helped bring our interventions closer together and more coherent. That was a journey I enjoyed 🙂

I also found a new interest in ecosystem creation/biodiversity, and I will definitely be looking more of that up!

 

KIPP development

So, I figured I’ll combine some things, and got this: regenerating abandoned city cores to accommodate housing and other needs of marginalized communities, by incorporating phenomenology and narrative into the built environment.

But that didn’t work, because this was my original idea before starting the blog, and I broke it down on purpose in the first post to make it more achievable for a KIPP scope. So I have to go back to breaking things down even more this time.

A friend of mine in the course mentioned neuroarchitecture, which seems to be something like phenomenological architecture, but a bit more direct and on-the-head in its way of looking at, and understanding contexts. I still have to look into it more. I’m considering, perhaps a link between neuroarchitecture and… trauma? But then, what kind of trauma? This is my problem, I can’t narrow things down efficiently.

If I focused only on phenomenological architecture, I’d want to see the effects of light and water in architecture, and their impact on health.

Another idea would be, like I mentioned earlier in the post, the influence of the built environment and literature on each other. There’s a proven link between science fiction, politics and real scientific breakthroughs, and it would be interesting to delve and see if there’s something there with respect to sustainability. There’s the Envisioning SLC book club to help with that idea… something I do still intend to catch up with! But I’m not too sure about this idea for KIPP…

Perhaps I should look for a completely different idea altogether. It’s 2.35 AM at the moment, and I really need to get  a move on with my Envisioning SLC portfolio. And also sleep.

Please wish me luck for that other blog post, and if you’re even reading this anymore, then thanks for spending all this time keeping me company on this post! 🙂 See you in a bit.

Nov 12, 2023