So one debate that I had been thinking about for a bit was whether I wanted to work with the project partners that EFI works with on my dissertation. On one hand, having a concrete base to build my ideas would be really good, plus the institutional help and connections from working with partners could be meaningful. On the other hand, I did not know how much of my agency in designing the project would be given up, and how active the relationship would be.
Ultimately, thanks to some encouragement from Kirsteen, I ultimately decided to put in a statement of interest for “A Collaborative Partnership with the First Minister’s Office, Steve (EFI) and Jonelle (Your 2040). This project was designed to talk about future built environments, how governments plan for what they want future built environments to look like, and what the impacts of those decisions were.
This aligned somewhat closely with the idea I talked about in my last blog–how “desuburbanization” might occur, and what is needed to push cities to embrace the urban and deconstruct the suburban. I thought there was potential in allowing for these ideas to mingle, so to speak. Originally, I was more interested in the American context, and being American, I probably still am, but suburbanization is a global issue. In cities like Bangalore, India, suburban sprawl is out of control–tech companies build offices in the periphery of the city, which results in development around those offices for the workers, and these are serviced through car-reliant infrastructure, a cycle so bad that Bangalore has some of the worst traffic in the world. I’m less familiar with the Scottish context–I still need to research more about it–but one thing we had talked about in Envisioning Sustainable Lands and Cities is how the Edinburgh Council allows developers to take bites out of the Green Belt to build suburban single-family developments. This obviously speaks to how suburban living and car-reliant transport haven’t been deconstructed even in the Scottish context, even if it isn’t as bad as the US or India.
As I start to focus on the KIPP project proposal due next week, I am definitely thinking about how the project partners could assist in adding validity, real-world applicability, and information to my general question of wanting to talk about how to move away from the suburb, and what doing so might look like. I also see this as a great opportunity for me to make a direct impact on decision makers. It’s also undeniable that a big component of that transition will come from government and governance. How must zoning laws change? What would land use ideally look like? What will it take to incentivize people to move out of suburbs, and into cities, and what happens to that suburb after? These are questions that governments will ultimately take action on, and being able to research them in collaboration with a governing structure, as well as an organization which has to contend with figuring out how to move the needle in that regard, will be super meaningful. That being said, one lasting question here is the methodology of it all. I’m inclined to prefer to do a theoretical type situation where possible, and while I’m open to other methodologies, esp case study analysis, I don’t know how that would play with these particular partners–a question I would imagine will be answered when I meet with them.
Leave a Reply