Workshop participants will share their work at two public events:
Final Workshop Presentation (LIVE)
Saturday, September 20 (2:00 – 4:30 PM)
Tsinghua University, Academy of Arts & Design
Building B, Room 413. 清华大学美术院 B 座 413
#cultural preservation #electric vehicles #bicycle urbanism #food systems #energy #land use
Smart City Expo @ Beijing Design Week
Thursday, September 25 – Friday, October 3 (All day)
China Millennium Monument, Exhibition Hall.
More info about Beijing Design Week here.
Project updated by Alice Fang, Aiwa Musihua, Caroline Nowacki, Qihan (Philip) Luo
Every hutong we visit seems steeped in stories. There are different stories for different times of day—different groups of people catching the breeze by their doors, different tones and colors like the rush of life when children are let loose from the neighboring elementary school. We are, at once, participants and observers. As researchers, we take in the life and the sights around us, interviewing elderly couples sitting by their doorway, and stopping to ask children where they play. But needless to say, we have likely also become the object of dinnertime conversation for the families of people we interviewed.
Static scenes in the hutong present stories begging to be told. Here, a Buick is parked next to chickens, and a trash can with red wine, half eaten 馒头 [buns], and other trash.
Project update by Tucker Bryant, Zirai Huang, Mercedes Peterson, Yuxiao Pu
Fantastic Fieldwork in Fugoli + Fenghuiyuan 一级棒的富国里和丰汇园实地调研
Today we dove feet first into the fieldwork aspect of our Land Use Project; quite literally managed to land inside a taxi right off campus, hustling inside before we even gave the driver a chance to blink. Tucker, Yuxiao, Ray and I decided to try out a couple different methods of transportation other than our usual subway rides; this had the twofold purpose of trying to master the Beijing traffic situation as well as experiencing the slightly strange adventure that cabbing in Beijing entails.
今天，首先我们从土地利用项目的实地调研方面入手。毫不夸张地说我们一出学校就钻进了一辆出租车里，甚至没给司机眨眼的机会。我和塔克，欲晓，自睿决定尝试一些不同的交通工具，而不是我们通常使用的地铁。这样做有两重面目的：试图掌握北京的交通状况和体验在北京乘出租车这稍微特别点儿的历险。
Project update by Valerie Gamao, Joyce Hujing, J.K., Yipei Shen, Elaine Zhou
Our recent focus has been understanding the ecosystem of the various different bicycle livelihoods — from providing services like recycling or parcel delivery, to providing goods and products like food or phone cases, and from legal status to illegal status.
First, we learned that a bicycle livelihood used to be, and has the potential to be very lucrative. The parcel delivery guy moved to Beijing specifically because of his job, and the person who collects recycled good reminisced the “good old days”, when one can make almost 10,000 RMB/month (a salary higher than that of a recent Tsinghua grad). It’s a service that the people enjoy and still enjoy using, considering that the recycling man oftentimes receives calls from a set of clients that he has.
Second, we learned that even though the pay is above average and working conditions relatively pleasant and flexible, some of our interviewees still did not tell their families about their jobs due to a sense of embarrassment. However, other individuals were more than happy to share with us their stories.
Project update by Geena Chen, William Woo, Sophia Wu, Fay Yang
New discoveries
We discovered firsthand at the Tesla showroom that Tesla vehicles are very intentionally marketed towards an elite set of users. In the front and back trunks of the display Teslas were an expensive foldable bike and a duffel bag of golf clubs. The wall advertisements also showed a Tesla parked at a golf course. The images advertised the Tesla as a luxury plaything.
On the other hand, the grandfather we spoke to on the street brought the discussion back to practicality. His three-wheel electric bike, which is able to squeeze through traffic and requires low costs to purchase and maintain.
Project update by Adriana Baird, Moon, Han Lin (Nancy), Alec Hogan, Zoey Zhou Yang
After a guest lecture from Professor Xie of the NRDC on sustainable urban development, our group took a moment to organize and restructure the plan for our Food Systems project. We discussed and defined the overall objectives of the group project: to conduct the initial research on the relationship between food preferences and urban development that could be used to delve further into to the food systems subject in the future. From there, we decided to focus on three topics within food systems: Quality, Waste, and Culture.
Some examples of questions we hope to address in these topics are:
Quality:
Project update from Christina Zhou, Elsa and Noelle Herring
The past few days, we’ve been working to understand the heating situation near Tsinghua University across a variety of building types, ranging from old hutong style buildings to campus coffee shops. Types of technologies we’ve seen range from coal stoves to district heating.
One key interview that stood out was one with an old woman who had lived in the historical preservation buildings near campus. To get her to talk more freely, we focused not only on the logistics of her coal use, but also the feelings involved. She was frustrated with the inconvenience and cost of the coal, on top of the health impacts from breathing in so much smoke the winter. She didn’t like that the building’s historical preservation status meant that it was impossible to redevelop the electricity, which couldn’t handle additional voltage for electric heaters. Moving forward, we will be doing research online (Taobao!) to see prices for coal and get a better sense of building efficiency improvements, and capture additional insights.
这几天，我们对清华附近的供暖情况进行了调查。包括很多不同的建筑类型，比如老的胡同里的供暖情况以及校园里的咖啡厅的供暖情况。他们使用的供暖技术包括：自供暖（小锅炉）以及集中供暖。
其中比较重要的一个访谈是与一个住在学校二校门附近的住户。在访谈中，我们不仅仅关注她是如何使用锅炉进行自供暖的，同时还询问了她对于这种供暖方式的感受。她并不喜欢自己烧锅炉取暖，原因不仅仅是因为买煤非常贵，更重要的原因是自己烧煤会有很多烟，对身体不好，也非常不方便，他们希望可以接受集中供暖，但是由于她所居住的房子是文物保护建筑，所以没有办法进行改造，并且在未来也暂时没有相关的改造计划。往前走，我们要网上查价格和别的保暖的方法，和跟别的人讲话.
This update is by Christina Zhou, Elsa Wang, Noelle Herring
Residential Heating in 承泽园: A Study of Comparisons
On the fourth floor of the Tsinghua Art and Design building, perched atop lockers next to long windows that span the entire length of one wall of the building’s inside courtyard, I write. Outside, there is an array of matching windows on each of the other three courtyard walls. These windows are not identically, as many are cracked open to varying degrees.
While summer draws to a close and Beijing enters its most comfortable season, the pollution remains light, assisted in part by a quiet breeze, yet in just a few months, a dry chill will descend upon the city, casting some areas in severe cold, and a few in severe heat. As one Tsinghua student described, sometimes the dorms located on higher floors of the dormitory building are heated to such an extent that students want to open the windows in the middle of winter, showing a lack of efficiency in existing HVAC design.
This post is by Geena Chen, William Woo, Sophia Wu, Fay Yang
What did you do?
Yesterday we rode our bikes to three different sites around Tsinghua University to document our observations of electric vehicles in Beijing. First we stopped at a courtyard of elderly people’s apartments. Because citizens over the age of 60 are forbidden from driving gas-powered vehicles by law, many elderly citizens choose to drive electric vehicles. In the parking spaces around the buildings, we took pictures of six low-end electric vehicles, which were all refitted three-wheel bikes. We were not able to find any vehicle owners to interview at these sites, but William shared his expertise about the vehicles as we walked around so that we could all get a better idea of what the EV landscape is like in Beijing.
This post is by Adriana Baird, Moon, Han Lin (Nancy), Alec Hogan, Zoey Zhou Yang
We are the food systems group, investigating the changing nature of food systems and preferences in modern Beijing during this period of rapid urbanization. We are excited to engage in this project through observing people in their environments, interviewing individuals in different places and spaces in Beijing, using other various fieldwork techniques like counting and tracking, and of course, eating the food of Beijing.
What did you do?
We began this workshop as strangers to one another, but have since pushed past the language barrier and are both friends and collaborators. After breaking the initial awkwardness through icebreakers, we got to know each other by sharing experiences. We have shared everything from meals to intimate bike trips and trips to cafes. The two Americans sat on the back of our Chinese collaborators bikes, which drew quite a few looks and laughs across the Tsinghua campus. In sharing these experiences as a group, we are definitely forming a more cohesive unit that will be beneficial in adding enjoyment and productivity to the experience moving forward. We are leaning the idiosyncrasies of our very different cultures, and are going to try and learn a new phrase from each other every day. Hopefully by the end of the seminar Adriana and Alec will be able to say more than “hello,” “goodbye,” and “thank you” in Chinese, and Nancy, Zoe, and Moon will pick up some American slang.
In terms of formal activities, we have done some preliminary fieldwork and practiced a few fieldwork and observing techniques from the Bridge Café in Wudaokou, presented our observations to the rest of the students in the seminar, and have since begun to delve deeper into forming the foundation for our project. Today we explored the topic of food systems in general through a “mind map” in order to come to a more narrow research question that we can use to address the four pillars of sustainability. It took us a while to come to a research question that we all though was relevant and interesting because of the broad spectrum of the topic and an inability to understand one another perfectly. We spent a lot of time discussing and sharing our views over lunch at the canteen and the Paradiso Café during out break. After a few hours of discussion, we ultimately decided on a research question and proceeded to create our action plan for next week–where we are going to go, who we are going to talk to, and when we are going to do it. We all seem to be on the same page and are excited to go into the field and start researching!
