As the quarter concludes, be sure to catch our design showcase highlighting urban sustainability projects from the International Urbanization Seminar. Six multinational teams of students from Stanford and Tsinghua University will present their collaborations on promoting walkable cities, disseminating air pollution data, facilitating energy-efficient green trucking practices, and re-imagining the youth hostel experience.

Special guests at the event (who will join us in person or virtually) include our partners from Tsinghua University and the NGO Clean Air Asia:

     Professor Zhiyong Fu, Tsinghua Academy of Arts & Design
     Mustafa Kirwan, Director of Branding, Reignwood Group
     Dr. Fu Lu, China Director, Clean Air Asia

Aside from the live walk-through exhibit and the design showcase, we will be hosting a faculty roundtable discussion on cross-cultural collaborations in the morning, and a second session on service-learning in the afternoon. There will be opportunities throughout the day to hear from those closest to the service-learning process—the students themselves.

Check out more details on the Symposium page of the International Urbanization website.

UPDATE: Our event is featured on the events.stanford.edu page!

This evening, the award-winning author Michael Meyer spoke to a joint session of students in URBANST145 (based at Stanford) and URBANST102 (based in Beijing). He made clear that he does not take a "sentimental" approach when studying communities; yet his clear-eyed analysis still yielded the sense that it is meaningful to save the hutong and its vibrant style of living.

The conversation was wide-ranging, with students chiming in from both sides of the Pacific. Some of the other key points we discussed included:

(1) The growing importance of traditional culture to Chinese citizens, who are beginning to recognize that it is part of their identity. This includes young people, to whom saving the hutong is a worthy cause, as well as the residents of the hutongs themselves.

(2) Decisions to demolish a neighborhood or to encourage its preservation often come from elite-led movements, but when discussing the future of a neighborhood, what about the people who live there now? It seems appropriate to bring the voices of current residents into planning discussions as well. There is an ethical basis to this, as it is right to include people to understand their needs and aspirations and seek their consent. There is a practical reason to do so: solutions are more likely to be well-received and effective in the long run if we first engage the grassroots.

To date, urban redevelopment has been driven by priorities of real estate developers, business leaders and local government officials. Conservation-minded outsiders have been able to chime in on some projects. But it would be meaningful to ask the silent constituency of people who currently live in the neighborhood about their needs, wants, and hopes for the future, to determine how we structure our communities.

(3) The rapid pace of development in China means that society may not have the opportunity to discuss social issues and make choices with deliberation. Changes are happening so quickly that communities, buildings and architectural features, and entire ways of living might be erased before there is a chance to establish a social consensus on how best to pursue modernity, while still preserving what matters. That's why it is important to make an effort now while possibilities still exist.

(4) However, these urban development issues do not pertain to China alone.  Cities in the United States and elsewhere around the world also face hard questions of change and evolution, whether it is how to deal with the impacts of gentrification, to more fundamental questions concerning "the kind of community we want to be." According to Meyer, after a spate of shocking incidents, the city of Santa Cruz (where he resides for part of the year), is now considering whether to establish a municipal police force after many years of living without such an institution.

Overall, the comparative lens has proven to be an insightful one, as the changes in China are put into a global context. Meanwhile, lessons from the Chinese situation can be applied in our home countries.

Caroline Nowacki:
It is hard to find the best places to interview truck drivers, and we need to plan some time for it in addition to working on questions and completing interviews. It is important to start early to also be able to engage our Tsinghua  teammates, get their inputs on questions to ask and their experience from interviewing truck drivers in China.

Laura Swenson:
Some things I've learned in my research about the Chinese trucking industry:

• Containerization rate in China is less than 2%
• There is a project going on in China right now called the Guangdong Green Freight Demonstration Project which is a model trucking efficiency project that is piloting techniques to improve efficiency that can be shared with other provinces in their trucking practices
• Getting clients is cited as the number one issue for truck drivers
• The average trucking company in China is comprised of 1 truck and less than 2 employees; moreover, from a presentation given to us by our Tsinghua teammates, I learned that 64% of China's truckers are owner-operators

Christina Zhou:
We should definitely work closely with the other green freight team, since we have many similar goals (understand local trucking system, etc). Additionally, I don't personally feel extremely qualified yet to provide recommendations on publicity approaches in China as someone completely unfamiliar with the social media/censorship landscape (not that a video about green trucking provides a major threat to political powers). The script has an interesting tone in my opinion, and is probably more cutesy than would be appropriate in a professional setting here, but that is probably not as much of an issue there in China. 

Green Cloud (Caroline & Laura) 
Our teammates in Beijing managed to convince the Wuhong team to help them conduct truck drivers interview in Beijing. They took pictures and conducted 60 interviews. On our hand we did internet research about the trucking industry in the USA and found interesting socio-economic data about onwer-operators, who are the majority of truck drivers in China. We also found interesting blogs and forums relaying the concerns of truck drivers in the USA. Laura has done more research about truck drivers in China to support the features of the app we will propose. We also reviewed existing apps for truckers in the USA.

We will meet with an entrepreneur form StartX working on an app for truck drivers in the USA called Dispatcher. This app was started last September during the Start-up weekend. We will also try to use Urban Lab 3 to interview truck drivers in the USA about their use of smart phones, apps and their knowledge of green freight.

We contacted Stanford RD&E to assess the possibility of interviewing truck drivers on campus. We will also possibly contact NRC to get advice about how to interview truck drivers. We will also try to find a public hearing about California new truck regulation. 

BreatheChina (Casey + Noelle)
This week we talked with our Tsinghua students and communicated with our NGO partner via email. We did some research on the design of air pollution monitoring apps, created a summarizing PowerPoint, and sent it over to our partners. Casey also made progress on our comprehensive guide to air pollution stats. 

We also revised our final project/exhibition to include a scale model of Beijing. It is going serve as the template for designing the air quality monitoring app of the future. We are doing research on how air pollution data is gathered and disseminated today, in order to suggest ways to improve that process in the future using new technologies, techniques, and platforms.

Click "Read More" to check out updates from Walk!man and Wukong

Adriana Baird:
Spontaneity can be great! We didn’t know exactly where Sean would be on Wednesday, but we took a chance and made a quick, unexpected trip to the StartX offices and it really paid off!

Alec, Valerie, and I seem to work best in person – we can each have a document up on Google Drive while discussing our work in person, and we tend to be very productive this way.

It’s important to be patient with communication between the Stanford and Tsinghua parts of the team – it took us a while to find a groove for communication, but now that we’ve found the best methods of communication we’re doing much better. 

Click "Read More" to see the lessons learned from other students.

Micro-Travel (Adriana, Alec, Valerie)
Since our last Monday lab, our group has completed our project scope of work and met with one of our Tsinghua collaborators, Sean. We met as a group on Tuesday (we have set Tuesday afternoons as our weekly meeting time) and completed the scope of work as we discussed our visions and goals for the project.  Our project and work for the rest of the quarter will be centered on the continuation of the research that Sean and Coco have started in Asia, based on our own survey and more detailed interviews.

Regarding communication with our Tsingua team members, Coco sent us the translated survey questions and results, which were very helpful in understanding where they intend for the research to go.  Our communication has improved a lot - because we are all in a WeChat group, and have been sharing our documents such as the project scope of work. 

Most importantly, though, we were able to meet with Sean in person! He was in the Bay Area visiting Berkeley and Stanford on a tour of schools and businesses with other Chinese students.  We met with him at the StartX offices, and were finally able to get a better grasp of what Sean and Coco want help with, and their ideas for how the research will be applied to their Lofter app and Pathbook project.  Sean told us that their main idea for this quarter is for us to expand their research to a broader demographic (not just those traveling within Asia) and gather as much information about youth hostels as possible. He was really enthusiastic about our research ideas and plans.  There was a language barrier, as is expected, but it was a great experience for us to meet and make the project more personal. 

Our goal for this week is to develop survey and interview questions that we will use in our research, so we can get started on collecting results as soon as possible. 


Click "Read More" for updates from all the teams.

Where are we from? The participants in the International Urbanization Seminar hail from all over the world, including China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Students from Stanford University are represented by blue bubbles, while students from Tsinghua University are in red.

The interactive map is based on Lab #1: My Hometown. Click on any bubble to bring up the student's profile and find out about your classmates!