On a recent visit to New York City, we had the chance to meet with Fred Kent and Kathy Madden, the founders of Project for Public Spaces. Founded in 1975, PPS builds upon the work of William (Holly) Whyte, the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and takes a human-centered, community-focused approach to placemaking. As Fred explained, "We are community agents and change makers", which was readily apparent in  PPS's portfolio of creating better places in over 3000 communities in 43 countries.

PPS has developed a set of analytical tools to allow communities to evaluate the quality of their public spaces and come up with useable recommendations. Their toolkit includes the "Place Diagram"-- which assesses the quality of public spaces by four qualities: accessibility, activities, comfit, and sociability-- as well as the "Power of 10", the idea of creating at least ten different uses or reasons for people to gather at a particular space. Kathy was kind enough to gift us the PPS Handbook on  "How to Turn a Place Around", and we highly recommend this informative resource to our students and colleagues.

Among the "11 Principles for Creating Great Community Places", I have to say that I was particularly drawn to #6: Start with the Petunias: Lighter, Cheaper, Quicker. There is something refreshing and honest about trying something out and observing the results immediately, and tweaking the result as necessary, rather than spending months or years talking about something without seeing anything come to fruition. The notion of petunias was described in the handbook as such:

Thank you PPS for the illuminating visit, and we look forward to collaborating with you in the Fall.

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!

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!

Walk!Man Update (Yari + Geena)
This week we confirmed Stanford's role in the project by solidifying the scope of work. We will be performing research online and through surveys and focus groups, while our Tsinghua teammates will continue to update us about their interactions with CleanAir Asia and specific goals of the app. They have done some research on the benefits of walkability, and they've looked at CleanAir Asia's current walkability app, to see what needs to be different.

They told us that the app will hopefully be used by people in a wide variety of cities, so we hope that through our research we will be able to find some ways to make that realistic. We've begun our literature review, and we've found a wide variety of walkability metrics and surveys, which we're parsing through.  

The Skype session went well and we have a nice group dynamic. 

Click "Read More" to view updates from all project teams.

Yari Greaney, Walk!Man:

• Don't be shy to repeat questions until you get the answer you are looking for.
  
• Get verbal confirmation that everyone understands the next action items.
  
• Follow up conversations with an email.
  
• It's really fun to collaborate with Tsinghua students!

Adriana Baird, Micro-Travel:
It was really helpful to have the email response from our Tsinghua counterparts, but the gap between the information we have and what they have already accomplished with the project is still there.  This has really stressed the importance of holding a videoconference or some sort of direct communication between us and the Tsinghua students that is more immediate than email.  It has also been very helpful to meet and talk frequently among ourselves, either in person, over email, or through messaging. 

Click "Read More" to view all lessons learned.

Our first video conference between students in the U.S. and China took place in the Highly Immersive Classroom at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). According to GSB technology specialist Bryan McCann, this session represents the first full-scale class-to-class exchange to make use of the HIC, which has only been open a few months. (While the HIC has been used for smaller events, this is the first time two academic Stanford classes have united.)

The visuals and acoustics were excellent, thanks to four large video screens stitched together and microphones installed at strategic points around the room. It felt like the URBANST 102 students in Beijing were sitting in the same room as our class at Stanford!

The connection was largely seamless (just a minor hiccup with getting slides to show), and it was exciting for everyone involved to pioneer this technology for use in educational exchanges. Many thanks to the GSB tech team and the hard-working SCPKU staff for helping us set up this joint experience. We look forward to additional trans-Pacific teleconference sessions in coming weeks!

One of the Stanford students based in Bejing later posted this note about his experience in the combined classroom:

Today, we tested out the teleconference equipment in the Wallenberg Learning Theater, which features an immense, room-spanning screen; an arsenal of computers, microphones, and cameras; and the ability to control everything by iPad.

After some initial connection snafus, we got in touch with our collaborator at Peking University, Professor Song, through Skype. During the video call, we introduced ourselves to the Stanford students studying abroad at the Bing Overseas Studies Program in Beijing. It was fun to see them in person and to send them greetings from the home campus.

We connected with Professor Fu at Tsinghua University by utilizing a Cisco teleconference system. As we worked to establish the video link, the WeChat app (on our phones) proved helpful in coordinating.

The first go-around with teleconferencing always seems to take longer, and as we had scheduled back-to-back tests with the two institutions, the calls ended up overlapping. At one point we had both connections up and running: Deland conferred with Professor Fu on one screen, while I spoke to Professor Song, using my own laptop and headphones, on another. During the evening, the executive director of SCPKU also called my cell phone, adding to the mix of media.

We have full-fledged teleconferences with both partners again next week, and next time we'll have a roomful of students with us, so I'm glad we tested out the technology first. We owe special thanks to Wallenberg Hall's technology guru Bob Smith, who demoed the Learning Theater's range of capabilities and gave us access to a range of equipment. The adventure continues!

Lessons Learned

• Build in additional buffer time between teleconference sessions instead of holding them back-to-back.
• WeChat or other phone-based messaging apps can help you coordinate when first establishing the video connection.
• Make sure both parties know in advance which teleconference system will be used.