Dear all,

You are warmly invited to attend the final presentations of the joint Tsinghua-Stanford workshop "The Human City: Design for People." The event takes place Saturday, September 20 at 2:00 PM, at the Tsinghua University Academy of Art & Design. Teams will present their work in six topic areas, including food systems, residential energy, electric vehicles, bicycle livelihoods, land use, and cultural preservation.

Through this September workshop, two dozen students from Stanford University and Tsinghua University explored innovative ways to tackle urban challenges, while gaining new perspectives on humanistic city development. Participants represent a wide range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including urban studies, information art & design, international relations, computer science, and civil & environmental engineering.

Guided by Deland Chan and Kevin Hsu of Stanford University, and Zhiyong Fu of Tsinghua University, multinational teams engaged with Beijing as an urban laboratory for experiential learning, exploring strategies to enhance sustainability and improve the quality of life.

Workshop participants will also present their work at the Smart City Expo, part of Beijing Design Week, from September 25-30. For more information, please visit:

http://humancity.internationalurbanization.org

Where: Tsinghua Academy of Art & Design, Building B-Room 413
清華大學美術院B座413
When: 2:00 PM

If you are an International Relations Major, our course has been approved for the following specialization areas in the major!

Social Development and Human Well-Being (click)

East and South Asia (click)

Latin American and Iberian Studies (click)

Happy studies!

Dear all,

We are about to embark on our adventure to Beijing! From September 7-21, we will be leading a joint Stanford-Tsinghua workshop on urban sustainability, entitled Designing the Human City.

Participants will observe neighborhoods in Beijing, meet with local experts in fields ranging from energy efficient architecture to sustainable transportation, and produce an exhibition for the "Smart Cities Expo," as part of Beijing Design Week.

Follow along at humancity.internationalurbanization.org

Sincerely,
Kevin + Deland

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.

Passionate about ...

     Enhancing Sustainability          Sparking Economic Vitality

                  Protecting Cultural Heritage                    Promoting Social Equity

                                                                                                                       ... in the world's fastest-growing cities?

Air and water quality. Resource consumption. Energy and transportation infrastructure. As the planet's urban population mushrooms to 6 billion out of 9 billion people by 2050, the sustainable development of cities—responsible for up to 70% of carbon emissions today—presents a major challenge.

We know you're up to the task!

This fall, join a unique experience studying urbanization and the environment, with a focus on China, home to some of the world's fastest-growing cities. Students will have a unique opportunity to collaborate with faculty and students from Tsinghua University in Beijing on urban sustainability projects.

Autumn 2014: International Urbanization Seminar - China
URBANST145 / EARTHSYS138 / IPS274

• Investigate cities in China and the United States, the world's two largest economies (and biggest emitters of greenhouse gases)
  
• Explore strategies for sustainable urban development
• Collaborate on real-world international design projects with Chinese faculty and students
• Engage in hands-on urban laboratories and field trips in San Francisco and Bay Area communities

Download the course announcement flyer here:

—KH

—KH

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.