After participating in the full seven weeks of the Chinatown Urban Institute, I definitely learned a lot more about Chinatown than I did before. I was just another tourist/consumer, exploring the neighborhood and going to restaurants with friends and family, but I feel that after the program, it gave me a better understanding about Chinatown and how it is not just a destination for tourists. Chinatown is like any other neighborhood with its own beauty on the surface and issues that the community faces within. It was overwhelming as we dove further into the different topics each week, such as maintaining sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing. The highlights of the Chinatown experience are very unforgettable and it was fun to experience Chinatown in a different perspective rather than just being a tourist/consumer. I definitely liked being apart of different tours throughout the program as it gave me a more valuable experience instead of just exploring on my own.
Even though I do not have a background in urban planning, the program gave me an insight of how organizations plan and help the community and also what the living conditions in some apartment units were like. For example, such as how the Public Utilities Commissions try to make Chinatown more sustainable by utilizing green infrastructure to increase water supply and to increase the sewer system capacity. And also how the Planning and Urban Renewal Association advocates for affordable housing. The most interesting aspect was the SROs. It is difficult for the people living in SROs as it can get very tight and crowded and also since it is one of the more affordable housing options people can live by. Making money and finding a place in the Bay Area can be a struggle. Organizations try to meet the needs of the community and if people do not engage with them and voice their thoughts, it can be proven futile for change to actually happen. It is very important to communicate with members of organizations and the community to help make and improve change. Meeting different people who were actively trying to improve the community was a great way to get insight on how the community might be affected and for those who live there and what the expectations they had were. Projects can take a long time to go into effect as you need to factor in funds, staff, and location depending on the project. Another interesting aspect was that SPUR also had different future scenarios of Chinatown and I hadn’t thought about those possibilities because those four future scenarios are very drastic from each other. The four are high and low social inclusion and low and high economic growth. It allowed me to think more about the future of Chinatown and how that would come to be. Chinatown can be well-off or it can be struck with poverty and a low quality environment (contaminated air/water, damaged buildings, decrease in business, etc.) Many don’t think about the future and just focus on the present and it’s good to think about what will happen later. It is a little depressing, but the reality is that as many new generations continue to grow, they might care less about the community and improving it. Thankfully, there are still those who continue to fight for better change. It is also very important to build relationships with one another in the workplace and also just your daily life because you don’t know when you will be needing that support. Despite this, people need to consider how their actions and voices affect the community. This will remind me about the actions that I take and what the consequences are going to be and also will keep in mind that these are issues (affordable housing, transportation) are long term. Even if it is quite expensive here, I need to be grateful for the resources that I already have. And that even though I might not like being around people that much, it will do me good to build relationships with others. Off tangent, but for the event I had gone to was the dancing at Waverly. It was just nice to see young people dancing and connecting to their culture and others. The dancers were wearing traditional clothing/costumes and traditional music were playing as well. Some of them were as young as age four! At age four, I was barely learning how to connect with others or something. I like cultural events like these even though I don’t get out often. It was nice to see the event attracting tourists as they made their way through Chinatown. As for the final projects, I hope that they will help better the community even if it is just slightly and give CCDC staff and others ideas that can be implemented in the future. I had a great seven weeks of Urban Institute and even though I probably won’t come back here, I will still remember CCDC. - Michelle Mei Dancing at Waverly!
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This week was primarily about working on our final projects. I'm going to talk more about our final project in next week's blog. So for now, I actually want to focus on something that we did last week.
Last Thursday, we went to SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. The non-profit does really impactful work in research, advocacy, and education surrounding planning and social issues in the Bay Area. It has three offices: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, with programming areas ranging from regional planning, community planning, housing, transportation, and sustainability. A few members of SPUR's education team lead us through a guided exercise meant to make us think about the future of the Bay Area. There were four images of different ways the Bay Area may look in the future. While the scenarios were a bit extreme, they definitely did SPUR discussion. We talked about what we liked about the exercises and what we want the bay area to look like in the future. In the end, we got to take home several copies of SPUR's magazine, The Urbanist. It made for some great train reading on my way home :) -Mac This past weekend, my sister and I went to the 2nd Annual Craving Chinatown Food Festival. We met up with Mark and Eric and got to eat some amazing food. My sister had Chow Mein, Egg Rolls, and Boba tea. I'm a vegetarian, so there weren't a lot of lunch items for me to eat, but I had a TON of dessert. I got to try an egg tart for the very first time. It exceeded my expectations. It was great to see locals and tourists outside hanging out and enjoying the seating areas. There was also some amazing music and dancing by local Chinatown Youth. My favorite was Son of Paper, a local rapper. My sister would agree that he killed it! Here are some pictures from this great event. Enjoy!
-Mac My highlights of Week 4 were Deland's lecture on sustainability and the City Hall Dome Tour. 1. Sustainability In her lecture this week, Deland spoke about the challenges of defining sustainability. I enjoyed learning about the origins of the term, dating back to the 60's when it had a strong focus on environmental regulatory policy. We also discussed the broad definition set forth by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development in the Brundtland Report. One definition that stood out to me is based on four pillars: Environmental Quality, Economic Vitality, Social Equity, and Cultural Continuity. The one pillar that I think is missing from this definition is health. If your community is unhealthy, then it seems like there is no way that it could be culturally sustainable. Health, environment, and equity are all dependent on each other.
2. Dome Tour I have always been amazed, at a distance, by the gold dome atop of City Hall. I never thought that I would get to explore it from the inside. We joined the City Hall Building Manager for an exclusive tour of the dome. He shared his wealth of knowledge about the history and architecture of the dome. I found it interesting to learn about the major seismic improvements. The building was damaged in the 1989 Point Loma earthquake, and went through a seismic retrofit. It was interesting to hear how engineers were able to prepare City Hall for San Francisco's next big earthquake. The view at the top was amazing, too. Luckily, we went out on a rare, clear day and could see the whole city. - Mac After participating in the Urban Institute and working on our final group project, I definitely have a different perception of Chinatown SF than prior to commencing. The main reason for this was that I was previously more of a “consumer” of Chinatown, only going to eat at restaurants or be a tourist, whereas now I feel as if I have a deeper understanding of the neighborhood, and hopefully our final project will actually benefit the community, even if only slightly.
One of the most surprising aspects about Chinatown to me was around the SROs since I was unfamiliar with them beforehand, and did not comprehend just how ubiquitous and important they are to the neighborhood. It has also been interesting to see how they have been changed over time from places for single male immigrants to being marketed towards young tech professionals. Conversely, a highlight has been seeing the activism of the local people as they contend for their rights and livelihoods. I loved being able to meet various residents such as Mrs. Lee and some of the board members of the CTA, and learning about their lives, advocacy, and how they have positively impacted their communities. It was inspiring to hear how long they have fought to protect themselves, because I think that our generation can be less resilient than previous ones, and it is encouraging to know that this struggle is not new. Plus, personally it is helpful to hear that it is not a short-term struggle, since if we have the expectations that things will improve rapidly, we will be quickly and easily discouraged when this proves not to be the case. I think my favorite outing/activity from the program was when we visited city hall and were able to go on a dome tour (particularly special since this is not open to the public), and then talk to the two legislative aids. I have been interested in how the government views Chinatown and the resources and methods that they bring to the table. Another one of my favorite parts about the program was simply getting to know Chinatown better in terms of the geography and the differences between the various streets, blocks, parks, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed the tours at the beginning for this, plus the fact that we walked most places, since slowing down really allowed us to get to know a place better than if we had just taken buses or not had the opportunity to explore. I think this personalized the experience more as we became more familiar with the people, businesses, and even eating places. I continue to have additional questions as to how the current zoning systems address the dearth of residential housing for low-income residents, and what plans are being created and maintained to stop the spread of the Financial District and other high-income residents and businesses from moving into the area, since Chinatown is still based upon a capitalist framework where money has a lot of sway and power. Furthermore, since Chinatown seems to be more economically stagnant compared to the rest of San Francisco, I am curious what is being done to address this, or if people are more preoccupied about the preservation of the neighborhood rather than its growth. My question is then whether cultural preservation and conservation are community values which is why they seem to be the main foci of CCDC. I definitely plan to apply much of the community-based planning methods in my future work and life. I appreciated when Matthias and Sam came to speak about policy form CCDC’s and the Coalition for the Homeless’ perspective, and discussed how policy is always local and political. I think that this is something that federal and state governments often miss because they are concerned more with the large picture and do not always think through how their actions and policies actually affect people and their lives. It was additionally good to be reminded that coalitions are extremely important. I think this was something that CCDC does well, and especially the Urban Institute in exposing us to the plethora of perspectives and methods of tackling various community issues. Overall, it was great to be able to visit and hear from such a diverse group of people and organizations, from think tanks to public utilities, to housing developers, all of whom will hopefully work together to maintain and build a better Chinatown. Finally, I did not know what to expect from the program, and I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to participate. So thanks Erika and Deland for creating and providing a great learning experience! - Sarah On Tuesday morning, Matthias from CCDC’s policy team and Sam from the Coalition of Homelessness gave us a presentation about policy. They shared their experiences on working with elected officials and members of the community. It was surprising to learn how impactful an elected official’s stance is on policies. From a community’s perspective it is hard to navigate through different levels of bureaucracy. Prop C was truly reflective of the community’s needs because it was written by people who were not in the government.
For the rest of the week, our team worked on our group project. We started off by surveying people at Portsmouth Square Garage. It was not easy to convince people to stop for a survey. We ended up making a second version to ask street parking users. It was a little easier to approach people on the street because they were often waiting in their cars. We also tried to talk to the attendants at Portsmouth Square Garage but they were reluctant to speak with us despite being a public garage. Using the results we gathered, we will compile it into our presentation and executive summary. - Maggie Dong Started from Tuesday, our group officially began our final project focusing on economic development of Chinatown. At the beginning, we started in doing the survey with the tourists who came to Chinatown. The experience of asking tourist to fill out our survey with both exhausting and interesting because it took a lot of courage to ask people to fill out the survey, and we also needed to have a relaxed mind set when people rejected our request. On the other hand, it was interesting because we got to know people's opinion about Chinatown. In the morning, we collected almost 20 surveys. However, during the lunch break as we discussed about the information or the data we collected from the survey, we found the questions and responses from the tourists were kind of vague. Therefore, we decided, instead of focusing on the perspective of the tourists, to focus on the perspective of the local business owners. The experience of interviewing with the business owners was educational and inspiring. On the afternoon, we made the interview with the Broadway Dim Sum, the music instrument shop, and the Wok Shop. From the interview, we knew that the business have been gone down in recent years around the Chinatown. Also, the owner of stores which lasted for 50 years have problem in passing their businesses. After the interview, our group had rough ideas of develop the economy in Chinatown.
The first solution we thought of was the "CityPass" which we thought would be a good idea to sell the punchcard that can let the tourists try different samples from different restaurants in Chinatown. The punchcard can be included into the CityPass or can be sold individually in the Chinatown visitor centre. We thought in this way, the tourists would get the chance to explore more about Chinatown instead of only sticking on the Grant Street. The second solution we thought of was to introducing the Non-profit Organizations which provide the free business services such as constructing the websites for the stores in Chinatown because we found that the stores which were using the online store could maintain their businesses better. On Thursday, we had the lunch with Walden who was the faculty member of Chinatown CDC, and he shared with us many useful and interesting insights of merchants in Chinatown. That afternoon, we interviewed with two more stores which could provide us more information. After finishing the interviews, we started to make our PPT. Unfortunately, as we started to make the plan for final presentation, we were informed that our focusing on the economic development for Chinatown did not really fit the requirement because we needed to focus on tourists instead of business owners. So, we had to have our heads up to do some extra work this weekend in order to catch up the schedule. I am looking forward to solve this problem and make a great final presentaion. On Tuesday morning, Erika gave us a lecture about storytelling and placemaking/peacemaking. This is an important tool especially in ethnic communities because stories and traditions are often lost throughout generations. Felicia Lowe showed us some of the projects that she had been working on throughout her career. We got to experience a VR video of the poems that were left on the walls of Angel Island. I thought it was incredible to incorporate the stories of those who have gone through Angel Island into digital art.
In the afternoon, we visited the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) building. We were given a tour of the building and got to see the cool green technology that was implemented. They also talked about San Francisco’s water system and the upcoming improvements they plan to do for the wastewater facilities. On Thursday morning, Deland led a brainstorming exercise on imagining the future of Chinatown. We tried to incorporate transportation into the picture but I would say we were mostly pessimistic about the future. However, this was perfect for the afternoon activity at SPUR. The afternoon activity was like a brainstorming exercise except based on pictures that were posted up. It really got us to think about how to plan for the future in extreme ways. - Maggie Dong On July 16th, Erika began the day with a lecture about storytelling and creative peacekeeping and how stories can contribute to the perspectives of the Chinatown neighborhood. This can help engage members of the community without relying on the perspective of economic growth and sustainability. It also helps to remember the information through stories that are told time and time again. We want to build relationships with the community in order to enact upon change. After the lecture, we visited the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission in which they talked about how they are utilizing green infastructure and how that helps in making Chinatown more sustainable.
On July 18th, we finally begin working with our groups and brainstorming on how and what we are going to present our projects on. We were given an activity that helped us think about what we were going to do. We had to answer these five questions and I think it's helpful when we have questions that will guide us. In the afternoon, we visited SPUR, Planning and Urban Renewal Association. They went into their background, issues across the Bay Area, and discussed about the four future scenarios of Chinatown. The four scenarios were high and low economic growth and low and high social inclusion. It was very interesting to see the futures visually. They were drastically different from each other. Even though you might not have background in urban planning, it's very thought provoking and it makes you think about what is going to happen in the near future, which is both scary and exciting at the same time. - Michelle Mei |