week 3 blog post - urban ethnography

Grocery

Chairs outside Ping Yuen

Ping Yuen North

Parking meter

Gatekeeper to Woh Hei Yuen

Boba shop

More chairs

Stockton St

In the morning, Deland and Roy presented a two-pronged introduction to urban planning. Deland gave an academic introduction, taking us thru the birth of the modern city as well as the academics / practitioners considered the pioneers in the field. Roy, from a more applications-focused perspective, spoke about a project done to save a park in the Oakland Chinatown, showing various methods used to record the stories of the park - pictures, video testimonies, heat maps to record activities, etc.

In the afternoon, we got to apply the lessons we learned in the morning by using Deland's Urban Studies tool-kit to experience Chinatown. This sort of morning-classroom and afternoon-outside experience-based learning strongly reminded me of the language training I did at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, which also emphasized out-of-the-classroom learning experiences. I love it - I feel intensely engaged when I know that the academic lecture in the morning is paired w/ an experience to actualize what we've learned. We had less than an hour to go through some of the observation methodologies, but I look forward to applying these ethnographic tools, methodically and comprehensively, for our fellowship projects.

andrew zhao