The Community – Sharing Stories

With the start of the course we have explored the suggestion that how we view our environment has an impact on how we treat it. Sustainability in the built environment is as much an action to our surroundings as a reaction to it. Many in the course have already expressed the lack of knowledge surrounding sustainability and its impact on the environment. Your midterm assignment is to explore, through representation, a mapping that will illustrate the inherent forces/flows/metabolisms occurring within your images from assignment 1.

Swyngedouw, from Social Power and the Urbanization of Water, states that urbanization is connected to the transformation of nature and the social relations inscribed within. Your explorations will take a two step process that will attempt to “re-present” the complex relationships of nature and social relations (as well as political and economic) occurring within/around/about the urban condition of your image. By exposing the underlying layers of a site’s perceived urban construct we can better understand the contradictory forces operating. True sustainable design has the capacity to mediate the power struggles that can disengage us from a sites fullest potential. This exercise will prepare us in creating a new process of socio-environmental reconstruction.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

BACKYARDS by Firas



BACKYARDS
by Firas Abou Fakher


CHAPTER 1

“Son, bring the hose closer!”

Shifting, a boy of 12 or 13 looks towards the far end of the field. Dragging the hose seemed worthless, he knew the water would dry up in a hour or so, but he says nothing.

“Where have you been this morning? you know its watering day.”

Nothing.

“Nothing!”

The son, shifting, drags the hose to the far end of the field, looks up at the houses around the field and sees a window begin to open in the landowner’s kitchen, no doubt to get a hint of a breeze.

CHAPTER 2

The window took too much energy, not worth what little breeze it let in. No matter, he pours another glass of cold water and sits by the window, watching the farmers tilling his land. Its a wonder they’re still able to make it, ever since the well dried up they’ve had to buy water from the neighbors and their farmers. No matter, he has no reason to trouble his mind, he gets the rent, all else is anecdote, it is a wonder. Where does the harvest go? it is a wonder. How has a group of Bangladeshi made it to these suburbs, taken control of pretty much all the agricultural fields, and managing to make a living? it is a wonder. He should just sell the land.

CHAPTER 3

“We’re not going to sell this month. The water’s out father.”

He knew this would happen, he knew his son knew this would happen, he knew this would happen again. Thoughts of rumors that farmers farther north are having similar problems, and that they were watering with sewage, had reached his ears and surfaced in these very moments.

“The water’s out father.”

CHAPTER 4

That was the second time today that his father was lost in thought.

“Father, the water’s out!”

“I know son.”

CHAPTER 5

The landowner closes the window and watches, he remembers when the town was a town, he remembers also when people started coming, quickly, and in large numbers, to live, affordably close to the center. He does not remember what it was like to be then, he reasons that that is part of human reason. He remembers, from pictures, what the mountain behind his house looked like before the migration. He glances again at the farmers, he wonders how long they will stay, if they will leave like the ones before them.
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