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

Mohammad A. Ramadan- Drinking Water Flows




I leave AUB and walk back home. On my way I feel thirsty, so I buy a bottle of water for 500 LL. When I arrive home, I open the drinking water tap and water flows from the tap. I feel lucky, as the municipality only provides drinking water two or three days per week. However, when I drink the tap water, I taste chlorine in it. As tap water is not pleasant to drink, and as I am not willing to pay a lot of money to buy “Nestle Pure Life”, I visit a water shop, and get a 20 litre plastic container filled with drinking water for 3000 LL. This is a typical story. The irony is that during the same day I drink expensive water, cheap water, and free water. The fact that the municipality provides free water only three days per week makes me obliged to rely on cheap water from water shops. Even when free water is available I might consider cheap water as free water has a “chlorine” taste. As for expensive bottled water, I am obliged to buy it when there is no other source of drinking water. This happens when I am in a public space. Now besides the cost, there’s a question of quality. In Lebanon, local brands of bottled water are supposedly of high quality, as they are bottled directly from the source, which is a natural spring that is not exposed at all to any contamination. As for the municipal water, it is controversial whether it is healthy to drink or not, but it’s for sure that it has an unpleasant taste that makes me reluctant to drink it. As for the cheap water, nobody can evaluate its quality! Its more or less pleasant taste and its very low price make it the most popular, but nobody is quite sure whether or not it is treated properly to become potable, especially that it comes from a groundwater well and it for sure needs treatment, as groundwater in Beirut is contaminated with nitrates.
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