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.

Monday, December 21, 2009

bottled water (bassem)


Good thing it only costs 500LL

Good thing it only costs 500LL – you can get a better price if you buy the dozen, because it’s cheaper by the dozen – the 1.5 L costs 750 LL (1.25 x the price, 3 x more water) – the 5 L gallon costs 1500 (3 x the price, 10 x more water) – the 19 L reusable gallon costs 5000LL, we get it for 4500LL, I don’t know how we got that deal though. (9 x the price, 38 x more water) –the last deal is better than the others, 263.14LL/Liter – you can go to the ‘ein (العين), fill up whatever container you have with the fresh cold water, no charge – you could set up your filtering system, get potable water straight out of the tap – you could also | WAIT – WAIT – WAIT | potable water out of the tap?! Why so surprised... Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be? Maybe in a million years –

He is a farmer, he lives in Akkar. Arab, jarab, darab, naatab, khachab, ghadab and yves are his sons who had survived, after the 5 others died. [they were a dozen]. With their father, they grow vegetables, the ones that would grow without water, tomatoes. They actually rely on rain water to get the crops, if it’s a dry season, they harvest the tomatoes after the first rain, no irrigation, they call the tomatoes baal (بعل (, now that they know how to grow crops with very little water, they still need to find out another way for having drinking water. No one mentioned potable water; they just need drinking water. Drinking water for them could come from the rain water they collect, a lake nearby, and sometimes, from the leaking faucet they have attached to the rusty pipe coming from we don’t know where. No ‘ein nearby, no luck for them. No good rain water collecting system neither, no luck for them. Lake dries sooner than they realize no luck for them. Faucet water is why abou arab now only has seven sons. Apparently, Mud, dirt, mire, muck, earth, ooze, sludge, giardia, E. coli, and protozoa did not prevent them from quenching their thirst.

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