Some New Terms from My Friends

Designing Urban Sustainability

A bout of H1N1-period sickness has lowered my productivity, which admittedly has not been very high lately anyway. This morning, from the confines of my bed I chatted with a friend and fellow PhD student in Hong Kong, and he sent me a sample of his work. It's an inspiration to see actual pieces of dissertation out there and done, complete with headings like "2.0 Info-sociational life & informational cities."

Comments and notes for my own reference:



1. A Point of Rhetoric

At one point my friend defines his "analytical framework" : "the cases of info-sociational life in Hong Kong and Taipei are at the intersection of three key conceptual themes: informational urbanity, or the global information city; urban civil society or associational life; and urban sustainability." There's a diagram to with this:

An Example of Rhetorical Illustration

The illustration is fascinating because it is an impossible level of abstraction, at least as far as I am concerned. I can grasp what is meant: new urban groups are using information tools to advocate for urban sustainability, but the relationship between the three substantives in the sentence I just wrote is already far more complex than that allowed by the Venn diagram, which pictures only logical intersection of sets. In this sense, the figure is only an illustration of the rhetorical usage "intersection."

I'm reminded of the Chinese paper I'm currently translating, which 'proved' a point by asking the reader to understand the ideology of a group in terms of a 'framework' that included 'deep' or 'core' beliefs as opposed to 'surface' beliefs. What struck me at the time was that there was no particular reason to see one thing as 'deep' and another as 'surface.' Indeed, there was no motivation for having this structural relationship at all, other than its convenience as a common convention in Chinese rhetoric. Perhaps at some point a young Chinese graduate student will think to illustrate his point with a diagram showing 'deep,' and 'surface.' If such a practice takes off, many analyses of many points will have the same sort of illustrations.

2. A Point About Story-Telling

The 'meat' of this piece of dissertation is a set of four profiles of four organizations who advance urban sustainability with informational tools. Learning who is involved in these organizations and what they have done is of extreme interest. A brief listing:

Designing Hong Kong. I'm struck right away that this group is comprised of some very rich and successful people.

A Map of Our Own. A really cool site combining urban and oral histories.

Organization of Urban REs. An Obviously well-meaning but hopelessly messy Taiwanese urban renewal site.

Taiwan Environmental Info Center. A news service that reminds me of the Aibai Library; both have excellent web pages.

The author synthesized these 'cases' with great skill in a list of 'tactics' : "advocacy journalism and new media activities; tackling urban planning and development issues; monitoring land use dynamics; protecting community heritage; supporting community identity; and encouraging participation in political and decision-making processes." I love the idea that community development and urban sustainability can bring together story-telling and imaginative policy development. My colleague is certainly a crucial participant in such discussions in that he has collected them here for comparative study.