Text of Call for Participation and Theme Statement:
Community Design as Professional Innovation
This is the first Pacific Rim Community Design Network conference to take place in mainland China. (For more information about the Network and its earlier conferences, see http://faculty.washington.edu/jhou/pacrim.htm.) This 6th conference of the Network is being hosted by the city of Quanzhou (pronounced like "Chwen-Jo"), where members of the Network have been engaged in community planning and design for a number of years. It is hoped that this conference will be more than an opportunity for old members of the Network to gather again, update each other on research and experience, and welcome new members; by gathering in Quanzhou, the Network has an opportunity to raise the profile of community design in Quanzhou and elsewhere in China.
Towards this goal, the local government is hosting the conference in tandem with a conference of the Minnan (southern Fujian Province) Urban Alliance of municipalities. The Pacific Rim Network conference organizers are also inviting a panel of experts in community design and participatory governance from other parts of China. Also, the conference will be followed by a multi-university studio led by Dan Abramson, to work with a community currently involved in an upgrading planning process. It is expected that conference participants will have an opportunity to engage in a workshop with local professionals, officials and community members to brainstorm design and policy related to the project. The organizers are seeking funding for translation of conference proceedings and activities.
Submission instructions:
Conference participants are invited to participate as individual presenters, or they may form panels.
Individual presenters are required to submit an abstract (300-400 words). Panels should be proposed by one organizing participant, who must submit an abstract for the entire panel that lists the name of each panel participant followed by a 300-word abstract of each participant's presentation topic. The deadline for all abstracts is March 15.
Based on the content of received abstracts, we will then identify possible panels and sessions and look for panel organizers and pair authors if appropriate. Please send your abstracts to Dan Abramson at abramson@u.washington.edu or fax: (1)(206)685-9597.
As in previous Network conferences, presentations may be in the form of practical case studies, research findings, pedagogical practice, or reflections. The following are suggested questions for presentations to address, that would provide thematic cohesiveness and local relevance to the conference:
- Driving forces - What local social, economic or political changes have served as impulses for greater community involvement in design and planning?
- Preservation of identity and environmental protection - How does community design serve to bolster local identity and/or sustainability? What conflicts exist between the aspirations of local residents and the preservation of locally characteristic or ecologically sound environments? How can community design help to resolve these conflicts?
- Cross-cultural perspectives - What are the different attitudes, outlooks, and perspectives on the concept of community and the practice of community design? What are the lessons of cross-cultural collaboration? What barriers exist to the transfer of techniques from one cultural context to another, and what adaptations in technique have helped to overcome these barriers?
- Community design learning - What are the different pedagogical models of community design education? What skills need to taught? What changes to design and planning education in general need to be made in order to foster community design? How can pedagogy specifically address the challenge of cross-cultural application and relevance of community design?
- NGOs (NPOs) and community design - What are the roles of NGOs in community design? In the absence of a strong NGO presence in society, how can community design help to enhance civic involvement in public affairs?
- Challenges of institutionalization - What changes to government and professions are necessary to support community involvement in design and planning in a sustainable way?
- Community Design in China - How has community design been experienced specifically in China? What are its prospects?
Logistics:
The Quanzhou Municipal Planning Bureau is providing the conference with meeting space and equipment, local transportation, group meals, translation, and printing expenses. Travel to Quanzhou, accommodations, and incidentals are to be paid by conference participants.
Accommodations in the city center of Quanzhou are approximately US$40/night single occupancy (US$20/night double occupancy). Accommodations in the mountainous region are likely to be very simple (shared washrooms, for example) but less expensive.
There are no direct international flights to Quanzhou. International flights to Shanghai Pudong Airport are best; then travelers can take taxi to Shanghai Hongqiao Airport and purchase a domestic ticket to Quanzhou (Jinjiang) airport for approximately US$100-150. Quanzhou can also be reached from Hong Kong by either:
Participants from outside China will need valid passport and visa to enter the country.
About Quanzhou:
Why Quanzhou? Quanzhou is an historic port city dating to the Tang Dynasty (7th-10th Centuries A.D.). Its numerous connections to a global network of Overseas Chinese emigrants and Taiwanese have allowed the city to thrive on an economy of small businesses, to maintain a degree of private property-ownership that is unusual in China, and to restore numerous small neighborhood temples that were suppressed in the 1950s-70s. As a result, conventional top-down redevelopment-oriented planning is not as prevalent in Quanzhou as in other Chinese cities, and the city's planning authorities have hosted a number of innovative projects in community planning and design since the late 1990s. Among these was a community planning studio in 2004, in which Dan Abramson, Jeff Hou and John Liu and their students worked together with students from Southeast University in Nanjing and Beijing University. A description of this studio is online at http://courses.washington.edu/quanzhou/.
In 2005, Dan Abramson led a subset of the 2004 studio group to conduct a short "design clinic" for property owners in Xi Jie ("West Street"), one of the city's few remaining unredeveloped main thoroughfares, which passes in front of the city's most prominent historic landmark, the Kai Yuan Temple. Information on this work is available at
http://courses.washington.edu/quanzhou/qzread/Abramson-ACSApaper.pdf.
We hope the 2007 conference will be able to see and perhaps contribute to the way this project is continuing.
Update from Dan Abramson, Monday, May 14, 2007:
I visited Quanzhou for two days last week and met with our hosts, the Quanzhou Municipal Planning Bureau. They are excited about the upcoming conference and eager to integrate their own Minnan (Southern Fujian) Urban Alliance conference with the Pac Rim conference. We want to make the most of this opportunity to engage planners in this region in China, and to promote dialogue on community design and planning experience in the area and from around the Pacific. There will also be presenters on innovative examples of practice and pedagogy from elsewhere in China, including the old city of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, and a new informal village-in-the-city in Shenzhen.
As a result, the conference may be quite large. Nearly 90 people from the Network and elsewhere outside Quanzhou have expressed interest in attending. 40 presentations have been proposed. (This is not counting local participants.) And we want to have as many presentations translated as possible. And for most of you, this will be your first time visiting Quanzhou and Southern Fujian, so we are organizing one day of excursions to important community-level preservation and planning projects within the old city of Quanzhou, and an overnight excursion to the Hakka earthen roundhouses in the mountains.
This means that we have to compress the presentations and discussions into two days, June 18-19, and hold some parallel sessions and evening sessions. I hope everyone will agree that this is not too severe a sacrifice in order to make the most of this opportunity.
* The Planning Bureau also plans to organize an exhibition of projects -- both by the Urban Alliance and also by the Pacific Rim Community Design Network. If some Network presenters can create posters instead of preparing papers, then we can organize evening roundtables around the posters and have more time for discussion.
A rough (and tough!) preliminary schedule is as follows:
June 18
- Morning: Plenary sessions, alternating between Pac Rim Network speakers and Urban Alliance speakers
- Afternoon: Parallel sessions of Pac Rim Network panels
- Evening: Roundtables and poster discussions
June 19
- Morning: Plenary sessions, alternating between Pac Rim Network speakers and Urban Alliance speakers
- Afternoon: Parallel sessions of Pac Rim Network panels
- Evening: Plenary Pac Rim Network wrap-up session
June 20
- Morning and Afternoon: tour of communities and projects in the old city of Quanzhou, including the upgraded Zhongshan Road arcaded shophouses; the new community of WuBao; informal community spaces in the Cheng Nan (South City); Xi Jie and Kai Yuan Temple.
- Evening: bus to the mountains
June 21
- Morning and Afternoon: tour of Hakka earthen roundhouses
- Evening: return to Quanzhou
