26 Jun 2024
On May 22, the sophomore students from the Department of Urban Planning and Design of Xi 'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University held the open space exhibition of UPD110 “Neighbourhood Planning”.
The event was hosted by Dr Ying Chang, associate professor, and Dr Kon Kim, an assistant professor from the Department of Urban Planning and Design. UPD110 is designed to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the values, concepts, principles, processes, evaluation frameworks, and methods of community planning. How to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals through good community planning is also a major focus of the course.
This year, the restructuring of the course was led by Dr Kon Kim. The group project is aimed to enhance sense of place and sense of community, with a tactical place making approach.
Professor Rui Wang and Dr Ying Chang
In collaborative group work, students collected the local needs of Hanlin Yuan Garden community and Hyde Park community, and suggested how to increase the sense of place in small public open Spaces through simple interventions. In the design proposals, the students showed a variety of novel and participatory planning and design methods and demonstrated the basic principles and methods of community planning they have learnt.
Professor Marc Aurel Schnabel
The final review was organised in the format of Open Space exhibition and each team showed the process and outcomes by posters and short video. Invited reviewers include Guihua Xu, member of the Communist Party Working Committee of Xietang Street; Yutsu Wang, Secretary of the Youth League Committee; Xiuyue Luo (Deputy Secretary of Communist Party) and Lu Liu from, Hyde Park Community; Jingxian Gu (Deputy Secretary of Communist Party) and Rongfei Zhu of Hanlinyuan Garden Community.
Attendees from XJTLU included Professor Marc Aurel Schnabel, Dean of the Design School; Dr Gang Liu, Deputy Dean of the School of Mathematics and Science, Dr Yuhang Liu of Department of Foundational Mathematics , and Yinyin Lu of the Academy of Future Education. In addition, there are teachers from the Department of Urban Planning and Design, including Professor Rui Wang, Professor Joon Sik Kim, Dr Xuefeng Wang, Dr Ju Hyun Lee, Dr Hyung Rae Cho and Dr Sophie Sturup.
Professor Joon Sik Kim
The invited guests expressed affirmation and praise for student’s work. Xu Guihua, a member of the Party Working Committee of Xietang Street, summarized: "Students have conducted solid research in the community and today we have seen many very creative ideas, which are very inspiring and helpful for our work. We also hope that students can continue to work hard and implement good ideas in the community."
Dr Liu Gang, Deputy Dean of the School of Mathematics and Physics, said, "In your freshman year, I taught some students advanced mathematics. Today, I am very pleased to see the fruitful achievements of students in your discipline. I am very happy to see students step out of the classroom, delve into the community, and contribute their knowledge to society."
Lu Yinyin from the Academy of Future Education said, "Just now I asked students a few difficult questions, and they all answered very well, suggesting that they have put in a very committed effort in community study. Many of their innovative ideas are very compatible with the social innovation competition we are currently organising. We welcome students to share their innovative ideas with wider society through our platform."
On the day, students also made hand drawing posters to summerise the learning outcomes from Neighbourhood Planning course. Sixteen groups have summerised 138 key words, and the top 20 most frequent words are neighbourhood planning, community, local, sense of place, skills, analysis, eco-friendly, mapping, create, culture, interview, poster, survey, sustainable, system, tactical, and activities.
Each group also had written down and decorated a kite with good memory of this semester and hopes for future.
Finally, as the initiator of Community Garden lab, Dr Chang invited the guests to visit the community garden on the third floor of the Engineering building, and introduced the main research results and experiences of community garden project.
This semester UPD110 Neighbourhood Planning teaching team include Dr Ying Chang (Module Leader), Dr Kon Kim (Co-Module Leader, right second), Dr Jinliu Chen (part-time tutor, right first), Dr Yueli Xu(part-time tutor, left first), and Hongchen Hu (Teaching assistant).
By Yizhuo Liang
Edited by Yi Qian and Dr Ying Chang
Photos by Shuyang Xu、Kon Kim
26 Jun 2024