<aside> 💁🏻 Xu Jie: Today we will talk about spatial practices in communities. By our interpretation, the Space is not limited to its physical environment but even a broader definition - space can be shared that belongs to everyone; it also can be political that empower people with certain right; it could be a product to serve people that you can control it or to wield the creative freedom over your life. Therefore, as indicated in the title, we would like to treat space as a collection of relationships, to understand how the relationships between subjects inside a space can in return affect space. Let’s welcome our three guests who are deeply involved in communities in mainland China, namely Professor Zhou Zishu from DIGUA Community, Zhang Xin —— TAS from Shenzhen, and Jin Jing —— Big Fish from Shanghai.
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Zhang Xin: Our team TAS is based in Shenzhen. We started our projects on youth development in Shenzhen in 2009, and our role when we first got involved in communities was to do youth culture research for community organizations and commercial brands. We were looking for methods of sustained youth development. Between 2014-2019 we organized a lot of cultural events, but all those experiences didn't answer my inner questions.
Then we started the social group Mixed Days, to bring up social concerns of Shenzhen and seek innovative strategies, and that is when we entered the community field unconsciously. We found out that communities provide the lowest start-up cost, and are the easiest place for young people to get involved in. Based on the topic of youth development, the whole team shifted to the community in 2016, starting research on sustained youth development in the community to achieve community autonomy. This is the start.
Then come some ideological changes. In the beginning, we as planners tend to answer the questions conceived in our minds, but when in the community, all problems are dynamic and correlated, which means the problem you see now may not be the real one. So later we tried to provide a dynamic solution, maintaining a continuous focus on the core problem at different stages of the project. In recent projects, we focused on rooting in local and promoting interactions when dealing with a series of problems. For all of our projects and participants, continuous learning and answering of these questions are our core strategies and approaches in recent years.
Zhou Zishu: Let’s be more relaxed. In fact, I didn't pay much attention to the community until my master thesis when I unintentionally cared about the people living in the basement, one thing led to another, it became a community project. We have paid close attention to underground space since 2013 at which time community projects were not so popular compared to now, as many people thought that we were just renovating the space. In fact, my interest was not in renovation nor community development. My core concern is always to see the process of development to make people-centered strategies. I don’t care about their backgrounds, as I myself studied ceramics for my bachelor, and then graphic design and curation, then after I was disappointed with art, I went to the UK to study Narrative Space Design, which lead to what I am doing now as social design–the whole process is a life experience for me. For me, it’s not essential to get involved in communities, and I don't think the community should become a fashion. Community projects, community-based perspectives, or approaches are very complicated, plus a lot of them can’t be discussed publicly, so they turned out not as fashionable as you may think. On the contrary, I think that young people may not be good at community projects. Those who can take root in the community and sustain it for a long time might be middle-aged, such as a full-time mother who has strong needs in the community and they can be an idle worker for the community. Young people are more possible to work as an agitator in the community.
Jin Jing: I agree with Zhou. I would love to share some of my personal experiences. When I was 20 years old, I have no idea about the community. At that time, I love exploring cities, walking in old alleys and taking photos of old buildings. I have a desire to step out of my little world and discover the outside. I started to notice the community until an urban renewal project happened in my hometown. My family had to farewell all our neighbors and the place we had lived for over a hundred years to move to a new place. At that time, I felt a sense of powerlessness because there was no way to maintain the current life. I studied environment design and have some ideas on historic building renovation. I hope people who live in their renovated houses can enjoy life at ease without fighting cockroaches and mice. But my neighborhood had different ideas about the urban renewal project. They were not against the demolition and waiting for the big payments from the urban renewal project. Finally, I got lost. Later I realized the reason why I had gotten no support is because I didn’t consider my neighbor’s desire. Then I spent a long time in Japan to find out what I really care for, do I care about the loss of my land or the loss of my relationship with my neighbors. And during my study in Japan, I noticed I care about the connection between the land and the people, and also the relationship between the residents. The disappearance of my old community arouses my anxiety. I have experienced earthquakes, tsunamis, and radiation in Japan, the local people taught me how they rebuilt their community and how to transform a broken neighborhood back to normal or even better than before. They didn’t do anything special but get on with their own life.
For me, designing a community is like designing your life. I didn't treat community design as academic research but as a part of my own life. I hope young people can do the same. Nowadays old residential areas have remained with traditional lifestyles and relationships, and they support each other like a family. Young people may not rely on support from their neighbors, there are all kinds of support online. But when they have the desire to connect with people around, I hope they can put themselves into the community and have real talks and try to make connections with real people and real places. It is very simple.
<aside> 💁🏻 Chen Feiyue: I agree that our guests said the local community is a different space existing between the small community system and the big community system. I always believe before we join in municipal or national issues, we are the member of a small and close community first, such as our family, our club, our department or even private relationships. With our own communities, we can engage and work better in a bigger world and local communities can be a very good connection between our own small community to the big public system.
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<aside> 💁🏻 Li Yalun: Something here I just have to say. I am a Beijing local and studied architecture in college. When I was doing my thesis project in 2018, the Beijing government was driving out migrant workers and the low-end labor force from the city. At that time, I also felt a sense of powerlessness. I hope I can change this situation through architecture. But I may have a different perspective because I am still a student. Actually, I have a question: When you join a community project, are there any changes happening in the way you design? Because I think the community is a very complicated system, either youth or migrant workers or any groups, the population composition is constantly changing, on the other hand, the development of the city is proceeding at a high speed, so I would like to ask our guests how do you deal with the changes happening in communities during the project, such as the people or the urban environment? Is there any difficult situation to deal with？ Have you ever felt tricky when you handle population movement happening in your community?
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Zhou Zishu: As for the first question, I care about how young people survive in the community and the subjectivity of a designer. Before when we come to a community and work there, we face the question of how to survive. So normally there are two ways of working in the community, One way is to go all-in, the second way is for the designer to find a decent job in an office, and find some time to do some research and display his research in the community in the community. And apparently these two ways are very different. The designer's work is the second way it is impossible totally and truly join a community. If you want to truly join a community, you need to have a strong mind, just like Jin Jing. She has regarded doing community projects as a part of her life, and she didn’t regard it as academic research.
If a designer sees a community project as academic research, he will face many difficulties in the community. From 2014 to 2018, I met a lot of oversea students who come back to China for community projects and ended up with great disappointment. Overseas students with top education still have to deal with issues at the basic level, and this reality is different from what our education has taught us. This is a question about personal subjectivity. How to make gain sustainable development both physically and mentally, is a question.
The second question is about the social process. Every project will keep changing in the social process. The power system, the Narrative Space, the social relationship, the material practice, and even the organization of the community may change during the process. So why do I still care about the community? It is because I become more mature in this process. And I become more sincere and truthful in this process， which is beyond academic gains. It is very important to find a balance point between personal subjectivity and social process.
Recently I am working on the theory of social design, and invited teachers from over 20 universities to conduct research on social design. And I hope we can cooperate to construct the social design theory of our own, instead of copying from western societies. And DIGUA Community is a platform that supports my research. There are three types of designers, the first type is architects and planners who make their proposals based on the perspective of the nation. The second type is a designer who works for the market. And the third type is Designers focus on certain societies or groups. I hope social design can deal with the tension between the nation, market, and society. This tension keeps changing in the social process. Finding the tension base on nation, market, and society’s perspective, finding the way to deal with the tension and finding a new pattern for production and consumption, and distribution, should be the work of future designers.
The social process is constantly changing. In 2013, I was helping people living in the basement, and the media described me as a designer who renovate underground spaces and bring the “mouse tribe” dignity. The way how the media report is ultra-left. But in fact, when we were doing research with the “mouse tribe”, people who lived in the basement don’t want to be called as “ mouse tribe”. And what we have done is just take advantage of their adversities for our benefit. People who were labeled as the “mouse tribe” no longer want to join in the renovated spaces. And I started questioning myself, is the DIGUA community successful? So when I shared the DIGUA community, I will describe it as a failure.
99.99% of so-called innovation was a failure.
If we can’t even talk about failure and only talk about success, we are misleading our audience. I prefer to find my failure than my success. Although the School of Visual Arts and Stanford have successful cases about social innovation, design for social innovation in America is not exactly the same as social design in China. Recently I am writing the difference between social innovation and social design. Social design is not using the same methodology as Sociology. For example, a Sociology project may use surveys, long-term tracking, and one on one service as its methodology. When a designer joins a social design project, he has to figure out his logic of action. How to use a creative way to design a platform which can present a discourse system from a different perspective? Social design can restore social discourse. If a designer is unable to restore social discourse but only displays a platform for the exhibition, he hasn’t finished his job. And the only solution for this situation is he should step out of his information cocoon and read more books from other areas, and do interdisciplinary study. And when I talk about social innovation, it is a restructuring of the social system. We often talk about social innovation, but we seldom hear different opinions from different perspectives. If there are no different opinions, then how can we have any innovation? So social innovation is different from social design, but during the process of social innovation, social design is part of the process. We can define social design as a method of social innovation.
Finally, I have a question for our guests. Who provides financial support for your community project? Does the support come from global capital, or government, or university and how do you use this support for your project?
Jin Jing: I also want to add some thoughts. I have regarded change as the only way to success. There is no way to avoid changes, so why can’t we take advantage of the changes to do more creative things. The second point is, to try to enjoy the temporary relationship. If my respondent can only stay one day with my team, then we only use this only day as part of our research. And no matter whether we have one day, one week, or one year of work together, the relationship is not permanent. The project is still running and we communicate and cooperate as usual, and we create our value together. Even if my respondent left, the value we have created together still exists. And when my project come to the next stage, it has new development and new connection, and our achievements at the previous stage will not be wiped out, sometimes our achievements can help us find another new chance or a new perspective. The third point is, that it is very difficult at first, and we can try to grow our seed in a more mature land, we can join in a project which already has some existing organizations or relations. And we can change our view when we first join a new project. We can first understand the needs and desires of people around us and gradually find connections that we can link together. Loneliness is a feeling that only comes from our hearts. If we can find new perspectives when we get along with other people, we can adjust our goals during the social process. When we are facing changes, we can change our helpless feeling to motivation for creation. We can use our creativity to adapt to the environment, but not use our creation against the environment.
Zhang Xin: I share the same point of view with Jin Jing. I am based in Shekou, and I grow up in this area with rapid changes. My team spent two years in Nantou old town, an urban village in Shenzhen. We were the only team left after the Shenzhen Biennale. At that time, when the exhibition was over, everything changed， and the visitors and money were all gone. And we started to think about what hasn’t changed in this place, then we found residents there didn't change so our position was changed from designers to residents. We almost stayed 24 hours in Nantou, and we listened to new desires from our new perspective. We had to find variants and invariants in our new position, for example, the history and culture of Nantou's old town and the real needs of residents. So after changing our perspectives， we have created a long-term platform for local children, which we hope could help children find their sense of identity and belonging in Nantou's old town.
So how can young people survive in the community? And what is our value in the community? If you come to the community, you can find locals are of great wisdom. People have many ways to make their living. When we are in a changing environment, we have to ask ourselves can we create a new lifestyle and new value. The desire of the community is always changing, and we have to keep creating to meet the desire of the community. We should not only be concerned about our research, but we should also be concerned about whether we have made our life become better. Better here not only means we have made more profit but means the life is more comfortable and more sincere.