Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
The mid-20th century road-based urbanization of the largest city in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai, has led to implementation of highway networks that break up rice fields and harden the irrigation system used to fill rice paddies in the city’s outskirts. These new infrastructure systems led to city developments that grow uncontrollably around villages who have relied on an indigenous community irrigation system for hundreds of years. These new housing sprouted in the village has led residents to reconfigure their domestic landscapes transforming their historical family houses into new microeconomic commons – adapting dormitories, crafts space, shops, and restaurants. Following four cohorts of students from Bangkok and New York to Chiang Mai and Pittsburgh, this presentation explores how years of fieldwork and spatial ethnographies nurtures a shift in architectural and urban design towards an action-based socio-ecological pedagogy rooted in the collective lived wisdom of communities our disciplinary knowledge has carefully erased. We learned new ways of seeing to appreciate our environments as complex ecologies of socio-natural relationships, rituals and somatic experiences. The villagers who taught us nurtured bottom-up developments around care and services – using the valley’s natural resources through labor exchange and incremental self-determination in maneuvering the urban interface of highways and gated communities. These stories are counter proposals for the future of Chiang Mai Valley rooted in kinship and commons making, reflecting new creative urban imaginaries to recognize that design is a communal practice beyond the imagination of modern urban planning.
Tommy CheeMou Yang is a multi-disciplinary Hmong designer, researcher, and educator whose work focuses on insurgent urban and architectural growth, utilizing multi-disciplinary methods such as fieldwork, oral/public history, and cartography. Using comics, illustrations, animations, and material studies his work draws from everyday stories of people and the built environment. Yang’s research has been funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Wisconsin Historical Society, Urban Systems Lab at The New School, Urban Field Station, Studio for creative Inquiry, and many others.
Brian McGrath is an architect with forty years of research and practice. The focus of his work is urban adaptation and change from social justice and ecological resilient perspectives. McGrath is a Principle Investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where since 2005, he led the Urban Design Working Group. His books and publications include: Genealogy of Bassac (2021), Patch Atlas (2020), Urban Design Ecologies Reader (2012), Digital Modeling for Urban Design (2008), Transparent Cities (1994), Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design (2012), Growing Cities in a Shrinking World: The Challenges in India and China (2010), Sensing the 21st Century City (2007), and Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (2007).