This morning we had our MSAP Christmas Market. The idea was that we would be selling our projects to our tutors, 5th years and anyone else who was visiting. There was lots of food and mulled wine to go along with the projects and I think I went really overboard with the gingerbread!
We did it in the form of speed dating in which we spent 5 minutes talking about our project and trying to communicate it as clearly as possible. It was good to have to summarise my project as I then had to focus on the most important ideas.
Afterwards when the 5th years had passed on their feedback to our tutors, we had short tutorials. The general feedback was that I need to focus more on what I am going to do rather than what I have done. I do however really need to make links between everything I have done and tie it all together, making sure that it is relevant and everyone reading through my project knows that it's relevant and why.
The other thing that I need focus on is backing up my argument: Why am I focusing on the stay at home women of Cheetham Hill? This was what I wanted to achieve with an event but I also need to start reading into it and I will be able to really focus my programme and take it forward. It might be worth talking to friends back at home with reference to staying at home.
After looking at Kevin Lynch and the elements of the [community], began looking at stats for employment. It was interesting (but not that surprising) to see the difference in gender for employment. One thing that did stand out to me was the percentage of 'Look after home/family'. For women, this was over 17% but for men in Cheetham Hill, it was less than 2%. I expanded my study and looked at the same stats for the whole of Manchester and while the male figure as slightly smaller (1.2%) the female figure halved. The rest of Manchester had similar figures to the rest of the North-West area and the UK.
I started asking questions: who/what/why/when/how? and trying to answer them to give me my programme however, some of them were vague so I need to start to look into these further to develop my programme.
When working through these, I remembered going past the West End Women and Girl's Centre in Newcastle every morning/evening on my way to and from the city. It's slightly frustrating now that I don't even have a photo of the place as I only walked past it twice, on my first day and my last. I managed to find their website though and it has a very similar programme and serves a very similar community that my project would. I've now begun to look into this as a precedent.
Buckling down to work this evening, one of the things I really needed to work out was how to tie Lynch's 5 elements theory into my work. I have already made the connection between his 5 elements making up the city and our 5 elements making up the community but I felt that I needed to go deeper than then to enable me to use it in my project.
While Lynch uses them to critique the city and its imageability, as I am in the process of doing with Newcastle, I've realised that I can reverse engineer his method and use it to create a space that allows a community to either begin or grow.
I can turn the theory into a formula:
Paths + Landmarks + Nodes + Edges + Districts = City
People + Employment + Markets + Street + Housing = Community
With the quality of each of these elements making up the quality of the total (City or Community). In Lynch's text, he works out the quality of each of them to find the quality of the city. In my project, I know what I want the end result to be and can work backwards by looking at what the current state of each of the elements is to then create what is lacking or improve what is in poor condition in my project.
In order to do this, another trip up north (that is, to Cheetham Hill, not Newcastle) may be needed and a closer look at the other groups' findings is definitely needed. However, just from looking at the area and listening to presentations etc, I can already make a start piecing together what is required:
People: Cheetham Hill has such a diverse population that I would be willing to say that the richness of the community in this sense doesn't need to be altered.
Employment: As with much of the country in the current climate, the state of employment in Cheetham Hill is not good, although I think it was suggested that this area is one of the worst. Something that needs looking into.
Markets: I've looked at markets in Cheetham Hill enough to know that this isn't an issue within the community and doesn't need faffing with by architecture students.
Street: This varies throughout the area but while the sites are in the centre, there is a good sense of street life although the street is something that is the main focus of my work anyway.
Housing: I already know there is a lot of housing around Cheetham Hill, much of it off the main high street through the sites though. Housing does however form part of our brief.
After quickly listing what the state of each of the elements is, I can see that my project will mainly be focusing on Employment, Street and Housing although I will still keep People and Markets in mind throughout the project.
Now to choose my site!
