informal urban practices

The beggars in Asian are quite different from the Western. In China, the beggars got hundred years history. It becomes a special culture such as “Beggar’s Chicken” (food), “The Mad Monk” (fairy tale), “The king of Beggars” (movie) and so on. Usually beggars just sit on the street with a bowl and bagging for money. Lots of them are disable people, but actually some of them are pretended. Some baggers scaming from people, as if their son or parents just died. The beggars trend toward younger age. These little beggars like fasten on passerby such as catch their cloth or hug their legs.   Most of children beggars are organized by criminals. Criminals trafficking in children and make them become disabled. So that leads one problem: How to treat thebeggars? Some people stop giving beggars alms, because beggars have to give most of the money to criminals. Some people have other rules, like this:

If they ask for money,
I gave them food;
If they ask for food,
I gave them money.

little beggar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcE92B__vBY

disable beggar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyyQn3yLIoQ

My video:

http://vimeo.com/13664225

By  Jiazhen Ken Chen

Street trading and hawking within Asia consits of both legal and illegal goods, items such as DVDs, clothing, bags, electrical can be found in department stores and these items are all legal, but most people travel to Asia to buy illegal and fake goods. Most of these goods might be fake but the quality is so good and it makes it really hard to tell if these items are real or fake. These street hawkers are hurting the department stores because they are selling more then the real goods. The government might say they are trying to control these hawkers but I don’t believe this is true because you can find fake items anywhere in Asia. The value in this is that both hawkers and tourist as well as the police are all getting something out of it.  Other street traders within Asia are people that are selling foods from small stands that move around, allowing the tourist and locals to buy traditional food that may not be customary to us.

http://www.vimeo.com/13756286

Why am I here?

I chose this course because I consider urbanism as the main influence on our daily life apart from our private spaces. Urbanism to me means foreign cultures, different backgrounds, density and vivacity which I think are the substantials of life as it affects us every day, I think it is a very intereting topic that I would like to learn more about especially how things are interrelated.

What is my motivation?

I would like to improve people’s living qualities in a rather subtle way, which means turning public spaces into places where people can take their dwell time and get in touch with foreigners, other cultures without moving mountains.

What do I want to learn?

I would like to learn more about how the melting pot of people react to their surroundings and in what way can I contribute to it. I would also like to learn more about the conversion of waisted space in urban areas and how to improve the quality of cities the image of their districts – how can I find niches in urban spaces that need to be transformed.

I’m interested in the public realm. In my previous studio with Lynda and Caroline we built 1:1 scale interventions for the public, and I was really intrigued in the way the public responded to us. I always thought of public being unpredictable in nature, you might never know if they would respond to your design in the way you want them to or in a way that you wouldn’t expect them to. That’s what fascinates me. And the idea of activating unused spaces and drawing in the public. The things that I would really like to draw from this studio is communicating with professionals from different fields in design and the tactics and the mindset in which they apporoach design, which in turn would broaden my understanding of DESIGN.