It’s been a busy week of conferences and symposiums and forums! This week in Toronto the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association had their Tri-Country Conference; in Ottawa yesterday the Governor General held an Arts Matters forum on Architecture at Carleton University; and today we had the Carleton Senate Symposium focusing on the role of architecture in relation to health and the environment, where I presented my research on youth cultures in young spaces.
At all three of these meetings-of-the-mind, the issue of housing was focal, and at two of the three the issue of youth engagement in housing came up. At the Tri-Country Symposium in Toronto, Julia Unwin gave a great speech which, among many things, addressed the lack of system thinking when it comes to addressing the matter of youth and housing. The next day at the Arts Matters Forum in Ottawa, Professor Boyle talked about housing existing in something of a void as it relates to young people, and the open discussion often returned to the issue of what the best way is to engage society with the art of architecture.
The discussions got me thinking about my own education. I spent four years doing a fairly high level liberal arts degree and, even then, I never learned much about architecture or housing. It took some continued education, a lot of digging in the course calendar, and a bit of luck for me to stumble upon a history of housing course that really developed a deeper appreciation for the built environment by showing me the process. Not only the physical changes that the houses went through, but the changes in human consciousness that followed and sometimes preceded those changes in our modes of living. The relationship between form and function, and how space is one of the sedimentary aspects of all life. Moreover, that the places we live, work, and play didn’t just show up as we did. They’re a product of a long deliberated process and negotiation with the things we value and our increasing ability to realize those things physically in the world.
To put it in even less lofty terms, I’ll paraphrase what Sarah Webb of the UK delegation said during our group discussion at the Tri-Country Symposium: If you do choose to buy a house, it will most likely be the most expensive, most complicated, most determining decision of your life. Why is it that most young people only start to learn about it as they’re about to do it?
If the places we live are such important financial and personal investments, should there not be some base level courses about architecture, or at least housing in our secondary or post-secondary curriculums? Is it reasonable to raise young people without giving them the understanding of their built environments as a part of a process? Without some context, how can young people develop opinions about how space should be used when they are voting citizens of a municipality? Where did you first learn about where/how you live?
And now, as always, some music.
October 17th, 2008 at 7:51 am
I come from a very small hollow in central Pennsylvania and, for me, it wasn’t long before I started learning about where/how we lived. With a maximum security federal prison due to be constructed a mile up the road and a water plant and a sewer treatment plant to be installed across the street… it was a huge invasion. I realized quickly how important space is, and how much I’d taken for granted our dead end location in the woods where we could play dodgeball and sled ride in the middle of our road without fear of traffic. No one was forced to move to make way for any of this construction but it came through without reservation and certainly changed daily life.
October 17th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Very interesting post. Moreover, whats really lacking is basic financial education (of which housing is a huge part).
There is much blame to go around regarding our current fiscal crisis (from policy makers to mortgage brokers and wall st. managers), but people with basic financial educations (even if they are very highly educated by academic standards) have fared much better of late. They are not caught in crazy mortgages or increasing consumer debt loads and they have savings set aside for times like this.
BTW, I grew up in some great suburbs and learned about where/how live when we went into Chicago to attend black hawks games. Also, when I lived in Japan I got a very different, but just as enlightening lesson in density/space etc.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Thanks for the comments folks,
Both of you seemed to make the observation that it was the experience of contrast – in Elizabeth’s case contrast that moved into her world, and in David’s case contrast that he observed in traveling – that helped you divine the nature of your respective places and your relationships with them.
My experience growing up was one that had a lot of spatial diversity and so I had a lot of intuitive questions, but I didn’t know how to ask them. For example, I wondered why it was that busses came so frequently downtown in Toronto but not so much in Mississauga – no one ever explained to me that suburbs were new, and predicated by the assumption of automobile ownership, so the municipality wasn’t as concerned about bussing at that phase of its development.
From my perspective, it seemed like ambient friction was frustrating my movement through the transportation network with no logic. It made downtown-Toronto seem much more friendly to movement and much more logical with respect to movement, while the suburbs were much less so in both cases. Of course, without the automotive perspective it’s the opinion that I was bound to have. While not being a car, the understanding of those planning principles would have gone a long way to making my pre-automotive experience intelligible.
I think that understanding simple stuff like that could really help young people start to ask the right kinds of questions about the world and their place in it.