Andrew_Kao_week5
As the end of our seminar approaches I find myself thinking about the beginning. The goals we set and the hopes we chose to pursue. The past few weeks have informed me about gardening, and more importantly about the sense of home and the memories it can help create and help sustain. If anything, the interviews and the time we spent with the MRC and its members really gave me a concrete basis for the power of gardening. As an immigrant myself, I have a few family members who actively garden. In each case the primary focus is to plant and, hopefully, harvest crops indigenous to Sri Lanka, fruits and vegetables that are hard find here in the United States. But our time with the MRC really highlighted that the crops were in essence secondary. What was really been cultivated was a sense of home.
All the MRC members I interacted with had that sense of home when talking about “their” garden. The community gardens we visited reflected this. Perhaps not with a wealth of participants all diligently attending to their plots all at the same time, but more in the sense that for each of them, it is “their” garden. There is an important distinction there, many of the MRC members are renters, but their garden is their own. There is an inherent ownership and connection between garden and gardener and it will be up to us to convey that message, of how gardens can strengthen a person’s sense of being part of a community. It can be argued that not every community garden might have the emotional significance of the MRC plots, but that might be an oversimplification. It will be up to us to share and inform those who, like us, had only a vague conceptual idea about what a community garden can be.
If the purpose of CRP, landscape architecture, and architecture is to help create a better built environment, whether it be in the scale of a building, community, or city, then we must begin to question the investments we choose to make within the city. If “community” is the endgame that idea of the community and the city must be accessible to as many members as possible, or at the very least, there should be an openness to the community as a whole. It is not up to me to determine if urban farming and community gardens are the best use of city resources in the efforts to foster a better sense of community, but at least in the MRC’s case, it appears to truly empower people to have a sense of community as well as a means of adjusting to a new life.
Ideally we would all like to share what we have learned these last few weeks, but it will be a challenge to convey the breath of what we have all learned. But as Sandercock mentions, “stories are a common denominator valued by all ethnicities and ages,” and perhaps that should be our focus. Not the data we gather or the metrics we might find, but the human connection. A story can transcend language, time, age groups, and communities. It is why the news is always presented as stories. Human beings have an underlying affinity for stories. It is how we have defined our existence on this planet and will continue to be the dominant medium in which we choose to record our time here. If we are able to do anything with our time with the MRC then it should be to help share their story. To help at least one of a hundred who may come into contact with their story to ask the question of, “how can I help?”
Urban farming on flood plain areas and community garden expansion will ultimately be determined by the city, but we might be able to shed some light on the work that goes on with the MRC and its members. Maybe that leads to more plots and less people on the waitlist, but at least there will be another form of documentation about what is going on within this city, its not all music festivals and “keep Austin weird,” there are communities defining themselves and work being done invisible to the rest of us, important work. No matter the medium, we should strive to share this story; it is a compelling story, a story about hope, hard work, and kindness. It is a story about people helping one another, and those need to be the stories we all need to be seeing and hearing more.
- Andrew Kao - Week5













