CapAsia: Zhang Ziyu in Thailand and Nepal: Reflections of a CapAsian (2017)

Sumer is approaching in Changsha, China, but I still miss the summer we spent together in CapAsia early this year. Joining this program was really a wonderful decision I had ever did. There is so much that I gained from CapAsia and is hard to tell all. Everything I experienced and everyone I met gave me new ideas about this world and myself. That make me become a better person. Let me try to recount some of this experience and my reflections.

Si Satchanalai Project

This is the first CapAsia project in Thailand. Everything was new for me. At the beginning of CapAsia, I always want someone to guide me and tell me what should I do. However, with the deepening of research, I learned that things were changing all the time. Do not panic about no survey direction. Time is the best way to tell us what we learn. For me, this was a self-positioning process.

We spent three weeks in Si Satchanalai, a district which is located in Sukhothai Province, trying to find the other side of Thailand. To be honest, I knew little about Thailand’s history and culture before I went there, especially, Sukhothai which was the first Thai kingdom was unfamiliar to me. However, everything unknown or interesting taught me how to do research. Observation and curiosity are the first step of survey.

The three sub-districts that our group focused were, Nong O, Tha Chai and Si Satchanalai. Si Satchanalai historic park is one of the most a significant landmark in this area. However, most tourists including Thai students did not know that there is a chinaware town nearby. My homestay father is a shop owner in the town. He wanted to get more outside information and make chinaware and be famous. He also had some good ideas on how to make his dream come true. Unfortunately, there were money problem and some obstructions with the local government. There are many businessmen like him in these sub-districts and they use their limited energy to develop their own lives. “Listening” helped us to learn their stories, needs, also what we need to do in the future. Most importantly, we learned from them. They made me start to think about my own major. What is our role of an urban planner?

Moreover, this project taught me how to learn and understand different kinds of people. Culture is people’s lifestyle. Sometimes we do not realize that something is culture because we feel comfortable. As an outsider, life experience in Thailand made me feel its culture more easily. Examples include bare feet in the room, sitting on the floor to have dinner, and taking cold showers. How to communicate became a big problem for us. Our difficulty to communicate with the Thais was not only due to the language difference but also due to the gap in understanding. A real understanding can only be built on long-term relationships. For instance, during the first week, when my homestay parents wanted to communicate with me, they always talked to my Thai friend in Thai language first and waited her to translate for me. As time went by, we became closer; the hosts tried to use some English words directly. What we need to do is just respect the locals and their culture and try our best to understand and learn.

There was another interesting story I remembered. When we had free time in Sukhothai after the project, we met a Chinese girl with her parents. She complained that she planned a three days trip in Sukhothai, but her program was completed in one day and was feeling bored that time. It was strange that I did not know where to start talking even though I came in touch with so many interesting things there. How can I help her get the same feeling as me in three days? Maybe the difference is between travel and experience. People usually care about their own feelings on a trip. They want to get experience of beauty and gain self-satisfaction in a short time by traveling. By contrast, people who do research will pay more attention to the environment and local people. They might get a new understanding and change themselves by making long-term observations and communication with local people.

Kamphaeng Phet Project

After a three-week study in Sukhothai, I almost had a basic understanding of CapAsia. So I started to relax and enjoy the trip. Owing to only ten days we had in KPP, we needed to look for stories which we wanted to focus on in a short time. Fortunately, Yuan and I found our study direction quickly, even though it was difficult to travel to the site, at first. I must admit that this was a period of rapid growth and of finding myself that I never knew.

Our target was Ton Pho Market, an old market which is close to the local government office and the historical park. In our viewpoints, it is a good location for the market. However, when we first visited this old market at noon, we saw a few venders and customers. Why is it a depressed market? This was the beginning question that directed our group’s inquiry.

We learned the following by talking with people in this old market.

Only if people pay less money for government, they can do business in the old market. This is a market with 60 years history. And it takes time-sharing and vender-flowing operation. It means the rush hours of the market are the mornings and nights, not noon that we visited the first time. Hence, our first impression was not totally true.
The influence of the old market is waning. There is a larger market nearby which has a 30-year history and is open all day. Local people called it the Central Market. At first, we wanted to find a vendor who has moved from old market to the Central Market and had a talk with him; we also wanted to find the connection between the two markets. When we went to the Central Market, we realized that the scale of central market is beyond our imagination. As the time is limited, we decided to pay more attention and do deeper research in the old market and also get some basic information about the central market, particularly how it affects the old market. There was a variety of vendors in the old market:

Old owners who has a steady stream of regular customers are satisfied with things as they are. Most of them had business for more than 10 years. They did not want to give up the circle of friends at the market; they also believed that a move to the Central Market would make them compete with more of the same trade and won’t make more money.
New owners do not have a steady stream of regular customers because the popularity of the old market is declining. They preferred to move to the Central Market for greater development.
Some vegetable vendors moved between the old market, Central Market and the night market. They did business in different markets at different times in order to make optimum money. Some venders did not sell things for a living, but for a hobby, or a way to fill time. So the cheaper booth-fees at the old market attracts them.

Through the study, we found that the old market and central market have different functions and different service times and areas. Their relationship is more than a competition. It is more of a cooperation and joint development. The owners have their agency to adapt and change the market. Moreover, the old market is not only a selling and buying space but also a social space for customers, vendors, workers, and those who come to hang out. The old market is already a part of their life.

This makes me rethink about planning I learn in school. Sometimes, we only consider the function of space and ignore the affection needs of people. People have a variety of needs and they will also change with time. What if the planners can follow people’s changing needs and make some changes in planning to accommodate this? Maybe people will live more comfortably and planning will be more successful.

To summarize the whole process, there are some problems and insufficiencies in practice. The first one is qualitative analysis is more than quantitative analysis. In fact, I still have some questions like how many owners in the old market totally? What kind of business do they do? How long have they been doing the business? what time do they open the shop? I wonder whether the old market can operate in the future.

The second shortcoming is most of our investigation objects what we focus on were shop owners. We lack of deeper talking with customers, government employee and local people near the market.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot of communication skills and developed a research mindset from the KPP project. In order to get more correct information, we need to observe steadily more than once. When we get information at the first interview, we could never come to a conclusion immediately. Hence, it is important to ask more questions on account of what we know and more information will come and wrong information will be amended. The whole study started with a question. The curiosity drove us to observe, ask, and reflect, over and over again. We wanted to help the market to be a booming market first but, in the end, we just understood a part of the market. What is study? Don’t always think about change, start with understanding first.

Kathmandu Project

For the last project of CapAsia, we came to Nepal. We collaborated with the students at Nepal Engineering College who major in architecture and conducted a joint architectural design project with them. We only participated in the preliminary phase of it. We talked with local people and tried to learn local culture and history. We then shared our observations and reflections with the Nepali students in view of helping and guiding their design process.

There is similar class in my college, but we never spent much time on survey and rarely asked why before. We always wanted to start our design quickly after we got the design requirements. The whole trip taught me to ask why and express my views as much as possible, even though we cannot get the answer.

I learned many more important things on the way. Nepal students wanted to build a museum of Newari culture. What we did was to think of some questions like how should we define museum? What is Newari culture? Do they really need to build a museum? How to show Newari culture in a museum? Everyone had their own opinions after study. Someone even said they do not need a museum. That sounded amazing and beyond my expectation. Everything will happen. This is CapAsia.

Reflections

All the things I faced in CapAsia, all become the things I learned. During the 11 weeks, I met so many people who have different backgrounds and personalities. They showed me a colorful and totally different world. I started to think about some questions that I never did before. I learned my capacity for self-expression and things-redefine. We always do planning according to our thinking without a concern for the city and people before. We often ignore what is happening, but prefer to recall what is losing. In my opinion, it is easy to get away from our daily life like going on a trip, but it is very difficult to observe our own lives. How to close to people. How to close to our life. Maybe this is the real thing that CapAsia taught me.