Ecologies of poverty 贫困的生态

Spotify Link above.

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/campaign-projects/id1700335123?i=1000654561964

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

poverty, ontology, ecologies, ecology, project, cancer, relative poverty, postcode, scotland, people, SPA, smaller towns, class, students, personal transformation

Transcript

In 1986, New Delhi. School of Planning and Architecture (SPA). I’m teaching a course on “creativity and problem solving”. And I have chosen to use some texts in the foundation in the arts, which essentially talk about personal transformation. And in class, I’ve been building up to the challenge. The students have been sent off – asking what is your action on the topic of personal transformation? And this is where you presented your project. Your wake one morning. You dressed shabbily. In torn clouds. You sat outside the gates of SPA. On the pavement, amidst hawkers. You sat there in full sight of everybody who was passing by. Passing by were your classmates in this class. Passing by you were your friends and other people on campus who knew you by sight. Yet nobody looked at you. Nobody recognized you. That is still a project I remember. That is still a personal transformation or realisation project you enacted for yourself. So Vineet where are you now? What are you up to? How dangerous are the things you’re doing? I wonder. All right. 

Welcome to the Campaign Projects podcast. I’m your host Soumitri Varadarajan and this is a new mini series called Ecologies of Poverty. The first topic in the Ecologies of Poverty, essentially is that, like polar bears, and like all species that Attenborough takes us to go and visit and then unpacks the ecology of. Poverty too constitutes an ecology. It constitutes an ontology. But last semester, when I did Ecologies of Environmental Action, I spent a lot of time on ontologies. My class was bemused. Why do we need to do ontology? They were to ask. Because we are the internet generation, we are the computer generation. When two machines have to talk to each other, the ontology, their language, the components, the building blocks of their language, are exquisitely important. What one machine says, and what another machine hears have to be precisely the same, not just identical, virtually, realistically, completely and totally the same with no excess meaning. 

I’m not going to do the ontologies of poverty here. I might have to address that when I write up the transcript or start modifying the transcript. But we’re staying with ecologies of poverty. Ecologies, as in the rewilding off Scotland. There is this book that I read recently. It is a fantastic book. Telling a fictional account. Where they release wolves into the wild of Scotland. I’ll put a link in the description section. So like the environment is complex. Yes, and hence best captured as an ecology, which means there is a symbiotic set of components of the elements of the ontology. But the other thing about poverty, as as with every topic that we’re going to look at, through all the different five different ecologies, the the thing about poverty, also, is that it’s a postcode phenomenon, just like cancer. The instances of cancer, incidence of cancer in Australia, is accessible through something called the Cancer Atlas. Where you can enter your postcode and th site will tell you that these kinds of cancers are more prevalent in that particular postcode.

So too poverty is a postcode phenomenon. If you want to find poverty, then you would have to go to those kinds of places. To simplify it now just so that we don’t abruptly end this particular opening episode, you would probably have to go quite far out. So if you’re in the metro, then it’s quite possible that in the center of the metro, you would find the homeless, or people who are stopping you at intersections and so on. But if you were to look at relative poverty, people who are living in homes, but they’re doing it hard economically, then you’d have to go further and further out where rents are lower and lower. So smaller towns, and on the outskirts of smaller towns. And so these are the habitats where people, who are doing it hard, would need to situate themselves at. 

To teach the Ecologies of Poverty inside a design school. There is a particular project that I have to do. But the students who come into a tutorial where they’re looking at poverty, may choose the tutorial because they’re interested in the topic. But it is reasonably unlikely. Because this is a course that is offered in the first year of design school. It’s quite possible that they’ve just said to themselves; “Yeah, let’s look we’ll have a look at what’s happening in there”. Which presents a particular kind of problem for the teacher. But it also presents a kind of opportunity.

What constitutes the encounter between students starting a program in educating themselves to become designers and topics such as poverty, which is something that everybody is familiar with, but potentially has not have not examined the way that poverty sits in their brain and the way it is constructed?

So in some senses, we are attempting to question how we make sense of the world. And yeah, so that’s where we’re at. And I’m going to stop here. And yeah, on to the next episode.

1986 年，新德里。规划与建筑学院 (SPA)。我正在教授一门关于“创造力和解决问题”的课程。我选择使用艺术基础课上的一些文本，这些文本主要讨论的是个人转型。在课堂上，我一直在为挑战做准备。学生们被打发走了——问你在个人转型这个话题上采取了什么行动？这就是你展示项目的地方。一天早上醒来。你衣衫褴褛。在撕裂的云层中。你坐在 SPA 的大门外。在人行道上，在小贩中间。你坐在那里，所有路过的人都看得见你。路过的是你这门课的同学。路过的是你的朋友和校园里其他认识你的人。然而没有人看你。没有人认出你。我记得那仍然是一个项目。那仍然是你为自己制定的个人转型或实现项目。那么 Vineet 你现在在哪里？你在做什么？你所做的事情有多危险？我想知道。好吧。

欢迎收听 Campaign Projects 播客。我是主持人 Soumitri Varadarajan，这是一部名为《贫困生态学》的新迷你系列。《贫困生态学》的第一个主题本质上是，像北极熊一样，像阿滕伯勒带我们去参观并揭示其生态的所有物种一样，贫困也构成了一种生态。它构成了一种本体论。但上学期，当我学习《环境行动生态学》时，我花了很多时间在本体论上。我的班级很困惑。他们问我们为什么要做本体论。因为我们是互联网一代，我们是计算机一代。当两台机器必须互相交谈时，本体论、它们的语言、组件、语言的构建块都非常重要。一台机器说的话和另一台机器听到的话必须完全相同，而不仅仅是完全相同，实际上、现实地、完全、完全地相同，没有多余的意义。

我不打算在这里讨论贫困的本体论。当我写出记录或开始修改记录时，我可能不得不解决这个问题。但我们还是要讨论贫困的生态。生态，如苏格兰的野化。我最近读了一本书。这是一本很棒的书。讲述了一个虚构的故事。他们将狼放归苏格兰的野外。我会在描述部分放一个链接。所以环境是复杂的。是的，因此最好将其视为生态，这意味着本体论的元素有一组共生的组成部分。但关于贫困的另一件事，就像我们将要研究的每个主题一样，通过所有五种不同的生态，贫困也是一种邮政编码现象，就像癌症一样。癌症实例，澳大利亚的癌症发病率，可以通过一种称为癌症地图集的东西来访问。在那里你可以输入你的邮政编码，网站会告诉你这些类型的癌症在那个特定的邮政编码中更为普遍。

所以贫困也是一种邮政编码现象。如果你想找到贫困，那么你就必须去那些地方。现在为了简化，我们不会突然结束这个特别的开场情节，你可能必须走很远。所以如果你在地铁里，那么很有可能在地铁中心，你会发现无家可归的人，或者在十字路口拦住你的人等等。但是如果你要看相对贫困，那些住在房子里但经济上很困难的人，那么你就必须走得越来越远，那里的租金越来越低。所以小城镇，小城镇的郊区。所以这些是那些生活艰难的人需要安身立命的栖息地。

在设计学院里教授贫困生态学。我必须做一个特别的项目。但是，参加一个研究贫困的辅导课的学生可能会选择这个辅导课，因为他们对这个话题感兴趣。但这不太可能。因为这是设计学院一年级开设的课程。他们很可能只是对自己说：“是的，让我们看看那里发生了什么。”这给老师带来了一种特殊的问题。但它也带来了一种机会。

学生开始接受教育成为设计师的课程时，会遇到贫穷等话题，这是每个人都熟悉的话题，但可能没有人研究过贫穷在他们头脑中的位置和构建方式？ 所以从某种意义上说，我们试图质疑我们如何理解这个世界。是的，这就是我们现在所处的位置。我要在这里停下来。是的，让我们进入下一集。