What I have experienced in the past two months in CityLAB is completely beyond what I ever would have expected. The first day of CityLAB, when Brian took us out to the McNab street and started to explain the histories and the cultures of the buildings in Hamilton and why buildings are built a certain way. I remember feeling totally amazed! That day has totally changed my opinion about this city.
Throughout the past two months at CityLAB, while attending Anna Maries’s classes on dialogue and communities, I’ve learned that trust is the critical element for community engagement. In Brian’s classes about living design, I learned how you can design a building according to 15 rules to make it a living design and how to let the building bring out the human in people. From doing our project with City staff on our SNAP project, I’ve learned so much about the north end, what are people’s priorities are and how we can implement these into SNAP climate change initiative.
Something that affected me the most is learning how to manage relationships between people and to validate our own feelings. This is something that I have ignored in the past, and I have learned that we should take our feelings from personal interactions as a clue to making that relationship work better to go from a low place to a high.
I have also learned so much about climate change! Students in CityLAB are so passionate about climate change. Pieces of knowledge from everyone piles together into something that can really make an impact. I am impressed how much the Semester in Residence at CityLAB has taught me in the past two months and I am looking forward to what the next month holds.