The past few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. It feels as if things are moving far too quickly for me to even stop and reflect. So I’m grateful for the opportunity these blog posts provide in forcing me to take some time to look back on everything that’s happened in the past few months.
It’s dawned on me that after this year, I will not be going back to school for the foreseeable future. I have therefore made a special effort to take advantage of all the opportunities I get as a student at Trinity. One of the things I’m the most grateful for is the opportunity to do active field work. My course actually took a trip to do some field work in Amsterdam, in early March. During our visit there, which lasted about a week, we were able to meet with various urban planners, architects, biodiversity experts, landscaping experts, social housing coordinators, transportation engineers, grassroot activists, housing cooperatives, artists—so many people who, through uncoordinated, decentralized action and conflicting theories of change, paradoxically come together to create this experience of the city that we call Amsterdam. I had visited Amsterdam as a tourist before and while I really enjoyed my earlier visits, interrogating the city from a planning and urban geography perspective really helped me to comprehend the city and think more critically about what makes the city work, and for whom, and the politics behind who is given a chance to shape the city.
I have come to realize that it is a fallacy to believe that, as per the utopian theory of urbanism, prosocial behavior of a city’s populace can be physically built into daily life through a city’s infrastructure. Instead, a city thrives and nurtures culture and community when citizens actively participate in their communities. As inhabitants of a place, it is politically and intellectually lazy to rely on being passively shaped by the built environment into acting better. To be sure, there are certain steps that urban planners can take with the physical to ensure that people have accessibly mobility and third spaces that foster community. Yet there is a limit to what the built environment can do to facilitate prosocial behavior, and from that limit onwards, inhabitants themselves must make an active choice. I witnessed that active participation in Amsterdam through the grassroots organizations that physically built their own neighborhoods, reclaimed land, developed innovative bioremediation techniques to clean a formerly polluted area. And the tension that exists between top-down city planning approaches by transportation engineers, power system engineers, city government officials and the inhabitants who are actively participating in their city will never be resolved. That tension is inherent in being an active participant, but that tension is also what drives and generates culture and innovation and a sense of fulfillment, a sense of ownership over the city. I’m very grateful to the experience that Trinity provided me to witness a totally novel way of conceptualizing what it means to live in a city.
Other than school, I have also been very fortunate to explore further around Ireland. This past weekend, my older sister and her fiancée were able to visit me. It was their first time in Ireland and so I showed them around parts of Dublin, including the Museum of Literature, the Museum of Archaeology, and some of my favorite pubs, such as Fidelity Bar and the Long Hall, which has a James Joyce award for being an authentic Irish public house. We also took the train west to Galway, where we stayed for a night before continuing further west towards Clifton, a small town nestled between the Connemara mountains. I had the best pint of Guinness I’ve ever had in my life at a local pub, washed down with some phenomenal fish and chips. In that pub in Clifton, where my sister and her fiancée were looking at me incredulously as I sidled up to the bar and bantered with the bartender before ordering my pint, I realized that I do feel much more at home here compared to last September.
With the foil of my sister, I could observe that I have changed—perhaps not indelibly—I move through certain Irish spaces with much more confidence and even a sense of familiarity now that I have hours under my belt watching comedians and pub crawling with my course mates, leafing through books in the countless bookstores around Dublin, and training with the running club at Trinity. This is true even in parts of Ireland I haven’t yet spent time in, such as Clifden: they do not feel as alien to me as I would have thought.
The next morning, we were up early to hike around the Twelve Bens in Connemara National Park. We scrabbled past some dizzying drops, sunk knee-deep into mud, scared far too many sheep, and came face-to-face with sheer rocky mountains bursting out of the bog. As I stood on one of the peaks we had reached, vertigo suddenly struck me as the landscape unfolded beyond my peripheral vision, on, on, past the seam of the horizon. It all looked so planetary. It looked extraterrestrial. And yet not too far in the distance, I did see the roofs of Clifton and that sense of familiarity came rushing back to me.
