Matsui Hideki named MVP World Series!!!

Just had to celebrate!!!

Matsui is from my mom's home prefecture of Ishikawa. They sell cookies with his face on it at the Kanazawa train station. I'm sure things in nihon are crazy right now.

Land and Power in Hawaii

Before I go to bed, I just had to mention that I received the book "Land and Power in Hawaii" from Dartmouth library yesterday. Out of Cornell's hundreds of thousands of books in their multiple libraries, they didn't have a single copy of this must-read. After ordering it from a neighboring university, I promptly requested that Cornell purchase it. I'm using this resource to provide background information on my term paper for affordable housing that focuses on municipal land trusts as a means of providing long term affordable housing.

November Resolution

Okay, I'm really going to be much better about blogging now. I need to treat Ithaca as though it's a new and exciting place. Live my now non-nomadic life as a nomad. Fingers crossed that I'll be able to keep this resolution, at least for the entirety of November. First things first. Pictures. Here are a few shots from the past few months.

I've gotten to visit my family on several occasions already. First before school started, then when my Aunt Pat and Uncle Skip so kindly drove up and took me out to some vineyards, and finally when I went to Oxford to visit my Grandma and a few Aunts and Uncles.

Here is a picture of me with my Aunt Pat at a Vineyard on Seneca Lake

Aunt Pat and Uncle Skip

My cousin, Lee (son of my first cousin Emily)

Hmmm... That's it for now. More to come.

Projects

Trying to stay positive as of late. It's usually not a big deal, but going to such a large school with so many young, intelligent, talented, but not always emotionally or psychologically stable individuals exposes me to a demographic that I'm not all together comfortable with understanding. I suppose there are some detrimental qualities with a fully type A personality (and several in one space for that matter).


Moving on, some projects as of late.

I entered the ULI-Hines competition. Every year the Urban Land Institute and Hines Real Estate sponsor a multi-disciplinary competition to re-develop an already existing space within a US city. Each team must consist of 5 graduate students representing 3 disciplines (Real Estate, landscape arch, arch, city planning, law, business, etc). We must create a financially feasible and profitable design that takes into consideration history, culture, demographics, design, and environmental sustainability.

My team consists of two landscape architects, another planner, and a real estate student. I think we are a pretty strong group and together we can think of some pretty innovative stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to working with these folks and getting to know them a little better. The competition won't take place until January, but for the rest of the semester, we will meet once a week to go over design and planning theory and critique past entries.

At the moment, I'm also writing a final term paper for my affordable housing class. I hope to examine municipal land trusts as an option for developing long-term affordable housing in Hawaii. The main crux of the argument is that housing is overpriced because of the inflationary qualities of land. If the government owned the land in the form of the trust, and people were okay with just buying the structure, housing would remain affordable for a long period of time. This land trust theory has worked well in places like Burlington Vt, but I'm eager to find examples where it's fallen through the cracks, and figure out why.

All in all, school is really good. I love being able to focus on ideas, while still leading a very balanced life. I think moderation is definitely the key to making it through the long haul.

Asia America

There's not much I can say here. Just watch and listen.

Best. Website. Ever.

I hate citations. This is why I love MLA GENERATOR!!!

Check it out!

東京モード学園

When I lived in Sendai, I used to always take the bus to Tokyo and get off in Shinjuku next to a soon-to-be-completed fashion school called Tokyo Mode Gakuen 東京モード学園. The structure of the building modestly resembled the Beijing Olympics, Herzog/ Ai Wei Wei Birds Nest Stadium, if it were unraveled and shaped into a skyscraper. I absolutely loved it and never got a chance to see it completed until I went back to Tokyo in July. It's completed form really revitalizes the Shinjuku area, giving it the futuristic feel that everyone expects when they come to Tokyo.

After a little Wiki-research, I also learned that it's the 2nd largest educational structure in the world, and designed by Tange Associates, aka. Kenzo Tange, the architect for the Tokyo Metro Government Building and Tokyo Dome, among many others.

Thoughts on planning

There are two new profs in my department who, in my opinion, are the saving grace of what will be my exit project. One focuses on multi-racial and predominantly Asian American issues and their relationship with space, and another was trained at University of Hawaii and will hopefully hook me up with some connections. I feel lucky that they were both recently hired, because sometimes I fell like a stranger in this school.

I joined the Planning Students for Diversity club yesterday. It's a very small club that needs more members and more voice. Planning isn't the most diverse field, if you can imagine. It requires the imagination that one has a voice or control over the land they occupy. Even Eric Shaw, Director of Community Planning at the Louisiana Recovery Authority who spoke to the department last week, mentioned that Cornell had one of the most diverse planning departments. Let's just say, if our course is diverse, I'd like to see the rest of the programs.

Anyway, I hope this organization, PSD, fills in the areas where the classes miss out. So many of the classes cover such broad topics that if they do include "diversity" issues, they either use international case studies or pessimistic statistics. A lot of planning history seems to be written as most history is written, from the colonizers perspective. It might be a bit of a reach for PSD, but it would be interesting to hear the voice of the unheard, whether it is that of the ethnic minority or the real estate developer.