Biography of the River Community Consultation Project

This project develops and conducts a series of creative workshops with local Saigon communities to build a strong qualitative methodology suitable for generating rich and useful information from community members living in regions of significant urban redevelopment. These workshops focus on the community that lives around the Kenh Te canal that runs between District 4 and District 7, connecting the Saigon river with the inner city. Held in our repurposed shipping container, these consultation workshops include various participatory engagement methods, ranging from puppet making, to visual sensemaking through photography, to mood mapping. These creative techniques are proposed as a way to invite expressions of attitudes and feelings that go beyond interviews or surveys, and to draw on the richness of visual and sensory understandings about this vital urban waterway. Each workshop will be facilitated by an Vietnamese person who is expert in one of these creative methods, which fosters the possibility for having a more localized understanding and connection with the local community participants. The workshops will be video recorded with consent of the participants. Alongside these workshops, community members will also be invited to participate in interviews, to share insights related to the issue of urban redevelopment around the canal. Prior to conducting the community workshops, the series will be tested with a group of 20-30 students from the University of Architecture, Ho Chi Minh City. This pilot project paves the way to larger projects in the near future that can develop and suggest creative community consultation workshop as a rich, participatory, and community-based method to gather community feedback around urban change and renewal.