โครงข่ายท้องถิ่นกับการเรียนรู้เมืองเชียงใหม่

Title

Chiang Mai Local Network of Learning City

Keywords

Collaborating communities and civil society,Learning from people and their everyday life,Architecture and the City,people and community,sharing and collaborating space,strategic city vision

Abstract

This research project is titled “Chiang Mai Local Network of Learning City”, which has Chiang Mai Municipality area as the target research area. Our notion of the city comes from the relationship of people, their daily lives and spaces. This research project aims to create a lifelong learning ecosystem. The research framework is designed to have a core project functioning to direct and facilitate a central learning space for both physical and digital learning in collaboration with three sub-projects. The sub-project 1 titled Cross Sectoral Collaboration Mechanism and Strategic Driving Process for Learning City focuses on identifying and developing learning mechanisms for the different sectors. SWOT analysis has been introduced to check-up and examine strength and weaknesses of cross-sectoral networks – i.e., communities, civil societies, and local government agencies. The sub-project 2 titled Learning Urban Vernacular Culture through People and Their Social Community aims to discover and identify the physical characteristics and the dynamic relations of urban social communities and uses them as a learning city lesson. Lastly, the sub-project 3 titled Local Study: Learning Multi-layer Chiang Mai City which focuses on searching for a variety of learning methods, through learning activities for the new generation of youth. The outcomes of these three sub-projects offer new ideas, alternative learning methods, and importantly a possibility for others to join such a learning network, and surely become supporting the learning city movement. The learning mechanism of this research project consists of (1) identifying and extracting what we regarded as “local community assets”, (2) selecting and organizing these local community assets to create “learning issues”, (3) collaborating with the local community to create “local learning city lessons”, and (4) providing them with various learning methods and channels of communication. Three local communities have been selected as the focusing targets to implement, namely Kua-Kham-Ma Samakkee Community, Pa-Ha Community, and Chang-Moi Community. Many learning activities and workshops – both online and onsite – have been used to highlight the local learning city lessons throughout the research period. At the same time we also aim to build up the local networks among communities, research team, civil societies, government agencies, and importantly public sectors in the area. Throughout the research period, we believe that there is a possibility of linking the three target local communities together by having the notion of “local community network” as the integrated core idea. We found that there are many local community networks. They usually operate in small but functional circles, loosely connected, and flexible working methods, which allows them to communicate and connect to each other. These local community networks based on kinship relations in general, therefore it is not surprising that the local networks can become the key to reflect people’s relationship in the community as well. To strengthen such the network, this can also be seen as to empower of the local community. By elaborating and highlighting the local networks in three main target communities, this research proposes three possible ways to connect and learn from them, which are 1) the physical linkage based on built-environment of communities, 2) the ecological and environmental linkage based on the natural resources in the communities, and 3) the local economy linkage based on the community festival which could create the income for the community. When the research project titled “Chiang Mai Local Network of Learning City” is completed, we have a vision that the city, especially local communities could become like learning resources and can be produced in various city learning lessons, such as historical learning lessons, creative learning lessons, or traditional or contemporary cultural lessons. With a proper organization of city data resources, easy and equally accessible, “Learning City” is not just a research framework but rather become the effective city driving mechanism.