My brain isn't ready to think again after so long away from school

I just looked at my calendar and realized I’ve only been here three weeks. I was sure it was longer than that. I’ve just finished my first week of classes, and as can be imagined it was long and full and tiring. I doubt I will get much less busy in the months to come, but hopefully I will at least become more used to the pace. So here is a rundown of the first week of grad school!

We started Monday with a meeting with the staff and faculty of the Planning programs, and all students. My program, Master of City and Regional Planning, is run concurrently with the Master of Landscape Architecture, and our two programs share a couple classes. So I have a core group of about 20 people that I will be studying with for the next two years, and an additional 15 or so people that I will be studying with a couple days a week. The majority of students are from South Africa, but there are a handful from other parts of southern Africa, a couple students who have lived a while in the US or UK, and one Canadian student. There are some very diverse backgrounds including English, Geography, Engineering, Fine Arts, History, Political Science, Architecture, etc. I’m the only student with work experience in Architecture, which means whenever the prof needs an architectural example, I’m the one that gets picked on. I’m going to have to get better at being put on the spot.

Classes this week were Planning Theory, Studio, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), Planning Techniques, and Natural Systems. We’ve already had quite a bit of lectures and readings. Highlights of the week were mapping workshops in Studio & GIS, where we went over basic hand-drawing techniques for producing maps, and then tried out some computer mapping programs.

First mapping exercise - I screwed up the section, I'm going to have to work harder to get used to the metric system.

Another highlight was walking down to the Rural Development and Land Reform /National Geo-Spatial Information office just off campus where we were given presentations on how South Africa is currently being mapped by camera. They gave us a lot of cool technical information that I didn’t really understand and don’t remember, but essentially this government department has been flying high def cameras over the country for the last few years to map every portion of the country as accurately as possible, then providing their imagery to Google Earth as well as creating various maps from the information. We were given demonstrations on how the raw imagery is manipulated by the department – cameras are attached to GPS units that record the exact location of each photo taken, and another instrument measures the angle of the plane to the ground so the image can be corrected if it’s askew. Photos are taken at exact intervals with an overlap on all four sides, and the flight pattern of the plane is recorded for reference. There were also some cool tidbits on how infrared cameras are used to photograph and identify live vegetation from the air.

The department offers its digital maps and information for free to anyone who comes in with a digital storage device big enough to hold it. It also has maps available for perusing in the office. It was a pretty cool visit, I’ve always wondered what cartography is like nowadays. Well, I still wonder what cartography was like decades ago, but that’s something still to discover. The department did have a display of old surveying and mapping equipment in the lobby, including an old copper plate etching of a map for printing.

We walked away with some cool map swag – at least I thought it was cool, but maybe that’s just me. It includes a couple maps – one of South Africa and one of the Western Cape. I’m now using the bag conveniently as an underwear drawer.

Waiting to see how long it takes till these get blown off by the wind

The most exciting thing of the week was getting our first-semester studio project. Each semester there is a different studio project – a sort of practicum that starts off at a local community level, then advances to a metro level, and finally to a regional level. For this semester’s studio, we will be working with a community in Franschhoek Valley, about an hour and a half east of Cape Town, in wine country. (Hoek means "corner", so "Franschhoek" means "French corner")

Franschhoek Valley (from Wikipedia)

The community we’re working with is an informal settlement (or slum or shantytown or whatever you want to call it), where residents are working to improve their surroundings. They’ve been having a problem there with grey water polluting a nearby reservoir, and have put together a team of community leaders to find a solution. That team approached the planning school at UCT to see if we would like to assist, so our class is now tackling this for the semester. We’ve only had a basic introduction to the community and the project, but tomorrow we’re bussing out to meet with the community team that we’ll be collaborating with and have a more formal introduction, and then to wander around the settlement interviewing residents and getting a feel for the environment. I’m really excited about this, I had no idea we’d be doing something so practical so early on. It seems like a bit of a daunting process, especially since we don’t yet really know exactly what the end goal is, but I’m positive I’ll learn a lot, and hopefully we can help to develop some positive solutions.

Finally, I'll sign off with some pics of my room and view. My room isn't too exciting, it's a little pod on the 6th floor right across from the communal kitchen. I've got a tiny little white-tiled bathroom that was built and installed in one piece (I think) so its floor is about 8" above the rest of the room. In the room I have a bed, a couple walls of built in cupboards and counter, and a chair, with a window that looks out over the back courtyard. It's quite loud and echo-y, I'm going to have to get used to that. It can get very windy, and when it does the wind just tears through the room, whipping the curtains and rattling the door violently. There isn't much in the way of ventilation when the window is closed, so I've rigged up a solution to the noisy-door-banging, where I thread a strap through the bathroom door handle and the bedroom door handle and tighten it as much as I can. This only really works at night though, since I'm in and out of those doors too much during the day.

Room

With a view

I'm still a little unsure of how much I like living in university housing. It's been 7 or 8 years since my last dorm experience. It gets quite noisy - the whole building is hard surfaces with very little soundproofing, and when any of the rooms on the courtyard gets noisy it just echoes around the whole space. There are some positives - laundry in the building, internet, security, being close to other students. I'll have to see which side wins. I may end up trying to find an apartment or a room in a smaller place over the June/July break, but for now this place should work out ok. Hopefully I'll be so busy with work that I won't even notice the noise.

Ciao for now, I will be trying to blog more frequently so as to break up some of these long blogs :S Thanks for reading!