ENABLING COMMUNITY

After the difficulties we encountered with the waste collection points, we continued to actively engage in the ger districts. We shifted our focus to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the growth of the settlements in order to better position design strategies that could change future patterns of the urbanization process there. We made this research the subject and focus of architectural studios we taught at the University of Hong Kong in 2016 and at Columbia University in 2017. The studios enabled us to conduct a parallel line of investigation that used the constraints of the conditions as a springboard to generate more speculative design projects. They also provided an opportunity to become more engaged with the community by conducting fieldwork, household interviews, and workshops with local people to get feedback on proposals. The fieldtrips and workshops provided energy and momentum to the project that otherwise might have been lost without a definitive building commission.

The first workshop was in the winter of 2016 in a primary school in Sukhbaatar-16, involving combined groups of residents and students drawing and sketching over three different scaled aerial photos of the district, highlighting ideas for scenarios of future change. The second workshop, in the summer of 2016, was a collaboration with a vocational training school, the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), in which we designed and built the timber structure of a housing prototype that could plug into a ger. Critical to the success of these trips was the involvement and collaboration of Badruun Gardi and Enkhjin Batjargal. We had met them both on our very first trip to Ulaanbaatar in 2014, when they