Urban Reclamation Amusement Park

http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/ruins-of-electric-train-turned-into-terribly-cool-amusement-park-in-lima-photos.html

Sometimes all it takes is a little imagination. The unfinished parts of a proposed transit network sat about for over 20 years before these guys came up with this awesome park.

Great work

Homoginator Part 3

Over time the people of of the city adapted to the new way of life and no longer used the Homogenous Zones. Their new lives had meaning and the people were connected with each other and with their city. They were proud of who they were and where they lived.

The Homoginator tried to feed on the new programs of the city but found them difficult to quantify. There were so many activities and people operated independently from one another but with one another. The Homoginator was unable to find a foothold in this new dynamic milieu. This lack of control infuriated the Homoginator. No city had been able to circumvent its control before.

The power it wasted trying to convert each new unique part of the city was draining the Homoginator, it began to control less of the city and started losing power. More gaps appeared that were then filled with newer, more dynamic programs further reducing the stranglehold of the Homoginator. The Homoginator soon shut down, its irrelevance complete. The people had regained their city.

The city had been unbuilt in the time of the Homoginator, requiring a social change on a city wide scale to rebuild the city[1]. The urban form became more a part of its society, not a product of society to be sold, the city changes with society over time. The city now has more layers, not a fixed location, the urban form as well as the people are included. The city is no longer just a small group of hyped up surface differentiations from other ‘competitor’ cities[2].

The newly re-found city has no singular branding plan with the sole purpose of bringing people and money to the city as it had under the influence of the Homoginator. The city though has become known for its depth of character, its unwillingness to be defined.

People the world over began to be drawn to the new and evolving urban spaces of the new city. With new urban space available, new programming options are sought and found in societies traditional ‘other’. Ideas and programs succeed and fail; there are challenges, differences of opinion, the perception of change has changed.

Opening itself up to all people and redefined what it is to be an urban society, reinstating meaning into the cities urban form. A city of collaboration, a people and city truly engaged with each other. The narrative of place in the reclaimed city became open ended.

The draw of the city became the ability of residents and visitors to be part of a new evolving vision every day, to imagine the city in new and dynamic ways. As had happened in Rio years before, the streetscapes of the city were activated and became continuous artistic elements, the space in between became its own attraction.   The abandoned refinery, overgrown with plant life, was given new life as a giant maze and hiding place for children. Place making in the city involved storytelling as much as any physical alteration made by its inhabitants. The act of creation and re-creation of spaces into places then enhanced people’s association with those places[3].

The turning back of the Homoginator was the start of a new age of cities, cities retaken by the people, freed from the encroachment of corporatised banality and meaningless urban spaces. The city had come to stand alone at the vanguard of future cities, iconic, comfortable in its skin. Its dynamic sense of identity and place is understood by its inhabitants, a beacon to what a city can be.

By breaking free of the Homoginator, the city had broken away from traditional, generic urban concepts of space and form that only reinforce out-dated, historical power structures. The new city embraced the other. The city had become truly unique.

By reclaiming the city, an alternate vision of a modern city was spread throughout the world, inspiring other people to rise up and take ownership of their urban space. The city became known as a place of the people, a people who had retaken control over their urban space and valued their unique city.

The Homoginator’s attempt to Homogenise the city had failed. Junkspace was reprogrammed and became a monument to the time of the Homoginator. The people wanted to remember the presence of the Homoginator, it had given them so much. Without its intervention the people would never have begun to truly engage with their city and to accept difference and understand each other. Though no single defining Iconic object had been built, through the engagement of the people with their city the city had become Iconic.

 

References:

•             Baltan Laboratories. (2009, 09 21). Retrieved 04 17, 2011, from Baltan Laboratories: http://www.baltanlaboratories.org/?p=1186

•             Carr, E. H. (2008). What is History? London: Penguin Books.

•             De Botton, A. (2010). The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

•             Friends of the High Line. (n.d.). Retrieved 04 17, 2011, from The official Web site of the High Line and Friends of the High Line: http://www.thehighline.org/news

•             Holt, D. B. (2004). How Brands Become Icons. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

•             Keller, K. L. (2008). Best Practice Cases In Branding: Lessons from the worlds strongest brands. New Jersey: Pearson Education.

•             Kennedy, J. F. (1963). Ich bin ein Berliner. Speeches that changed the world. (S. S. Montefiore, Ed.) London: Murdoch Books.

•             Klingmann, A. (2007). Marketing without Marketeers. Cambridge Massachusets & London: MIT Press.

•             Koolhaas, R. (1995). The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, & B. Mau, S, M, L, XL (pp. 1248-1257, 1260-1264). New York: The Monacelli Press.

•             Koolhaas, R. (2002, Spring). Junkspace. Obsolescence, October, Vol. 100, pp. 175-190

•             moderndesigninterior. (2011, 03 06). Modern Design Interior. Retrieved 04 17, 2011, from http://www.moderndesigninterior.com/2011/03/copacabana-beach-boardwalk.html

•             Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd.

•             Saieh, N. (2010, 03 21). Retrieved 04 17, 2011, from Arch Daily: http://www.archdaily.com/53348/indemann-maurer-united-architects/

•             Shane, G. (2004, Fall-Winter). The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism. Harvard Design Magazine, pp. 1-8.

•             Tudor, B. (2008). Local Lookouts as Places of Belonging and Escape. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 221-227). Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

•             Vanclay, F. (2008). Place Matters. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 3-12). Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

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[1] Shane, G. (2004, Fall-Winter). The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism. Harvard Design Magazine, pp. 1-8. p 7. Shane raises the idea that social change cannot be achieved through design mantras and interventions into the urban form alone. Social justice and equity need to be part of any solution to any true improvement in urban society.

[2] Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd. p 20.

[3] Vanclay, F. (2008). Place Matters. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 3-12). Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

Homoginator Part 2

The Anti-Movement, the process of social change brought about by individual engagement on a collective scale.

The Anti-Movement is mass action
with no definable direction.

Mad for control, the Homoginator had gone too far. More and more people were marginalised when they didn’t fit the Homoginator’s plans. People’s identities were being stifled; some began to question the control they had given to the Homoginator. None of the promised benefits could be seen. The Homoginator said the economy was booming but no one could recall being any better off. The question started to be asked: whose city was being sold and who to?

 

People began to form plans to reclaim areas of the city from the control of the Homoginator. A wholly uncoordinated approach was needed. A plan was implemented to save their city; people banded together to display their disunity. The Homoginator, as a machine of mass change, was found to fail on an individual scale. Gaps could be found.

 

The inhabitants of the city, on mass, needed to work independently. Each citizen looking within themselves to rediscover what they wanted from their city. There was no utopia, no one panacea to look forward to, just a communal acceptance of difference, with all its failings and rewards.

 

No grand ideological movements took place, no great orators pleaded to the masses. The Homoginator was programmed to infiltrate and subvert the collective, make it eat itself from within, install doubt when resolution was required. The people had become unified through silence.

 

Small tentative steps were taken by the people to redefine place from space. Residents began to inhabit areas outside the Homogenous Zones. This Edge Space became place with the writing of new narratives and the interaction of people and site[1].

 

Edge Space was where people could operate outside the Homogenous Zones. Edge Space was primarily waste space, the site of failed industry and commerce. Edge Space was space with no value to the Homoginator. The value of the refinery, docks and smelter had been considered secondary to the beaches and the city[2]. The reappropriation of elements of the industrial as elements of urban, everyday life removed this hierarchy of place.

 

The reclamation of the city started to bring a change in the understanding of the city. Working in the gaps, the spaces in between, left over from the processes of the Homoginator, the residents were forced to re-evaluate and transform their perception of this new found edge space.  The utilitarian and industrial landscapes of the city became places of meaning and affection to greater numbers of people[3]. Opportunity and beauty were now visible where once binary relationships were perceived[4].

 

The inhabitants of the city became aware of other non-traditional interest groups that inhabited various parts of the city deemed unworthy of the attention of the Homoginator. Differing groups and individuals interacted without judgement, forming previously inconceivable bonds. People like the Pylon Appreciation Society and the Cargo Ship Spotters, passionate people with non-mainstream interests, had become just passionate people[5].

 

Women, ethnic, homosexual, disabled & lower income groups once making up the city’s ‘other’ had to be accepted as equal in the urban setting[6]. This ‘other’, whose history and connection to place was ignored or erased by the Homoginator by its privileged writing of history, could no longer be marginalised if everyone was in the margin.

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[1] Vanclay, F. (2008). Place Matters. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 3-12). Canberra: National Museum of Australia. p 5.  Vanclay simplifies the complex concept of place as ‘space that is special to someone’. Identifying place as something humans have narratives around and have names. For place to exist it needs people to connect with it. Vanclay also cites Gieryn’s assertion that place should be interpreted broadly and can mean different things to different people.

[2] Tudor, B. (2008). Local Lookouts as Places of Belonging and Escape. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 221-227). Canberra: National Museum of Australia.Cities have always contained formal and informal lookouts, constructed places that attempted to control perception of landscapes, prioritising space and suggesting value and order.

[3] De Botton, A. (2010). The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. London: Penguin Books Ltd. p 212. De Botton discusses the utilitarian windmills in Holland which were once seen as a blight on the countryside before being transformed into an object of beauty. This change in perception was brought about by their portrayal by picturesque artists, modern day utilitarian objects may well be awaiting a similar transformation.

[4] Meyer, E. (1994). Landscape Architecture as Modern Other and Post Modern Ground. In H. Edquist, & V. Bird (Eds.), The Culture of Landscape Architecture, EDGE Publishing, (pp. 13-34). Melbourne. p 19.

[5] De Botton, A. (2010). The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. London: Penguin Books Ltd. p 216 De Botton asserts that activities of these groups hold no less intrinsic value than a bird watching society; they are only showing their inquisitiveness for their world in a different way.

[6] Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd. p 22.Through the philosophical lens of Marxist and Feminist theory the division of labour, wealth and power of urban societies was investigated by Kearn and Philo in relation to selling cities. This research highlighting the tradition of a male, white, urban bourgeois elite as the keepers of power and the sole writers of a shared history.

Los Angeles River

Great article on Grist about the re-colonisation of the LA River and wetlands. Natural systems just want to get on with what they do, however much we get in the way. It’s cheaper, more sustainable and easier to help nature than try and re-think it.

There have been numerous cities around the world day-lighting rivers and waterways after years of filling them in, diverting water in concrete channels or underground pipes. In South Korea they tore down a whole freeway that had been built over a river, the area is now hugely popular with local residents and is becoming an icon for great urban planning.

In Toronto the Don River was initially a selling point to bring in investment and people. Then when factories had polluted the river enough, the city covered it up, and diverted the water underground, once again advertising to potential investors about their now clean city. Now the Lower Don project by MVVAI is reconnecting people to the river and restoring some of the rivers function.

Climate adaption can mean getting out of the way, not just big engineering projects.

Who is being tolled?

Infrastructure Australia has suggested that existing roads be tolled to pay for new roads. Is this really where we are at as a society here in Australia? Tolling roads is a socially divisive measure that makes it more expensive or time consuming for those at the far flung fringes of our cities to get to work or connect with their social support networks.

Keeping a AAA credit rating seems more important than investing in needed public transport infrastructure. This is short sighted and flawed thinking. We have governments to coordinate functions of society that are better managed communally with the benefit of the whole of society in mind. This means collecting taxes to pay for things we all get a benefit from. By keeping taxes low for all and raising revenue in other ways seems a bit underhanded to me. Looking purely at the upfront economic cost-benefit does not mean good policy. Social cost and environmental cost also need to be considered, even before economics, and the negative effects policies can have in other areas of society.

Socially disadvantaged people living on the fringe are already car dependent as the public transport system is shoddy at best in the burbs and adding to the time and cost of travel will help promote a two tier city. Housing mobility is becoming more and more of a challenge for people who cannot now afford to live near to employment or family. Once you are in an outer suburb you are stuck there even if you would like to move.

What’s this got to do with adaption to climate change? By reducing a societies capacity for resilience in an economic sense we are harming their capacity to adapt to a changing climate. This is called maladaption, by investing in public transport now instead of roads we are in a much better position to adapt to a global increase in the cost of energy.

Tolling some existing roads and using the revenue to improve the public transport infrastructure in Melbourne is not great but is a much better option than tolling existing roads to create more roads which is pretty high up on the scale of maladaption to climate change…

Homoginator Part 1

This is a rework of a pretty fun fictional piece I wrote for a university subject,  a bit of a manifesto . I had a real city in mind when I wrote it, but have just left it now as any city, feel free to insert your own city when thinking about it. This is part one. More to follow, enjoy!

Death of the Homoginator

 

The Homoginator, the physical manifestation of a process used to destroy a city’s identity.

 

Imagined as a giant grinding machine the Homoginator swoops upon cities and turns place to space. Sucking the essence and soul out of urban environments, leaving only the saleable shadows of what were once unique segments of urban life. The Homoginator inserts an easily interpreted culture to areas whose culture is deemed inadequate, uncomfortable or dangerous.

 

Through the Anti-Movement, a collective effort of individual engagement with their city, the people diminish and destroy the Homoginator. By finding ways to co-inhabit the margins of their city, the Edge Space, and embrace a dynamic interpretation of place, the citizens reinvented their city.  This engagement of people and their city became an Icon throughout the world.

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The world’s fossil fuel supplies had been depleted and carbon pollution was choking the planet. The effect had been dramatic; a city historically tied to manufacturing and oil refining was suffering. Financial turmoil had shaken the people. Vast numbers of commercial and industrial properties lay vacant. The city was vulnerable.

Mired in a crisis of identity dislocation; surrounded by a herd of similar metropolis’. This city was a bypass, an obstacle, struggling to assert its own identity. The people sought an agent of change. The Homoginator appeared and promised a paradise. This paradise became a consumer paradise, an architectural, spatial and cultural abomination; a paradise that consumed the city, leaving void space[1].

The Homoginator showed how none of their current challenges or suffering were present in the past. The Homoginator promised to restore the glories of the past to the city. Dazzled by how bright their past had been, no one asked about the future.

Precedents were shown of cities the world over that had been transformed by the Homoginator. Citizens of those cities were happy to hand control to their homogenising machine. The residents of the city were told they could feel at home in any of the interchangeable Homoginator’s cities[2].

The people welcomed the Homoginator. They welcomed the convenience, the freedom from having to think about elements of the city they found uncomfortable. The Homoginator was only doing what was needed to improve the city they said, nothing more.

The Homoginator set upon the city with full force. Visible signs were everywhere, palm trees appeared to let people know a beach was imminent; giant shopping malls descended, crushing locals with their global scale and strength; the waterfront was gentrified. The city forgot who it was and what it wanted to be. The city had been tricked into thinking it was another generic city, a consumerist paradise without a soul.

The creation of the Homoginator was led by society’s historical perception of change and treatment of progress as an object of fear[3]. If everything was the same then there could be no change. The Homoginator excluded anyone it perceived as a challenge to its vision of normality, divisions were highlighted, difference became dangerous.

Architecture and design were tools of the Homoginator in the creation of spaces that do not say or do anything. Endless space that is in a constant state of transition, neither new or old, high or low, just there[4].The Homoginator had created Junkspace[5].

Junkspace had taken firm hold in the city; the gigantic shopping malls dominated the downtown space, impoverishing nearby strip shopping precincts and sitting adjacent to disjointed open spaces that were neither for people or cars. The Homoginator encouraged an illiteracy towards the places the people had lived in, leading to the destruction and homogenisation of the very elements of the city that make the city[6].

The Homoginator, with control as its sole desire, had been adaptive to changes in ideological movements.  A formalist centralised modernism or the excessive decontextualisation of postmodernism only led to differing tactics[7]. Postmodernism brought about the superficial cutting and pasting of cultural & heritage to package cities, renovated industrial properties, local culture museums, architectural forms built into the landscape referencing rose coloured versions of the past[8]. The Homoginator was turning layers of history into simple saleable kitsch[9].

The Homoginator soon turned on the people. Individual thoughts were now processed; the ability to perceive and conceive new ideas was reduced. The Homoginator distributed thoughts and perceptions to the people, enabling them to enjoy and interact more easily with their new homogenised city.

The Homoginator kept operating under its own control. More changes were made. Less of the city was able to be distinguished from what was there before the Homoginator arrived. Homogenisation of the city’s unique places had led to the destruction of the very experience people previously sought out[10].  Homogenous Zones were created throughout the city, filled with Junkspace, stripped of authenticity, inoffensive caricatures of their former selves. These Homogenous Zones were programmed by the Homoginator for industrial scale consumption, distorting and draining any sense of place.

An Icon was installed in the city, a generic object with which to draw generic people. This object could not become iconic, it had no meaning[11].  Designed by the Homoginator to brand the city; this iconic object, just the same as large edifices the Homoginator had installed the world over, complete with gift shop and t-shirts, was a monument to a bourgeois elite tradition of dominance benefitting only the chosen few[12]. This ‘icon’ became the symbol of control for the Homoginator.

The Homoginator had used the city’s history and culture as fuel, sucking at the essence of individuality only to pump out a standardised product. By selectively stripping back the layers of the complexity the city the Homoginator at once created a hierarchy of value in the city[13]. Elements of the city that did not fit with this vision were pushed aside or erased[14].  History was rewritten and divergence became marginalised, dissidents vilified[15].

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[1] Koolhaas, R. (1995). The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, & B. Mau, S, M, L, XL (pp. 1248-1257, 1260-1264). New York: The Monacelli Press. p 1254  Koolhaas. Koolhaas breaks down the sameness of the modern city, where every element can be interchangeable with cities in other regions of the world. This is a dystopian view of the evolution of modern architecture, population, urbanism, politics, program, identity and history into generic representations of what were once individualising elements.

[2] Koolhaas, R. (1995). The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, & B. Mau, S, M, L, XL (pp. 1248-1257, 1260-1264). New York: The Monacelli Press. p 1254  Koolhaas discusses how we may be losing our ability to decipher our city. There is a language of the city though without “patient detection we have developed an illiteracy and blindness toward it.

[3] Carr, E. H. (2008). What is History? London: Penguin Books. p155.

[4] Klingmann, A. (2007). Marketing without Marketeers. Cambridge Massachusets & London: MIT Press. Klingman discusses the notion of Nobrow a morphation of cultural and artistic elements blurring traditional lines of taste and class, no high or low, everything equal.

[5] Koolhaas, R. (2002, Spring). Junkspace. Obsolescence, October,Vol. 100, pp. 175-190. Junkspace  is an idea, a critique of modern architecture and urban spaces, the sameness and meaninglessness of architectural creations such as airports and shopping malls put forward by Rem Koolhaas. In Koolhaas’s view this Junkspace has become a major (un)identifier of cities, if the development of human spaces is allowed to continue with a view only to maximise capital Koolhaas’s the conclusion is that Junkspace will eventually be all space.

[6] Koolhaas, R. (1995). The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, & B. Mau, S, M, L, XL (pp. 1248-1257, 1260-1264). New York: The Monacelli Press. p 1254  Koolhaas discusses how we may be losing our ability to decipher our city. There is a language of the city though without “patient detection we have developed an illiteracy and blindness toward it.

[7] Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd. p 23.

[8] Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd. p 22. A manipulation of cultural elements was unfolding, dislocating them from their proper context and rendering them meaningless and alienating them from the segments of the community for whom they had been historically attached. Marketable pastiches such as theme parks, simulations of rituals or events or hyped up monuments were part of urban vernacular.

[9] Khalaf, S. (n.d.). Contested space and the forging of new cultural identities. In Socio-Economic Framework (pp. 140-164). p 141. Khalaf writes about the vulgarisation historical and indigenous cultural elements in Beirut, turning genuine into kitsch.

[10] Tudor, B. (2008). Local Lookouts as Places of Belonging and Escape. In F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place (pp. 221-227). Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Tudor discussed the experience of place to locals and visitors and how this experience differed. Local people rewrite the narrative of place over time with layers of association and meaning.  The depth of this experience has always been hard to pass on to visitors.

[11] Holt, D. B. (2004). How Brands Become Icons. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. p 1.Oxford English Dictionary defines Icon as “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or a movement; a person or an institution considered worthy of admiration or respect”. Holt adds Icons are ‘symbols people accept as a shorthand to represent important ideas.” In the first chapter Holt goes on to outline the difference between truly iconic brands an those which do not reach this status. The myth and meaning people assign to an Icon is the main differentiator.

[12] Philo, C., & Kearns, G. (1993). Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In G. Kearns, & C. Philo (Eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultual Capital, Past and Present (pp. 1-29). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd. p 11.Philo & Kearns discuss the power exerted by an ‘urban elite’ externally and within the city. On differing scales and in many incarnations this control has always been part of urban societies since humans began to form cities.

[13] Meyer, E. (1994). Landscape Architecture as Modern Other and Post Modern Ground. In H. Edquist, & V. Bird (Eds.), The Culture of Landscape Architecture, EDGE Publishing, (pp. 13-34). Melbourne. p 19.

[14] Porter, N. (2007). Landscapes and Branding: The Global Market for Place. Globalisation and Landscape Architecture: Issues for Education and Practice. St Petersburg: St Petersburg State Polytechnic University/Polytechnic University Publishing House. The branding strategy of Brand Blue Mountains is an all-encompassing strategy of control over how the Blue Mountains are marketed. Text, images and colours are managed in the BBM strategy, Porter queries this limited vision of place. A more broad interpretation of saleable place needs to be considered to enhance experience and expresseion.

[15] Koolhaas, R. (1995). The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, & B. Mau, S, M, L, XL (pp. 1248-1257, 1260-1264). New York: The Monacelli Press. p 1262 Koolhaas is writing about the Generic city and how resistance to postmodernism is labelled antidemocratic, this enables it to create a ‘stealth wrapping’ making it irresistible. The Homoginator uses the same tactics to quell any opposition.

Evolution not preservation

House For All Seasons by John Lin

Adaption and resilience takes many forms. Great design like this is out there, its just the mass take up that is missing.

In this building design from China, local materials and traditional design elements are reworked to create a sustainable new building.

Landcare Loving

Landcare Loving

Climate adaption is not a bad thing and its nothing new, simple things like joining you local Landcare group works to enhance your communities resilience to a changing world. This study shows people getting together to look after the environment in their local community feel are more connected to the land and each other.

Plant a tree, meet someone new, have some tea. Love it.