For the past 3 days, we had some wonderful time in sharing thoughts and ideas with different actors, including community members, CODI staffs, banker, community leaders and community architects. Many important thoughts and information were then continually imported to our mind and the title is a motto-like sentence given by the amazing lady Somsook. Actually besides this one, she created many more interesting sentences that really struck my heart, for example, another interesting one is ‘Every time you feel too comfortable, you are going down’. I always believe that it is the people who have the experience of practice that own the power to talk. There is no doubt that she is using the condensed sentences to guide us the philosophy of her working experience. For me, I learnt so many things beyond the Baan Mankong program per se.

Maybe it is too early to say that, but I have already acknowledged that this fieldtrip would influence me a lot and for a long time in terms of shaping my thoughts in solving realistic problems. As I concluded in my portfolio, the methodology we studied in the first term in urban intervention studio is a very useful one. And the chance to examine it in Brescia is a good practice in terms of preparing this much longer and complicated case. Apart from this methodology which relies more on spatial production rather than social and economic ones, however, I find it of great importance to rely our intervention on the basis of demand-driven thinking. Actually it is not only limited to solving urban problems, but could be applied to all the strategy-required tasks, just people are tend to forget the basic rule of solving problems based on needs when coming across sophisticated issues.

I always ask myself: what does CODI want from us? And why us? From my point of view, finding out what we could provide, or say, our value, is very important. Meanwhile, a feeling always occurs to me that from time to time we are putting ourselves at a position which is too high. I say it because I realize people are always trying to find out troubles and propose ‘better’ things instead of being humble enough to learn the beauty of this programme. Being critical is nothing wrong, but as Somsook also mentioned that it is us that should learn from the poor as they know how to build up things from nothing. We do need to have the appreciation of what the communities are doing now instead of holding too many assumptions about our ability to provide them something dramatically new. And as this programme is adjusting itself all the time based on the reality, I think we should move our feet to the field of helping out people to address future needs and enable them to have a better life via small and feasible changes.