Projects:Civic Tech1. Milieu.io2. Milieu Civic Engagement Platform3. Entrée Nord, Nouméa, NC

Interventions 4. In a Space of 1 1/2 Bodies

5. Percy Station

Texts6. Exceptional/Exceptionable Spaces7. Does Architecture Dream of Upheavals?

- Abstract/Observations

Alternative Realities8. Does Architecture Dream of Upheavals?

- Somerset House9. A Line of Reflection

Medium:https://medium.com/a-floating-space/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisa-j-b4094b104/

Twitter: @Luisalyji

Company:https://milieu.io/

Luyao (Luisa) Ji

Discover Strategize

Implement

Evaluate

MILIEU TOOL KITCUSTOM BUILD FEATURES

Launch

Discove

r

Eval

uate

PARTICIPATORYSERVICE DESIGNEnsure service compliance anddefine project success indicators

STAKEHOLDER COMMUNICATION STRATEGYDesign engagement journey, timeline, andtools best suitable for a project

Tool Kit forCivic Engagement

Effective Use ofCollected Data

DATA COLLECTIONEffectively collect public feedback to inform urban planning projects

DATA VISUALIZATIONLeverage artificial intelligence to analyze data and gain actionable insights

DECISION SUPPORTMake confident decisions by identifying issues in real-time and reduce risk

One can easily find notices about new development opportunities on the side of a street when wandering through the city. Very few people understand the terminologies printed on these notices, and the lack of context makes every proposal look hostile to the existing urban fabric.

These notices ask you to “let them know what you think” yet only the vocal minorities worrying about their own backyards make it through the hurdle of attending meetings, making phone calls, and sending in complaints via emails.

The mechanism to involve citizens in the process of urban development and land use planning is clearly dysfunctional. Although civic engagement has been made mandatory as part of the planning process in Ontario, Canada, it is often seen as a checklist item that the practitioners find frustrating. When engagement goes poorly, practitioners fear making decisions that misrepresent the community interests. When engagement goes well, there are simply too much information to be managed and analyzed by a human being.

Milieu is conceptualized to de-congest this information bottleneck and provide a better experience for people to understand and share thoughts on developments opportunities near them.

Milieu wants to shift the culture of “engagement“. To do so, our team work with our clients in a circular motion to discover, strategize, implement, launch, and evaluate the entire engagement project. We also build tools and features to collect and manage public feedback, and Natural Language Processing modules to categorize the keywords and concepts extracted from collected feedback in unstructured text to help practitioners navigate the diverse array of community interests.

Milieu.io2015 -2017

Key Services Provided: - Designing and building products for better civic engagement for municipalities

- Designing and building more effective citizen feedback data collection and analysis mechanism for architects/planners/engineers/ real-estate developers from proposal submission to project approval

Pictured is a typical development application notice in Ottawa littered on the side of a building.

Milieu Civic Engagement Platform

Guelph Civic Accelerator 2016

Many cities engage citizens on urban planning proposals using old and dysfunctional notices as well as physical letters in mail.

In 2016, City of Guelph put out an open call to transform its analogue service. Milieu stood out as a strong proponent to tackle this challenge with a map-based interface that enables residents

of Guelph to search and discover new development proposals in their city and have a dialogue with city staff members.

Online conversations carry the same weight as the ones collect at official town hall meetings.

Visit cities.milieu.io for demo

Nouméa, New Caledonia is updating the northern entrance to its town centre and Milieu is stepping in to provide urban data collection and analytics services.

Milieu’s goal is to be a part of the revitalization process by collecting and analyzing feedback data from residents. Residents respond on a variety of topics: parking, traffic, public space, and temporary use.

Likert scale is used for residents to rate proposed elements for the waterfront. Residents are also

asked to provide text comments to support their ratings. The comments are parsed and categorized with MOEE (Milieu Opinion Extraction Engine) into the following themes to inform the clients’ decision-making process:

- Funding- Design- Implementation- Operations- Promotion- Maintenance

A visualized report will be released December2017.

collect residents’ opinion

normalize collected data

categorize residents’ opinion and sentiment with Natural Language Processing

visualize civic insight

inform decisions

Milieu Opinion Extraction Engine Illustrated

Client: Aziza Chaouni ProjectsVille de Nouméa

Status: On-going

www.entreenord.com

In a Space of 1 1/2 Bodies

https://vimeo.com/125206474

Design/Build: Luisa Ji, Ema Graci, Lee-Michael Pronko, Thaly Crespin + Volunteers from Azrieli School of Architecture

Photography/Videography: Antoine S. Legault (Lonely Fire Productions), Brandon Thomas Ng (PCTV), Luisa Ji

March 2015

In a space of one and a half bodies is a minimally constructed installation. This installation seeks to draw the viewer into an experience of the merger of worlds.

Rather than simply remaining a passive observer of the ‘real’ at-a-distance, the viewer is confronted with a choice to encounter the other half. This other half is none other than that of the ‘dream’.

The installation is designed in such a way that a pathway of lush, green sod leads into an ever increasing density of hanging white threads that act to symbolize rolling clouds converging on mountain hills, where greener pastures remain.

By engaging the installation and entering into its space with the transition from the sod to the clouds the viewer is essentially, traversing the unknown zone of convergence and experiencing its surreal intimacy.

What can be discovered at the centre of this convergence is a unique and puzzling experience. In the centre of the installation amongst the density of the hanging threads there is a ‘carved out’ circular space no bigger than one and a half bodies. Forming a perfect circle, this space is occupied by a hanging light that represents the end result of the exploration of the unknown.

In the body’s encounter with the merger of the everyday and the dream world, amongst the surreal, conceivably a moment of stillness can be realized. In a space of one and a half bodies seeks to capture that moment.

Percy StationArchitectural Design/Implementation: Luisa Ji, Lee-Michael Pronko, Monique St-Pierre

Promotion/Program Funding Management: Jackpine Creative Co.

Videographer: Antoine S. Legault (Lonely Fire Productions)

https://youtu.be/lKFQ5ED840E

Instagram:#percystation@percystation

In 2016, the City of Ottawa announced an open call for “Streetside Spots”. Among other selected proposals, Percy Station was built to bring cultural programs and micro-businesses back to its site - a local cafe and music venue destroyed in a fire Winter 2015.

The construction was sponsored by the City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Chinatown BIA. The residents in the surrounding areas also donated plants, fixtures, and cash to keep Percy Station running for the duration of the “Streetside Spots” program - June to October 2016.

The program includes a kiosk run by local businesses on a rotational basis, a social area surrounded by edible plants, and a bike repair tool-stand maintained by volunteers.

Ottawa Chinatown BIA received numerous complaints from business owners who felt their businesses were threatened by Percy Station’s rotational kiosk. The structure was later relocated to a shared garden by Ottawa Community Housing (OCH), a local not-for-profit organization, and now maintained by tenants at Strathcona Heights, a mixed-income community of OCH.

7

Exceptional / Exceptionable Space is a joint event funded

and organized by Migration

and Diaspora Studies and the

School of Architecture at Carleton

University. The discussions are

documented in text to invite

cross-disciplinary conversations

on spaces that are excepted

and spatial patterns that are

exceptional:

https://carleton.ca/mds/wp-content/

uploads/EX_Pamphlet_2015v5.pdf

Event details:

https://carleton.ca/mds/2015/12/04/

exceptionalexceptionable-space/

exceptional/exceptionable space

November 17th, 2015

— an interdisciplinary event organised by the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism in collaboration with the Migration and Diaspora Initiative.

Internationally recognised writer, architect and speaker Keller Easterling (Yale University), will discuss “Extrastatecraft”.

9.30-12.45 in the Media Room of the Discovery Centre (MacOdrum library) at Carleton University.

Open event, all are welcome.twitter #exspacecarleton

“Massive global systems — meta-infrastructures administered by public and private cohorts, and driven by profound irrationalities — are generating de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them — a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which there is studied political response”— Keller Easterling

“What then is Exceptional Space? A migrant ship afloat outside Thailand?Turned away, turned to where?”

The coordinating research partners include:Luisa Ji, Thaly Crespin & Lee Michael Pronko (contact@atelierruderal.com).Professor Roger Connah, The Azrieli School of Architecture& Urbanism (roger.connah@carleton.ca).Professor Daniel McNeil, The Department of History & Migration and Diaspora Initiative. (daniel.mcneil@carleton.ca).

Does Architecture Dream of

Upheaval?

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of Graduate and

Postdoctoral

Affairs in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the

degree of

Master of Architecture

https://medium.com/a-floating-space/up/

The passage begins by drawing connections between the advancement of China’s Special Economic Zones 1 (SEZ)

and the implementation of SEZ in Kashgar 2 in 2010 using a pre-existing model succeeded in Shenzhen 3. The

observation of the change in urban conditions through rapid development is heightened with the outbreak of the

upheaval in Kashgar four years into its transformation from the historic silk-road trading hub to the newly destined

economic frontier of China. The sudden disturbance brings the previously unspoken dilemma of SEZ under the

spotlight: an interesting phenomenon of violent disruption brought by the frictions between the old and new.

An upheaval 4 , where unsolicited violence has bloomed is a child to the social, political, and economic

condition. It is neither a leader nor a follower. Upheaval expresses a different scenario that coexists within

the larger cultural context; it re-examines the context it is situated in and generates new conditions.

Upheaval demonstrates a collective behavior that is attempting to grab onto an alternative way towards

the future. Considering the leading culture of architecture today, instead of preserving the loss,

embracing the cycle of degeneration and regeneration as continuous events can result in an alternative

strategy for architectural conservation. In the process of introducing such a concept, can architecture

take the form of an upheaval, a radical break that resonates enough to generate shared emotions?

Wolf D. Prix’s of the Austrian studio Coop Himmelb(l)au was once fascinated by a leaping whale which

exemplified an amazement brought on by disruption: “I was in a boat and the water is very calm but

I could feel that there was something moving under the surface. All of a sudden the animal emerged

and jumped 15 meters high. You have to imagine it: a 30-tonne, floating, flying object”. 5 The figure of

heaviness transitions from one medium to another. As from water to air through its power to defeat the

confinement of gravity, the leaping whale disrupts the tranquility of both water and air as it flies.

Can architecture become an upheaval disrupting the clearly defined social values in this example of

the leaping whale? In the search for a speculative architecture to break free from linear evolution, a

thoughtful investigation in regards to social, political and economic factors must be conducted. These

factors participate within the rhizome 6, re-appropriating not only on a map, but through a network

that suggests an alternative set of parameters influencing architecture and urbanism. This rhizome

does not offer a solution to existing architectural difficulties, rather it aims to generate a radical uplift

of possibilities: an upheaval, in this senses an architectural performance. The architectural upheaval

resembles the great leap of a thirty-ton whale in the ocean: in struggle, it jumps for survival.

1. SEZ: Special Economic ZoneChinese (Pinyin) jingji tequ or (Wade-Giles romanization) ching-chi t’e-chü, any of several localities in which foreign and domestic trade and investment are conducted without the authorization of the Chinese central government in Beijing. Special economic zones are intended to function as zones of rapid economic growth by using tax and business incentives to attract foreign investment and technology. “Special economic zone (SEZ)”, accessed October 27, 2014, last modified April 20, 2009,http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/558530/special-economic-zone-SEZ

2. KashgarIn 2011, the city of Kashgar is appointed a SEZ using Shenzhen as its development model hence started the on-going friction between the newly introduced Han culture and the local Uyghur culture.

3. ShenzhenA city bordering Hong Kong ,designated in 1979 under the Deng Xiao Ping regime as one of China’s first SEZs. Under privileged policies and convenient access to Hong Kong, a free port, Shenzhen has become the fastest growing city in China.

4. Upheaval Noun, Definition:1: the action or an instance of upheaving especially of part of the earth’s crust 2: extreme agitation or disorder : radical change “Upheaval” accessed October,27,2014, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/upheaval.

5. Wolf D. Prix , On the edge, in: Andreas C. Papadakis(ed.), Architectural Design Profile No. 87, Deconstruction III, London 1990, p. 60

6. The term rhizome was originally mentioned in Deleuze and Guattari’s co-authored book A Thousand Plateaus describing the constant deterritorialization and reappropriation in a non-linear expression

Sharing the name with the famous culture venue in London, UK, Somerset House, the “eye-sore“ of Centretown in Ottawa, Canada is the centerpiece of demolition-by-neglect. A full decade has passed by as the owner and the neighbourhood representatives continue to seek the perfect businesses to lease the space to so that they can begin the repair. The third part of “Does Architecture Dream of Upheaval?“ explores a performance where fluid spaces enabled by the notion of sharing can bring life back to Somerset House.

“A Line of Reflection”- An Imaginary Piece for 2017 Shenzhen Hong Kong Urbanism and Architecture Bi-City Biennale (UABB)Directed Studies with Prof. Tuomas Toivonen & Nene Tsuboi, Helsinki, Winter 2014

“A Line of Reflection” is a proposal for UABB 2017.

It reflects on what Shenzhen as a city has established upon. The city has a strong symbiotic relationship with its residents. The positive synergy not only establishes a city with strong economy, but also a place called home for those who contributed to the city. To reflect is to learn from the past and to

re-imagine the future. To reflect is to see the self through a critical eye, so the self will continue to thrive. Standing at the line of reflection, it is the time for the residents to voice their opinions. Architects do not build the city. It is the people who build the city. The exhibition curriculum runs parallel with the construction of the venue. Through the process, different pockets of activities are formed organically. Artists, designers, and creative minds in different professions are free to express their views using different medium, at different stages of constructing of their own pavilions. The visitors are also

free to participate and exchange ideas with the exhibitors while constructions are in action.

The venue that is always a “work-in-progress” engages the visitors of the exhibition to a “construction site”, which resembles Shenzhen, a city that is always responding to its citizen’s by the act of building.

A city and its people are bonded by the line of reflection: they are symbiotic.

The theme “A Line of Reflection” is derived from previous themes of UABB. From 2005 -2013, the exhibitions examined Shenzhen’s border conditions and relationship with innovation, openness, and cultrual interference with cities alike.

However, being called the city with no history, Shenzhen struggles to find its own identity.

“A Line of Reflection” seeks the city’s identity through its people, and the diversity of spaces assembled by the acts of restless demolition and construction.

The grid illustrated is a representation of the fabric of the city. The city itself is the site for an array of exhibitions. The Biennale serves as a mirror to reflect the mundane lives of people.

As one exhibition gets taken down, a new one will be constructed. The exhibitions reflect the growth of Shenzhen -- a pattern that is rapid and diverse.

“A Line of Reflection“ is a theme that allows diversity and differences, while respecting the heritage of Shenzhen -- its people.

Notes: