Community transects

The Rapid Rural Appraisal approach

• Choose a more-or-less straight line through the area. • The line chosen should take in as many of the different

physical zones, types of vegetation, land-use areas and sections of the community as possible.

• It is often a good idea to start from the highest point in the area.

• Depending on the size of the area to be covered and the nature of the terrain, a transect can be done on foot, animal, cart or motor vehicle.

• But the slower modes are preferable because they allow for greater observation.

• PS- vegetation types may not be too important in Kingswood!

http://www.fao.org/Participation/ft_more.jsp?ID=3581

The Havana way

• Students asked to chart a transect by becoming intimately familiar with their "slice of the city."

• They were asked to unearth the chances, the collisions, the coherences, the paths, and the identities of the city in a way that was comprehensible, communicable, and evocative

Plan 545C UBC Studies Abroad in Havana, May 2000

• Explore the vertical plane that is described in plan by your transect.

• Explore and inhabit as many of the spaces in the plane as possible, both above and below ground.

• Ask yourself as you go: what is happening here? • To what else is this activity, this support

connected? • What is isolated from what and how does the

built environment support these spatial and symbolic definitions?

http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/Havana_web/Transect_Vedado.htm

http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/Havana_web/Little_wall_detail5.htm

Kingswood

• What are our objectives?

• What are we going to look at?

• How are we going to look at this transect

• What meanings are we looking for?– i.e. what is our interpretative lense?

• How are we going to map/record what we see?

Wrt your assignment

• Coping mechanisms

• How would your welfare group describe the two locations?

• How would your interviewee(s) cope with the environment you see?

• What ‘interventions’ do you think are needed?