Text/Starry Sky Arts Festival
October 26, 2021
From September 1 to September 7, 2021, the third Starry Sky Art Festival opened in Beijing with the theme of "People and Things", and the opening ceremony forum focused on "a more imaginative aging society", inviting scholars, artists and activists from all walks of life to discuss this unprecedented "aging society" with broad ideas and integrated imagination.
Liang Chunxiao, Director of Pangu Think Tank Aging Society Research Center & 30 Elderly Society Forum, E Junyu, Chief Planner of "Everything Like You", Li Nianning, Playwright/Drama Educator, Lu Rongzhi, Curator/Director, Gu Chunling, Founder of Shanghai Perfect Elderly Service Center, Mao Mingrui, Founder of Beijing City Quadrant Technology Co., Ltd., Niu Ruixue, Founder of Beijing ONE Art creative Agency, and seven speakers from "Embracing Aging", "Creating Art aging" and "Integrating Aging" The three sections shared their views and practices with the audience, and the public account will continue to publish the speakers' speeches, hoping to bring these voices to more people, bring more aspirants and institutions, and jointly help the issue of aging.
Forum Presentation Review 05
Mao Mingrui
Founder and CEO of Beijing City Quadrant Technology Co., Ltd., director of Beijing Community Research Center, co-founder of Beijing City Lab, deputy director of the Planning Information Center and secretary general of the Innovation Center of Beijing Urban Planning and Design Research Institute for many years, responsible for the innovation and informatization of Beijing Planning Institute. In addition, he has also served as a member of the Human Settlements And Environment Committee and the Community Construction Committee of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, a member of the National Technical Committee for Natural Resources and Land Spatial Planning Standardization, a member of the National Technical Committee for Natural Resources and Land Spatial Planning, a deputy secretary-general of the Urban Big Data Professional Committee of the China Urban Science Research Association, a member of the New Technology Professional Committee of the China Urban Planning Society, and a vice chairman of the Spatial Big Data Technology and Application Working Committee of the China Geographic Information Industry Association.
Today, when I come to the Starry Sky Art Festival, I want to talk about what methods we are engaged in in urban science that can help us recognize aging and promote the integration of the elderly and other groups, so let's talk about the perception and tolerance of such an elderly population.
We talk about perceiving the elderly population, as if we don't need to do any research, because we have more and more elderly people around us, and we can see it every day. But what I want to talk about is how to systematically construct a perception, how to break down our stereotypes about the elderly population or their behavior. We tried to do something. Of course, the method we use is not just for the elderly population, but a whole set of methods of observing society, especially without big data, with some offline means, we call it space detective. I always feel that sitting in the office with some second-hand information or holding some big data results is difficult to really understand a group, especially the elderly on the Internet using big data means can be less perceptible, so we prefer to go to the community to observe our subjects, we call this method of observation immersive community research.
In community research, we sneak up on them, sneak up on them like a cat, and make some notes. We chose a lot of old cities in Beijing for observation, such as Dashilar, and we spent many hours on Yanshou Street, recording people's behavior and understanding the characteristics of different groups of people. In this picture we can see the relationship between different groups of people and the community, especially with the main street of the community, Yanshou Street. If you are a child, there will be a lot of short-distance random behavior, and if you are a general community resident, you will have a very clear destination to visit and travel paths. Tourists often walk on Yangmeizhu Diagonal Street, and the other is tourists who take three wheels to tour the hutongs. What about the old man, who has a lot of round-trip, small-segmented turnbacks in this community, and he doesn't have a particularly many destinations, just walking around the bend, and has no intention of walking through.
In the same way, we look at where I used to work and see the interaction between the behavior trajectory of the elderly group and the space. Of all the observations, the most interesting thing we did was the residents' life logs, and the data from this experiment came from the community in Huilongguan, Beijing. In 2018, we recruited dozens of resident volunteers to report on their activities using a small program we developed. From 7 o'clock in the morning to going to bed at night, they need to clock in every hour on the mini program, upload the location, tell me what he is doing, and take a photo to prove it. In this way, we collected a lot of behavioral logs of many residents every hour over a period of one to two weeks, and through this behavioral log we can see the differences between different age groups at different time periods and in different types of activities. Most people spend the most time on the trivialities of life, followed by life entertainment. If you look at the elderly group, people over the age of 60 are the highest proportion of all age groups that spend time on leisure and entertainment, of course, they also have a unique leader, that is, physical exercise. In the past, we thought that young people exercised, but the proportion of older people exercising was higher than other age groups.
In addition, we used other data visualizations to see the differences in behavior between different age groups. For example, the eating habits of the 20-year-old to 68-year-old group, the breakfast of young people starts very early, dinner can be eaten late, and sometimes supper is eaten at night. 30 years old is a dividing line of leisure and entertainment, people before the age of 30 leisure and entertainment activities start very late and end very late, especially when they are 20 years old, they can be active until midnight, but when they are 45 years old, life suddenly becomes regular, and entertainment activities will inevitably end before 11 pm. Of course, we can also see the sad middle-aged people, the leisure and entertainment activities of the middle-aged people are hollow, young people play, the elderly play, they do not play.
There are also significant differences in transportation. Our age group is called rushing middle-aged people, and the elderly after retirement will also show that they often travel in some samples. In the case of life trivia, young people in their early 20s have no trivia, they live a carefree life, and from the age of 30 until the age of 50, they reach the peak time of a day's time allocation of trivia, and the proportion of trivia in their 60s begins to decline. Then there is work and study, as the previous teacher Lu Rongzhi introduced, the elderly are useful, 70 years old also have still learning, we also agree, but what we see in our data is that the proportion of such elderly people is still relatively low. There are some groups that have very intensive learning time, and also see a contrasting data is exercise, the time of exercise in the elderly population is densely concentrated in the evening and morning time periods, the proportion of young people exercising is relatively low, they form a complementary behavior.
Comparison of young adults (red) and middle-aged and elderly (green) work-study
Comparison of young adults (red) and middle-aged and elderly (green) health exercises
In addition to the difference in age, we can also see the difference in gender, which is even more interesting. We each randomly selected three samples, three big moms and three big uncles, of which we saw the typical gender differences: in terms of physical exercise, the big uncle was exercising all day, and the big mother basically exercised at night; the big uncle was relatively more no trivia, the big mother was doing all kinds of chores from morning to night, except for a few more sad uncles; the uncle was leisure and entertainment all day long, and the big aunt had to be busy until after 18:00 at night; the uncle did not study, the big mother studied; the traffic traveled, the big mother traveled less, and the uncle ran around If you eat, the aunt is irregular, and the uncle is particularly regular, but there is a grandfather who only eats breakfast. We will see a lot of interesting differences in life, which is also reflected in our workshops on community building, and it is usually difficult for us to find uncles to participate, always big aunts to participate.
Big Mama and Grandpa's Week Red represents Big Mama Green represents Grandpa
About their travels. Big Mama's travel radius is this small circle, basically going to the range around the community, up to the North Third Ring Road. Uncle is not the same, to the west to the West Mountain Summer Palace is not far, to the south to The Cow Street, Taoran Pavilion, Daguan Garden, the great uncle runs all over the world, the mother is at the doorstep. The little data life logs we do can really see things we don't know. If big data research is used, there are many people using video now, such as there are many cameras in the community, so what is the aging scene? Found an elderly man lying on the ground for a minute and alerted the police with a video signal? We have also seen someone use the elderly card to analyze the consumption behavior of the elderly, which is a good scenario, but we cannot rule out that his children are using his card. There are also people who use the data of the water and electricity meter to see which old man's home has not been turned for how many days, and will find that there is no problem at home, which may be an effective scenario.
Big Mom travel radius
Grandpa travel radius
There are also some data that are very interesting, that is, hotlines. The pre-1970 community, until 2005, belonged to the old community, these communities are generally more aging, and the demands of the newly built commercial housing communities are not the same. We studied the hotline data of the old community last year and found that the older the community, especially the community before 1970, will pay attention to the topics of water and electricity safety, the new crown epidemic, and demolition, and the new community will pay attention to the construction of disturbances and property facilities. From 1990 to 2000, the main controversies arose in the community on demolition and house repair. The most aging community will have some unique demands, such as air pollution, construction management, historical problems, ownership of houses, especially in old age, he will have similar problems with inheritance.
The degree of aging of the community and different demands
We also see some other hotlines, such as the old community calls more will have 120, 999 calls, there will be a lot of water repair calls, these are not so common in other communities. There is also an illegal dog keeping, and many old communities will often call to complain about illegal dog breeding. We compared the changes between people who hit the 110 age group and those who hit the 12345 age group, and 40 years old was a dividing line. People in their 40s like to call the police, and people after 40 like to call 12345. We have such a bold conclusion, if you do not care about the trivialities of life of 12345 complaints, it does not matter, the future you will, people in this life is slowly from caring about national affairs to calculating the short process of home, this is the data to see.
Proportion of types of complaint calls made by age group
This is what we do with some crowd cognition, and we have to do something after cognition, so we also do some spatial perception, especially the spatial perception of urban accessibility. In Beijing, we have obtained a lot of standard specifications for barrier-free construction in cities, including barrier-free construction for the Winter Olympics, planning and barrier-free construction plans issued by the housing department, but can the specification booklets we get solve the accessibility problems of cities? It's actually so hard, why? First, it says about various types of spaces, such as what should be the wet market, what should the residential community do, what should the urban roads do, what the transportation facilities and elevators should be, what should the information accessibility requirements be, but where are these objects? Suppose we were to go to the art museum today to feel its accessibility, first of all, we must have a clear space ledger to know how many facilities are in the art museum's block, and where they are distributed, so that we can know what we want to do with it. Second, different respondents have different investigation contents, I came to this theater with a standard specification, and I had to check what the requirements of the theater were, and then find out where the theater was compliant and where it was not compliant, which greatly hindered the designers and the space renewal crowd from participating in this matter. So we were thinking that this is actually a need for digital governance, whether it is possible for us to do it in a digital way, so we did a small program for digital investigation. Now there are a lot of Internet maps that can help us to know how many banks, how many restaurants, how many schools, how many supermarkets and convenience stores in this community before the barrier-free transformation of a neighborhood, so we can directly give you a list of all the facilities in the block in the mini program, such as a vegetable market, whether it has a barrier-free elevator, and if there is, it will give you the specifications of the barrier-free elevator requirements. Such digital gadgets can be a great cost saving for conducting barrier-free surveys of the community.
We used this gadget in a survey of Xinjiekou. This is the spatial data and list of spatial census objects we constructed, here each type of facility is where we go when we investigate, each facility has an attribute table behind it, we take this attribute table to investigate it, forming such a database of census results. Is there any access to the facility? If there is an expansion channel, is the amplitude less than 1:20, and is its width greater than 1.5 meters? We quickly establish barrier-free evaluation results through such a survey, and after we have the evaluation results, we can turn it into a barrier-free evaluation map, according to the requirements of accessibility norms, where there are problems in the jurisdiction at a glance. After that we can automate the export of two kinds of tables. One is the evaluation table, C stands for no such facility at all, B stands for this facility is not up to standard, you can export the classification results with one click, you can quickly put forward complete renovation suggestions for each facility, based on this we have guided the work of improving the accessibility of Xinjiekou.
This is the problematic barrier-free facility that we have remodeled in the renovation of Xinjiekou, of course, we have found far more problems than we have remodeled, and most of the facilities street does not have the right to move it. We're trying to quickly advance our urban accessibility transformation through digital gadgets, which is a small task that we barely have to come up with. In addition to Xinjiekou, we are also promoting the transformation of Shuangjing Street.
Finally, I would like to address the issue of how to promote the integration and inclusion of ageing societies. Let me start with a few small examples. My previous company was in the Yaziqiao community in Beijing, and as a planner for the Yaziqiao community, we needed to renovate the community market, which is the picture on the right. There is a wet market in the center of this community, and there is a wet market on the west side, which is relatively far away, and the two wet markets are about the same size. The vegetable market in the central area is a little smaller, but we have transformed this market into a comprehensive transformation according to the planning suggestions, and transformed it into a people's life service center. Our vision at that time was like this, we thought that for an aging society, in order to allow the elderly to be able to solve his basic life shopping problems in a closer range, we hope to promote the construction of a five-minute life circle, we think that such a vegetable market in the center of the community has various elements of the five-minute life circle, for the elderly he no longer needs to walk 15 minutes to the outside morning market to buy vegetables, they can have at the doorstep, and the environment of this facility is very beautiful and bright and clean, and the format is very rich. There are cooked food and fresh food, and there are other tinkering things. We believe that the improvement of this wet market will bring great convenience to residents.
Duck Bridge Life Service Center is only a 5-minute walk away
In contrast, the farther red lotus vegetable market looks like this, the order is relatively bad, and it is far away. We have great hopes for this "five-minute life circle construction", but according to our observation of the residents of the Duck Bridge community, we found that the elderly do not go to the vegetable market we have remodeled in the morning, they are willing to walk 15 minutes to the red lotus vegetable market, basically only at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the red lotus morning market will close the elderly will go to this vegetable market. This vegetable market is close, the area is similar, the format is richer, the environment is more hygienic, why don't the elderly go? We asked some grandparents and they said why do we want a 5-minute circle of life? We have more time, I am willing to go more, you don't think we can't walk, we are willing to go. Second, they feel that the morning market is pulled from other places, which is fresher and cheaper. But I really compared the price of the two sides of the market, I didn't think that the price of the market here was more expensive, nor did I think that the side was cheaper than this side, but everyone was willing to go, and he didn't go to the tall and clean market on this side. On the left is a good vegetable market, middle-aged people buy vegetables here, very deserted, it is a messy vegetable market, very lively, but the elderly love to go here, I think this is their psychological needs. Don't think that older people can't walk, they might be gone. So the way of life in old age we have to understand.
Need to walk 15 minutes to the Red Lotus Market
There is also the custom of sacrificial sacrifice sweeping, this is the photo of burning paper on the street of Beijing on the Middle Yuan Festival, and on the right is my hometown of Yichang, Hubei Province, burning paper by the river, this is our culture, you don't say it is superstition, this is the mourning that represents our sustenance. Not long ago, I heard a story that an old man burned paper for his wife at home and died on fire, and this question touched me particularly. We will all be old, and it is impossible to say that when we burn paper, we go far away and go to the mountains to burn. This problem arose in my hometown, what is the solution in Yichang, Hubei Province, they have set up a lot of altars in the city, which can solve the needs of residents who can burn paper on the community walking scale. My good friend Li Weiwen and I write an article every year to promote urban renewal and urban design in Beijing, which is an article we wrote in 2019, and we believe that when we plan and design, we can't squeeze out life and customs and let them do it in a disorderly way. We wondered if we could use paper-burning facilities as a community space so that our children could more easily express their mourning, which is our protection of traditional customs and our response to the way of life in an aging society.
Sacrifice by the river
Earlier Teacher Lu talked about the integration of one old and one small abroad, I actually often see such scenes. Our company moved to Shuangjing, the five-pointed star that building, next to the building is the Gonghe Garden of Shuangjing, the southwest corner is the kindergarten, there is a secret passage between the kindergarten and the nursing home, this passage is connected to the nursing home and the kindergarten. They often organize the elderly and children to interact together, and the children and the elderly celebrate birthdays together, and they will do activities together. Later, I wanted to promote the integration of the elderly with our community. In the northeast corner of the Shuangjing Apple community, there is a vacant lot very close to the Today Art Museum, and some elderly fitness machines are placed on the platform of the open space, which is planned as a fitness venue for the elderly. But when the elderly go to this fitness, they will take the children with them, but there is nothing for the children to play on the stage. The Apple community is a particularly young community in Beijing, such a venue next to the Apple community, very few young people come here; there are some restaurants next to the site, so from noon to afternoon, many workers and delivery workers come to this venue to eat, but our venue also does not have any facilities for them to rest, they squat on the road teeth to eat. We give space to the elderly, which is exclusive to others and not tolerant enough for the elderly.
We want to transform this venue, first do some observations, young and middle-aged people rarely stay in this venue, a day on average more than 40 elderly people or children to visit this venue, we will observe these people who often come to this venue to find, the elderly, passing young people, people who come to this fitness, children, we give him a lot of props, divide them into four groups, let them design the future of this venue by themselves. So we got the design of the children, the design of the grandmother, the design of the designer and the design of the fitness enthusiast. The final summary of their design plan shows that the elderly want to have barrier-free expansion, children want to have trampolines, the elderly say don't take away the fitness facilities, he needs it, he also needs space for rest, also needs planting space, young people also need to play, punch cards, interactive devices for landscapes, and so on. So we implemented this design, such as letting the residents vote for the name of the site themselves, letting the residents choose what plants to plant for the site, and we send the seeds to the residents for them to plant themselves. We also posted a QR code at the venue to let residents give us opinions on the venue, such as when using it, we can tell us at any time if we find any problems, and we will organize the community.
After the opening of the park on July 15 last year, it became like this, in this picture you can see that the elderly are still there, the children are also coming, the young people are also coming, and everyone is playing here from morning to night. We found that the workers and delivery workers also came, and at 10:30 p.m. the security guards would run here to swing, the camera could see it, and they were embarrassed to come during the day. All the people love this facility, does such a facility that is inclusive of all groups of people exclude the elderly? You said that this space was originally only for the elderly, and now that you have pulled so many people over, can the elderly still be active? There is no problem, the stay of the elderly has not decreased at all and increased, the stay of people of all ages has increased by 100%, we have also promoted communication, the proportion of social interaction between young and middle-aged people to this venue has increased by 80%, the exchange activities of the elderly have also become more, children are more, children chat for an average of 15 minutes, it has become a space that everyone likes. Some spaces may be specifically geared toward the elderly, but there are spaces where you should integrate the elderly with others and not exclude the elderly from our society, which is what the community needs. Here's some of the data from this venue a year later, our venue swings an average of 14,400 times a day in the fall, the trampoline jumps 4,800 times a day, the gyroscope turns 1,920 times a day, and 400 people visit every day, and only forty or fifty people came over in the past. This is our small attempt to promote the integration of the elderly through spatial transformation.
In essence, our team is not a team dedicated to the aging society or aging transformation, we are an urban science team, but have been using the scientific paradigm, digital method and participatory approach based on humanistic values to promote the renewal of our society and the city, so that it becomes more inclusive, more vibrant, more livable and more ecological.
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Manuscript Proofreader: Feng Yuzhang
Edit: Yi Yang
Luminous Festival
The Starry Sky Arts Festival is China's first inclusive arts festival, initiated and founded by the Beijing Unceasing Cultural Exchange Center in 2019. The participants and creators of inclusive art include Disability, Aging, Gender, Marginalized Minority and the public, etc.; the perspective of inclusive art is based on the subjective expression and integration of life equality, eliminating opposition, promoting inclusion, and rebuilding connections with art.
Read the original article: "Starry Sky Opening Forum Review| Mao Mingrui: Using the "Space Detective" Method to Break stereotypes about the elderly"