Lauren's Euro Trip

Marseille: A bittersweet place to live

There is only so much reading a paper or article can do to illustrate the diversity, surroundings, public housing situation, and racism in Marseille, France.  On a recent trip to Marseille we were able to take readings from the classroom and experience countless observations first hand.  One prominent observation was how many different cultures reside together. We also saw the beautiful beaches that seem to unintentionally integrate the many immigrants of the area, creating a peaceful abode.  We observed the public housing situation and saw how many of the buildings were empty, with signs of protest on the outside of some and false promises posted by the city on others.  We also experienced what it felt like to be stigmatized by the color of our skin and gender, which is something that I for sure, am not used to.

View from a distance of Marseille, France

One thing that I noticed while walking through Marseille, was the vast amount of cultures and nationalities of the people there.  It is clearly noticeable how many different types of restaurants line the port area.  From Japanese Sushi to French cuisine, the people have taken their culture and worked to share it with the rest of Marseille.  Besides the bustling streets, the most common place to notice how the diverse Marseille is, is by traveling to the beaches.  La Plage de Corbière is the common beach where, according to a National Geographic magazine article, “for several months of the year, rich and poor, white and black, African and Arab, Muslim, Christian, and Jew, all find their own space on the sand, strip off most of their clothes, and settle down to socialize—and be socialized— under the Provençal sun” (Dickey 2012).  It has inadvertently integrated the many different cultures and provided a place that has a common interest, relaxation.

Beach at Marseille

The public housing situation is what interested me the most.  I found it so fascinating walking around and looking up at these massive condemned buildings and wondering how the city was going to fix them.  There were so many signs saying that all public housing renovations would be done by 2011, which obviously didn’t happen.  There were even more saying everything would be done by 2012, then 2013.  The grad student that was giving us the tour basically said that the city didn’t have enough money to fix these buildings.  It was also very clear that the citizens were upset about this by the amount of protest signs outside “hotels”, saying “This is not a hotel” and they were being forced to live there.  Another thing that stood out was the huge signs saying how this elaborate new boulevard was in the process of being designed on top of all the city’s other projects.  All this just made me wonder what the city of Marseille is doing?  They have no money to fix the public housing and are paying people off to move out, yet they are planning this beautiful boulevard!  On top of that, the grad student expressed how developers created a massive skyscraper for people to live in.  Even though only half of the skyscraper was filled up, the city was already planning on building another one!  After leaving the public housing area, it just really made me wonder whose interests the government had in mind and where their priorities lie.

Public Housing Promises

It seems that during the day when  around the port area and all of the shops and beaches everyone gets along.  Maybe it’s the fact that people come to the ports, shops, or beaches to relax or enjoy other culture’s food and company.  It seems like the second you leave the main area of Marseille the tensions become a little thicker.  Especially at night, you will find yourself walking and getting approached by certain groups of people to be harassed and talked to.  Those areas are usually small alley- ways filled with trash.  Almost every one of those alley-ways has people in them sitting or standing in groups, mostly of the same race.  There just seemed to be parts of the city that more people of the same race tended to hang out in and made it very obvious when someone else walked in that they were not welcome.

Overall this experience was irreplaceable.  I never could of learned the same amount and learned with such great quality if we had not visited and seen the things we had read about.  Although the racism and segregation can be severe on the outskirts of Marseille, it is amazing how simple things such as beaches can work towards integrating the different cultures.  One final observation was how the city uses it’s money to promote it’s public housing.  Marseille clearly is on the track towards development, but it seems that money is not being spent in the right areas.

Working together to create a better tomorrow.

Throughout this module I have learned about topics that were very new to me.  I came into the cube that is sustainability from the viewpoint of an engineer.  I could calculate how efficient these clean technologies were and even give some examples of where I think I’ve seen the decoupling ideology or weak and strong sustainability, but I had never discussed the abstracts of this field.  My viewpoints throughout this entire section have evolved in a way I never deemed possible.  I never really had any definite opinions about the vast ideas of different theories working towards sustainability prior to this module but after learning about them and seeing which ideas are accepted by different countries I am able to grasp a bigger picture in which I can connect parts of instances I have learned in my green engineering classes and link them to these different theories.  The main reason I came over to study in Switzerland was because I had learned a good amount about the concrete aspects to green engineering and I thought it would very beneficial to come over and observe those aspects in action.  I really believe that learning in a classroom can only do so much for you.  One wide spectrum topic that I really took away from these past weeks was how innovation plays such a large roll in every area of sustainable theory, policy, or process.  It was clearly important to know the basics of these theories while visiting Bern.

Parliament Building
Bern, Switzerland

We first met with Donald S. Beyer Jr. who is currently the Ambassador to the United States and Liechtenstein.  It was apparent right away that he was very laid back and gregarious which made it very easy to ask questions.  As he was discussing the Swiss sustainable practices in their cities and towns he started talking about the people’s mentality.  The people in Switzerland just seem to care so much more about the well being of their country while those in the United States don’t.  While walking around the city and even while I was in Zurich, you notice there really isn’t littering at all and it is generally very clean.  Compared to the United States, every aspect of Europe so far has seemed cleaner and more efficient (e.g. trains, streets, transportation).  After Beyer’s talked about the Swiss people a little longer, I asked him why he thought Americans weren’t as dedicated to being as efficient as the Swiss people seemed passionate about doing.  He seemed to think the Swiss, from an early age, were surrounded by people being as efficient and clean as possible so it kind of came into their nature to preserve the state at which everything was in, while in the United States, you learn in schools about the importance of being efficient and leaving the smallest destructive footprint possible.  In the United States, you don’t grow up seeing clean cities or great transportation as we drive everywhere! One other possibility could be the influence from the government.  The Swiss have a long term goal of what they want to achieve while the United States seem to be working on a short term view.  The government in the United States, though it has been around for quite some time now, works on two spectrums, Conservative and Liberal.  Basically, if the Conservatives are elected to represent the United States, the other party has lost.  It is not like that in Switzerland.  They use the idea of shared power.  I actually really liked this idea and became really interested in prospect of having the Republican and Democrat party working together to create solutions to problems.  These solutions would contain a little of each party’s idea of a compromise.  After this meeting, we then ventured to the Swiss Embassy and talked to two people from the Federal Office for Spatial Development and one person that was at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference.  After a brief presentation on the specific progress that has been made environmentally in Switzerland we switched into questions and discussion about green economy.  I had never heard the term green economy before but the idea of improving human well-being and social equity, while reducing environmental risks and use of resources sounds pretty ideal.  Obviously this is hard to attain to it’s fullest extent but countries try to be as optimal as possible while using as little resources as possible.  After this meeting we were able to take some free time and tour around the city of Bern.  I had been to Zurich previously and I liked Bern a lot more.  While both locations seemed to still have great transportation systems, I felt like Bern had more of a centralized city with everything somewhat closer together, while Zurich seemed to be more spread out.  We headed over to the Bärenpark where there are four bears right along the Aare River.

View from Barenpark of the Aare River

We then toured around the main town area of Bern, which was such a cool experience.  There are hardly any cars there, just trams, and little shops lining the pathways.  In one of the attached pictures you can see all the wires that connect the trams, and the tram tracks.  These are literally all over the city to make sure it can take you wherever you need to go.

View of the central city’s transportation lines.

After a nice long tour of the city, and lots of chocolate eating, we walked back to our hostel to prepare for our meetings and tours for the next day.  We met with Fabien, a student at the University of Bern, and learned about the photovoltaic industry.  Photovoltaic cells are pretty interesting to me in not only that I studied them back at school, but also that I love the possibility of capturing the sun’s rays and converting it into something we can use.  After a question and answer session we were given a tour of the University of Bern.  The schools back in the United States are so much different than those in Europe.  I had a friend visit from Austria a few months ago and she noticed the same thing.  First off the buildings were huge and literally structures that would be designed for a president and second, it seemed that most people commented to the schools because the cost of living in the city is pretty high.  The train’s are so efficient that commuting by train isn’t really that farfetched of a decision.

Amazing buildings at the University of Bern.

Overall, this short trip gave me so much insight into the sustainability goals that not only the United States have, but other countries as well.  It is really inspiring to know that other countries care so much about sustainability and have goals they want to implement for the future.  Sometimes it is easy to forget that we are all in this together and it was was really cool to realize that we all want to work towards the same thing.  This experience has made me very adamant about helping the United States create a long term goal for sustainability and I really hope to take what I learned and help other’s understand that it is possible to make a difference.

Innovation and the role it serves in sustainability

Innovation is a pretty broad topic in that it is somewhat involved in every idea that has been presented about.  After reading the assigned material, I decided to present the idea in a way that I grasp concepts easier, through example. The one example and concept that really interested me was directly showing innovation’s relationship with decoupling and the closed loop theory.  With my major of Industrial and Systems Engineering and a Green Engineering minor I love thinking of ways to make processes in industry greener and more efficient, which is why I found the next hypothetical situation very interesting.  I was posed with the thought of carpet companies ‘renting’ out their services instead of just selling a customer their product.  The idea is that your carpet would be composed of squares of material (for example, 3’x3’) instead of one large roll.  Once a certain section became worn out, it would be pulled up, easily replaced, and then sent back to the company who made it. If you think about it, EVERYONE uses carpets.  Such a high volume of them are made and chemically treated to ensure they last the maximum amount years for the optimal dollar. With that in mind, the amount of waste when disposing/replacing them must be astronomically high. What I started thinking about was how companies would react if they were required to take back the products that they created, in that customers wouldn’t just throw them away?  I feel like not only would manufacturers put more money into making better quality products (so they would last longer), but they would also start to use materials that could be easily broken down to make the same product once it was returned to them.  This would diminish the use of chemicals to treat their products because they would be much harder to work with them once they were sent back.  Now for cost.  If the government were to make a regulation that would charge people a fine (disposal fee) if they just threw away their carpets as opposed to sending them back to the company, people would be more inclined to spend that extra money towards an idea where they are not fined and at the same time are preventing unnecessary waste.  Then, a company could charge a little more for their service to ensure they made a profit.  As of now, Xerox does something like this and has prevented 2 billion pounds of potential waste from entering landfills.  I feel that if more industry were willing to try this, we could slowly move towards making less of a disruptive impact to the world we live in.  If I were to do this presentation again, considering I had more time, I would most definitely go into more detail about how innovation is directly or indirectly related to each and every person’s topic.  Each person researched and present on a different topic, so I think if I was able to explain innovation’s role that their topic has towards sustainability they would be able to relate and understand it on a different level more personal to them.

https://scholar.vt.edu/access/content/group/732c12f0-54da-46cc-9a58-32a946a321fc/Module%201%3A%20Sustainable%20Development%20and%20Europe/Thursday%2C%2030%20June/12.%20The%20role%20of%20innovation%20in%20achieving%20sustainable%20development/Ashford%20Hall%20_2011_%20Chapter%207_Organizational%20Innovation%20and%20Learning.pdf

Switzerland: Where wine is cheaper than water.

Nothing is more intimidating than coming to a foreign country. The locals give you unconscious, unwavering stares that immediately remind you you’re out of place, and the language barrier sort of makes your mind freeze and just HOPE that a person knows English.  I met up with another girl from the program three days before we were to head to Riva san Vitale.  After a drivel plane ride of 8 hours we arrived in Zurich and spent the night in the Hotel Leonek.  That, I can say with confidence, was my first cow themed hotel I had ever stayed in.  We were immersed right away into the Swiss culture through the amazing food, great chocolate, language…oh and the prostitutes.  That little sighting definitely threw us off for a few minutes as you don’t exactly see that kind of thing in reasonable safe areas of the cities back home.  One thing that I quickly learned was that you do not wear high heels in any of these cities, towns or basically anywhere in Europe.  Everything is paved with cobblestone or uneven surfaces! I made that mistake the first night and ended up walking on my tip-toes the entire time. MISERABLE! After Zurich, we headed over to Lugano and spent two days there in Hostel Montarina.  I could tell this was just a little differently set up than American places when the woman asked if we had brought our own sheets.  For a second I thought she was kidding, but no, that is custom in most hostels.  Lugano was gorgeous, not what I expected at all, but I’m starting to get used to that.  We arrived in Riva before noon and made our way to the villa.  It is so interesting to me how you can take a train from a different part of Switzerland for a few hours feel like you’re in a completely different country!  Riva is an adorable little place that almost has a village-esque vibe to it.  We found right away that there was no air conditioning in the Villa which was a little discerning!  We thought at night to just open the windows for a little, but then turned around and there were about 300 bugs on the walls behind us!  Luckily we have gathered a group of fans so the nights are not as hot.  So far everything has been extraordinary and unreal and I am looking forward to the rest of my time here.