"Nomad City"

Chapter 13 is about Urban Patterns, the distribution of people and services within a city. And I have been feeling pretty stymied, because Mongolia for me isn't about the cities, it's about the rural way of life and the wide open steppe.

But UlaanBaatar by itself contains almost half the country's population, and it is growing quickly as herders abandon their rural life for the possibilities of the city. So there are huge concerns about city life, and developing a plan to provide or increase basic services for all its residents.

As I was searching for information about how the models of urban structure fit Ulaanbaatar I came across a very cool project: Nomad City. This project is a collaboration between the University of Berlin and the University of Ulaanbaatar and the Goethe Institute in Mongolia. Essentially, it used a ger community on the periphery of the city to test ideas on how to incorporate the ger settlements surrounding Ulaanbaatar into the city and provide city services, including representation and acknowledgement as well as sewer and running water, in a meaningful way. The project began in September 2013 and is now in the documentation phase. And there is a handy YouTube video that talks about the project (it's only about 18 minutes long, but repeats).



The next blog post is going to be about conservation and preservation. When 60% of your residents live in gers and have makeshift heating, there is a LOT of air pollution in Ulaanbaatar.