Operating in the Badlands: Learning from Place, Building Relationships, and Rethinking Rural-Urban Futures Beyond Service Learning
Name of Event/Lecture
Operating in the Badlands: Learning from Place, Building Relationships, and Rethinking Rural-Urban Futures Beyond Service Learning
Name of Speaker
Betty Chang
Location
SDE4, Level 5 Forum, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
You are cordially invited to attend the lecture event by Betty Chang:
Date & Time: 17 September, 18:30–20:00
Location: SDE4, Level 5 Forum, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
RSVP here: https://bit.ly/nusdoa_Betty
BOA-SIA CPD Points: TBC
Operating in the Badlands: Learning from Place, Building Relationships, and Rethinking Rural-Urban Futures Beyond Service Learning
What can declining mountain villages teach us about navigating an uncertain future? Collaborative Badlands is a decade-long university-community initiative based in the rural badlands of southern Taiwan. Through the lens of place-based education, this talk explores how faculty and students learn to navigate not only a challenging landscape, but also the boundaries between university and community, rural and urban, and knowledge and practice.
It asks how universities might extend beyond service learning to become active participants they engage with—building relationships, fostering mutual learning, and creating new possibilities for rural-urban futures.
Hsiu-Tzu Betty Chang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and currently serves as the Division Director of Social Engagement at the university’s Research Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She envisions herself as a participatory planner embedded in higher education, a social designer creating rural-urban linkages to foster mutual learning, and a community architect advancing the institutionalization of university social responsibility from the bottom up.
Across these diverse roles and settings, she practices placemaking by connecting the assets of everyday life and cultivating meaningful relationships, inclusive processes, and vibrant public spaces. Collaborative Badlands, an initiative she leads, has received international recognition from SEED and the Live Projects Network, and, most recently, the Global Equity in Service-Learning and Community Engagement Award from IARSLCE.