I met Jane, Joe Holyoak, four young graduates, Paul Bartlett from Birmingham City Council, at Handsworth metro station to have a site visit. Paul showed us the development sites and he explained the main purposes of the project, which was develop basic layouts and scheme design proposals for five challenging sites of potential housing in north west Birmingham. All sites visited are located in the area between Handsworth station and Soho Road.

Personally, comparing with my Italian experience, where graduate are less involved, I found it unusual the involvement of those new graduates. I thought it was a really good opportunity for them, having the opportunity to talk directly with their hypothetical client.

My impression and thinking around the area? The metro station was completely lost and lifeless. While I was waiting, I thought that probably nothing had been there before the metro lines. So, in some way, the metro station has made a sign in a place previously empty and anonymous, linking suburban area with the city centre with a good frequency service.

During my waiting I also thought around the concept of connection and disconnection, explained by Irena Bauman in her lecture “Happy cities, stitching the disconnections.” At the same time, my sight had been attracted to a crane crashing old cars in the site close to the station. There was a big mound of metal all around, that increased the sense of desolation and neglect.We started our site visit, moving around the suburb. All around a lot of terraces house lined up in a repetitive way (typically English) which sometimes was broken up by personalization by their inhabitants deciding to change doors colour, window shape, etc... All around was a lot of litter and abandoned items.

Walking around, we passed through Soho Road.The streets and roads were full of colourful shops appearing strange to me. One of most curious things was that local shops use part of the pavement to display their goods. Plenty of colours were all around specially from fruit and vegetable shops and from traditional Indian women’s clothes. People walked along animating the street.

After the site visits, we came back at “base MADE” and we had lunch together in a “caff”. On this occasion people explained me the difference between caff and cafeteria. If I have well understood, the caff is the typical English place where you can eat traditional, simple food for a cheap price. Usually these places aren’t attractive and comfortable, but you can certainly eat a good and big English breakfast and a huge jacket potatoes.