Microclimates + Sensory Comfort Robbinsdale, Minnesota

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

The video is an exploration of some of the sensory conditions that impact the long-term health and wellbeing of the people who live in a place. Robbinsdale, Minnesota is the setting for this exploration. Robbinsdale is a small suburb located just northwest of Minneapolis, in Hennepin County – Minnesota’s most populous and metropolitan county, At the scale of the county, large-scale spatial landscape patterns like tree canopy, road networks and noise, and temperature are unequally distributed and correlated to the life expectancy of residents. The lowest life expectancies correspond spatially to the absence of tree canopy, road noise, and elevated temperatures.

On the ground in Robbinsdale, these patterns play out at a far more nuanced scale, varying from block to block. In turn, residents’ wellbeing must be equally varied, responding to daily patterns and the infrastructure someone uses based on where they live and the routes they travel day-to-day. The video walks through a few moments “on-the-ground” in Robbinsdale, in an effort to begin observing how noise, color and variety, light and shade, and the scale of the built environment – including height and setback distance of buildings – might impact a person’s experience of this transect.