Monthly Archives: February 2014

The World in a Garden is an organization that focuses on educating the community and working working on various urban projects to help teach community members about the importance of nutrition health and how to grow your own food.  They have farms located between East and West Boulevard at 57th &  55th Avenue in Vancouver. It spans alongside the railroad tracks.  Each farm contains various foods from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to maintain and spread culture diversity.

While they are currently a smaller organization, they eventually hope to work on a global level and create similar projects in various third world countries.  Ultimately they wish to create ten similar, large impacting gardens in ten different countries.

The ultimate goal of the living fence project is to develop a design that can be recreated and implemented in other various farms to maximize the usable space.  As the project stands now, the goal is to create a fence out of bamboo from which various herbs will grow.  Community members can then come and pick the herb to use in their home cooking.

The project is fairly open to change and as a result most of the constraints are mobile.

The non-negotiable constraints are:

                   -the perimeter length must be 25ft by 55ft

                   -the fence must be made out of bamboo

                   -a watering system needs to be in place

                  -it must be possible for the design to be re-created

The negotiable constraints are:

                  -spacing between bamboo

                  -irrigation method

                  -hole dimensions in bamboo for herbs

                  -work schedule (to small degree)

                  -cost

                  -general design of overall project

The fence needs to be easy to replicate and flexible in implementation.  Multiple designs will have to be proposed to fulfill this requirement.  We must also consider that the re-creation of this fence will not be done by engineers so the design has to be simple enough for everyone to understand.  As a result the fence has to functional and practical without unnecessary clutter.

In order to achieve these goals a large amount of brainstorming and minor testing will be required to ensure success.  This could mean the early ordering of bamboo to test a few various model ideas to understand which works best.  Ultimately success will be based on the number of diverse and creative concepts that are brought forth to the group.

As this is our first post to this blog I will introduce our team and our purpose!

Our CBEL project team consists of 6 members; Payam Mazloum, Kieran Bertsch, Shane Duke, Riley Jang, Adam Ostereicher and myself (Nolan Wiebe).  We are all second year Civil Engineering Students at UBC Vancouver and we will be working with the World in a Garden organization.  Here is a little about ourselves:

I am  from Terrace BC and I am really excited to be studying Civil Engineering in Vancouver.  I enjoy hiking, kayaking, snowboarding and the outdoors in general.  I look forward to working on this project and meeting the people  involved with World in a Garden!

Adam Ostereicher was born and raised in the lower mainland. He is especially excited about working on a project where he can give back to the community he grew up in.  His interests outside of Engineering include soccer, baseball and climbing.  He looks forward to seeing how the project will unfold.

Kieran Bertsch chose to pursue a career in civil engineering because he has always been interested in how structures work and how to build them. Outside of school, his passion is tennis. He has competed in professional tournaments around the world while also backpacking and exploring as many countries as he could. He looks forward to working on this project for The World in a Garden and gaining new experiences in the “real” world.

Shane Duke is very interested in structures and the materials that make up our modern world, and how modern projects interact with societies at large. Apart from engineering, Shane is a big fan of hockey and soccer, and works part-time as a soccer referee. For the World in a Garden project, Shane hopes to help produce the most productive and rewarding CBEL fence of all time.

Payam Mazloum was born and raised in Malawi, completed his High School with an IB diploma, worked as a professional photographer and voluntarily served in the Department of Security at the Baha’i World Centre, Haifa, Israel. He also worked with Engineers Without Borders Malawi and is continuing to strive to be of service to the community around him. Working with World in a Garden will be an excellent opportunity for him to continue doing so in Vancouver.

Riley Jang grew up in Delta, BC, and he hopes that his career in civil engineering will make an impact on the importance of sustainability.  He loves the outdoors, with camping being one of his favorite vacations, as well as being big fan of athletic accomplishments. He is excited to work with World in a Garden, and the implications of sustainability in this project have him very excited. He hopes that this CBEL assignment will provide some valuable project experience, especially because it is aimed at one of his top career goals.

Our team is very excited to work alongside World in a Garden and benefit the community around us.  We feel our experience with World in a Garden will build us up as engineers.

World in a Garden upholds many great community and environmental values and the project we will be working together on reflects that.  The idea behind our project is to increase food production in small spaces so we will be building a unique fence made from bamboo, and we will grow plants in the fence.