Session 5 - July 5

[stubing]

Join us for the discussion session on Tuesday, 7/5 at 4pm PT:
https://usc.zoom.us/j/97179452925?pwd=SWxqSmVkWDBpWXA5K0dhamFMUkRZdz09

The Village, the Vernacular and Informal City - Notes from Mongolia, China and Hong Kong

 

 

Required reading

 

• Everyday Urban Flux: Temporary Urbanism in East Asia as Insurgent Planning, by Jeffrey Hou

 

Lessons from the Contemporary City: From the Chonggyecheon River Revitalization to Japan's Train Network

 

 

Required reading

 

• Reshaping Hong Kong: Dimensions of Change in a Compact City, by Peter Cookson Smith

 

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[Nia Gipson]

I really enjoyed the discussion on urban informality in the first part of this week's assignment. I think about how vibrant my area becomes in the summer with farmer's markets, festivals, and open markets and how they completely transform the public square or an empty parking lot. Though I have never been to Asia, I can imagine how that adds new dynamism to the city as a whole if that is the daily culture in the city, and not just a once a week/once a summer event. As a person who teaches environmental science, I have never thought about how these ephemeral enterprises and multi-use spaces are actually a form of sustainable urban planning. The idea of vertical urbanism/ horizontal urbanity will certainly make it into my next lecture on environmentalism in urban environments. I plan on showing my students pictures of different rural environments, suburban environments, and urban environments and have them talk about how sustainable each development is and why they think that. The challenge with some of these densely populated urban areas is that they are incredible heat sinks, with the lack of green space, they pose a huge challenge to migratory birds, there are environmental justice issues, the challenge of dealing with MSW, urban runoff, etc that are not solved by building higher. I also plan on teaching about Seoul's Cheonggyecheon river as an example of restorative ecology as well.

[Candace Slobodnik]

Each of the last two lectures and readings, gave new insight for educators on our approach to using the concepts of East Asian urbanization within our classrooms.  If we use the constructs of context, culture and climate, many of the ideas such as informalities, socioeconomic inequities and environmental impact can be adapted for most topics.  I agree that it is important that we introduce these concepts to our students to prepare them to become global citizens with a broad multi-perspective approach to the challenges of urban development. 

One question I have - what are the ecological benefits and drawbacks of urban tourism?  As we have seen in East Asian cities, it is important to preserve the traditional spaces and cultural interactions, as well as the traditions that migrating workers bring with them when settling in cities.  Urban economies -jobs, renovations, moderization - are also dependant on both domestic and foreign tourism.  Are there any studies that show that limiting tourism, or promoting rural eco-tourism packages are more or less beneficial?  One the one hand many urban poor may depend of benefits of tourism, but on the other hand, do the environmental drawbacks, including CO2 emissions from transportation, outweigh the postive aspects? 

 

Thank you, Professor Bharne. 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi Nia, I appreciate the connection you make between urban informality and sustainable urban planning. In my city, the economic hardships of the pandemic and the changes in patterns of social interaction as a result inspired new conceptualizations of social space, including closing off downtown streets and setting up outdoor dining and walking areas that brought people together in new ways and supported local restaurants and businesses. 

I'm wondering how many cities that have become very vertically oriented have begun conceptualizing green spaces vertically, as opposed to their typical horizontal orientation. There are vertical agricultural initiatives on a small scale, but I wonder how people are innovating to create plantlife that can be integrated onto the walls of skyscrapers or if there are any successful solar or other renewable technologies that are being built into windows and walls of tall buildings. The multi-tiered urban parks that Professor Bharne showed us were such cool examples of this interweaving of the sustainable use of limited space with cooling and climate-supportive green infrastructure.

I really liked your idea of showing students images of different rural, suburban, and urban environments and asking them to give reasons for why they are or are not sustainable environments.

[Amy Stamm]

Hi Candace, your question about how travel benefits and harms the world is so important. Airplanes, as currently designed, are incredibly fossil-fuel intensive, and yet, the lack of travel and exposure to and experience of other frameworks for interacting, making decisions, planning urban and other environments, valuing or not valuing particular groups of people, plants, and animals can also be so harmful in terms of long-term policy decisions that impact global warming. At the same time, traveling has impacts on the ability to sustain indigenous traditions, creating a whole other set of social, political, cultural, and environmental pressures. I'm curious, too, if there are groups attempting to measure these impacts.

[Amy Stamm]

Jeffrey Hou’s observation that “the acceptance of temporary urbanism as a legitimate planning approach reflects the realization that outcomes of large-scale developments can no longer be planned or predicted” ((p. 193) points to the extraordinary complexity of the organism of a city. Importantly, urban informality's creative basis is often survival and the need "to circumvent suppression of formal regulations" (Hou p. 197). The need for residents of a given city to implement creative strategies just to survive points to the inadequacies and shortcomings of urban policy as imagined through privileged actors who benefit from those policies to the extent that they do not need to think about day-to-day survival or consider the lives of those who do. I wonder how much official policies rely on all of these unaccounted for economies. In the U.S., for example, the informal economy of the drug trade enables the survival of many people who don't have access to official avenues of steady income, and the drug trade also undergirds a lot of the "official" economy, like the carceral and justice systems and all of the businesses (food, linens, technology, surveillance) that populate those economies. The culture of drug dealers also seems to have some parallels with the appreciation of impermance that Hous refers to in Japan - the sense that you can be swiped from your daily life at any minute (in drug culture through arrest and incarceration and in Japan through earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.).

Hou also reminds me of projects like universal income, where people are provided a basic income and make their own decisions about how to spend it. Experiments with universal income have shown that not formalizing the requirements of survival-level salaries has all kinds of positive effects on the larger economy.

Peter Cookson Smith talks about the more permeable boundaries between public and private spaces in Hong Kong vs. many western public spaces and takes place more vertically as urban space is subjected to constant reinvention and complexity.

Questions:

1) I'm wondering if there are cases in Asian countries in which marginalized people are given an "official" role in policy making.

2) I'm also wondering how generational factors are being conceptualized. For example, the youth-led climate movement is interacting with official governing bodies and leaders around the world, and I'm wondering how that movement is affecting urban planning and design.

3) The gaps between how policy is conceptualized and how it plays out are such interesting places to study. It seems like increasing numbers of people are marginalized, made refugees, forced to live mobile lives, and subjected to environmental threats, while the ultra-rich are mobile and both live outside of and exert influence on official policy in entirely different ways. Gentrification also dumps long-term inhabitants of cities into the margins. I'm wondering if there are any successful efforts to cut through these vast inequalities and create more leveling mechanisms that enable ongoing creativity but detach it from the necessity of survival.

 

[Mark Levine]

  I am interested in the cultural implications of the persistence/acceptance of the informal and oftentimes illegal commercial and social/community networks in the East Asian cities (as described by Hou).  I wonder how the historical patterns of urbanization and informal trade have contributed to the persistence of the dynamism of the "soft city".  While Hou states that this phenomenon is not unique to East Asia, it does seem to me that there is something unique about East Asian cities, in terms of the dynamism of the street life- the "organized disorder" that permeates most urban areas.  Sadly it seems that in China at least, the government has been clamping down on the informal networks of vendors and destroying the temporary structures inhabited by migrants, artists, etc.   The perfectly designed, symmetrical multistory megamalls in these cities just feel sterile compared to the spontaneous flow of people and goods in the "in-between" spaces that Professor Bharne discusses so eloquently.  I wonder if these megamalls and the government support of large scale projects in addition to omnipresent surveillance technologies are further diminishing the informal community of vendors and urban migrants/workers.

[clay dube]

A dozen years ago, one of our students spent time studying the rehabilitation and restoration of downtown Foshan, along the river. Here is his short article accompanied by photos about it: https://uschinatoday.org/features/2010/06/08/student-experiences-preservation-in-foshan-china/

[Joanna Bourque]

During the last readings and lectures, I was reminded of a course I took last summer about life on the Tokaido Road in Japan. Starting from the Nihonbashi Bridge, which is considered the source of the Gokaido, Japan's five main roadways during the Edo period, we studied the culture and commerce that rose up around Nihonbashi Bridge and the 53 stations of the Tokaido from Edo to Kyoto. A statement from Prof. Bharne regarding the difference in the way cities were depicted in the art of different cultures stuck with me from a past lecture. In the West, more focus was paid to the city's buildings and infrastructure, while in many non-Western countries, the focus was on the life of the city's inhabitants.

Hiroshige created a series of woodblock prints The 53 Stations of the Tokaido that depicted the multitude of travelers you might find journeying to different destinations for a myriad of reasons along the Tokaido, along with the inns, eateries, tea houses, etc., that sprung up at each station in response to the influx of people. I find his first print, Nihonbashi, fascinating in that the river made the whole city of Edo possible, yet it didn’t command attention, as if the river itself was secondary to the crowds, boats, and general bustle of commerce and city life. I can almost imagine stopping at the apex of the bridge to look out over the river, all the chaos around me becoming a blur. A highway was built above the bridge in preparation for the 1964 Olympics and destroyed the view from the bridge. The city of Tokyo had plans to move the the highway underground in order to return the clear sky to the cultural landmark, but I have not found news that they have proceeded with the project. 

As expressed in Prof. Bharne's final lecture, "The true heritage of a city is the patterns of people." The bustling crowds around the Nihonbashi Bridge in Edo, the street musicians at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, the early morning dancers in Shangai, China, the vendors catering to Filipino diaspora in Little Manila in Seoul all make contributions to sustaining the vibrant cultural life of their respective cities. The continuation of these subcultures seems attributable to informal negotiations between these marginal groups and officials. 

[clay dube]

Prof. Bharne introduced the fascinating tale of the Kowloon Walled City. Here's a 2014 video from the Wall Street Journal about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_8ucS3lMY

[Taylor Bub]

In class you mentioned how many of the tourist places that people like to travel to often become preserved and are labeled with the "World Heritage" label, and then the authenticity of the cities kind of goes away.  You also mentioned cities like Florence, where this has happened before.  I remember traveling through Italy, and in particular in Florence, my friends and I walked through an outdoor market, and I was very disappointed because many of the items that were being sold were things that were clearly manufactured (like t shirts and bags that were clearly made in factories).  I wanted to find places that were owned by families or smaller businesses in town to find things that were more authentic to the culture of the city I was in.  I have never traveled to any Asian countries, but the idea that there are places that still have this authenticity to them is inspiring and I want to travel to these places more than before to be able to experience the actual authentic culture of the area.

[Taylor Bub]

In class we also discussed how to combat gentrification in our society by creating more equal green spaces and by utilizing good design.  I think this is so important, that we understand that if we focus on creating beautiful, liveable, accessable and useable spaces in every city, there is no need for people to move to certain places that are considered 'nicer'.  I think about growing up in Santa Clarita, and I always lived in Canyon Country, which was the not so nice part of our city, where Valencia was the nicer area and there are more green spaces put into place in Valencia, and when I was a kid, they built paseos, which are pathways that connect homes all throughout Valencia through bike paths and walkways.  There are also parks and sports complexes built within those pathways for everyone living there to use.   It was always so strange to me as a child why they wouldn't also build those on my side of town, and then the city would feel so equal and everyone would have the same beautiful amenities.  I think this is something interesting to discuss with students as to how we might work to create these more accessable green spaces for everyone.  Professor Bharne also mentioned how in Tokyo there are parks being created on top of buildings and in Los Angeles there are plans to build parks along the river.  These are such interesting ideas to how we might bring in more green spaces.  It makes me want to build on a previously mentioned idea to have students explore how we mgiht bring in more green spaces to their community.

[Madelyn Masterson]

The patterns of heritage lecture in Dr. Bharne’s second video was a fascinating perspective that shows how much culture can be found beyond architectural design. Public hawker centers sell for such low prices and they make a profit because of the large volumes that are sold. This is ironic as some of the hawker centers are within cities that cost a lot of money to live in. I feel this is representative of the vertical urbanism and horizontal urbanity symbolism. The hawker centers are so rich in culture and there is some concern as to whether or not hawker centers will last. Many people who run these hawker centers are of older generations and younger generations may not want to take on this type of work and want to live in bigger cities. Some of these centers have become travel destinations for tourists. I wonder what can be done to preserve these centers in various cities. I will be sure to bring this discussion up with my students when we go over Human Impact on the environment. What are some things we can do to not only preserve the environment but also the culture within? Should we prioritize one over the other?

[Madelyn Masterson]

 Hi Candace, I like your idea of introducing the ecological impact of tourism to our students. I feel we always encourage students to travel and immerse themselves in various cultures. However, we don't often take a moment to consider the impact r the benefit we are bringing by visiting other countries. Some of the poorest countries tend to be popular vacation destinations. It may even be that not all of these countries benefit from tourism. There are travel companies, including hotels and cruises, that promote inclusive packages limited to what they offer as opposed to what the cities have to offer. The towns may not always receive the money from visitors' stay. To your question, I hesitate to think that the environmental drawbacks of tourism outweigh the benefits.

[Madelyn Masterson]

In class, we talked about the uniqueness of street vendors and how it is a way of preserving culture. Dr. Bharne mentioned that some of the street vendors sell recipes that may be centuries old because it was passed down from their families. These recipes have had less opportunity to be changed by modernism. Dr. Bharne also mentioned that there are joint partnerships that prevent gentrification in certain areas. I wish we could see more of this within cities to preserve the heritage. We also talked about the environmental ramifications of cityscapes and street vendors, and how to make them more environmentally sound. My students complete a final project on the ecological effects of a lake, Lake Grace. We talk about the effects coming from designing new buildings and farms. Students are often unsure about how these actions can affect the environment and the lake. Students assume that just because large buildings are introduced into the area, there is an increase in the human population. Dr. Bharne explained that this is not the case. I will be sure to bring this perspective to my students when we are approaching this unit.

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