Session 5 - November 10

[cgao]

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

 

[Elizabeth Rosales]

With my students, I will facilitate a discussion about the necessities of life. What do you need to survive? What do you need in order to thrive, and not just survive? What does that look like? Whom does that involve? We are a Leader in Me school, so I would ask about how those questions relate to the seven habits of being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first things first, seeking first to understand and then to be understood, finding a win-win, sharpening the saw, and synergizing.

Patterns of heritage are the ways in which we use these seven habits privately and publicly. How do we take care of ourselves and then work with others in order to have healthy and effective patterns, which become our heritage? The practicality of a building is integral to it's effective use. In order to determine that, we have to ask basic questions of our future engineers and architects and scientists, and let them come up with innovative ideas about answering those basic questions surrounding surviving and thriving.

P.S. I teach third grade. They are eight years old. My training as an elementary teacher is to find ways to say things positively, when possible. We are literally told that instead of yelling at kids to, "STOP RUNNING!!!", we should ask them kindly to, "Walk, please." It is important that we teach good manners and treat others with kindness and respect. So, where I come from, positivity is seen as healthy. It is healthy. Actively looking for things to appreciate and be grateful for makes your body healthier. I felt a caveat was necessary, based on some previous misunderstandings of my comments.

[Elizabeth Rosales]

Hands down, no question, the highlight of this video for me was the freeway being removed to reveal and reclaim the river below it. That just lit a spark in me about researching with my students, ways in which we can do things like that in California. We have immense amounts of open, wild, prairies, forests, and deserts, for which I am grateful. But we can also improve upon the cities and urban areas we already have. We do study land formations and waterways in third grade. I look forward to hearing my students ideas about how to live in and around natural features.

[Elizabeth Rosales]

On a side note, I have studied (a little bit) the albedo effect, and it was made very apparent to me that it matters when I was driving this summer in a car whose air conditioning was broken. It was extremely hot, over 100 degrees, and I was driving from the high desert to Riverside, where I live. I was so hot, I thought I was about to pass out. Just as I came near the 91/215 interchange and overpass, I passed from black asphalt to nearly white cement. Immediately the temperature started to come down, and I felt better. I feel that this is a very important concept in city/road planning. Not just the color of the road, but roofs, cars, any massive surface. Reflecting heat, rather than absorbing it into the earth helps.

[Kimberly de Berzunza]

Both Dr. Bharne's lecture and Hou's article got me thinking about these unregulated markets and temporary spaces for activities, like dancing and karaoke.  Although I enjoy the intense energy of cities, I don't spend a lot of time in those kinds of places, so I don't tend to think about them much, and I haven't been to most of those mentioned. I did visit Snake Alley in Taipei in 1990 when people did do shots of snake blood after the snake was slit open in front of them...  (there were also animals in small stacked cages, including puppies and monkeys, and I found it disturbing.)  I also had the opportunity in 1990 to see markets in Beijing, and at that time wondered how legal they were and how they were allowed to operate under the umbrella of communism and before the growth of private economic activity more common there now. But it also made me think of the vendors at the Tijuana border crossing, and the slums built on the Tijuana hillsides out of corrugated metal and castoff plywood, or the "fire breathers" in Mexico City intersections.

One point I find striking about this topic is this apparently murky legality/illegality of the activities. Live dancing and music was banned in the Tokyo park, so they moved beyond the park. Benches were removed but people didn't stop their activities. Homeless men sleep on pieces of neat cardboard and pick them up in the morning, and apparently everyone turns a blind eye? I am reminded of the African street vendors I saw on the streets of Athens in 2011 and how they would quick roll up their blanket with purses pinned to it and walk to another street when they saw the cops coming, and then we'd see them selling two blocks away a few minutes later. I am also reminded of seeing the police in San Diego rousing the homeless people sleeping on the streets near my son's high school when I used to drive him there a few years back. They later installed pointy rocks there to discourage sleeping, but again, it only moved the "problem" somewhere else. In east Asia it's not like they don't know where the people went, but rather that they allow this "illegal" activity to continue. Why? Because it brings in money. Money to the city, and probably money into the pockets of individual officials, I'm going to hazard a guess. Also, because it's hard to control, and it's maybe not hurting people that much. Although you could make an argument that it has a harmful environmental impact (unregulated waste? unhygienic practices?,) you could also make the argument that a temporary stand is preferable to permanent constructions that in the long term are more harmful to a space and use more resources.

A couple of quotes stood out to me from the article: "They bring to light the ability of ordinary citizens to shape and reshape the cities in which they live and work," and "individual and collective agency..." (Hou, 212-13)  I really found compelling this idea of individual and collective agency in shaping our living spaces to meet our needs, when maybe the slow pace of government planning either misses the mark or can't keep up with the pace of change. And this made me think of how very quickly this past year, in response to the pandemic, businesses looked for ways to resume business outdoors- we blocked off streets to put tables outside of restaurants, hair and nail salons started doing their business outside on the sidewalks, food trucks have become even more popular and now set up in parking lots like a street fair. This was all allowed and encouraged, because it met a need for both business owners and consumers. When we want to, we can find solutions. I think the big lesson here was alluded to at the beginning of Dr. Bharne's lecture, regarding the creativity and resilience of people, particularly those who are on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and I find this to be inspiring and worth supporting.

[Kimberly de Berzunza]

I really enjoyed this lecture!  

First, it reminded me of some ideas I'd had for teaching, based on how living spaces reflect the environment and needs of the people who build them, looking particularly at the indigenous buildings- the Minka, the yurt, the round apartment buildings in China that I can't remember the name for...  and then also the influence and adaptations of architectural styles we saw in previous weeks, such as the slope of the roof or the use of color.

Second, the revitalization of the Cheonggyecheon River is so very impressive.  I really hope Los Angeles can follow their example, and I hope San Diego's plans for our river come to fruition over the years to come.  We have done terrible damage to our cities by building on/over our rivers, and created a mess that I hope it's not too late to remedy. I am always astounded at how the Earth is able to heal when these revitalization projects are done.  Likewise, the rooftop parks- why don't we have rooftop parks and gardens everywhere? They've been around for decades I think, but seem to be still very rare. I assume they are expensive to create and maintain, but I have to imagine the costs are offset in other ways.  There are examples of these around the US, but they are pretty rare still. I hope they become more popular in coming years.

Third, I thought the discussion of Chinatowns was really interesting and something I'd not thought much about. As I looked at the building in the slide with its "typical LA plaster" I then recognized it as actually a Spanish colonial style building with the "Chinese-esque" roof and details added, but I would not have noticed it before. And the discussion of "you would never see this in China" struck me as the same as a discussion of American Chinese food or fortune cookies or comparing a book to a movie rather then just enjoying them independently for what they are. Just because a shushirrito isn't authentic Japanese food, doesn't mean it isn't delicious!

And fourth, I just put Tokyo Disneyland on my list of things to do whenever I finally make it to Tokyo!

Thank you for a great class.

[Kimberly de Berzunza]

I'm not really sure what to think about this article or chapter on Hong Kong. I can't figure out whether they are doing a good job of addressing housing and land-use issues or not. I have to wonder how safe the building is when it's done so quickly and to vertically. On the other hand, it has to be built.

I was particularly surprised by the statistics of nearly 50% of the population living in some kind of government subsidized housing, and I wonder what happened to land values and costs when Hong Kong was returned to China. I know it is very expensive there; I wonder how salaries compare to housing costs and what the standard of living is like for different social strata. How safe is the fill on which it is built?

[Thomas Pineda]

The article gave a great description of some of the liveliest or unique urban areas in East Asian cities that would attract most tourists- save for Shinjuku’s housing of the homeless. I think the article ties together with the previous lecture regarding the architecture of the Bund in Shanghai, that some of these cities are defined not by the permanent structure on their facade, but the resilient cultural practices that exist between them. This seems to reflect nature, in terms of the symbiotic relationship these locations and pop-up events/markets have. The location expands the times of its daily use and purpose, and people’s livelihoods depend on balancing an appropriate unintended use of the space. Looking at examples of this phenomena, other examples of street vending and the balance between legality and regulation can be found in streets of LA or in many places around the world. As mentioned in this nice, long and summative quote of another article, “Performed by ordinary citizen actors, these activities constitute a form of insurgent planning, a set of counterhegemonic practices by marginalized groups, which serves as a counterpoint to the institutional practice of citizen participation under neoliberal governance (Miraftab 2009)”, pop-ups/street vending/temporary urbanism work when they don’t step on the toes of structure of society too much.

[Thomas Pineda]

I think that would be a nice comparative lesson for Life Science standards in science, where different types of symbiotic relationships or availability of resources could be compared to real-life locations of “temporary urbanism” in students’ neighborhoods. They could also relate it to competing design solutions of maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services- When do community members begin to offer products or services that are not readily available or consistently available to a community in need? How does these pop-ups help maintain the diversity of a neighborhood or economically help a neighborhood sustain its population?

[Elizabeth Rosales]

Kids just naturally go to urban flux. They grab their skateboards and start riding down something that looks good. They dance wherever they are standing. Urban flux seems just very, naturally, human. Creative and necessary. The amount of work it takes to live by all of the rules is difficult and costly, and not everyone can do it. I wonder myself, sometimes, how I keep doing it. But I enjoy seeing people dancing and singing and selling. My town becomes like a ghost town sometimes. Everything has to be properly enclosed, unless it is a special occasion. It is neat, but it is boring.

[Elizabeth Rosales]

The drawings are an interesting perspective. The view from an upper floor window. I am going to share those with my students, if that is alright. I love the big sign in the foreground of one. It looks like a photograph taken from a window, but done in black and white lines and outlines, it is more interesting.

The growth in population before and after WWII was shocking. So many people fleeing Japanese occupation. I know that Hong Kong was still under British rule,but I don't see how it avoided being invaded and occupied as well. Are there any films about Hong Kong during this time?

[Jennifer Lee]

You're comment about the skateboarders reminds me of the many times I've been walking around different neighborhoods and seen a random piece of metal stuck on cement benchs and railings. The art teacher in me wonders if it is a design element, but normally I then realize they were just put there to prevent skateboarding.

[Jennifer Lee]

I loved the drawings too.  I was really impressed that they were done by the author. I was also impressed by their use of linear perspective and would like to show them to my students when I teach them linear perspective drawing. 

[Elizabeth Rosales]

It makes me sad. I have three kids, and my boys used to love to skateboard in our street and driveway. I know that skateboards cause some scuffing and damage, but I wonder if people realize that there are so many worse things kids could be doing. 

[Jennifer Lee]

In several of the articles and lectures this week and in previous weeks there were mentions of squatters and homeless. I was curious if this issue was seen as a solvable problem or something that is an just another aspect of urban life? In Los Angeles the homeless population just continues to grow and I don't think this is a solvable problem with the strategies that are being currently implemented. 

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