[Amy Stamm]

This course has helped me to understand some of the unique characteristics of Asian urban design and urban spaces that have grown from long traditions of artistic practice, as well as Buddhist and Shinto traditions, ecological conditions that have shaped indigenous vernaculars, and bureaucratic and political institutions. The course started out with a discussion about the distinction between the conceptual underpinnings of Michelangelo’s Pieta vs. the Ryoanji Temple. Whereas Michelangelo used the medium of stone to create a work that centralized the human form and people as a subject, the Japanese artists who created the Ryoanji Temple made central the form of the natural world. This reverence for the natural world and natural forms continued into East Asian design of spaces with Paul Wheatley’s (1975) explanation of how the design of certain Asian cities was thought to create a portal from the heavens down to the earth and in some cases then to the underworld.

The course helped me to think about the liminal spaces of East Asian cities, from the travel and communication between sacred and secular, or between the living and the dead, to the ever shifting boundaries between public and private life, as in Japanese cities where the membrane or wall that separated the house from the street in Japan was permeable. From shifting uses of the same spaces to layered and multiple forms of interaction made possible in Hong Kong’s vertical stacking, edges, interfaces, and shifting and/or layered uses of the same spaces at different times of the day (Cookson Smith 2012), these contingent and multivalent relationships are made possible through specific forms of spatial design.

I particularly appreciated our study of indigenous vernaculars in response to specific ecological conditions, such as the underground houses in China, the yurts in Mongolia, and the pagoda-inspired residential designs in Japan. Jeffrey Hou lays out in “Everyday Urban Flux” (2020) the Japanese appreciation of impermanence that is founded, in part, on the city’s repeated redesign and rebuilding process in response to tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that periodically wipe out the urban landscape. In addition to this natural sense of flux, the “temporary urbanism” of marginalized populations to circumvent exclusionary formal regulations forms “ritualized spatial tactics” (2020: 197) that reorganize the opportunities that urban spaces make possible. Temporary adaptations of public spaces like parking lots, traffic islands, the undersides of bridges, abandoned buildings, etc. thrive on the creativity and possibility of marginalized groups trying to survive, making possible new types of relationships and interactions between people.

I hope to use some of these ideas and case studies with my students to help them to see multiple ways to address and adjust to climate change and to think of design as a fundamentally important shaper of how we move, interact, feel, pass time, and form relationships.

[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.

 

[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]

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]

Yes, and how is the concept of sustainability related to on-the-ground practices? It seems like the concepts of modernity and modern life in many contexts were coupled with the idea of disposability, plastic, conspicuous consumption, so places in which people for years practiced re-use, craft, and other things that have been subsumed under the language of sustainability, now that climate change is a glaring issue, changed into places where waste became commonplace and attached to status. Because a lot of economically humble countries are disproportionately experiencing the effects of climate change and because youth around the globe are taking leadership in the climate change movement, I think the idea of sustainability is circulating in many of these contexts, but I would be curious, too, to understand the history of these concepts and their cultural underpinnings.

[Amy Stamm]

Taylor, I really like this idea of having students research steps various cities are taking to address climate change. Doing this research initially would give students a bigger vocabulary from which to then research what is going on in their community. Our school is a regional special education school, so students come from cities that are defined as environmental justice sites, and that brings up a whole other set of issues in terms of who suffers from pollution and infrastructural decisions, and what steps communities have taken to counter these forms of marginalization. Our students would love to install solar panels on our building, and I think it would be a great project for them to research the steps necessary to do so and then advocate with the school's administrative staff and board for it. I think that even if the school weren't willing to fund such a project, students would know a lot more about how to make something like that happen in their future lives.

[Amy Stamm]

Nia and Nina, I appreciate your trying to get at more specific complexities and ways of addressing particular flows of power in the colonial relationship. Nina, I thought your question about what the nature of the exchanges within colonial relationships was excellent and not fully addressed in our discussion. The creative outcomes and reuses that colonized populations have put into circulation are one part of the story, but the suppression of ideas, the deferring to colonial authorities and their bureaucracies and cultural backgrounds, the lack of access for marginalized and indigenous populations all have specific effects on the aesthetic terrain that gets carved in particular colonial contexts. Thanks for raising these issues.

[Amy Stamm]

Thanks, Professor Bharne, for your complex perspective on colonialism when examined temporally and from the multiple perspectives of people’s individual lives over the generations. I like your generosity and openness when examining these histories that are full of cross-fertilizations, play, exaggeration, and creativity. Your discussion about urban development in Japan, Hong Kong, and China was also so interesting in terms of the impact of national and local policy on city shapes and in terms of the pressures and creative designs that grow out of space constraints. I’m wondering about all of the environmental consequences in recent years as the rate of development outpaces, it seems, human thinking. It seems so difficult to intervene effectively in the churning, constant process of building.

The readings and lectures this week raised a number of questions for me.

1. I’m wondering what is happening in terms of class and access in these cities. You mentioned that Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai are some of the most expensive places in the world to live. How are rising real estate costs impacting the people who can’t keep up with those costs?
2. This question is building off of some of the discussion from Week 3, but I’m also thinking of some of the flows of ideas from the Week 4 material in new forms of globalizing travel. I’m wondering how surveillance technologies and the new positioning of people as sources of data to be tracked and collected are interacting with more local architectural vernaculars. How are these technologies changing the ways in which people inhabit and move through public and private spaces in different countries? In a country like Japan that has a tradition of an honor code where people are trusted in public transport, etc., are surveillance technologies eroding this sense of trust and honor?  

 

In the U.S. and other countries, security cameras are repositioning visitors to people’s homes as potential sources of danger and threat, or in the case of public spaces, they are repositing people as potentially carrying secrets or criminal intent/histories that could be pried open with new visual technologies like facial recognition.

 

“Smart” technologies are creating new ways in which people are conceptualizing the idea of “home” as an interactive entity that the inhabitant can program to prepare coffee, play particular songs, alert owners to “predators,” provide ways for people to remotely interact with their pets, etc.

 

The Chinese surveillance state is asserting new relationships between the government and its citizens, at the same time as activists are using technologies to create new forms of community and communication that outsmarts government surveillance. I’m wondering your thoughts on how new technologies are reshaping flows of power or aesthetics or possibilities that promote democracy or preserve local vernaculars, rather than subject people to global forces of surveillance and consumerism.

 

3. I’m wondering how China’s ghost cities fit into this discourse of urbanization. What role do they currently play economically, and how is their cultural role changing over time?

 

4. You mentioned the sheer pace of the development and growth of cities like Shanghai, where Chinese development policies do not account for environmental impacts in the slow, bureaucratic, and possibly environmentally-careful way that U.S. zoning policies are formed (or more likely to be formed). After destroying acres of wetlands and taking over the landscapes that were once on the outskirts of the city, Shanghai is now in danger of flooding from rising sea levels. What innovations have you seen in urban design to account for, protect against, or address rising sea levels?

 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi Candace,

I appreciate your comment about the shift away from the outdoors for many youth who are absorbed in social media, whose design is about propelling users into spending more time and thus buying more products or creating more data for advertisers and corporations. The space of the classroom, while often physically stable, has shifted as students spend their days interacting with their phones. When I bicycle, the majority of walkers, and some cyclists, have their heads down absorbed in their phones and miss a good amount of what is happening around them. So these small capsules of design are changing people's relationships to the spaces they are inhabiting. This makes me wonder about how technologies are changing the concept of space. The metaverse is a good example. People create second lives for themselves and new kinds of relationships that enable them to be brave in new ways but also abandon their other relationships and interactions with space. We've seen the grave mental health consequences of existing largely within and through these technologically mediating worlds, and as a teacher in a school that is packed with phones and split attention, I wonder what is happening to students' brains as they toggle back and forth at a rapid pace from the classroom to the multiple social media worlds they inhabit. And now with "smart" buildings, facial recognition, and other technologies, how are our public spaces and public priorities transforming with the massive amounts of tracking that is happening? And how will all of this interact with climate change?

[Amy Stamm]

I could almost feel in my body the different paces, emotions, and states of mind that different types of spaces were designed to evoke, like the Zen spaces that create an “abridged nature almost to the point of abstraction,” like a painting seeking to “imitate the inner essence of nature, not its outward form. As Bharne writes, these Zen architectural ideas create a visual dissociation from the surroundings to bring about an interior revolution, “alternative interpretations of reality, alternative engagements with the physical world, and alternative prisms to assess our own states of mind” (p. 58).

Professor Bharne presented interesting examples of the cross-fertilization between inhabitants of palaces and the commoners who picked up aspects of palace design, for example, common dwellings make their homes little palaces by lending them certain details that mimic those of the palace.

I also found the discussion about the different types of interfaces between private and public interesting – how in suburban U.S. neighborhoods the lawn opens to the street, whereas in Chinese neighborhoods, a wall separates the street from a home’s interior, which contains courtyards inside of it. And those courtyards open the interior spaces of the home to the sky. At the same time, ideas of interiority within Confucianism make interior thought an emblem of space.

The flexibility of the machiya dwellings, with their changeable membrane to the street, creating rhythms of activity that become the signature of the Japanese town made me think of new types of mixed use buildings that emphasize different types of interactions with the space of one building or one street block.

Questions:

Ping Xu discusses the strict gendered and class hierarchies that organize feng-shui principles, and in your reference to the shoin at the Hosen-in at the Sanzen-in Temple, you discuss the visual organization of natural scenes to highlight the contrast between masculinity and femininity: one view of a pine tree “suggesting qualities of masculinity and strength” and another of a grove of bamboo “suggesting qualities of femininity and grace” (p. 73). Are there examples of different qualities being gendered differently in any Buddhist spaces that you know of, for example, strength being associated with femininity? Where and how have architecture and design movements reflected changing notions of gender and sexuality, and how have these notions defined spaces in new ways? What examples of a queering of spaces have you seen in Asian design?

Professor Bharne writes about how Zen teaches us another comprehension of time and space, that time “can exist in many simultaneous dimensions” and “can be seen as separate fragments of a larger reality,” none of which tell the complete truth. Could you explain these concepts of time a bit more – how time moves and what it means if it exists in simultaneous dimensions or fragments?

 

[Amy Stamm]

The points you both raise remind me of legal trends to recognize personhood for thing like rivers and mountains, trends that are gaining momentum in the face of global warming. Most of the rulings in favor of personhood for the natural world are based on indigenous understandings and a framework that considers perspectives that widen out from a human perspective, in terms of both space and time. Bangladesh is one country that recently recognized personhood for rivers, now framed legally as living entities that should be protected from harm. Equador was the first country to grant environmental personhood to the natural world, then Bolivia, and also New Zealand (thought its law is more limited than Equador's and Bolivia's). In New Zealand the ruling equates harming the protected river, which is seen as a Maori ancestor, to harming the Maori people. I think that subjecting legal frameworks to these new perspectives that center what decisions look like from a forest, field, mountain, or river's point of view, for example, will have some important implications for material usage and architectural design in the upcoming years as climate conditions worsen.

[Amy Stamm]

I really like this idea for a class. It seems like artists design or account for particular subjectivities, too, and many of my students wouldn't necessarily fit with those subjectivities, so it'll be interesting, if you do this class, to hear from your students about whether they felt like they could be part of particular artworks or that the artworks addressed them or took them into account in some way. I like your application of these concepts to the subject of psychology and mental health, too, which are organized very specifically in different contexts.

[Amy Stamm]

I've wondered about that question, too. Why labor to create an endless cycle of arriving at the same place when you could simply appreciate all of the leaves? And since people, in this case, Zen masters, determine what aspects of the natural world they think are worthy of highlighting, what human hierarchies and values do those determinations reflect and perpetuate?

[Amy Stamm]

Thanks so much for these images and descriptions. They seem like perfect examples of the indigenous knowledge and relationships to the landscape that we talked about in both the first and second discussions. Their design uses local materials to address an environmental concern - both protecting a building from rain through the top curves and draining the rain through the bottom curves. And, as you wrote, providing ventilation in the process through the spaces. Professor Bharne's description of the thatched roofs that address snowfall in unique ways and the living roofs that are seeing more variety with new attention to climate change makes me think that we could spend a whole week (or a whole course) on roof designs. Thanks. And also, I appreciated all of your contributions in the Asian Foodways course!

[Amy Stamm]

I found our second-week discussion about the intention of the artworks and their purpose in situating and involving the viewer interesting - how the aesthetic decisions of the artists or designers of space can make viewers into outsiders or participants and can evoke specific emotions or experiences as they view/walk through/consume/etc. the art. The discussion made me wonder whether there is some essential difference between carving a piece of stone and rearranging stones or other aspects of the landscape. Both artworks are processes of guiding the viewer into a particular perspective. I'm not sure I agree that one process is more "natural" or highlights "nature," as both manipulate natural elements. At the same time, the Pieta doesn't intentionally set up a relationship with the stone as a natural element. Rather, the stone is kept in the role of medium. The Ryoanji Temple is meant to create an experience and new perspective/interaction with the elements of stone and landscape as themselves, in a way. They are being manipulated, but the manipulation is intended to highlight their qualities as parts of the landscape and to help the participant/viewer/experiencers see themselves in relation to that landscape, which includes time and breath.

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