Article

• Mapping Urban Complexity in an Asian Context

  The second issue of Footprint aims at reuniting two themes which are receiving a great deal of attention in recent times: Asia’s extraordinary urban growth, and the problematique of mapping highly complex urban environments. The 21st century, forecasted by many as the ‘Pacific Century’, brings to the fore the region's economic, social, political and cultural changes, wide-ranging in their manifestation and far-reaching in their consequence. All of these factors are inscribed in the urban environment. In a region where a population of one million constitutes a small settlement and mega-cities such as Tokyo and Shanghai have come to dominate the global network, sheer size is itself an important issue and not just in practical terms. Then there is the apparent chaos that is actually a delicately balanced autopoeisis in cities such as Mumbai, as well as the interesting and potentially useful city-state model of Hong Kong. These conditions and rising phenomena bring important questions on the potentials and relevance of mapping to the fore.

  The second issue of Footprint aims at reuniting two themes which are receiving a great deal of attention in recent times: Asia’s extraordinary urban growth, and the problematique of mapping highly complex urban environments. The 21st century, forecasted by many as the ‘Pacific Century’, brings to the fore the region's economic, social, political and cultural changes, wide-ranging in their manifestation and far-reaching in their consequence. All of these factors are inscribed in the urban environment. In a region where a population of one million constitutes a small settlement and mega-cities such as Tokyo and Shanghai have come to dominate the global network, sheer size is itself an important issue and not just in practical terms. Then there is the apparent chaos that is actually a delicately balanced autopoeisis in cities such as Mumbai, as well as the interesting and potentially useful city-state model of Hong Kong. These conditions and rising phenomena bring...

  The second issue of Footprint aims at reuniting two themes which are receiving a great deal of attention in recent times: Asia’s extraordinary urban growth, and the problematique of mapping highly complex urban environments. The 21st century, forecasted by many as the ‘Pacific...

  Gregory Bracken, Heidi Sohn

  1-4

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• Ephemeral China/Handmade China

  A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to paraphrase Milan Kundera). Does all this then suggest that China, as solidified in its buildings and cities, is no longer ‘handmade’ in the sense that memory and a sense of history are redundant (particularly for a country that has a recorded history of more than 5000 years, which have been so lovingly recorded in handmade artefacts)? The true meaning of the handmade, which absorbs labour — an ‘honourable labour’ as Joseph Conrad lovingly put it in his Mirror of the Sea, as well as memory, like that of a home, is a static artefact, which harbours our changing emotion, the frailties of human life, and indeed, the growing awareness that comes with time of our mortality: the handmade offers the necessary enshrinement of life’s vulnerability. Let me assure you, the seemingly fast-changing China, as represented in its new architecture and city forms, as well in its frenzied urbanisation and booming economy, is but a smoke screen. It is, in other words, ephemeral. The other China is, or has to be, handmade.

  A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to...

  A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities,...

  Xing Ruan

  5-14

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• Diagnosing Beijing 2020: Mapping the Ungovernable City

  Beijing Municipality, characterised by the ‘off-ground’ architecture distinguishing neo-liberal privatisation, is attempting to mitigate the damaging effects of rampant development on the social fabric, cultural heritage, and the environment by adopting sustainable urban planning. I argue that the sustainability rhetoric in the Beijing Municipality 2020 Plans functions in part as strategic metaphors masking unnamed, imminent threats to governance. In this article I diagnose four Beijing plans (Beijing 2006-2015 ‘Rail Transit Plan’ for Compact City, Beijing 2005-2020 ‘Underground Space Plan’ for Alternative Space, Beijing 2006-2020 ‘Undeveloped Area Plan’ for Ecological Responsibility, and Beijing 2006-2010 ‘Low-income Housing Plan’ for Affordability and Liveability). A diagrammatics of the plans illuminates not so much a mapping of Beijing’s future as the forms of spontaneity preoccupying the nation at this historical juncture. The Beijing 2020 plan, as city mapping more generally, discloses the imminence of ungovernable city. The fact that citizens are demanding greater authority over Beijing governance suggests that radical alterations to its urban fabric and quality of life have incited the imminent sociability that is the city.

  Beijing Municipality, characterised by the ‘off-ground’ architecture distinguishing neo-liberal privatisation, is attempting to mitigate the damaging effects of rampant development on the social fabric, cultural heritage, and the environment by adopting sustainable urban planning. I argue that the sustainability rhetoric in the Beijing Municipality 2020 Plans functions in part as strategic metaphors masking unnamed, imminent threats to governance. In this article I diagnose four Beijing plans (Beijing 2006-2015 ‘Rail Transit Plan’ for Compact City, Beijing 2005-2020 ‘Underground Space Plan’ for Alternative Space, Beijing 2006-2020 ‘Undeveloped Area Plan’ for Ecological Responsibility, and Beijing 2006-2010 ‘Low-income Housing Plan’ for Affordability and Liveability). A diagrammatics of the plans illuminates not so much a mapping of Beijing’s future as the forms of spontaneity preoccupying the nation at this historical juncture. The Beijing 2020 plan, as city...

  Beijing Municipality, characterised by the ‘off-ground’ architecture distinguishing neo-liberal privatisation, is attempting to mitigate the damaging effects of rampant development on the social fabric, cultural heritage, and the environment by adopting sustainable urban planning. I argue...

  Robin Visser

  15-30

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• Spatial ‘Complexity’: Analysis of the Evolution of Beijing’s Movement Network and its Effects on Urban Functions

  This paper is an attempt to read the dramatic transformations happening in Beijing from a spatial perspective. Based on a model developed by Spacelab, which understands scale as being constructed in movement and communications technologies, we try to represent this process on two levels: first, on the morphology of the movement network itself, I would like to show how technological development of highway, metro and bus systems change the way people move in the city; second, on the effects of changing movement networks, I would like to examine how shops and other public activities locate and relocate themselves within urban space. In general, Beijing is a good example, with a combination of old and new patterns of movement networks, whose spatial composition results in a different pattern for emerging economies and public activities compared with western city centres. However, it is still possible to uncover a strong and consistent logic based on the way individuals move and appropriate different scales of networks. In short, this paper will try to illustrate this difference based on the local pattern of space and explain the underlying, yet simple, spatial logic behind dynamic interaction between changing movement networks and the urban functions emerging from them.

  This paper is an attempt to read the dramatic transformations happening in Beijing from a spatial perspective. Based on a model developed by Spacelab, which understands scale as being constructed in movement and communications technologies, we try to represent this process on two levels: first, on the morphology of the movement network itself, I would like to show how technological development of highway, metro and bus systems change the way people move in the city; second, on the effects of changing movement networks, I would like to examine how shops and other public activities locate and relocate themselves within urban space. In general, Beijing is a good example, with a combination of old and new patterns of movement networks, whose spatial composition results in a different pattern for emerging economies and public activities compared with western city centres. However, it is still possible to uncover a strong and consistent logic based on the way individuals move and...

  This paper is an attempt to read the dramatic transformations happening in Beijing from a spatial perspective. Based on a model developed by Spacelab, which understands scale as being constructed in movement and communications technologies, we try to represent this process on two levels:...

  Qiang Sheng

  31-42

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• Politicisation and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism

  Despite the spectacular contemporary metropolis image of Luijiazui, the new Central Business District (CBD) of Shanghai on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River, this paper discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through the ‘reality’ of its urbanism. The purpose is to check in a practical way the actuality of the built environment in relation to its history and political presence through first-hand primary sources, which is intended to fill unanticipated voids that surfaced in the understanding of Shanghai in a physical sense. This can be done from the four following perspectives: urban form; individual buildings and urban imagery; visualization of the skylines; and streetscape. Using the city as a primary source, this paper succinctly presents specific information derived from the observations needed to authenticate the research, i.e. to understand the existence of contemporary architecture as a means of urban iconography, which will contribute to the theory of how we conceive and experience the hybridized urban complexity in Asian cities in a practical manner from the perspectives of both the pedestrian and architect-planner critical to the awareness the far-reaching consequence of Shanghai’s urban environment.

  Despite the spectacular contemporary metropolis image of Luijiazui, the new Central Business District (CBD) of Shanghai on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River, this paper discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through the ‘reality’ of its urbanism. The purpose is to check in a practical way the actuality of the built environment in relation to its history and political presence through first-hand primary sources, which is intended to fill unanticipated voids that surfaced in the understanding of Shanghai in a physical sense. This can be done from the four following perspectives: urban form; individual buildings and urban imagery; visualization of the skylines; and streetscape. Using the city as a primary source, this paper succinctly presents specific information derived from the observations needed to authenticate the research, i.e. to understand the existence of contemporary architecture as a means of urban iconography, which will contribute to the theory of how...

  Despite the spectacular contemporary metropolis image of Luijiazui, the new Central Business District (CBD) of Shanghai on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River, this paper discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through the ‘reality’ of its urbanism. The purpose is to check in a...

  Non Arkaraprasertkul

  43-52

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• Performing Mimetic Mapping: A Non-Visualisable Map of the Suzhou River Area of Shanghai

  This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American Settlements, and an ever-changing and transforming territory. Through the detailed description of the mapping processes, we analyse the position of this particular map within contemporary discourse about mapping. Here, we question the purpose of the process, the desired outcome, the consciousness of the significance of each step/event, and the possible significance of the final traces that the mapping leaves behind. Although after the mapping had been carried out, the procedure was analysed, post-rationalised, and justified through its partial documentation (as part of an educational process), this paper questions the way and the reason for these practices (the post-rationalising of the mapping activity, justifying the strategy, etc.), and their possible meaning, purpose, demand or context. Thus we conclude that the subject matter is not the final outcome of an object or ‘map’; there is no final map to be exhibited. What this paper brings forth is the mapping as an event, an action performed by the embodied experience of the actual place and by the trans-local materiality of the tools and elements involved in the process of its making.

  This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American Settlements, and an ever-changing and transforming territory. Through the detailed description of the mapping processes, we analyse the position of this particular map within contemporary discourse about mapping. Here, we question the purpose of the process, the desired outcome, the consciousness of the significance of each step/event, and the possible significance of the final traces that the mapping leaves behind. Although after the mapping had been carried out, the procedure was analysed, post-rationalised, and justified through its partial documentation (as part of an educational process), this paper questions the way and the reason for these practices (the post-rationalising of the...

  This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American...

  Anastasia Karandinou, Leonidas Koutsoumpos

  53-66

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• The Rise of the Private: Shanghai’s Transforming Housing Typologies

  ‘On top of the sea’ is the literal translation of Shanghai, whose urban structure was built around thin canals that crossed the city. These canals, just as the traditional street in Chinese culture, were able to move people and goods while creating a public arena for interaction. It was infrastructure – streets and canals – that was the basis for the city’s morphology. As the rivers and streets eventually grew, merged, and monumentalised, they created separation. Thus, infrastructure, which once was used to collect, now divided – as is witnessed in the new six-(or more) lane-streets or the Huangpu River, isolating Puxi from Pudong. This transforming notion of infrastructure is directly linked to changes in Shanghai’s housing typologies. The traditional lilong housing structure is comprised of a unit that multiplies through group linkages to create streets. In these lilong dwellings, the street and the architectural type are one. More recently, an influx of high-rise apartment typologies has dislocated the relationship between infrastructure and building. Here, infrastructure is used to subdivide massive plots onto which built form is whimsically placed. The disconnection and monumentalisation of infrastructure that corresponds to these shifting building typologies reveals an even deeper transformation of the public sphere – one in which isolation and alienation are substituting a loss of reality. It is here that we witness the rise of the Private and the emerging loss of public life.

  ‘On top of the sea’ is the literal translation of Shanghai, whose urban structure was built around thin canals that crossed the city. These canals, just as the traditional street in Chinese culture, were able to move people and goods while creating a public arena for interaction. It was infrastructure – streets and canals – that was the basis for the city’s morphology. As the rivers and streets eventually grew, merged, and monumentalised, they created separation. Thus, infrastructure, which once was used to collect, now divided – as is witnessed in the new six-(or more) lane-streets or the Huangpu River, isolating Puxi from Pudong. This transforming notion of infrastructure is directly linked to changes in Shanghai’s housing typologies. The traditional lilong housing structure is comprised of a unit that multiplies through group linkages to create streets. In these lilong dwellings, the street and the architectural type are one....

  ‘On top of the sea’ is the literal translation of Shanghai, whose urban structure was built around thin canals that crossed the city. These canals, just as the traditional street in Chinese culture, were able to move people and goods while creating a public arena for interaction. It was...

  Neeraj Bhatia

  67-76

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• Caves of Steel: Mapping Hong Kong in the 21st Century


  Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its climate and consumer economy, has in fact effected a wholesale interiorisation of public society unprecedented in contemporary urban form. 'Caves of Steel' is borrowed from the title of a 1954 novel by science fiction master Isaac Azimov, in which humanity has been divided into interior and exterior factions. The radical separation of public society in Hong Kong that accompanies the growing disparity of interior and exterior urban space is perhaps better understood through Manuel DeLanda’s (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002) application of the terms ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ from the physical sciences to a description of abstract space. Through Reiser (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2005) ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ properties may be understood in the urban context as competing and collaborating ‘infrastructural’ and ‘topological’ conditions. In Hong Kong the infrastructural (dense interiorised infrastructure of multilevel shopping warrens) and the topological (vast open topology of country parks, new towns, and industrial estates) exist often in immediate proximity, while the gap between their respective public societies continues to grow. Recent proposals for the development of a variety of sites on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour waterfront are examined in detail as a case study of this condition and its attendant effects on mapping complex and three-dimensional urban conditions, on notions of post-colonial and post-industrial image and identity, and on the evolution of public space in an Asian context.

  Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its climate and consumer economy, has in fact effected a wholesale interiorisation of public society unprecedented in contemporary urban form. 'Caves of Steel' is borrowed from the title of a 1954 novel by science fiction master Isaac Azimov, in which humanity has been divided into interior and exterior factions. The radical separation of public society in Hong Kong that accompanies the growing disparity of interior and exterior urban space is perhaps better understood through Manuel DeLanda’s (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002) application of the terms ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ from the physical sciences to a description of abstract space. Through Reiser...

  Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its...

  Jonathan D. Solomon

  77-90

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• Getting Lost in Tokyo

  This paper explores the potential for using alternative forms of inscriptive practice to describe the urban space of the Tokyo Subway. I begin with an account of the process of getting lost in Shinjuku Subway Station in the heart of Tokyo. This station represents a limit condition of place, being dense and complex beyond the powers of traditional architectural representation. The station is explored through serial translations, beginning with narrative, moving to a flowchart diagram, Laban dance notation, recurring motifs and archetypes, architectural drawing, photography, and cartography. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour and Tim Ingold describe, the form our inscriptive practices take are crucial to the ways in which we conceptualise those places. How much of the experience of a place is lost in the traditional inscriptive practices of the architect? This description of the urban space of the Tokyo subway forms the basis for an extended study exploring the description of this experience of place, and the power of such description to theorise space. The ultimate aim of this is to shift the focus of urban design away from geometric principles and towards the experiences that might be enjoyed in such places.

  This paper explores the potential for using alternative forms of inscriptive practice to describe the urban space of the Tokyo Subway. I begin with an account of the process of getting lost in Shinjuku Subway Station in the heart of Tokyo. This station represents a limit condition of place, being dense and complex beyond the powers of traditional architectural representation. The station is explored through serial translations, beginning with narrative, moving to a flowchart diagram, Laban dance notation, recurring motifs and archetypes, architectural drawing, photography, and cartography. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour and Tim Ingold describe, the form our inscriptive practices take are crucial to the ways in which we conceptualise those places. How much of the experience of a place is lost in the traditional inscriptive practices of the architect? This description of the urban space of the Tokyo subway forms the basis for an extended study exploring the description of this...

  This paper explores the potential for using alternative forms of inscriptive practice to describe the urban space of the Tokyo Subway. I begin with an account of the process of getting lost in Shinjuku Subway Station in the heart of Tokyo. This station represents a limit condition of place,...

  Raymond Lucas

  91-104

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• The ‘Agency of Mapping’ in South Asia: Galle-Matara (Sri Lanka), Mumbai (India) and Khulna (Bangladesh)

  The territories – cities and landscapes – of South Asia are under incredible transformation due to man-made and natural conditions. Globalisation is spatially leaving its imprint as cities and landscapes are progressively being built by an ever-more fragmented, piecemeal and ad-hoc project modus – funded by established and new-found fortunes of national and international developers and lenders, development aid projects and (often corrupt) governments. At the same time, ‘natural’ disasters are increasing in severity and frequency – due to climate change and the flagrant disregard of the environment in the relentless dive to impose imported terms of reference for modernisation and urbanisation. The challenges and strategic importance of realising urban design in South Asia’s contemporary context of borrowed visions, abstract land-use planning and a diminishing political will are, obviously, innumerable. How to qualitatively intervene as an urbanist in such a context? This paper will argue that an understanding of contexts, based on fieldwork, is necessary in order to project feasible urban visions and strategic urban design projects that can make more evident particular sites’ inherent qualities and creatively marry ecological, infrastructural, and urbanisation issues by solutions that cut across multiple scales and sectoral divisions. Interpretative mapping is a first step to transform a territory. An understanding of the context and the reading of sites are necessary in order to create modifications that have logic and relate to the particularities of places and situations. Three scales of mapping (territorial, urban, and tissue) will be presented. The territories/cities investigated are the southwest (Galle-Matara) coast of Sri Lanka, Mumbai, the economic engine of India, and Khulna, the third largest city in Bangladesh.

  The territories – cities and landscapes – of South Asia are under incredible transformation due to man-made and natural conditions. Globalisation is spatially leaving its imprint as cities and landscapes are progressively being built by an ever-more fragmented, piecemeal and ad-hoc project modus – funded by established and new-found fortunes of national and international developers and lenders, development aid projects and (often corrupt) governments. At the same time, ‘natural’ disasters are increasing in severity and frequency – due to climate change and the flagrant disregard of the environment in the relentless dive to impose imported terms of reference for modernisation and urbanisation. The challenges and strategic importance of realising urban design in South Asia’s contemporary context of borrowed visions, abstract land-use planning and a diminishing political will are, obviously, innumerable. How to qualitatively intervene as an urbanist in such a context?...

  The territories – cities and landscapes – of South Asia are under incredible transformation due to man-made and natural conditions. Globalisation is spatially leaving its imprint as cities and landscapes are progressively being built by an ever-more fragmented, piecemeal and ad-hoc project...

  Kelly Shannon

  105-119

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