The City and Public Space in Asia

26 - 27 April 2011

DSD-IIAS-HKU
Gregory Bracken (DSD & IIAS) & Jonathan D. Solomon (HKU)

The third annual Delft School of Design - International Institute for Asian Studies Workshop will take place in collaboration with the Architecture Department of Hong Kong University in the Hong Kong University Shanghai Study Centre on 26-27 April 2011

SPEAKERS

• David Grahame Shane (keynote): Asian Public Space Since 1945: A Global Perspective.
• Arie Graafland: The Delft School of Design.
• Weijen WANG & Jason Carlow: [Re]Forming Public Space: The Politics and Design of Parks in Hong Kong.
• Jonathan D. Solomon: Public ‘Spheres’.
• Xing RUAN: The Temperament of a City: A Postscript to Post-Olympic Beijing.
• Gregory Bracken: The Shanghai Alleyway House.
• Stephen Lau: The Formal Versus the Informal: A Dogma of Designing Asian Public Spaces – An Architectural Discourse 
• Brian McGrath: Bangkok Simultopia: Reformulating Public Space in the Asian Megacity.
• Andong LU: Public Space as Battleground: The ‘Green-City’ of Nanning and a Genealogy of its Spatial Practices.
• Kelly Shannon & Annelies De Nijs: Recovering China’s Urban Rivers as Public Space.
• Lian TANG: A Tentative Approach to Quantitative Descriptions of Street Vitality: A Case Study of Chinese Urban Central Districts.

The City and Public Space in Asia

Richard Sennett defines the city as a place where there are ‘large numbers of people living closely packed together, a central market or markets, and the division of labour to a high degree’ (The Fall of Public Man). Joel Kotkin sees urban areas as having performed three basic functions from their very earliest origins: the creation of sacred space, the provision of security, and the siting of marketplaces (The City: A Global History). It is interesting, therefore, that the Chinese term for a city is cheng shi, cheng meaning wall and shi, marketplace.

Older Chinese cities were simply referred to by the term cheng, as in Beijing cheng, which while old-fashioned does not sound alien to the Chinese ear. The Chinese, it seems, made little or no distinction between the terms ‘wall’ and ‘city’, using them as if they were interchangeable, one denoting the other. With the disappearance of city walls from Chinese cities in the twentieth century, the term cheng seems to have fallen out of use; it is now more common to refer to cities as shi, as in Shanghai shi, or Beijing shi.

The cheng, or city wall, was what separated the city from its rural hinterland. It differentiated the urban from the rural. The shi, or marketplace, was considered something of a necessary evil in Confucian society, which had a particular disdain for any kind of trade, hence markets tended to be placed on a city’s periphery (as were the temples for that matter, religious being another group that Confucian society held in little esteem). China’s urban culture is very old indeed, beginning as far back as the second millennium BCE when it consisted of relatively small ritual centres surrounded by artisan workshops servicing the royal court. The creation of a united empire under the Zhou Dynasty, around 1110 BCE, saw the development of large walled towns, and with the Han and the Tang Dynasties which followed devising a pattern of centralized control which was unparalleled in its duration and thoroughness, at least according to Joel Kotkin. For more than a millennium, China’s capital cities of Loyang, Chang’an, and Kaifeng were among the world’s largest.

Richard Sennett sees the words ‘city’ and ‘civility’ as being etymologically linked. He sees civility as ‘treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance’. Sennett’s definition of a city is a ‘human settlement in which strangers are most likely to meet’ and he sees the public geography of a city as being an institutionalised civility. According to Sennett, the contemporary Western definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as entirely separate and diametrically opposed domains dates from the end of the seventeenth century. Public meant being open to public scrutiny, whereas private denoted the sheltered region of home life (i.e. family and friends).
Public space in its classic sense is a Western concept, moreover, it is a concept that is somewhat old fashioned. Asian cities have a classic vocabulary of public and private distinctions that are also threatened by rapid urbanisation. These papers will be focussing on specific cities in Asia and their public space. Comparisons engaging the historical processes in the development of urban form, diverse political or cultural frameworks for the development and use of space, as well as future opportunities for and threats to public space in Asian cities are also going to be explored. We look forward to what promises to be a dynamic and intellectually stimulating series of academic exchanges.