Urbanization in the East Asian Region
GSD 4239, Lecture, Fall

The purpose of this lecture course is to provide an overall account of the urbanization in the selected cities within the rapidly developing Pacific Asian region and to characterize relevant spatial patterns of urbanization, including illustration at appropriate levels, such as district, block and building type.

The questions being addressed are whether there is a distinctive form of urbanization within the Pacific Asian region, or whether it is largely a matter of satisfying demands for rapid urban expansion within the ambit of internationally available building technology? Are there common problems and opportunities accompanying urbanization within the Pacific Asian region, or is each place sufficiently different so as to defy unitary characterization? And, finally, what special challenges are presented for architecture and urban design in the Pacific Asian region and are they any different from challenges that might be confronted in other parts of the world? The cities in question are Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul, and while each is certainly distinctive, they do all share certain common characteristics. For instance, with the exception of Tokyo, they all have, or continue to have, colonial influences; each has grown recently, or is in the process of growing and modernizing rapidly; and, both independently and collectively, they seem to define, at least in part, the "Asian City" phenomenon.

Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
GSD 4344, Seminar, Spring

Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered into China and began to take root in the aftermath of the Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Over time, Qing Dynasty China’s earlier stand-offish attitude towards these incursions became replaced by concern with the foreign threat and increasingly serious questioning of their own institutional structures and place in the world. By 1911 Revolution was well underway, resulting in the toppling of the Qing and the unsteady formation of a modern republic. Years past, under deteriorated conditions of factionalism and with Japan, by then a power in East Asia, making territorial demands. Two opposing ideological camps—the Communists and the Nationalists—also began to emerge, although with the Nationalists in the ascendancy throughout large parts of China. With the full-scale outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937, a United Front was joined, only to be irreversibly broken at the end of World War II with the advent of civil war. The victorious Communists came to power in 1949 and immediately began to re-fashion China as a modern Marxist-socialist state. After a short though propitious start, the country was then plunged into the tragic Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, also becoming isolated once again. Then in 1978, with the historic opening up to the outside world, economic if not social circumstances began to change drastically, as China shifted from being a welfare state into a socialist market economy. The contemporary period now finds the nation with burgeoning modern industrialization and urbanization and perhaps a certain ambivalence about the precise shape of its future identity.

Against this backdrop, modern architecture and urbanism has developed unevenly, before coming on more strongly during the past decade or so, at least in some regions of China. Therefore, rather than attempting to provide a continuous cohesive narrative, this course concentrates on specific episodes of modern architecture and urban development. Of particular interest is the work of several generations of Chinese architects, as well as that of foreign architects, working in China during various periods. Among the first generation of essentially foreign-trained architects from the 1920s and 30s will be Yang Tingbao, Liang Sicheng, Dong Dayou, Tong Jun, Lin Keming and Song-sing Kwan, together with western counterparts like Henry Murphy, Harry Hussey, Francis Kales, Curt Rothkegel and Laszlo Hudec, as well as firms like Palmer and Turner. Notable second generation architects, educated primarily during the 1940s, include: Zhang Bo, Wu Liangyong, Chen Dengao, Zhang Kaiji, Dai Nianci and Xiong Ming, followed by a third generation, comprising at least Xing Tonghe, Zhang Jinqiu, Zhu Jailu and Zheng Shiling. Study of the contemporary period also includes work by numerous foreign architects, including: I.M. Pei, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Lord Foster, Jean-Marie Charpentier and Paul Andreu, as well as by some members of the younger fourth generation of Chinese architects like Ma Qingyun, Cui Kai and Zhang Yonghe, Wang Lu, Lu Jiakun, Lu Jiwei and Rocco Lim, among others.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to these modern developments and also to explore the boundaries of present knowledge about the subject in the form of researchable areas of interest. At present the literature about Chinese modern architecture and urbanism is relatively sparse, particularly in an analytical and critical mode of inquiry. Presentation of course material takes the form of a lecture followed by class discussion on pre-assigned topics. There is no limit on the class size which meets on Monday afternoon between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm.

Advanced Research Seminar: Pudong New Area, Shangai, China
Fall 2003, with Yue Wu

The aim of this research is to conduct a re-appraisal of the current masterplan for the Pudong New Area in Shanghai, China, and to make recommendations for improvements. Plans for the expansion of Shanghai across the Huangpu River date back at least to the beginning of Republican China, after the fall of the Quig Dynasty in 1911, although it wasn’t until the 1990’s that any serious development occurred. Today, the Pudong New Area covers 553 square kilometers of land and is subdivided internally into a number of special districts, such as Lujaizui– the new central business district – special port facilities and tax free zones, areas for manufacturing, the new international airport, and recreational and institutional areas, as well as numerous residential districts. Indeed, the close proximity of Pudong to well-developed areas of Shanghai makes for logical expansion of the city to the east, a major past impediment to which was the high costs of infrastructure improvements necessary to cross the Huangpu River. Now that the economic wherewithal of Shanghai has improved substantially, since the late 1980’s, Pudong has become one of the fastest growing areas of the city. In many essential ways, what occurs in Pudong provides valuable insights into the state of urban planning and development in market-oriented China.

Masterplanning of Pudong followed functionalist concepts, popular in the west in the 1960s and 70s, with a general spatial configuration that incorporated ring and radial roads serving clusters of relatively intense development, with open-space preserves and greenbelts in between. While serving the needs of rapid development reasonably well, at least during early stages, a number of issues have arisen that require greater attention. These include: uniform criteria and standards that are nationwide in scope and not necessarily well suited to the contemporary setting of Pudong; technical parameters for development that are now clearly outmoded; a lack of any inherent flexibility and a prescriptive, as distinct from proscriptive, orientation; a lack of recognition of unique local features; uneven and excessive land consumption; and a laissez-faire attitude towards relocation of existing communities and peasant farmers, of which there are several hundred thousand.

The scope of work for the research includes: understanding the historical trajectory of development in Pudong, from the centrally-planned economy of the early Communist era, through the socialist market economy, to the present market economy; understanding the master-planning process in China, including various forms of regulation and their technical bases; comparative analysis of Pudong with other dense regions of comparable scale, like Singapore at around 600 square kilometers and the Randstat in the Netherlands; localized critique of present development practices and results, especially with regard to urban place-making and conservation of urban land; and development of an alternative view of Pudong’s future development. A field trip will be made to Shanghai for on-site reconnaissance and the seminar is sponsored by the Pudong branch of the Shanghai municipal government.

Advanced Research Seminar: Territorialization in the Region of Romagna, Italy
Fall 2002-Spring 2003, with Robert Pasini

In large measure, territorialization is an old and venerable process by which land is settled, converted to productive use, preserved and conserved in some cases, and a geography is made. It almost goes without saying, for instance, that urbanization takes place in a broader territory. Terms and phrases like "urban region" or "urban areas and their hinterlands" certainly imply a broader terrain than the cities and towns involved and signal ideas of economic and other interaction, as well as building, across an area more extensive than the cities and towns themselves. Also, recognizable gradients, from central and inner urban zones to peripheries and peri-peripheries, turn the idea of a territory inward by suggesting ways in which its urban landscape can be spatially qualified. Conversely, territories are also often the sites of non-urban production, of agriculture, forestry, coastal activity and natural preservation, inscribing different patterns of use across a landscape and placing other demands on land and its margins. Moreover, the concept of a territory is rarely fixed, changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, as the scheme of urban and non-urban use, influencing its character, matures under the auspices of different technological, political and other circumstantial regimes. Nevertheless, in spite of these vagaries and intellectually compartmentalized depictions, the territory itself is of significance as both a registry and component in urban and non-urban development processes and, ultimately, because of how it must be considered and made.

One way in which the process of territorialization might be better understood is through the somewhat self-organizing and dynamic characteristics of the process and the simultaneous presence of "deterritorializing" and "reterritorializing" phenomena. Essentially, territorialization is a combination of both, but where effective, or recognizable, deterritorialization occurs when enough pressure is brought to bear on an existing territorial order so as to eliminate existing spatial distinctions, socio-political power relations, or habitual ways of doing things, to the extent that aspects of the prior regime collapse on the way to becoming something else. Reterritorialization, then, is the process that takes up with this elimination of distinctions, power relations, etc., or rather with the forces behind them, and results in a different territorial order, and so the process continues to unfold.

An essential aim of the study is to develop a comprehensive and temporally longitudinal understanding of the cultural process, or processes, by which the territory in Romagna, Italy, has been and continues to be made, shaped and produced. It does not aim to yield planning proposals, specific designs, nor political blueprints. Rather, it attempts to contribute to an academic understanding of territorialization as an important contemporary phenomenon and explore various scenarios of possible spatial reconsideration and development, under varying assumptions, in a manner that allows them to qualify most closely with practices that might be inferred to as belonging to the culture production of territorial space.

The study is conducted at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Peter G. Rowe, in collaboration with the University of Bologna's School of Architecture in Cesena, under the direction of Professor Gianni Braghieri. At Harvard, the study will form part of the normal curriculum, under the rubric of GSD 9206 Independent Research Study, and includes active participation by Roberto Pasini, a lecturer in the GSD Urban Planning and Design Department. The class size at the GSD is approximately eight to ten students, and research involves a field trip to the study area during the fall semester, supported by a grant from the Regional Government of Emilia-Romagna and the Province of Forlì-Cesena.