Urban Design and East Asian Characteristics

Peter G. Rowe

Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor

Keywords: Urban Design, Scaling, Thingness, Appreciative Contexts

1. Introduction

When discussing the nature of urban design concerned with the vital part of urban conformation between the micro-scale of buildings and the macro-scale of larger city- wide spatial organizations, as elsewhere, a number of observations can be made regarding East Asia. These may start in the contemporary context with substantial changes that have occurred almost simultaneously throughout the East Asian region concerning the orientation of urban development. This may be followed by the persistent issue of appropriate and operable scales of urban design practice and the palpable circumstances of primary importance to that practice, before entering into other distinguishing characteristics, including those of spatial appreciation within the region. Finally, the question of just how much difference there is across the region and how different it is from other parts of the world as a milieu for urban design can be broached. Probably responses to these issues and questions are far from clear- cut. But, on par, certain distinctive underlying themes and trends do tend to emerge.

2. Turning Points

Historical turning points are moments in which the shared characteristics and circumstances of one regime of life change, often abruptly, towards something else. Regarded in a Deleuzian manner, patterns of urbanization are the outcome of two simultaneously occurring activities of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, usually acting away from long-standing equilibrium in the overall dynamics of urban development. In such a context, deterritorialization refers to a state transition when sufficient pressure is brought to bear from a variety of sources so as to eliminate existing distinctions, such that the predominance of a specific urban regime of operations collapses. Reterritorialization, by contrast, involves the processes that take up with the destabilizing pressures resulting in a different regime and predominant pattern of urbanization.

Turning points in urbanization in East Asia began occurring recently in the 1990s, if not somewhat before, and were fully evident during the 2000s. They did not happen all at once, nor were they otherwise aligned symmetrically. Having said this, however, in a generalized manner most places made a transition from developmental states with narrow production-oriented versions of city making into competition states with further inclusion of broader life-style opportunities, improved environmental amenity, higher material standards of living and more multi- functional alignments of urban activities. To be sure those in power along with many segments of society were egged on by rising affluence and a broadening of aspirations and tastes, as had happened in much of the West several decades earlier. They were also responding to the need for cities to become more competitive in increasingly globalized contexts.

In Korea, for instance, one can begin earlier in the late 1980s with the final rise of the democracy movement becoming fully embraced in 1993. Also along the way, Korea had changed from being a poor country into one with middle levels of wealth. The infrastructure-intensive, modernist manner of development pursued earlier, particularly under militaristic guidance, gave way in Seoul by around 2002 to a number of breakthrough projects with emphases on environmental amenity, historic conservation, and life-style expansion. Longer-term national policies concerning urban de-concentration also seemed to have been sufficiently successful to allow large cities, like Seoul, the breathing room to move in new directions. By contrast, in Tokyo of Japan, which were already modern and wealthy, events went in a different direction. The real-estate bubble that had been building in the 1980s bursts in the 1990s, plunging the nation into obvious crisis, including substantial losses of competitiveness almost across the board. Later, between 2000 and 2004 as well as onwards, this situation led to strenuous efforts to turn matters around, particularly with departures from one-size-fit-all urban policies towards more specialized, diverse and multi-scalar developments.

The city of Taipei focused on dealing with deferred environmental issues, as well as diversified business practices in the 1900s. In Singapore, following economic recession there was significant loss of confidence in the city-state’s ruling party in 1991—let alone for other reasons more recently—leading to a movement away from the straight-laced and strict social attitudes towards conspicuous expansion of leisure-time opportunities, additional urban amenities and diversified living environments. Indeed, one outcome was Singapore’s rebranding as a “city of tropical excellence” and then a “lively and livable city”. Nearby Hong Kong went through similar transformations although for other reasons, following the handover to China in 1997 and before, again with substantial increases in infrastructural, communal and life-style amenities. Finally, urban formation in China has been brisk to say the least, with something like 350 million new urban inhabitants since the historic opening up to the outside world in 1978, although at an accelerated rate with the ascendancy, in urban circumstances since the mid-to-late 1990s. Moreover, this trend continues today well below the level of tier-one and tier-two cities.

3. Scaling

Within the meso-scale between the micro- scale of buildings and the macro-scale of cities, the appropriate realm of urban design is often difficult to specify with consistency and accuracy. In fact, the matter of urban scaling more generally gives rise to variations but also to certain regularities with degrees of empirical certainty, setting up different though distinctive conditions for meso-scale consideration and urban design. For instance, cities and towns tend to be distributed with respect to size, with big cities spread more widely and with smaller settlements nested in their hinterlands. Distinctions among these kinds of places also immediately resonate regarding potential. 

urban design project scope, resources, and tactics of, say, implementation. Moreover, it appears that interactions within urban areas tend to be more intense in bigger rather than smaller communities, often referred to according to the Dunbar Number, after the British anthropologist, who suggested an individual cognitive limit of the number of people within an urban area that one can maintain a stable relationship with. This limit, apparently somewhere between 100 and 250, has repercussions for scales of community and, by extension, to neighborhoods and one of the persistent areas of possible urban design intervention.

Cities also change in shape as they change in size, overall exhibiting allometric characteristics in the manner of biological counterparts observed by the likes of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and Julian Huxley. Also, often this behavior is expressed in the form of so-called “power laws” defining relationships between two measurable qualities such as economic activity and length of highways, for instance, in which a scale exponent emerges. In fact, the Santa Fe Institute, established in 1984, has made systematic study of these relationships likening the behavior of urban systems and ensembles to the study of complex adaptive systems lying outside of normal boundary conditions. Among these findings, for instance, is that positive algometry, where the exponent in the relationship is above unity, result in super linearity, with increasing returns to population size, wealth and social interaction. By contrast, exponent values less than unity lead to sub-linear conditions found, for example, around material qualities of cities, infrastructure, and influences of economies of scale. Although certainly not posing as causal laws, these regularities again frame different circumstances ultimately of consequence to meso-scale urban conditions and on to urban design.

Several other so-called “laws” in the form of regularities rather than causal relationships, can also be cited to round out this discussion. First, there is Metcalf’s Law and his version of Moore’s Law for networks, in which the number of potential connections increases as the square of populations of users, inhabitants and so on. Second, there are “gravitational laws” and place-distance frameworks whereas average measures increase (e.g., time-distance) interaction decreases exponentially. More elaborate frameworks have also been proposed and rendered operational incorporating measures of cultural distance, administrative distance, and economic distance, in addition to the usual geographic distance. Finally, there is the Zipf Law, named for George Zipf who observed that as cities get bigger there are less of them and in circumstances of well-integrated, hierarchical arrangements of cities and towns the second largest is half the population of the first and the third largest is one third of the second largest, and so on. In short, the Zipf distribution obeys a linear array at 45 degrees within a log-log plot of city size and rank order.

（文章来源：Urban Design 2016(2) excerpts）