Review

of Future Urban Space:

Projecting the Urban Space of New East
Asia
L. Hee, D. Boontharm, & E. Viray, eds.
Singapore: NUS Press, 2012.

http://singaporereviewofbooks.org/201
3/01/17/future-asian-space/

In a long tradition of writing on architecture and urbanism, practitioners
from Vitruvius to Corbusier sought to define fundamental principles that linked
questions of meaning and social purpose to the design physical form. In the
contemporary extension of the tradition, one field of literary practice is exemplified
by the editors and contributors to Future Asian Space: Projecting the Urban Space of
New East Asia. This mode of writingurbanism attempts to identify, conceptualize
and theorize the social world in order to discern the role (and often explicit
importance) of the fields of architecture, urban design and planning in (re)shaping
space and society through a dialectic of theory and practice. In contrast, I cite the
studies of urbanism by Rem Koolhaas and the Harvard Design School Project on the
City as a sort of graphic polemic that is aimed at reinforcing the aesthetic technics of
the practitioner without an explicit critical stance or political engagement. At times,
this amounts to a designers mea culpa in recognition of social forces and complexity
beyond the field of practice, with which there is simultaneously a fully cognizant
complicity.1

1 For example see Chung, C.J., J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S.T. Leong, eds. 2001. Great
Leap Forward. Kln: Taschen.

Review of Future Asian Space

Singapore Review of Books

CHEN, Jia-Ching
January 17, 2012

Across the broader tradition, the figure of the practitioner as a rational

technician of general ideas2 and a type of revolutionary who proposes that the
new city should be a model of radically different social practices3 is the implied
audiencethe object of study and the agent of transformation engaged in a process
of self-reflexive subject making. This latter assertion might seem controversial,
especially after wide recognition of the failure of utopian modernism cited by the
editors of Future Asian Space (p. xv). However, I argue that the practitioner
researcher seeking the appropriate design and planning of cities (e.g. chapters 5,
7, 9 and 10) through the assessment, generalization and solution of urban problems
represents a specter of modernism that underpins and links the approaches of
Koolhaas et al and the concepts of temporality, legibility and praxis at the heart of
the volume reviewed here.
That said, I believe that given a well-defined intervention such an approach
offers readers an opportunity to question broadly held assumptions and dominant
forms of practice. Here, the editors walk a fine line between a normative criticality
seeking a culturally plural sustainable future and a post-critical projective
practice.4 Balancing these disparate approaches and agendas, the editors have done
a laudable job in presenting a broad range of research that unsettles a unitary
conception of Asian cities and questionswithout dismantlingour ways of
knowing them. In making the bold program to describe the distinctive technological,
environmental, economic, social and cultural vectors of transformation of Asian
cities, the editors have organized disparate research approaches into three sections,
which, I argue, serve to assemble corresponding concepts and arguments (while
eliding others) that have not been made fully explicit in their summation by the
editors.
TEMPORALITY
In the first section, three essays are leveraged to provide an understanding of
the temporality of newness and Asian geo-cultural particularity of the spaces in
question. Though by their own admission, the essays in the book do little to address
the question of futurity in explicit terms, the editors present a distinct
conceptualization of temporality. In particular, an uncritical approach to framing the
contemporary and modernity is evident in what the editors describe as a tension
between tradition and modernity (p. xviii). Although various essays in the volume
offer engagement with postcolonial theory, the program of delimiting the newness
of Asian space and projecting its radical potentiality tends to re-center essentialist

2 Rabinow, P. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment.
Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 9.
3 Holston, J. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.4.

4 Somol, R. and S. Whiting. 2002. Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods

of Modernism. Perspecta 33: 72-77.

Review of Future Asian Space

Singapore Review of Books

CHEN, Jia-Ching
January 17, 2012

dichotomies of geography and historical progress even as it attempts to unsettle

them.
In the essay Exporting China, Lawrence Liauw cites McKinsey and others
who describe the urban dynamism of what is frequently referred to (elsewhere) as
a new Asian century, in order to build a contrast between his typology of Chinese
urbanisms and the pathology of megacities (p. 11). While cognizant of the context
of global capitalism, Liauw represents Chinas SEZs as an urban invention that is
wholly endogenous and progressive (p. 5). Although this essay makes a needed
contribution in highlighting the importance of the export and globalization of
Chinas urban ideology, his description of the practices are taken out of the context
of Chinas Going Out Policy and the linkage between the cited city building projects
and resource extraction and territorial concessions in Africa, Asia and Latin
America. Likewise, in his reference to virgin land and his elision of the inherent
inequalities that underpin Chinas migrant labor flows, Liauws apparent optimism
for the model seems oblivious to processes of massive rural dispossession that are
fundamental to Chinas sociospatial transformation.
In contrast, Lees short chapter links careful examination of art curatorial
discourses on Asia to a critique of concepts of modernity. By foregrounding
postcolonial temporalities of Western modernity in the positing of a critical neo-
modernity, Lee poses a question to the reader (and the other essays in the volume),
highlighting the inherent contradictions in the program of seeking a teleologically
progressive new Asian modernity. Lees essay, though brief, illustrates a potential
model for self-critical urban practice.
Kims essay on the layered historic transformation of public space in South
Korea serve to further question apparent contradictions between various concepts
of progress and their constructed opposites. However, in his demonstration of an
effective historical reading of state-society relationships in the shaping of South
Koreas cultural values and norms of public space, Kims attempt to show how these
tensions have shaped a general disregard for a public dimension in the urban fabric
yields a perplexing diagrammatic understanding of urban morphology its
relationship to an under-articulated conception of public space. In the crux of
Kims argument, he asserts, public space itself has not emerged and infiltrated the
[linear and planar polarization of the] urban landscape (p. 36). However, Kim does
little to explicate a situated understanding of cohesive planning and a normative
judgment of its failure. Moreover, his argument about a new urban sociality made
possible with the advent of virtual space such that morphological and typological
polarizations are no longer obstacles is illustrated with examples of how public
space has been continuously occupied (albeit with new internet-enabled spatial
tactics). Kim concludes by explicitly dismissing the possibility of radical urbanism
while upholding the legibility of distinct cultural paradigms and hybridities.

Review of Future Asian Space

Singapore Review of Books

CHEN, Jia-Ching
January 17, 2012

LEGIBILITY
By assembling chapters on cultural economies in Singapore, and creative
reuse urbanism and gentrification, the second section further takes up the question
the spatial legibility of Asian cultural specificity. The section presents the most
coherent intervention toward the program of projecting new Asian space. The
chapters accomplish this by utilizing well-defined analytic frameworks and
narrowly defined urban research problems. Marshaling an impressive array of data,
Hutton provides a substantive analysis of the cultural economy of Singapore with a
focus on the Telok Ayer Chinatown district in the context of national political-
economic transformations and evolving development policy discourses. His study
emphasizes the historical contingency of the case and points out the inherent
complexities of attempting to pursue a Telok Ayer model as an economic growth
strategy. Together, the chapters by Boontharm and Hee and Su argue the
importance of bottom-up cultural production in processes of urban
redevelopment that can benefit from architectural heritage and reuse. However, the
question of whether these cases might represent new urban frontiers in longer-
term processes of gentrification remains unanswered.5 Although the question of a
broader Asia-ness is not addressed in any of these cases, the question of legibility
as requisite for critical urbanism is highlighted and affirmed.
PRAXIS
In their introduction, the editors are explicit in their pursuit of a non-
universalist purposeful sense of direction in order to make a substantial difference
(p. xiv). In the final section, various efforts at investigating spatial practices and
cultural meaning are assembled. Lais ethnography of public housing estates in
Singapore demonstrates the importance of researching everyday spatial practices in
order to inform policy. Chees examination of efforts to expand and deepen the
conceptualization of sites through a studio program at the National University of
Singapore provides reflective commentary on the importance of historical
narrativity in shaping subsequent interventions. However, the presentation of
student work from the studio underlines the importance of the questions of political
process and social inclusion broached by Lais ethnography. To re-appropriate
Chees quotation of Barthes (on p. 154), freed by generative and creative
approaches to site (pp. 143-5), the architect can just as easily appropriates and
manipulates the objectivity of the site. Radovi presents a deeply personal
exploration of the urbanism of smallness in Tokyo in order to argue the
significance of this cultural asset in the context of environmental crisis and
scarcity. However, the value of this posited cultural asset is highly conjectural and
is not assessed critically. We are not provided any clear understanding of the
relationship of smallness to obviating crisis in the past, present or future.

5 Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.
New York: Routledge.

Review of Future Asian Space

Singapore Review of Books

CHEN, Jia-Ching
January 17, 2012

Ohnos final chapter in the section presents a designpolemic to address

compound problems of population decreases and economic and environmental
resources in Tokyo. The chapter appears almost as a totem to actual design practice
in the context of the Future Asian Space program. In it, Ohno makes explicit
questions of social and environmental sustainability with metrics of demographic
transitions, CO2 emissions, economic impacts of fire hazards and other natural
disasters. The editors argue that such visions are needed as they propose [a]
certain directedness and practical ideas [for] finding ways of building sustainable
futures (p. xxv). In the context of the volume, the editors and contributors are
successful in highlighting how such proposals must also be welded to the diverse
lessons and research methodologies presented, and thatindeedfoolproof
conclusions [and] normative response[s] (p. xxvi) cannot possibly be expected
from such efforts.
The editors walk a fine line between a normative criticality seeking a
culturally plural sustainable future and a post-critical projective practice.6
Balancing these disparate approaches, the editors have done a laudable job in
presenting a broad range of research that unsettles a unitary conception of Asian
cities and questions our ways of knowing them.

6 Somol, R. and S. Whiting. 2002. Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods
of Modernism. Perspecta 33: 72-77.