U R B A N A S I A 7 th Annual IIAS-TU Delft Seminar Convenor: Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken (IIAS and TU Delft)

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2 U R B A N A S I A 7 th Annual IIAS-TU Delft Seminar Convenor: Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken (IIAS and TU Delft) hrs, Thursday 7 May 2015 Museum voor Volkenkunde (Paviljoen Building) Steenstraat 1, Leiden Introduction Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken Learning from Hong Kong: Bridge in Difference Ir. Renske van Dam The Emergence of a Chinese Urban Subjectivity Jacob Dreyer Asian Cities: Consanguinity Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken Coffee break How Flexible is the Rigid? Theorising Caste and Gender in Contemporary Mumbai Maansi Parpiani Neighbourhood and Small Town: The Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan Prof. Carola Hein Plenary Session 2

3 U R B A N A S I A 7 th Annual IIAS-TU Delft Seminar The 7 th annual IIAS-TU Delft seminar is convened by Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken, a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) Leiden and an Assistant Professor of Theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. This is the latest in a series of spring seminars organised by Dr Bracken that explore the urban environment of Asia from a variety of different multidisciplinary perspectives. This particular event, titled Urban Asia, will look at a number of different themes, including the urban transformation that took place in Japan after World War II; conditions in the slums of Mumbai, particularly the plight of Dalit women there; Hong Kong s urban identity; and the related topic of the emergence of a Chinese urban subjectivity. Dr. Bracken will also present one of the key concepts from his forthcoming book Asian Cities Colonial to Global (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming in June 2015). This book is a collection of a number of the best papers from the 5 th annual IIAS- TU Delft seminar, which took place in Leiden in

4 ABSTRACTS Learning from Hong Kong: Bridge in Difference Ir. Renske van Dam Interactive Media Design, Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague Due to Hong Kong s history as a British colony and its recent transformation into one of the most important global urban agglomerations connecting Eastern and Western economies, Hong Kong has developed as a space of transit. In contemporary urban theory this sense of movement is often understood as a problem rather than a quality, resulting in the experience of placelessness. However place in Hong Kong is valuable; not only in an absolute sense, reflected in the high land prices, but also in an emotional sense, as acknowledged by its visitors and inhabitants. But what makes place in Hong Kong valuable? What is the influence of globalization on the local experience of place other than placelessness? And, especially, how can designers work with these conceptual constraints? The design presented here, of an inhabited bridge located at the border between Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) and Shenzhen (Secial Economic Zone (SEZ), which will disappear in 2047, recognizes both the global movement within the Pearl River Delta (PRD) as well as the local sense of place. The Emergence of a Chinese Urban Subjectivity Jacob Dreyer Independent scholar, China What is often overlooked in wide-eyed discussions of Chinese urbanization is the ways that this urban configures relations between the individual and society as a whole (otherwise known as the spectacle ), much less what an analysis of what the urban even means within the legal terminology of contemporary China. A never-quite-defined or resolved Chinese history, notably the experimentation with Socialist collectivity, is the point of origin of today s Chinese urban society; yet this point of origin is, at the same time, a repressed moment of mass trauma. Without arriving at any artificial conclusions, this paper will attempt to define the framework in which Chinese urbanization has taken place in an attempt to offer some scenarios under which an individual can relate to the collective, and to problematize the totalitarian nature of the Chinese information economy. 4

5 Asian Cities: Consanguinity Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Assistant Professor, Theory Section, Architecture Faculty, TU Delft Why have certain cities in Asia taken such a lead in the twenty-first century? How have they been able to make the successful segue from nodes in colonial-era networks into global players in their own right? Could it be that they have been making canny use of infrastructure inherited from the era of Western colonial expansion? Or is there something else that underpins and explains these cities remarkable global dominance? This paper introduces the book Asian Cities: Colonial to Global (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming in June 2015), which is based on papers from the 5 th Annual IIAS-TU Delft Seminar held in Leiden in The book traces the genealogy of some of Asia s cities trajectories from the colonial to the global, and it does so from a number of multidisciplinary perspectives: including history, geography, and cultural studies, as well as architecture and urbanism (the main lenses through which these cities and their networks are examined). The consanguinity of the title is taken from the book s Conclusion, which critiques Foucault s genealogical methodology (while also taking cognisance of his archaeology) to point out its imitations in the twenty-first century. In seeking to address these limitations the book s editor has posited the term consanguinity to describe the multi-disciplinary approach being used by the authors in their attempts to better understand the living links that connect the cities of Asia. How Flexible is the Rigid? Theorising Caste and Gender in Contemporary Mumbai Maansi Parpiani Ph.D. Fellow, Global South Asian Studies Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Caste identities in contemporary India seem to be in a state of flux. Its insecurities have sharpened with increasing financialization and economic competitiveness, even while its ritual forms and practices may appear to have been diluted. This flux relates to the ways in which caste relations have come to be dislocated by a subsumption of the caste question within the idea of class, and by the capitalist frameworks of both the market and contemporaneous governmentality. This paper argues that within a larger context of the masculinisation of caste, the category of Dalit women has become a plank of contestation for discursive shifts in the debates on caste and patriarchy, with the subjects own voices rarely being heard. This marks the Dalit woman s position as one of immense possibility, not merely to state the differentiated discrimination faced by them, but also to bring out how caste as a phenomenon is fluid while retaining its rigidity. It asserts that the multiple identities of Dalit women within caste and gender hierarchies problematise the hierarchies and studies thereof. A move away from caste 5

6 as hierarchy mandates the need for caste identities to be studied in conjunction with other identities and processes. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork, the paper present three narratives of Dalit women in Mumbai their sense of desire, happiness, and mobility and argues for a need for phenomenological forays into everyday caste experiences, semantic landscapes, spatial contourings, and the making of Dalit public spheres and modernities, to delve deeper into the contemporary experientialities of caste and gender. Neighbourhood and Small Town: The Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan Professor Carola Hein Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning, TU Delft The term machi, signifying both neighbourhood and small town, is a key element for understanding Japanese urban form and city planning. After tracing the origins of the term, this article explores the historic and contemporary significance of the concept and its particular spatial and socio-economic forms. The article then argues that the concept of machi influenced the ways in which Japanese planners picked up foreign concepts through the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, absorbing some ideas and rejecting others. Building on their perception of the city as composed of urban units that allowed for planning in patchwork patterns, leading Japanese planners carefully selected models independently of international appreciation making, for example, the book The New Town by the German planner Gottfried Feder a standard reference. The presentation concludes by arguing that foreign observers must understand the concept of machi to comprehend contemporary Japanese neighborhoods, city life, and urban forms. 6

7 BIOGRAPHIES Gregory Bracken is Assistant Professor of Theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, he is also a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden. He founded, along with Dr Manon Osseweijer, the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) and is also one of the founders of Footprint journal His research is concerned with the urban environment of East and Southeast Asia and recent publications include issue 12 of Footprint: Future Publics: Politics and Space in East Asia s Cities (co-edited with Jonathan D. Solomon); The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular (Routledge, 2013 the Chinese translation of which will be available later this year from the Shangai Academy of Social Sciences Press); and Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou (editor) (University of Amsterdam Press, 2012). He is also the author and illustrator of the Walking Tour series of city guides, which includes a number of cities in Asia, and has recently published Tincture of Malice, a murder mystery set in colonial Singapore. Jacob Dreyer is a Beijing-based writer and theorist of architecture. He is Senior Editor at Lifestyle 品味生活 Magazine and his work has been published in a wide variety of journals in the US, UK, and China. His book The Nocturnal Wanderer is due to be published by Eros Press shortly and his writing can be found on his website. Carola Hein is Professor and Head, Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning. She trained in Hamburg (Diplom-Ingenieurin) and Brussels (Architecte) and earned her doctorate at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg in She has published and lectured widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning notably in Europe and Japan and has authored several articles and books on capital city issues in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Berlin, and Tokyo. From 1995 to 1999 she was a Visiting Researcher at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Kogakuin University, focusing on the reconstruction of Japanese cities after World War II and the Western influence on Japanese urban planning. Among other major grants, in 2004, she held a grant by the Brussels-Capital Region Government to investigate the urban location and architectural expression of the European capital function. In she was working with a grant from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy for research on Regional integration and land policies affecting the future development of Tallinn, Warsaw, and Budapest. In 2007 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on The Global Architecture of Oil. Carola Hein s publications include The Capital of Europe. Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (Praeger, 2004); Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (with Pierre Laconte) (Routledge, 2011); Brussels: Perspectives on a 7

8 European Capital (Publication of the Foundation for the Urban Environment, 2007); Bruxelles l Européene: Capitale de qui? Ville de qui?/ European Brussels. Whose Capital? Whose City? (with Philippe Pelletier) (Cahiers de la Cambre-Architecture no.5, La Lettre Volée, 2006); Cities, Autonomy, and Decentralization in Japan (with Jeffry Diefendorf and Yorifusa Ishida) (Routledge, 2006); Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). She has also published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, and magazines. Maansi Parpiani Maansi Parpiani is a Ph.D. Fellow with the Department of Cross- Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her thesis work centres on the everyday life of Dalit women. It aims to look at the experiences of caste among women in rural and urban spaces in western India, towards re-orienting the conceptualisation of caste from being a rigid system of ritual exclusion to a matrix of subjectivities and lived experiences of caste. Parpiani completed an M.A. in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in Her masters thesis focused on the discourses of urban planning and failed schemes of development in early twentiethcentury Bombay. Parpiani regularly writes on contemporary issues of urbanity, gender, and caste in the mainstream Indian media. Renske Maria van Dam graduated in architecture from TU Delft in She currently works at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Hague as co-ordinator of ALEPH (Autonomous Laboratory for Exploration of Progressive Heuristics) where she connects philosophy to (design) practice. Previously she worked for Architectuur Studio Herman Hertzberger in Amsterdam and Li Xiaodong Atelier in Beijing. Her experiences in Asia, as well as her interest in philosophy, inform and inspire her current research and design. 8