The Emerging Asian City

Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms

Vinayak Bharne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136208515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

The Asian urban landscape contains nearly half of the planet's inhabitants and more than half of its slum population living in some of its oldest and densest cities. It encompasses some of the world's oldest civilizations and colonizations, and today contains some of the world's fastest growing cities and economies. As such Asian cities create concomitant imagery – polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurred lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines.

This book embraces the complexity and ambiguity of the Asian urban landscape, and surveys its bewildering array of multifarious urbanities and urbanisms. Twenty-four essays offer scholarly reflections and positions on the complex forces and issues shaping Asian cities today, looking at why Asian cities are different from the West and whether they are treading a different path to their futures. Their combined narrative – spanning from Turkey to Japan and Mongolia to Indonesia - is framed around three sections: Traditions reflects on indigenous urbanisms and historic places, Tensions reflects on the legacies of Asia's East–West dialectic through both colonialism and modernism and Transformations examines Asia's new emerging utopias and urban aspirations.

The book claims that the histories and destinies of cities across various parts of Asia are far too enmeshed to unpack or oversimplify. Avoiding the categorization of Asian cities exclusively by geographic location (south-east, Middle East), or the convenient tagging of the term Asian on selective regional parts of the continent, it takes a broad intellectual view of the Asian urban landscape as a 'both…and' phenomenon; as a series of diverse confluences – geographic, historic and political – extending from the deserts of the Persian Gulf region to the Pearl River Delta. Arguing for Asian cities to be taken seriously on their own terms, this book represents Asia – as a fount of extraordinary knowledge that can challenge our fundamental preconceptions of what cities are and ought to be.

PART I

Traditions

Editor’s introduction

Traditions frames a series of critical counter-narratives to the modernity of Asian cities. Even as discourses on the destinies of Asian cities are being increasingly dominated by rubrics of post-industrialization and globalization, the term ‘tradition’ is used here as a direct antipode to such intellectual viewpoints.

But the term is more than a metaphorical counterpoint. It is embodied in those Asian landscapes that appear to resist technological prowess and hold on to seemingly anachronistic patterns of public and private life. At the Ganges ghats in Varanasi, for instance, the diurnal enactment of ancient Hindu rituals along five miles of a holy river generate a complex urban ‘faith-scape’ that is simultaneously contemporary and ancient. In the bazaar of Isfahan, the economic organization of artisan guilds seems like a medieval viewport, with traditional skills passed on over numerous generations. In the tenuous mohallas (neighbourhoods) surrounding the Jami Masjid (Friday Mosque) in Old Delhi, the lack of basic infrastructure seems contradictory to its thriving and self-sustaining micro-economy. Neither exotic worlds for a co-opted tourist economy, nor stagnant subcultures ignorant of cultural progress, these places embody parallel contemporary urbanities and urbanisms intrinsically linked to the economic, institutional and formal future of the Asian city.

The eight chapters in this section reflect on the dominant issues surrounding such places, and engage in complex discussions on the destinies of Asia’s disappearing heritage. The dilemmas of urban conservation within Asia’s historic urban cores, the futures of its historic monuments, the continuing influx of rural migrants into Asian cities and their import of traditional village patterns into metropolitan landscapes, the place of traditional symbolic morphologies and meanings in contemporary Asian cities, and the tenuous futures of indigenous rural habitats and peoples within an increasingly globalizing milieu, are all examined as significant formal, social and phenomenological dimensions shaping Asia’s future.

Anointed cities: The incremental urbanism of Hindu India traces the vivid yet undermined influences of anointed trees and anonymous wayside shrines in contemporary Indian cities. In examining the magical metamorphosis of such elusive sacred spots into larger formalized habitats such as hamlets, campuses and entire towns across India, it recognizes the plebeian grassroots efforts behind these modest sacred places as powerful urban catalysts deserving an inclusive attitude in the conduits of Indian city-making.

Cultivating cultural memory: Observing ethnic transitions in Inner Mongolia contemplates the place of minority ethnic cultures within a rapidly changing cosmopolitan milieu. It observes the contrasting results of recent government attempts to accommodate two proximate indigenous tribal communities – the Orochen, the last hunters of China, and the reindeer-herding Ewenki – into new designed villages. It argues that convenient transformations from the unique to the ubiquitous require strategic interventions before all is lost or embalmed; that distinctive identities, practices and techniques emerging out of centuries of geographic isolation are dynamic heritages that need to be kept alive.

The paradise between two worlds: Rereading Taj Mahal and its environs exposes the dilemmas of preservation versus appropriation surrounding many historic monuments across Asia. It excavates the intentions behind the original design of one of Asia’s most iconic landmarks, traces its evolving guises and re-contextualizes the monument within its larger contemporary setting, situated between a dilapidated riverfront and a slum. In so doing, it cautions against the Taj Mahal’s myopic preservation as an embalmed building complex for a tourist economy, arguing for its expansive reading as a larger contemporary setting with complex relationships to the city’s people and by extension their cultural and economic wellbeing.

Vernacular shifts: Observing dwelling patterns in Anatolian Turkey documents the struggle between vernacular and modern dwelling patterns in the rapidly urbanizing town of Aksaray. Observing three generations of a native family from 1997 to 2003 – as they renounce their traditional homes for modern apartment buildings – it evaluates which traditional patterns remain, shift or vanish, highlighting the dichotomy between the conveniences of modern living versus the changing lifestyles to obtain it.

Axes and alleyways: The tradition of duality in contemporary Korean cities forges a discussion on the place of traditional urban morphologies and elements in contemporary Asian cities. It examines the historic Korean binary of the royal axial arterial and the tenuous neighbourhood alley, tracing their original meanings and examining the reasons behind their erosion in contemporary development. It argues that such elements should not only be preserved but adapted as armatures for alternative urbanisms that can simultaneously retain traditional connections, as well as enrich contemporary urban life.

The cultural construction of Surakarta, Java explores the persistence of the Hindu-Javanese cosmological model as the cultural blueprint of Javanese tradition for more than sixteen centuries. In observing how the city and people of Surakarta have been able to embrace Islam, accommodate European colonializations and pursue international aspirations without entirely relinquishing their traditional beliefs, it posits that cultural identities can in fact be reinforced and renewed through successive transformations, affirming their ability to reconcile seemingly conflicting cultural meanings.

The new Old City: Nostalgia, representation and gentrification in historic Damascus observes how Syria’s historic capital, not-so-long-ago associated with backwardness, is today the nostalgic epicentre of cultural authenticity for Damascenes at home and abroad boasting of the Old City’s glory. The forces behind this cultural renaissance however are not stereotypical top-down preservation efforts, but the incremental reuse of the city’s old residential quarters as a leisure centre for the new middle classes, through new restaurants and hotels flaunting aesthetized and kitschy expressions of an imagined past.

The death and life of traditional aquatic habitats in central Thailand traces the evolution of the amphibious bang riverine settlements, their traditional prosperity, subsequent decline through changes in modes of production, consumption and transportation, and their current revitalization mostly through the influences of global and local tourism industries in search of authentic and romantic Thai village lifestyles. It thereby observes how the global–local nexus and cultural commodification contribute significantly to preserving a past for the benefit of the present on the one hand, yet simultaneously undermine its continuity and future on the other.

Collectively, these essays reveal the complex dialogues surrounding Asia’s inherited past: the nature of the crisis of a loss of heritage alarms different cultures to different degrees, and varies from place to place in the attention bestowed on it. Some aspects of an inherited past may disappear, others may persist, and it is this dynamic stemming from the practical experiences of people in space and time that accumulates as a treasure-house of know-how or what we call traditions. Traditions loom between feelings of authenticity versus cultural stasis, and are consequently recreated and admired, even as we may reject the very forces that originally birthed them. But traditions are also so magically resilient, with an uncanny ability to survive the most dramatic onslaughts and upheavals. The traditions of Asian cities therefore offer us compelling alternatives to the convenient western and modern lenses typically used to read them. They need to be recognized as powerful parallel forces that will shape the future of Asia. Indeed the destinies of Asian cities will emerge from the choice of either including them in our discussions or simply evading them as bygones.

1

ANOINTED CITIES

The incremental urbanism of Hindu India

Vinayak Bharne

The magnificent Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, in India may appear at first glance like a built-at-once complex, but a closer examination reveals quite the opposite. It is in fact a piecemeal cohesion of multiple buildings and open spaces, beginning with an ancient anonymous stone lingam (phallic symbol of the Hindu God Shiva) and the subsequent commemoration of that sacred spot over centuries of communal worship, patronage and craftsmanship. In this sense, the entire temple town of Madurai as its stands today represents the teleological end of an ancient lineage of grassroots urbanism powerful enough to bear the makings of an entire city.

Three millennia since Madurai’s inception, such patterns continue to exert a dominant influence on Indian urbanity. Innumerable rural habitats evolve around anonymous sacred insignia and shrines, and the influx of village migrants into cities brings among other things a sacred substratum into the public and private dimensions of urbanity. Indian cities have become gigantic ‘faith-scapes’, sprinkled with a thousand nameless spots of Hindu devotion that transcend all legal norms and nurture a parallel urbanism associated with Hindu shrines. What is the place of these elusive, illegal sacred encroachments? As alternative paradigms on place-making and populist informality, do they surface other, contradictory dialogues on the future of Indian cities?

Anonymous beginnings: The venerated tree

As the antediluvian allegories of Hindu India, trees have since Vedic times connoted the idea of supernatural abodes, where things happen as part of larger cosmic orders and under whose branches lies a place of enlightenment. Not surprisingly then, many Hindu temples have begun as anointed trees. Shading a smeared stone or a diminutive portrait of divinity, marked with flags and banners, or its trunk dressed like the goddess herself, a devasthana (‘place of the deities’) has appeared mysteriously under its branches, whether along a city street or remote in a rural field.¹ As the venerated abode of a gramadevata (local deity), the tree is worshipped through diurnal and seasonal rituals directly under its sacred canopy.

Over centuries of Hinduism’s evolution, select tree species have been endowed with divine associations and mythic meanings. The peepal tree, for instance, also known as ashvattha in Sanskrit, represents the divine Hindu Trinity or trimurti : the roots being Brahma, the trunk Vishnu and the leaves Shiva. Some believe that Krishna died under this tree, and according to the ancient scripture Skanda Purana, cutting down a peepal tree is therefore a sin. The Vat, Bargad or banyan tree is another of the most venerated trees in India, invariably planted in front of temples and mentioned in several scriptures as a tree of immortality.

Thousands of such venerated trees presently dot Indian cities, as both the centres of various invisible cults, as well as meeting places of micro-communities. When a positive change happens, gifts are endowed to these biological abodes, gradually eliciting their transformation into a shrine. When such a tree dies, the spot remains sacred, believed to be vibrant with the energies of the innumerable rituals that became the focus of community worship. In these venerated trees then, lie seeds of larger hallowed places to come (Figure 1.1).

Marking sacredness: The wayside shrine

As parallel components of this sacred urbanism, wayside shrines are born anywhere and everywhere, shrouding all sources of their inception. They may be appendages to buildings, companions to street trees or autonomous objects floating in urban space. In form, they range from the abstract to the literal: some are diminutive semantic icons, such as a small lingam or a statuette; others have the formal rudiments of a temple, as a niche or chamber with a pyramidal roof. And some are ad hoc accumulations of any or all of these types, as if displaying the various stages of a shrine’s evolution in the same place.

FIGURE 1.1 A lingam (phallic symbol of Shiva) anoints a wayside tree near Connaught Place, New Delhi (photo by author)

Interestingly, for all their semiotic association, these shrines do not follow the canonized rules of a Hindu temple. Their orientation to the cardinal directions is ad hoc, as opposed to the strict east–west alignment of formal temples – facing any and every way, as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Framing the Asian city
• Part I: Traditions
• Part II: Tensions
• Part III: Transformations
• Epilogue: Engaging the Asian city
• Index