DeCoding Asian Urbanism

Book excerpt: deCoding Asian Urbanism explores the current discourse and creation of innovative architecture and urban interventions that are effectively transforming the spatial and operational landscape of the complex Asian city. The book highlights efforts that strategically embrace the rapid growth and the cultural and physical complexity of the built environment in Asia. While the scale and pace of 21st-century urbanization are staggering and unprecedented, new urban development in Asia alone in the next two decades will likely exceed the urban growth worldwide of the last two hundred years. While Asian cities have historically drawn on their history and regional culture, this critical assimilation has been vastly superseded by the sheer velocity of urban growth inspired by external/global/western models.The phenomenal growth of Asian cities remains a challenge to their infrastructure, existing resources, and the roles that have traditionally constituted city-making in the broadest sense. Essays by some of the most prominent architects, historians, sociologists, urban designers, and activists across the globe provide unique perspectives on the diverse complexity of the Asian city. The book is extensively illustrated with project images, analytical diagrams, maps, and selected photographs. The essays and illustrations complement transcripts and images of spirited panel discussions from a symposium at Harvard University's South Asia Institute that reveal contemporary thinking and practice of design and planning in Asian cities.deCoding Asian Urbanism focuses on those critical interventions that go beyond globalization to achieve a substantive systemic innovation in the Asian City. The book is organized into three sections: Decoding the City, Mediating the City, and Transforming the City. These sections present the context, consider a strategic approach, and present transformational projects that revitalize, renew, and transform the complex urban environment and illustrate their key principles. The urban condition, the historical context, the proposed program, and the stated objectives of stakeholders are considered elements that inform and guide the formal and spatial responses.