Everyday Urban Flux: Temporary Urbanism in East Asia as Insurgent Planning

• In Event: Messy Urbanism: Understanding the "Other" Cities of Asia

Abstract

This chapter examines the flexibility and fluidity of urban spaces in selected cities in East Asia focusing on their spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions. Rather than random occurrences or disorder, it argues that such flexibility and fluidity reflect specific strategies and tactics on the part of the cities, neighborhoods, businesses, social groups, and individuals cope with the density and limitations of the urban environment. Overtime, they also reflect the social and cultural norms that emerged from those settings. Focusing on selected urban fabrics of Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo, the chapter examines how such phenomena occur in the streets, arcades, markets, alleyways, buildings, as well as other hybrid and less recognizable spaces and processes in the East Asian cities. Within these spaces and temporal processes is a vocabulary of frugality and practicality, as well as defiance against the hegemony of official discourses and practice of urban planning and design.

Author

• Jeffrey Hou, University of Washington