10: Messy Urbanism with Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana
““It can change. It can evolve. There are multiple layers of order in this system.””
Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana, Professors of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, discuss the 'mess' that makes the vitality of the contemporary Asian city, and the lessons one might draw form that in thinking about the future of a city like Seattle. Discussion topics include: Event-city, Mekong Railway Market, slum porn, filmic narratives and racial segregation.
Timestamp Outline
0:58 Book: Messy Urbanism: Understanding “Other” Cities of Asia
2:25 Bangkok Maekong express market: “What appears to be messy is actually extremely organized.”
3:43 “Choreography has a temporal dimension that is often lacking in a formally planned urban space. It can change. It can evolve. It adapts to things that are happening and changing from time to time. - There are multiple layers of order in this system.”
5:50 “Filming narrative”: Chungking market in Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express
6:42 Time lapse, collage, filmic narratives and technologies for capturing “other orders” in the urban experience
8:05 Time in architecture: Charles Correa’s temporal street sections of Mumbai, Bernard Tschumi’s concept of Event City; Rahul Mehrotra’s concept of Kinetic City
9:41 The difference between “accidental” events and “choreographed” events, time, agency and attention in the street [parallel conversation about Eastern Islamic city streets in Episode 6]
13:46 “Intense negotiation of space”: what Western cities can learn from Asian cities
14:02 Density in Seattle: DADUs, ADUs, HALA, tent cities
17:58 Blade Runner LA street scene
18:34 Messiness in Lower East Side Manhattan in the 1800s
18:56 Why not Pike Place Market on every street in Seattle?
23:00 Chicago’s White City exhibition: city beautiful (utopia) vs city industrial (reality)
24:28 Central Park and the eviction of Seneca Village and Seattle’s racist property covenants: racial and cultural segregation history in the planned American city
29:29 “Seattle is not inclusive”: actual Seattle messier than in the imagination
30:52 “If Seattle had density of Dakar, we would only use 10% of our land.”
32:11 Romanticizing the Mess (slum porn) vs Cleaning Up the Mess (Colonial Modernism)
35:40 Seattle homelessness, income disparity and big tech money moving into the city: What is an alternate future for Seattle?
37:06 Self-organized rather than top-down alternative living arrangements; 80% of Seattle land zoned for single-family housing = very little choreographed messiness
42:10 Q: How do you semi-choreograph space? A: Start by acknowledging the story of messiness already happening.
44:09 Neighborhoods suing HALA: “Not in my backyard”
44:36 Palimpsest as theory for a city: Layers, looseness, flexibility and a quality of openness to allow for adaptation and resilience
