The Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific

Kapila Silva, Kapila Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429943072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

The Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific sheds light onto the balancing act of urban heritage management, focusing specifically on the Asia-Pacific regions in which this challenge is imminent and in need of effective solutions. Urban heritage, while being threatened amid myriad forces of global and ecological change, provides a vital social, cultural, and economic asset for regeneration and sustenance of liveability of inhabited urban areas worldwide.

This six-part volume takes a critical look at the concept of Historic Urban Landscapes, the approach that UNESCO promotes to achieve holistic management of urban heritage, through the lens of issues, prospects, and experiences of urban regeneration of the selected geo-cultural context. It further discusses the difficult task that heritage managers encounter in conceptualizing, mapping, curating, and sustaining the plurality, poetics, and politics of urban heritage of the regions in question. The connective thesis that weaves the chapters in this volume together reinforces for readers that the management of urban heritage considers cities as dynamic entities, palimpsests of historical memories, collages of social diversity, territories of contested identities, and sites for sustainable liveability. Throughout this edited collection, chapters argue for recognizing the totality of the eco-cultural urban fabric, embracing change, building social cohesion, and initiating strategic socio-economic progress in the conservation of Historic Urban Landscapes.

Containing thirty-seven contributions written by leading regional experts, and illustrated with over 200 black and white images and tables, this volume provides a much-needed resource on Historic Urban Landscapes for students, scholars, and researchers.

PART I

Conceptualizing Historic Urban Landscapes

1

CITIES

Palimpsests of cultural memory and their management

William Logan

Introduction

Penelope Lively’s novel City of the Mind (1992) opens with her protagonist driving through London on his daily trek from home to work. He sees the building mix of columns, pediments and porticos, and stucco, concrete and brick walls. When he gets out of the car, he hears the city’s people speaking in tongues and eating a diversity of cuisines—pizza, kebab, tandoori. The city is exciting, a dazzle of sensual stimuli, apparently chaotic. How to understand the complexity of the city? Of course, architectural fashions and immigration patterns lie beneath much of the mix. But much of his city is in his head—memories of what he has been told in the past about the city as well as personal memories attached to parts of the city in which he has lived, worked and played. ‘And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to another’ (p. 2). The city is a memory bank, a ‘jigsaw of time and reference’ (p. 4), ‘a chronicle, in brick and stone, in silent eloquence, for those who have eyes and ears’ (p. 3).

A townscape is a physical manifestation of the cultural, economic and political environment in which it developed. Few cities were created in a single time period and cultural layering is the normal condition. There are rare exceptions, of course, such as Noto, Italy, an old city destroyed in 1693 by an earthquake and rebuilt in Sicilian baroque. Some newly planned towns in the Asia-Pacific region also defy the normal rule, like Canberra in the early twentieth-century and Petaling Jaya built in the 1950s alongside older Kuala Lumpur. Colonial summer resorts on hilltops at Murree, Pakistan and Sapa, Vietnam, and settlements in newly conquered areas, like Israel’s Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim in the Occupied West Bank, also fit the single period of creation category, as do new suburban districts of old cities such as Tsukuba Science City built from the 1960s on the outskirts of Tokyo. Most of these places, however, now have more modern structures alongside the original so that, although created as a unity in a particular period, they have since started to undergo the cultural layering process. Examples are Bandung and Dalat, once planned to be the new capitals of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina respectively, where the early twentieth-century Art Deco architecture is now surrounded by more modern structures.

In the majority of cities where growth has been more organic, the layering has a longer history and is more complex and intricate, with recent buildings erected within the historic cities cheek-by-jowl with traditional indigenous and imported colonial structures. If we were talking about an archaeological site, a deep trench could be excavated that would allow the layers to be observed. In the case of the city, this can sometimes occur when a new building is being constructed and where local legislation requires an archaeological dig to be undertaken before foundations are laid. Usually, however, we observe only the top layer, although very often buildings from earlier layers still survive at the city surface. Because of this, cities have been likened to mediaeval palimpsests—parchments that have been cleaned and re-used but in which some of the earlier writing is still seen. Writing surfaces were relatively scarce at that time and they had to be re-used. Despite washing or scraping the parchments and vellums, the cleaning process was incomplete and traces of the earlier text kept coming to the surface. So, too, old cities had to be constantly re-used and historic structures continue to appear among the new. Cities then combine different elements from different times and cultures, juxtaposed to create today’s urban landscape.

Using case studies drawn from contrasting cultures in the Asia-Pacific region, this chapter shows how cycles of creation, demolition, modification and/or replacement make up the cultural layering processes through which today’s urban palimpsests have been created. Many theoretical and practical questions arise. Are the cultural layering and the palimpsest character of cities important, other than to historians and heritage specialists? Are city residents and visitors really as aware as Penelope Lively’s protagonist of the old among the new, or has the mix simply been normalized as their commonplace living environment? The palimpsest nature of layered cities is recognized by city administrations world-wide but their urban planning and heritage conservation responses vary considerably from low-priority concern to the protection of only the most significant individual buildings (a ‘gems approach’) and to the more inclusive protection of precincts and the full range of historic buildings within them (a ‘landscape approach’). To understand the diversity of planning responses, it is necessary to explore the politics of heritage that underlies the attribution of significance to some places but not to others. Relevant here is the state’s use of heritage for nation-building and other ideological purposes and as the basis of lucrative tourism industries.

Six case studies are drawn from the two countries I know best—Vietnam and Australia. Vietnam in mainland Southeast Asia is a socialist country that has survived two wars of independence to become one of the world’s most rapidly developing countries. It is keen to improve standards of living but has an acute awareness of and pride in its cultural traditions. Australia is a developed, capitalist country with a predominantly Europe-derived way of life superimposed on an indigenous culture and increasingly modified in recent years by immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. From the case studies, the chapter draws out and explores a number of key issues. These include considering what happens or what should happen to old structures if the uses for which they were constructed no longer exist. Should they be demolished despite their historic interest or aesthetic value? Do heritage controls impose an unreasonable burden on property owners and limit the opportunity for new generations to create their own, new heritage? Who makes, or should make, decisions about what to keep and what to let pass into history?

Development of the urban palimpsest concept

While the use of the urban palimpsest notion has flourished in the last 20 years in the social sciences, particularly in the United States, it is not entirely new. Ivan Mitin (2010) points out that a number of geographers were propounding very similar concepts in the early to mid-nineteenth century, such as Carl Sauer on cultural landscapes and Derwent Whittlesey on ‘sequent occupance’. Mitin notes, too, that the first geographer to refer specifically to a cultural landscape as a palimpsest was Donald Meinig (1979: 6). Meinig also extended the notion from the physical to the psychological, exploring the way in which human interpretations and representations create the cultural landscape—or rather the ‘multivocal cultural landscape’ since it is ‘read’ by different individuals and groups in different ways. Richard Schein (1997: 660) found in his American suburban research that people viewed landscape essentially as ‘reflective and symbolic of individual activity and cultural ideals.’ This emphasis on the palimpsest as ‘an endless number of coexisting semiological systems’ can make the concept too passive, Mitin (2010) argues, since during the process of constant re-interpretation new senses of a place emerge and new layers of the palimpsest are formed, all of which serves to highlight the dynamic nature of cities in which the palimpsest is never fixed for long.

Marshall et al. (2017) push the intangible aspect of city life further, pointing out that use of the term ‘palimpsest’ as a metaphor for describing the city includes both ‘the physical urban form as well as memories and experiences of everyday urban life’ (p. 1163). It is this focus on memory that characterizes the work of cultural critic, Andreas Huyssen, who has perhaps been the writer most responsible for popularizing the ‘trope of the palimpsest’ (2003: 7). His book, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, analyses the relationship between traumatic events, history, forgetting, selective memory, memorialization and the generation of works of art. He focuses on three cities—Berlin, Buenos Aires and New York—showing how their palimpsests have unfolded over time. In some ways this is not particularly new: historians and historical geographers have long been writing about the cultural layering and cultural memory in individual cities without using the term. Alan Balfour, for instance, studied the political history of Berlin through a detailed analysis of Potsdamer Platz and Leipzig Platz and their ‘layers of living residue’, pointing particularly to the way the ‘ideals, myths and fictions of a culture [were] seen through the reflections of architecture, architects, and artists’ (1990: 11). Although focused on the city’s phenomenal twentieth-century growth, historian Howard Spodek (2011) nevertheless reveals much about the cultural layers of Ahmedabad, India. My own ‘biography’ of Hanoi, Vietnam (Logan 2000) shows how that city’s cultural layering is the basis of its special character.

Case studies: city palimpsests and their management

Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, has a culturally layered history stretching back more than a millennium and is now a major metropolis of around 8 million people. The value of the palimpsest notion to cities—to understanding their historical evolution and their current day heritage significance—quickly became clear to me when I first went there on a UNESCO mission in January 1990. On the basis of a confusion of Vietnam War media images in my head, I had expected to find a city heavily destroyed by American bombs. I found instead a city almost unscathed by that war, although badly damaged in the earlier struggle against the French in the 1940s. It was a quiet city, bicycles everywhere and barely a motor vehicle in sight, quite unlike the Hanoi of today with its surfeit of visual and aural stimuli. This was just as well because there was enough visual confusion, I initially thought, in the mix of building types and architectural styles.

As mentioned in my Hanoi book (Logan 2000: 7–8), one of my first appointments was at the Australian embassy in Ly Thuong Kiet Street in what is commonly referred to as the ‘French Quarter’. This is an area laid out by the French colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century with broad tree-lined boulevards and stuccoed villas and administrative buildings in a French provincial style. The embassy itself was of this style, a handsome building that still serves as the ambassador’s residence today (Figure 1.1a). But within a short block or two of the embassy were other significant buildings of totally different form and style such as the important and colourful Buddhist Quan Su Pagoda (Figure 1.1b) and the modernist Soviet-Vietnamese Friendship Cultural Palace (Figure 1.1c). It was only by recognizing that these disparate buildings were survivors of distinct cultural layers created at different stages in Hanoi’s history that sense could be made of the cultural landscape. What I was seeing was not just a jumble of built forms and styles but a palimpsest reflecting the past with an underlying logic based on a layering process in which foreign powers imposed their own cultural values over those of the indigenous Vietnamese.

Figure 1.1 Hanoi’s ‘French Quarter’, early 1990s: (a) Australian embassy; (b) Quan Su Pagoda; (c) Soviet-Vietnamese Friendship Cultural Palace.

Source: William Logan

Much of this influence was directly applied; that is, the foreign powers controlling Hanoi politically wanted to demonstrate their command by ordering the construction of buildings in their own architectural styles. But much was indirect, where Vietnam’s rulers sought to emulate the foreign powers to which they owed allegiance or where foreign belief systems, such as Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism or Roman Catholicism, had been absorbed into Vietnamese life. Thus, the Thang Long-Hanoi Citadel emulated Chinese citadels, while temples and pagodas reflected their Chinese counterparts and churches were built with pointed spires in Neo-Gothic style. Under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which controlled northern Vietnam after 1955, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, that has run the reunified country since 1975, Hanoi acquired another, socialist layer. Today’s palimpsest includes many urban design and architectural elements that were either fraternal gifts from other socialist countries or were the result of Vietnamese planners, architects and engineers having been educated in those countries. These socialist constructions include the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Museum designed by the USSR, the Thang Loi Hotel built by Cuba, and the Hai Ba Trung and Kim Lien housing estates (for further discussion see Logan 2000: Chapter 6; Schwenkel 2014).

Hanoi’s palimpsest is changing dramatically and a new layer of medium-rise commercial buildings and high-rise apartments threatens to obliterate earlier layers. Urban planning is still locked into the master plan approach inherited from the French and reinforced by the Soviets. The latest master plan was approved in 2011 and district level planning was in place by the end of 2015 (Vietnamnet 2017). This kind of planning is too inflexible to cope well with the city’s booming population and urban growth. While there is an increasing community consultation element, this is usually after plans are drafted, and there is no attempt to engage the public in preliminary determination of its vision for the city and its component parts. Houses can be built without official approval, providing they meet minimum construction standards (Guardian 2014). Bringing the planning system under control has been difficult and even a prime ministerial order to reduce population density in the central city by capping new development projects and limiting building height is apparently being ignored (Vietnamnet 2017). High land values provide a strong incentive to demolish low-rise structures, including the colonial villas, and to rebuild. Officially the Hanoi People’s Committee has declared that colonial buildings should be demolished only if they are uninhabitable. According to the report on Hanoi in The Guardian’s 2014 city series, however, most are built on foundations of bamboo rammed ...