RIM: Newsletter of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network

Issue 1 | Issue 2 | Issue 3, Spring 2010 | Issue 4 | Issue 5 | Issue 6 | Issue 7
The 7th Conference of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network
Organization is underway for the conference in Awajishima, Japan, hosted by the Awaji Landscape Planning and Horticulture Academy/University of Hyogo, September 11-14, 2010. Registration information to be available in May/June 2010.

 

The Danceable City

  In the past six months, Caroline Chen (PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley) analyzed data collected in 2007 from the field, received the Roslyn Lindheim Award from the School of Public Health to start new research on elderly health and daily patterns of spatial use in Beijing, and contributed a chapter on my dissertation to "Insurgent Public Spaces," edited by Jeff Hou. She is now back in Beijing to continue research on aging yangge dancers who are gathering in Beijing's parks, streets and parking lots in search of health and community in Beijing; to map the daily path and destinations in the city of a small group of aging women who dance yangge and disco; and to hopefully finish writing the dissertation "The Danceable City" by the end of the summer.
 
Citizen Participation in Park Planning and Management
Mayumi Hayashi (Associate Professor Univ. of Hyogo/Awaji Landscape Planning & Horticulture Academy) is conducting research on community design with citizen participation, landscape management, park management, and reconstruction of the city from the Great Hanshin Awaji earthquake in Japan, Landscape Planning with Cultural and historical background. As for teaching activities, she is promoting landscape design and management for physically disabled people, including their use and work places. The other major theme of her work with the students is to evaluate streets in fisherman's village. I am analyzing the quality of narrow streets that have beautiful view of the sea and houses. She is looking forward to having the Pacific Rim conference in September at her school.

 

Insurgent Public Space

 

 Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities is released in UK in April and in the US in May by Routledge (2010). Edited by Jeff Hou, the book is a collection of more than 20 case studies that examine the making of public space outside the regulatory and institutional domain. Ranged from Park(ing) Day in San Francisco and community gardens in Seattle and Los Angeles to dancers under freeways in Beijing, these cases challenge the conventional notion of public and making of space. The book began as a collection of working papers from the 6th Conference of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network in Quanzhou, China. Contributors from the network include Shin Aiba, Caroline Chen, Annie Chiu, Yasuyoshi Hayashi, Isami Kinoshita, Laura Lawson, Sawako Ono, Michael Rios, and Ryoko Sato.
 
Great Places Award
Jeff Hou, Julie Johnson and Laura Lawson won the 2010 Great Places Award from the Environmental Design Research Association and Places: Design Observer for their book Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens. The book was published in association with the University of Washington Press and supported with a grant from the Landscape Architecture Foundation as part of its Land and Community Design Case Study Series.
 
Community Design in Seoul
Sohyun Park (Associate Professor, Dept of Architecture and Graduate Program of Urban Design, Seoul National University) and her remarkable PhD students conducted two major community design projects in Seoul, one in Gwang-jin Gu and the other in Seong-buk Gu, sponsored by the City of Seoul, which slowly shifts its housing policy concepts from total redevelopment to neighborhood regeneration. Meaningful contributions and implications drawn from the two projects include: 1) For the first time, we could test the potentials and the limits of the conventional planning institutions, such as 'District-Unit-Plan' and 'Landscape Agreement', as new tools for community design in Korean neighborhood contexts; 2) We could articulate the ironic natures of the participatory design in Korean planning cultures, such as 'bottom-up processes promoted by top-down orchestration' and 'fragile foundations of community design values against redevelopment myths'.

Other recent researches in Sohyun's Lab include the conservation and management plans for historic villages of Hahoe and Yangdong to be nominated to the UNESCO World Heritage, funded by the Korea Cultural Heritage Administration and a development of evaluating systems for street improvement projects, funded by the Korea Research Foundation. And, researches for more walkable neighborhoods keep continuing.
 
Ecological Urbanism
The urban design work of Perry Pei-Ju Yang (Associate Professor, College of Architecture, Georgia Tech) was recently featured in one of China’s leading architecture journal WA (World Architecture, Tsinghua University) under special issue Ecological Urbanism in January 2010. His new book Ecological Urbanism: Scale, Complexity and Design is to be published by China Architecture and Building Press in 2010 in Beijing. He is co-chairing the organizing committee of UPE9, the 9th Symposium of International Urban Planning and Environment Association, in Guangzhou China in August 2010.
 
Personal Note
T Thao Luong (Lecturer in Hanoi Architecture University) has been an exchange scholar of a Ford Foundation sponsored program in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Hawaii, Manoa, since January 2010. He is also a consultant with the RISO8 Company.
Recent Publications

Ahn, Hyunchan, and Sohyun Park (2009) “Local Governance and Participatory Design Process: A Case Study of Mangwon Bike Path” Journal of Architectural Institute of Korea, Vol. 25, No.8

Chen, Caroline (2010) Dancing in the streets of Beijing: improvised use within the urban system. In Hou, Jeffrey (ed.) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. London: Routledge.

Hayashi, Mayumi (2010) The Creation of Mature Landscape. Soft Science Co. ltd.

Hayashi, Mayumi (2010) A Study for Design for Environment. Asakura Publisher Co. ltd.

Hou, Jeffrey (ed.) (2010) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. London: Routledge.

Namgung, Jihee, and Sohyun Park (2009) “Characteristics of Street Evaluation System: A Preliminary Study on Contents, Formats, and Processes of 8 Evaluation Cases” Journal of Architectural Institute of Korea, Vol. 25, No.11

Park, Sohyun, et al (2009) “Perception of Pedestrian Environment and Satisfaction of Neighborhood Walking: An Impact Study based on Four Residential Neighborhoods in Seoul, Korea” Journal of Architectural Institute of Korea, Vol. 25, No.8

Yang, Perry P. J., Lew S. H. (2009) An Asian model of TOD – the planning integration and institutional tools in Singapore. In Transit-Oriented Development: Making It Happen, edited by Carey Curtis, John Renne, Luca Bertolini, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Yang, Perry P. J. (2009) Questioning urban sustainability: social sufficiency, ecological efficiency and ecosystems compatibility. Journal of Urbanism, November 2009, Vol. 2, Issue 3.

Yang, Perry P. J. (2010) Ecological Urbanism: Five Dimensions in Design, in Special Issue “Ecological Urbanism”, WA (World Architecture), Tsinghua University Press, January 2010

Yang, Perry P. J. (2010) Landscape as Flows: An Ecological Design Approach to Large-scale Urban Landscape, in Special Issue “Ecological Urbanism”, WA (World Architecture), Tsinghua University Press, January 2010