Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

After the catastrophic events that hit Japan, and particularly in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, a large scale debate about the sustainability of our energetic, economic and even civilizational model is badly needed. Such a huge task which is before us, and which calls for a general rethinking of our ecological approaches and aspirations, could perhaps start from some spatial and environmental insights that Japanese thought itself has transmitted to us.

The collection of short essays reviewed here provides an excellent introduction to the work of the French geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque (born in 1942), who has devoted most of his life to an exploration of Japanese thought and culture, with particular reference to its peculiar spatial and environmental attitudes. Not much of Berque’s oeuvre is available to English readers, yet his major theoretical works (Berque 2000a, 2000b) can be said to engage a dialogue with Japanese philosophical tradition in order to develop reflections that are more widely applicable to the contemporary world, rather than a merely philological reconstruction of certain sources – an intellectual project that somehow recalls what François Jullien has done with Chinese thought.

[CC image credit: Traditional houses in Ogimachi by Guillaume Brialon]

In a larger work that appeared nearly at the same time as the collection on milieu and human identity, Berque (2010) has explored the notion of the ‘ideal habitat’ and has questioned the contemporary transformation and sustainability of that ideal. In these shorter essays, written during the last ten years, the focus is rather on the notions of landscape, milieu, common heritage and identity. Starting from the acknowledgement that western modernity has produced a grave disequilibrium in the relation between the human species and the world – as landscape devastation, waste of natural resources and the many aberrations in the design of the urban built environment testify – the author advances a distinction between a western conception of landscape, pivoted around the subject, and an eastern conception, which instead focuses on the predicate–the latter logic being best represented by Nishida Kitarô’s basho no ronri, or logic of place, a text from 1966.

On the one hand, the author observes, an analysis of the Chinese Zong Bing’s (375-443) classic treaty on landscape painting (Shan Shui) shows a rising awareness of the spiritual dimensions of landscape many centuries before the western notion we employ was conceived during the Italian Renaissance period; on the other hand, in Japanese haiku poetry not only is the subject implicit, but there are verbal forms without a veritable subject. This latter fact should not be taken as a sign of abstraction of space from place; quite the contrary, Japanese sensibility remains extremely grounded in the ‘emplaced’ presences that ‘people a place’. For one of the most important Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century, Watsuji Tetsurô (who was born in 1889, the same year as Heidegger and Wittgenstein), the crucial notion of fûdo, or human milieu, can be found. To stress the fact that, contrary to a superficial impression, Watsuji’s notion does not entail a deterministic approach (i.e., the idea that the climate determines the mores and ethos of a people), Berque proposes to translate fûdo as médiance, meaning something that simultaneously mediates and is in the middle of the relation between a society and its environment. To be true, Berque also rejects the notion of environment as too objectivist, and prefers to speak of milieu, a concept which inherently entails a point of view from within on such a relationship.

The major argument running through the various essays of the book is that it is all the more urgent today to retrieve our perception of the horizon that surrounds us in order to give meaning to the scale of our actions. From this perspective, Berque speaks of ecoumène to address the phenomenon of the birth of a plurality of life-worlds through progressive unfolding and development of milieus. Hence, if the médiance is an always local and ‘emplaced’ relation between humans and their milieu, a reciprocal ‘absorption’ between a place and its inhabitants, the ecoumène is the human relation to the geographic extension of the planet at large. The ecoumène can be contrasted to the ‘cyborg landscape’, which the author criticises as landscape based on a mechanistic view which determines a detachment (débrayage) of people from their household (foyer), their horizon, and ultimately from the earth. Some further important insights ‘for a surpassing of modernity’ might also come from a comparative examination of the notion of heritage (patrimoine) in the East and in the West: in this respect, the author reflects, the traditional Japanese approach might help us to escape from the false alternative between mummification versus demolition of landscape which has characterised the Western approach to common heritage.

Perhaps Berque’s approach remains in many senses stuck to certain overall dichotomies, which might ultimately undermine his arguments. However, as suggested at the outset, a serious discussion on the human ecological relationship to the environment is so necessary today that all contributions attempting to open new perspectives – for instance, as in this case, through cross-cultural analysis of spatial concepts – should be greeted as most welcome.

References
Berque, Augustin (2000a) Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2000b) Médiance. De milieux en paysages. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2010) Histoire de l’habitat idéal. De l’Orient vers l’Occident. Paris: Félin.

More information about Augustin Berque
Augustin Berque, Directeur d’études, EHESS
Augustin Berque – Wikipédia
Ecoumene

[image credit: Christoph Gielen]

China’s Instant Cities

“This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed. The construction sites, surrounded by concrete walls, are almost impossible to enter without a guide who knows how to get past suspicious guards. But once inside, it’s like entering a science fiction novel. Even in the middle of the night, bulldozers, cement trucks, and workers swarm the sites as muscular cranes hoist cargo to ever-greater heights. Bamboo scaffolding and mesh encase the partially built residential high-rises, giving them the appearance of gargantuan cocoons. Entire neighborhoods arise within months of groundbreaking…”

“Now available for purchase or free download, Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim’s 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it’s put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something ‘we see too often, and then forget to see’ to full, vivid visibility. The result is a book that provokes its readers to see the city around them with new eyes — whether that city is Tokyo, or their own.”

In addition to 64 beautiful photographic plates and an interesting essay by Do Projects and real-life partner Adam Greenfield, I was honoured to contribute the book’s foreword.

“Perversely enough, after spending some time with Nurri’s Tokyo Blues, I came to see the blue plastic tarp as the symbolic, and maybe even something of the actual, presence of nature in a city and a culture in which that quality is impossible…”

- Adam Greenfield, “Blueshifted”

Tokyo Blues has been published under a Creative Commons license as a free pdf download, but I encourage those taken by things spatial and cultural to get their hands on one of the signed (and very affordable) limited edition books.

Congratulations Nurri & Do Projects!

In person, Rushdie is relaxed, wittier and far better read than one would expect. He is funny, almost like a comic who can’t help himself but make jokes that push the limits just past the conventional mores of his audience by saying publicly what might be thought privately. His ability to sustain conversations on history and ethics is also a surprise. I have just time to put up some of his comments on mobilities, frontiers, movement, cities, space and culture, based on my brief notes.

Home:

‘Many of us now come from many places… Its ok to feel at home in different places.’

‘Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!’

[Home is where there are] ‘Echos of home which you never have anywhere elses…’

Travel

To the question about what are the most difficult frontiers in a person’s life, regarding a quote from one of his books that humans are ‘frontier crossing’ people:

‘The most difficult…most important frontier…my father asked if I wanted to go to boarding school in England. My decision when I was 12…’

And later: ‘In ‘Ground Beneath our Feet’ [the argument is made that]…There are two great dreams: the dream of home and of leaving…the direction of away, our imaginings, what excites us is that, …the outcast. … What if Odysseus had stayed home… the journey of the person who departs is absolutely at the heart of our dreams…’

Religion

‘Despite the storehouse of powerful narratives which religions are …[there is, we live in a] Twilight of the gods. A time comes when we have to take on for ourselves our responsibility for our fate…this is a kind of growing up… found in both Nordid and Greek mythologies.’

The last time the Gods appear… intervene in the affairs of man… is the wedding of Cadmus the inventor of the alphabet and the nymph Harmonia – the union of writing and peace.’

Later, Rushdie contrasts the foundations of contemporary European and American political cultures: ‘the Western European idea of freedomn is freedom from religion, not to be declared ‘anathema’ by the church. In the United States liberty is freedom to have religion…. the main preoccupation of the First Amendment.’

Islam:

‘It is important to understand that Islam has never created a free society…’

‘In an open society, people constantly questions their first foundations on which they are based and disagrees on them. [Thus] it shifts and those disagreements shift. …. Societies that don’t allow you to question the fundamental principals on which they are based are not free.’

‘Literalists who insist [that religion is based on] the actual word of god… Once can’t be quesitoned other things atrophy. …Questions are considered to be blasphemy.  A stultifying atmosphere results.’

 And later, recommending the book of David Eggers What is the What: ‘as for the question of ethics, I don’t want to be told by some priest how to live… it is the Mystery’

Freedom

‘An open society requires the ability to quesiton. If you can’t ask difficult questions, quesitons people don’t want asked… you can’t grow.’

‘If you look at the cites of the Muslim world in the 50s and 60s… very different from today… Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East… Cairo. If have witnessed their backsliding into a bog of narrow mindedness during my lifetime… in part a self-inflicted wound.’

‘Who would you rather be, a heretic, apostate or a blasphemer?’

The Global: East and West

‘Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to understand that this [American continents] was a new thing, it was not India. It was very very big and another big ocean was on the other side… [The 1400s are] a world in which one can see our world at the moment of its birth. [The natives of the New World had a very different sense of time, which didn't invovle progress].. The time included the collision of two different existential ideas of how one lived … either …in a sense of eternity or in a Western European sy in dynamic linear time.’

‘What united these worlds [the Mughal and Florentine Courts] was a belief in magic, even more than god. If you gell in love…you went and got a love potion to make the other person love you back. …[It was a time of the] use of sexual charms. …how to manuals.’

‘The division of East and West is a retro notion which is broken down inside me. Bombay was built in India as an English city on Indian soil. [There is no ancient] Bombay… Old bombay was a fishing village.’

Rushdie’s hilarious comments on American politics and the election of Obama can be found in the broadcast version of this interview.

Salman Rushdi was in Edmonton to launch the inaugural Festival of Ideas and as part of the University of Alberta Centenary. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel at a full house in the Winspear Centre. Their conversation will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s ‘Writers and Company‘.

- Rob

The Chinese Dream Neville Mars, Adrian Hornsby, and Saskia Vendel (project management) 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2008 .  704pp+79pp magazine.  ISBN 97864506529 [Amazon.ca]

The Chinese Dream surveys scenarios of possible Chinese urban development over the dozen years to 2020. Using graphics and text, the book explores the urban implications of current plans, population migration and the consumerist aspirations of Chinese society. The title is reminiscent of Victor Quinaz‘ 2004 award-winning  film of the same name about a dishwasher in China who longs for the glamour of New York.  The format is the image-rich architecture book, in the style of Koolhas and Mau’s S M L XL. The architects’ approach to books is as a built object, not an extended argument, nor a visual communication design. While it is innovative in its provision of endnotes and authorities in the form of urls, free layout of blocks of text, mixing of Chinese characters and roman text, and in its provison of visual glossaries of urban design ideas, as a whole it hard to read as a linear narrative.   Take a look .  An ironic magazine from 2020 is even bound into the closing sections of book to explain the culture that the authors expect to emerge. 17 chapters consider changing urban design and architecture in China, including the imported idea of ‘creative neighbourhoods’, green suburbs, and new retail and consumer environments.

The book contributes to, but otherwise sits outside of the academic literature on framented urban form and suburbanization. A scale from actual to dream bleeds off the lower right corner of the pages grounding each of 17 chapter-scenarios. Mapping these regional development trents onto urban and rural China, the book presents a stark picture of the implications of the hyper-urban development of China. Shanghai with its central highrise Pudong district, is one well known form in which China’s cities are developing. However, at a broader scale of whole cities and urban regions, this book shows the significance of Chinese growing cities. Where one sees most often the idea of 400 one-million population cities, the book argues that China is headed in the direction of a single Northeastern megalopolis of 400 million.

What if you built the whole mass of Western Europe in 20 years? What if 400 Million Farmers then moved in? What if it happened between now and 2020?What woudl it look like? How whould it work?…. Would there be jobs? Would it be dense? Green? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else?

If one accepts the premise that China is a society under construction, this book attempts to map aspirations and dreams into urban landscapes. While the book attempts to alert all to the challenges and risks of a future megalopolitan China, it glosses the human rights history of China’s development to date as ‘the most successful humanitarian project ever to have taken place’, and in a non sequitur, advances economic evidence to support this claim (these are very different categories). However it does provide critical nuance elsewhere such as the details of the lack of popular benefit from current growth.  This is a symptom of the global neglect of critical and cultural discipline to architects’ and urbanists’ education. Reflecting the small business status of the architect and developer, economics is privileged, politics gets in the way, while culture is reduced to the history of architecture with scant attention to beliefs, social interaction, ritual and memory, or to issues such as cross-cultural communication. Hence there are few countertendencies to the ability of authoritarian planners to resculpt entire cities whenever thought necessary.  Other art and architectural reviewers also mention this but lack the critical insight to see that this is a pivotal issue.  In general my impression is that ‘desire’ is rendered as consumeristic in this text, but the harder to quantify desire for community seems not to figure in any way. Surely Chinese citizens are not so one-dimensional? In short, there are many more aspects of the emotional repertoire which guarantee that Chinese society will evolve less deterministically than this books suggests.

Super Brand Mall, Pudong, Shanghai.  Photo: Rob Shields

While the creators conclude by offering an offshore website www.BURB.tv ’seeded’ with ideas from the book but welcoming communal contributions within its pre-set information architecture.  My sense is that rather than computer-mediated expression, sociology can predict that authorities will not be able to forestall such large masses in high density cities will repeat the political awakening (although not necessarily the outcomes) of nineteenth century British industrial cities, as documented by Simmel, Weber and Engels.

Shanghai neighbourhood.  Photo: Rob Shields

At the same time, from where I sit in the wheat, potash and oil rich northern Canadian prairie, I read this book as a warning. It surmises that as wealth increases and families demand more commodious apartments, the per capita footprint of Chinese cities expands. Laid out on page after page of maps and graphs, it presents a design to preserve arable land by creating more compact city forms that will still be able to accommodate the projected 930 million Chinese living in cities by 2030. To paraphrase, this means:

1 new Beijing every year for 35 years… = 2 X the total built volume of China… driven by population growth… rural-to-urban migration… China becomes an urban society.

…Movement into the cities is mostly temporary ‘Leaving the Land not the Village’ (1980s slogan). Rollover migration leads to sprawl clusters and city form becomes scattered and discontinuous.

…There is a specific region in the East where this development is in all forms taking place…PUC People’s Urbanity of China: 96% of China’s population…GDP…migration flows…arable land. Area 3,302,997 Km sq. Population 2004: 1.263 Billion, urban population 2004: 530 million, density 2005: 382 persons/km sq. Population 2020: 1.488 Billion, urban population 2020: 893 million, density 2020: 451 persons/km sq.

About one third the size of the USA, only India will be comparable in its population density. This will put extreme pressure on arable land, requiring China to outsource much of its food supply, with enormous impacts on global markets and the global ecology. This urban-region, stretching from Beijing in the north to Shanghai in the south. Zhangzhou in the west and the eastern coast, will define the future of China itself. An S-shaped metropolis stretching across the region is proposed to preserve at least some land near in Qingdao and Zhangzhou.

Reviewed by Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Canada.

- Rob

As you travel east from Danshui along the number 2 highway that runs along the north coast of Taiwan, you come to the small town of Sanzhi. Just before arriving in Sanzhi, there’s an interesting site hugging the shoreline … Accounts vary on the origins of this complex, and indeed, as to whether it was meant to be a hotel development or a housing development. Apparently, it was constructed in the 1960s and included/was to include a dam to protect it against sea surges, floors and stairs made of marble and a small amusement park. The site was commissioned by the government and local firms and there is no named architect.

Local papers at the time reported that there were numerous accidents during construction which caused the death of some workers. As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture. When I was there, I met 4 young university students who were passing by and stopped for a look. They didn’t want to get to close to the buildings for fear that the ghosts would take them. They told me there was ‘heavy evil’ in the buildings.

– Craig Ferguson

Photos by yusheng & cypherone.

- Anne

Mobile tech researcher Younghee Jung describes the extraordinary interaction design of Japanese love hotels:

The entrances of love hotels are characteristically discreet. It is impossible to see the inside of the lobby from outside. There are many entrances to the building. Once in the lobby, you see the big board with pictures of all rooms. The pictures with backlight on indicate that the rooms are available now. Any good love hotel would minimize or eliminate the need of human contact completely in the check-in/out process. This board with backlights usually spit out the room key when you press the button. This also marks your check-in time. There is a reception window but no one is visible behind it except a pair of hands.

A few rooms are equipped with an outdoor or a very large bath tub at the same room rate. But reservations are impossible at the love hoel so those rooms function as an effective lure for return customers fishing for better luck.

When you go up to the room, the flashing light on top of the room door once again indicates that it is an empty room to be checked-in. The door is lockable only from inside. There is basically no key to the door – i.e., guests are not expected to come out of the room during their ‘rest’ or ‘stay’. There are no common facilities outside the room such gym, restaurant, or lounge area, anyway.

See also: Fantasy Love Hotels, Soaplands and Love Hotels, Love Hotels book

- Anne

But perhaps more interesting than a city that plans to combine elements of Sydney, Venice, Paris, New York, and London is one that plans to put ubiquitous technology at the centre of its space and culture:

Creating an “ubiquitous city,” or “U-City,” in which all major information systems (residential, medical, business, etc.) share data; computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings; and the technology and facilities infrastructures are integrated would be a gargantuan challenge for an existing city. In the case of Songdo, it’s the easy part. Since Songdo is a completely new city, it serves as a blank canvas on which to freely imagine and implement a technology vision without having to incorporate existing buildings or legacy networks. Songdo also has the advantage of being located in a nation that boasts an extraordinary level of technological acumen, the highest penetration and variety of broadband services, and a population that is likely the most computer literate – and demanding – on Earth. What is more difficult is planning for the emergence of a “U-Culture” that is energizing and enabling, that results in applications both serendipitous and unpredictable, and where citizens will decide for themselves what kind of digital life they want… (Songdo U-Life)

What we have there is a scenario that may well result in the world’s largest living RFID laboratory. As Anthony Townsend puts in it Korea’s High-Tech Utopia, Where Everything Is Observed, “There are really no comparable comprehensive frameworks for ubiquitous computing. U-city is a uniquely Korean idea … Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea. There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.” Such an experimental situation will also inevitably involve failures, and in the same article BJ Fogg cautions “they should be prepared for the frailties of human nature to emerge.”

If this is the case for ubiquitous technology, then perhaps it is even more so in the realm of “u-life,” which is alternately described as a convenient life, a peaceful life and a safe life. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an example of where everyday life is so thoroughly integrated with technological infrastructures, but it seems to me that the experiment at hand is hardly limited to technology. Beyond different cultural expectations of privacy I can’t help but wonder about the broader social–and human–costs.

- Anne