In every issue of topos, personalities from the fields of landscape architecture and urban design express their opinions on relevant topics. In topos 104, Kongjian Yu of the Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture comments on the transformation of Chinatowns and calls for more authenticity:

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For the last few centuries, millions of Chinese people have left their villages in costal rural China, having survived dangerous voyage and hardship to pursue better live abroad. Upon landing on their strange – and in many cases, hostile – new environment, they depend on their original family bond, sticking together in the same neighborhood, which helped them to overcome social and economic difficulties. Searching for better living, they were homesick; and so they created the urban village that depicted their home village back China: a gateway, a commons in front of the village, a tea house, etc.
This became a “Chinatown” – according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “a district of any non-Chinese town, especially a city or seaport, in which the population is predominantly of Chinese origin.” A stereotype image of a Chinatown is a gateway covered with glazed tiles, with a roofed pavilion in red. This image gave the uprooted Chinese comfort, a sense of belonging, hence – an identity. But this image needs to be changed.

(…)

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean: Destroy the heritage of Chinatown. Protection of historical heritage, and creation of new landscapes, are sides of the same coin. What’s wrong with today’s Chinatowns is that they mimic or distort authentic images of a culture and people who have evolved over time.
The newly built Hing Hay Park in Seattle’s International District, and the Boston Chinatown Park, are trials in creating new images for Chinatowns. In both cases, while traditional Chines gateways and structures are well preserved, the contemporary designs accommodate modern use of public space and address the changes in the district.

How the designs of these two chinatowns work, what needs to change and be preserved, you can read in the full article in topos 104.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape (1998), one of the first and largest private architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism practices in China, with a multi-disciplinary design team of over 500 professionals. He is professor and founder of the College of Architecture and Landscape at Peking University.

In topos 104 Rasmus Hjortshøj from the architectural research and photography studio COAST writes about the challenges of the Danish coast – challenges that coastal societies and planners are facing in the present and displays the corresponding images of the “Border” photo project:

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The territories of the Anthropocene are territories defined by their entanglements, where that which is perceived as being natural, is often a construct of mankind and that which clearly is man-made, is always rooted in a natural context.

Denmark is such an Anthropocene territory. A small island nation in the Nordic region with one of the longest coastlines in the world in relation to its land area, and with never more than 50 km to the nearest seaboard from any point in the country. An anthropogenic territory if any, with 62 percent of the land area covered by agriculture, 20 percent by buildup area and arguably in a complete lack of any true wilderness. Here natural formations have been levelled for agriculture and watersheds reclaimed to landmass to form basis for cityscapes. The urban centers and rural communities and the natural areas in between, seem to blend together into an all-encompassing urbanized territory. But in line with the ambiguity of such entangled territories, this is also a territory consisting of landscapes of pristine natural splendor created by powerful natural processes still active today. Although in many ways designed, the Danish territory is first and foremost comprised of fragile ecologies sustaining and merging with the societies that are overlaid.

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Denmark could, at present time, on the one hand be considered a coastal society that culturally and socially is entirely linked to the atmospheres, the dynamics, the ecology and cultural heritage of the coastal territory. But on the other hand also a less dynamic society shaped in such a way, that its existence depends increasingly on the systems that human beings have constructed around themselves, rather than the natural order that, from the outset, formed the foundation for the settlement’s success. We see this dependency in the constant battle against coastal erosion, where the coastal settlements, to an increasing degree, is faced with the challenging questions of when to abandon and when to protect, as well as how this materializes into physical landscapes.

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An example is the west coast of Denmark, where the coastal protection system to a large extent consist of sand deposits on the shore on a yearly basis, that on the one hand keeps the border between land and sea in check, and on the other tries to pertain the image of a beautiful and healthy coastline – often reminiscent to the coastal motifs created in the romantic painting tradition of the 19th century. This challenges not only the nature of borders and how they are perceived and engaged with. It also challenges the nature of the Anthropocene territories, as they can no longer be ascribed solely to the (natural) forces from which they have emerged, but must indeed also be ascribed to the (cultural) desires from which they have been designed.

… The whole text can be found in topos 104.

Rasmus Hjortshøj is a Danish photographer and architect and founder of COAST Studio, based in Copenhagen. He is also a PhD fellow at the Aarhus School of Architecture – where he also carries out his research – and is engaged in architectural design at both building and planning scale alongside his profession as a photographer.

Also visit the Instagram account of Rasmus Hjortshøj and the COAST studio.