Stairs as public places in Hong Kong

Posted on 2023-12-01 by Blaž

Our lab has invited Melissa Cate Christ to give a talk about stairs as public places in Hong Kong. This lecture is included in the courses Urbanisation and Social Change in East Asia, and Theory of Urban and Regional Sociology.

Melissa is a doctoral candidate and casual academic at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, and at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She’s also the director of transversestudio, and has previously worked as an assistant professor of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Hong Kong. Melissa holds master in landscape architecture from the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her art and design research and practice explores mechanisms of critical intervention at the juncture of landscape, culture, urbanism, and infrastructure.

The talk ‘Stairs as public places: investigation, collaboration, and celebration along Shung Fung Lane, Hong Kong’ will take place online on Friday, December 8th, 2023 (11:30-13:30). Below is a brief description of her talk.

Due in part to historical street and development patterns, topography, and building restrictions, Hong Kong Island’s urban development and population density is one of the highest in the world. Within this densely populated hilly area, stairs are a crucial typology of vernacular pedestrian infrastructure that sustain Hong Kong as a walkable city with a unique ‘Stair Culture’. Stairs act not only as movement corridors which allow access to areas otherwise inaccessible, but also as vibrant public places with crucial social, cultural, environmental, and heritage value. This talk presents one example of this in the context of Magic Lanes, a placemaking project which was located along Sheung Fung Lane, a set of alley stairs in the Sai Ying Pun neighbourhood in the Central and Western District of Hong Kong Island. This project, which was funded by the HKSAR Urban Renewal Fund and developed by two NGOs, aimed to create places for intergenerational activities and community engagement, and to improve the environment through green and blue infrastructure. The talk reflects on how the project provided challenges and opportunities for investigation, collaboration, and celebration, and the potential role of these places in the creation of a more inclusive and healthier environment in Hong Kong.

Magic Lanes placemaking project along Sheung Fung Lane in Hong Kong (Photo: Magic Lanes Project)

Mapping resilient communities

Posted on 2023-10-19 by Blaž

Blaž will join Alban Mannisi and Zoh Kyung-jin in discussing alternative exploratory strategies in mapping human and non-human communities. Discussion Exploratory Strategy on Alternative Habitat Groundwork will take place in 1 Euro Project/1유로 프로젝트, 서울 성동구 송정 18길 1-1 on Friday, Nov 10th, 2023 (18:00-20:00).

Blaž는 Alban Mannisi, 조경진교수과 함께 인간과 비인간 커뮤니티 매핑에 사용되는 대안-탐색적 전략에 대한 토의에 참여할 예정입니다.

His contribution will explore opportunities of editorial work as exploratory strategy to map resilient communities in Asian and European urban contexts by drawing from his experiences as the co-editor of book Emerging Civic Urbanisms in Asia.

Registration is required to attend the discussion.

Moving day in 서울 옥인아프트 (Photo: Blaž Križnik, 2010)

Community rewilding

Posted on 2023-09-07 by Blaž

Our colleague Jeff Hou will give lecture Community Rewilding: Case Studies of Urban and Rural Commoning. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, September 13, 2023 at 19:00 in the 1 Euro Project in Seongdong-gu, Seoul.

Jeff is professor of Landscape Architecture and director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. Together with Cho Im Sik and Blaž, he edited the book Emerging Civic Urbanisms in Asia: Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei beyond Developmental Urbanization, published last year by Amsterdam University Press.

Registration is required to attend the lecture.

Designing as making sense together

Posted on 2023-07-07 by Blaž

Our school has invited Jae Shin to deliver a lecture on community design as a part of the BK21 HY-GRIP seminar. Her lecture “Designing as Making Sense Together” will take place online on Wednesday, July 19, 2023 (10:00-12:00).

이 강의는 BK21 HY-GRIP Super Seminar의 일환으로 커뮤니티 디자인에 대한 강의를 위해 Jae Shin님을 초빙하였습니다. ‘Designing as Making Sense Together’ 강의가 2023년 7월 19일 10시에 온라인으로 진행될 예정입니다.

Jae holds degrees in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and architecture from Princeton University. Serving as an Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow at the New York City Housing Authority, she facilitated efforts to define and implement design principles for preserving and rehabilitating New York City’s public housing. She is lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and founding partner in HECTOR urban design.

HECTOR practices urban design, planning, and civic arts. Informed by traditions of visionary architecture, popular education, and community organising, they work on landscapes, buildings, development plans, and regulations with complex constituencies and competing priorities. HECTOR’s recent projects include a South Philly neighbourhood park, a youth-centric development plan for a district of 37,000 people on Detroit’s west side, and a memorial for ecofeminist Sister Carol Johnston. The MacArthur Foundation describes HECTOR’s designs as “vivid and witty strategies to help residents exercise power within the public and private processes that shape our cities.”

Reconstruction of Mifflin Square Park in Philadelphia (Photo: HECTOR, 2022)

From ground to design

Posted on 2023-06-10 by Blaž

Our lab has invited Huiying Ng to deliver a lecture on community gardening in Singapore. The lecture is a part of Theory of Urban and Local Culture and Community Development Seminar courses.

우리 연구실은 Huiying Ng 연구원을 초빙해 싱가포르의 커뮤니티 가드닝 가꾸기 대한 강의를 듣고자 합니다. 이 강의는 도시·지역문화론과 커뮤니티개발세미나 수업의 일부로서 기획된 것입니다.

Huiying is a doctoral researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, Germany, and associate faculty at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. She writes, teaches and explores knowledge co-production with approaches from action research and visual methodologies. Huiying is a founding member of the Foodscape Collective and TANAH, and collaborates with soft/WALL/studs. She is also engage in the Soil Regeneration Project, a community-led action research process in Singapore.

Her lecture ‘From ground to design: community gardens as a “time niche” for sustainable agriculture’ will take place online on Friday, June 16th, 2023 (16:00-18:00). Following is the lecture’s summary:

How can people in the city learn to share public spaces with one another—especially edible food spaces? How can urban space be an “active moment” that shocks, surprises or introduces people to different relations with the human and more-than-human world? And how can urban spaces also be “time niches” that scaffold learning, and expand opportunities for care time, to enable socio-technical transitions towards more sustainable futures? This talk looks at two groups’ works in Singapore between 2015-2020: the Foodscape Collective’s work in Singapore from 2015-2020, as it began following community gardens and building a learning network around, and with them, and the community bonding and energy that grew from this activity of learning, researching, writing and sharing about gardens and their fruits. It also looks at TANAH, an urban spatial intervention group, between 2016/2017-2020/2021. Learnings from international groups (Hong Kong, Latin America, Italy, Taiwan) will be discussed.

Making compost on Bukit Gombak community garden in Singapore (Photo: Chingwei Chen)

Marginal communities

Posted on 2023-04-11 by Blaž

Blaž will talk about marginal communities on the international seminar Offshore-Outskirt, On the Other Conviviality. The seminar will take place on Tuesday, April 25th, 2023 at the Research Center for Regional Planning and Urban Design, Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

His contribution Marginal communities: enclosures-to-be, liminalities or pure possibilities? draws on the author’s ongoing comparative study of neighbourhood communities in urban Asia. Their particular historical, socio-cultural, urban, and political contexts make generalisation across the cases and their comparison difficult. However, the study outcome shows that successful neighbourhood community building often builds on the shared experience of marginality.

The author proposes to approach marginal communities as enclosures-to-be, liminalities, and as pure possibilities to better understand the importance of neighbourhood community building for community empowerment and transformative social change. Such an approach may reveal the relevance of marginal communities, located on the urban “outskirts”, for building inclusive, resilient, and convivial “offshore” maritime communities of humans and non-humans, the major focus of this seminar.

Hangang fishermen as an “offshore” community on the “outskirts” of Seoul (Photo: Blaž Križnik, 2023)

Urban regeneration of Taipei’s Treasure Hill

Posted on 2022-11-25 by Blaž

Our lab has invited Dr. Igor Rogelja to deliver a lecture on urban regeneration of Treasure Hill in Taipei. The lecture is a part of Urban Regeneration and Social Sustainability, and Urban and Regional Sociology courses.

우리 연구실은 Igor Rogelja 박사를 초빙해 타이베이 Tressure Hill (寶藏巖)의 도시재생에 대한 강의를 듣고자 합니다. 이 강의는 도시재생과사회적지속가능성과 도시·지역사회학 수업의 일부로서 기획된 것입니다.

Igor is Lecturer in Global Politics at University College London. He was previously based at the Lau China Institute at King’s College London and completed his doctoral studies at SOAS, University of London, with a study on ‘creative city’ interventions in marginal urban spaces in China and Taiwan. He remains interested in the politics of space and is currently involved in several research projects examining the role of infrastructure and materials like coal and steel in global politics.

His lecture ‘Taipei’s ‘Treasure Hill’: from a marginal space to an outdoor museum’ will take place online on Friday, December 9th, 2022 (17:00-19:00). Following is the lecture’s summary:

‘Close to Taipei’s bustling university area, a small hill facing the Xindian River has been home to a small neighbourhood of illegally constructed houses that originally housed former military personnel that were evacuated to Taiwan after the Republic of China lost the civil war against the Communists. Existing on the margins of a developmental city, the small neighbourhood was meant to be demolished, but interventions by activists, the mobilisation of residents and input from experts transformed the once ‘illegal’ settlement into a hybrid social-creative project managed by the city’s cultural affairs bureau.

The transition was however not as smooth as the city’s version of the history suggests. This talk will outline the struggles and negotiations that led to the creation of this outdoor museum. Specifically it will explore why and how more radical visions of cohabitation between artist-activists and elderly veterans were sidelined in favour of a more top-down design that has been (somewhat inaccurately) denounced as ‘gentrification’ by Taiwan’s critical audience. The experience of Treasure Hill, while in some ways unique to Taipei, nevertheless presents a compelling case study that points at the limits of ‘creative redevelopment’ of marginal urban spaces.’

Treasure Hill in Taipei (Photo: Igor Rogelja)

Talking about community design…

Posted on 2022-11-11 by Blaž

Forum season is about to begin. This year, it seems to be all about community design.

Blaž will talk about civic urbanisms, community design and sustainable neighbourhoods and cities on the Jeju Universal Design Forum on Monday, November 14th, 2022 and Urban Design Forum in Seoul on Friday, December 16th, 2022. He will also join the International Forum of the Institute for Urban Humanities at the University of Seoul as discussant on Wednesday, November 16th, 2022.

블라쉬는 2022년 11월 14일 월요일 제주국제유니버설디자인엑스포과 2022년 12월 16일 금요일 서울에서 열리는 더나은도시디자인포럼에서 시민적 어바니즘, 지역 사회 디자인 및 지속 가능한 이웃과 도시에 대해 이야기 할 것이다. 2022년 11월 16일 수요일 서울대학교에서 열리는 도시인문학포럼-국제포럼에 토론자로 참여한다.

Lots of talking to do… 😛

Community design in Singapore

Posted on 2022-06-27 by Blaž

Our lab has invited Larry Yeung to deliver a lecture on community design in Singapore as a part of the BK21 HY-GRIP Super Seminar.

우리 연구실은 Larry Young 초빙해 공동체와 도시 커먼즈에 대한 강의를 듣고자 합니다. 이 강의는 BK21 HY-GRIP Super Seminar의 일환으로 커뮤니티 디자인에 대한 강의를 위해 Larry Yeung님을 초빙하였습니다. ‘사람을 위한 것이아닌 사람과 함께하는 디자인: 싱가포르의 커뮤니티 디자인’ 강의가 2022년 8월 3일 16시에 온라인으로 진행될 예정입니다.

Larry is a designer and community organiser from Singapore. He is currently the Executive Director of Participate in Design (P!D), a non-profit design organisation that helps neighbourhoods and public institutions design community-owned spaces and solutions. He has also been recognised as a World Cities Summit Young Leader in 2021, honouring him as one of the change-makers shaping the global urban agenda, as well as a recipient of the BCA-CPG Industrial scholarship and the URA Urban Design prize in 2014. Long ago, Larry has also spent a semester at the Hanyang University as an exchange student of architecture.

His lecture ‘Designing with people and not just for people: community design in Singapore‘ will take place online on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 16:00.

Neighbourhood Pop Up Ideas Market at Tampines North, Singapore (Courtesy of P!D)

Community, commoning and urban commons

Posted on 2022-04-15 by Blaž

Our lab has invited Dr. Didi Kyoung-ae Han to deliver a lecture on community and urban commons. The lecture is a part of Theory of Urban and Local Culture, and Community Development Seminar courses.

우리 연구실은 한경애 박사를 초빙해 공동체와 도시 커먼즈에 대한 강의를 듣고자 합니다. 이 강의는 도시지역문화론과 커뮤니티개발세미나 수업의 일부로서 기획된 것입니다

Didi holds a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Asian Urban Society at the Seoul National University. She is also a member of several civil society organisations in Korea and Japan, and lecturer at the Kyung Hee University in Seoul.

Her lecture ‘Community, Commoning and Urban Commons: Theories and Practices‘ will take place on Monday, May 30, 2022, at the Graduate School of Urban Studies.

Sustainable Localities Lab

지속 가능한 지역사회 연구실

Category Archives: Lecture