Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization 9789048544011

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Asian Alleyways

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interests are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organization of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Asian Cities The Asian Cities Series explores urban cultures, societies and developments from the ancient to the contemporary city, from West Asia and the Near East to East Asia and the Pacific. The series focuses on three avenues of inquiry: evolving and competing ideas of the city across time and space; urban residents and their interactions in the production, shaping and contestation of the city; and urban challenges of the future as they relate to human well-being, the environment, heritage and public life.

Series Editor

Paul Rabé, Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) at International Institute for Asian Studies, the Netherlands

Editorial Board Henco Bekkering, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; Charles Goldblum, University of Paris 8, France; Xiaoxi Hui, Beijing University of Technology, China; Stephen Lau, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Rita Padawangi, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore; R. Parthasarathy, Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Gujarat, India; Neha Sami, Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, India

Asian Alleyways An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization

Edited by Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai

Amsterdam University Press

Publications Asian Cities 15

Cover illustration: An ordinary morning in an alleyway of Bình Thạnh district in Ho Chi Minh City Photograph by Marie Gibert-Flutre Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 960 4 978 90 4854 401 1 (pdf) e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789463729604 nur 740 © Marie Gibert-Flutre & Heide Imai / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

13

Asian alleyways

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An urban vernacular in times of globalization Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai

Asian alleyways fading in the shadow of towers Asian cities upside down: Turning the theoretical approach to global cities on its head Asian alleyways: A cross-cultural approach An urban vernacular in times of globalization: Common ground and core issues Alleyways as liminal spaces and time reservoirs Alleyways as appropriated and multifunctional spaces Alleyways as contested and political spaces Reconsidering the versatility of the alleyway in times of globalization: What does the future hold for Asian alleyways? 1 Between ‘network’ and ‘territory’

Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways as challenged liminal spaces Marie Gibert-Flutre

15 18 19 25 26 27 28 29 33

Introduction 33 Understanding the alleyway at the interface of ‘network’ and ‘territory’ 34 The case of two alley way neighbourhoods in District 3 of Ho Chi Minh City 36 Research methodology 37 Alleyways: Standing on the threshold of the metropolis 38 At the crossroads of planned and spontaneous historical development39 The alleyway as a multifunctional urban object 40 Alleyways in times of metropolization: Towards a disrupted balance of network and territory? 44 New challenges 44 ‘Civilizing’, ‘modernizing’, and widening alleyways 46 Metropolitan Vietnamese alleyways: Towards a hybrid model 49 The new urban practices of the emerging middle class 49 When the riveraineté strikes back in the alleyways 51 Conclusion 52

2 Street-corner society and everyday politics in the Beijing hutong 57 Ethnographic perspectives Judith Audin

Street-corner politics in Beijing: Political control, everyday creativity, and social change in hutong alleyways 57 The politics of placemaking: Local appropriations and social differentiation in the hutong 63 Three imbricated spaces (house/yard/lane) producing a sense of place 63 Living through spatial proximity and social distance 68 The politics of interactions: Temporalities and spatialities of hutong use 71 State control and subaltern forms of resistance 74 Biopolitical Beijing: Sanitizing, reshaping, and civilizing the alleyways74 Resisting through inhabiting? Neighbourhood attachment and the pingfang-loufang opposition 78 Marginalization of the ‘collective’ and exit from the hutong 80 Conclusion 82 3 Alleyways between urban renewal, cultural innovation, and social integration The cases of Tokyo and Seoul Heide Imai

Introduction The alleyways in Tokyo and Seoul: A realistic revival of the ­alleyway? The case of the roji in contemporary Tokyo The case of Tsukuda and Tsukishima, Tokyo The case of the golmok in contemporary Seoul The case of Insadong and Ikseondong, Seoul, Korea Urban narratives of everyday life in Tokyo Urban narratives of everyday life in Seoul Discussion The case of Tokyo The case of Seoul Conclusion

87 87 88 89 90 93 95 98 103 108 108 109 109

4 The transformation of ‘urban ordinaries’ into creative places

115

Introduction Creative places formed from a bottom-up approach Spontaneous creative places in Asian contexts Chapter outline and research methodology Transformation processes of ordinary neighbourhoods in the cultural quarter of Bangkok Modernization and urbanization State-led urban regeneration, tourism, grassroots conservation efforts, and creative city policies Gentrification of the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area Narratives of local residents and shop owners Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery Passport Bookshop Dialogue Coffee and Gallery Kope Hya Tai Kee, at Phanfa Head in the Cloud Conclusion Acknowledgements

115 116 117 118

A case study of Bangkok’s alleyway neighbourhoods Wimonrart Issarathumnoon

5 Shanghai lilong

From everyday life to conceived space Jiayu Ding and Xiaohua Zhong

119 120 122 124 127 127 129 130 131 133 134 136 139

Introduction 139 Lilong: Narrative of the Shanghai alley 142 Arrival of migrants in the modernization of Shanghai (1900s1950s)142 Cramped units and equalized everyday life in the industrialization of Shanghai (1960s-1990s) 144 Imagined built heritage in a market economy and the globalization of Shanghai (post-2000) 145 Locating Tianzifang in the Shanghai lilong 146 Spontaneous creativity: Transforming the abandoned factories into galleries 148 Communal entrepreneurship: Transforming residences into stores148 Legitimizing space: Off icial rezoning and governmental management149

Discussion 150 Conflicts within conceived space: Cultural asset or ‘hot land’ for real estate?150 Conflicts within lived space: Home to live in or rental income? 151 Conflicts among conceived and lived space: Top-down regulation or self-governance? 153 Conclusion 154 Acknowledgements 156 6 From conflicts to commoning

Alleyways as sites for social innovations in Taipei Jeffrey Hou

Growing up in the alleyway Alleyways as urban commons in East Asia Alleyways in evolution in East Asia Changing alleyways in Taipei From conflicts to commoning: Shida Night Market and the Gufeng neighbourhood Xiaobaiwu as a social and spatial experiment Branching out through the alleyways Alleyways as space of commoning and innovations: Lessons and implications Acknowledgements 7 Magic Lanes

A placemaking approach for laneway spaces in Hong Kong Melissa Cate Christ and Hendrik Tieben

Introduction The lack of open space in Hong Kong’s high-density urban areas Placemaking, the right to the city, and the lack of citizen power The role of placemaking and asset-based community d­ evelopment Existing open space conditions and issues Conditions and potentials of Hong Kong’s alley, laneway, and terrace open space network History of alleys and lanes in Hong Kong Use, significance, and types of alleys and lanes in Hong Kong Magic Lanes, a pilot project for Hong Kong’s lane spaces From Magic Carpet to Magic Lanes Funding the Magic Lanes project

159 159 161 162 164 166 168 171 174 176 181 181 183 184 185 186 189 190 193 196 197 198

Project aims Process of the project Conclusion Acknowledgements

198 200 203 205

The future of Asian alleyways

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Towards integrated and diverse alleyways Heide Imai and Marie Gibert-Flutre

The cycle of the alleyway Common shared place or alternative landscape of reminiscence? The alleyway as marginal place The alleyway as everyday place Realities and possibilities of public places: A more sensitive urban design approach? Recognizing the role of marginal places Outlook

213 213 214 215 216 217 218

List of contributors

221

Index

223

List of figures and tables Figures 20 Figure 0.1 Map of Asia 35 Figure 1.1 The alleyway as a metropolitan liminal space Figure 1.2 Location map of Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City 37 Figure 1.3 Bàn Cờ alleyway and its bustling market in Ward 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City 41 Figure 1.4 The production of comfit (mứt) in the alleyways of District 3 in Ward 1 of Ho Chi Minh City 43 Figure 1.5 A sign rewarding the neighbourhood as part of the ‘cultural neighbourhood’ campaign, in Ward 3 of District 3 48 61 Figure 2.1 Map of Shichahai area in 2019 Figure 2.2 No more courtyard in Shichahai 64 Figure 2.3 Hanging the laundry outside is a common practice in Shichahai66

Project aims Process of the project Conclusion Acknowledgements

198 200 203 205

The future of Asian alleyways

211

Towards integrated and diverse alleyways Heide Imai and Marie Gibert-Flutre

The cycle of the alleyway Common shared place or alternative landscape of reminiscence? The alleyway as marginal place The alleyway as everyday place Realities and possibilities of public places: A more sensitive urban design approach? Recognizing the role of marginal places Outlook

213 213 214 215 216 217 218

List of contributors

221

Index

223

List of figures and tables Figures 20 Figure 0.1 Map of Asia 35 Figure 1.1 The alleyway as a metropolitan liminal space Figure 1.2 Location map of Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City 37 Figure 1.3 Bàn Cờ alleyway and its bustling market in Ward 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City 41 Figure 1.4 The production of comfit (mứt) in the alleyways of District 3 in Ward 1 of Ho Chi Minh City 43 Figure 1.5 A sign rewarding the neighbourhood as part of the ‘cultural neighbourhood’ campaign, in Ward 3 of District 3 48 61 Figure 2.1 Map of Shichahai area in 2019 Figure 2.2 No more courtyard in Shichahai 64 Figure 2.3 Hanging the laundry outside is a common practice in Shichahai66

Figure 2.4 Lao Beijing residents install chairs and tables to play chess, go, cards or mah-jong in Shichahai 72 Figure 2.5 Resisting with Spring Festival poems (chunlian, 春聯) in Shichahai; left ‘Those who implement the law don’t guard the law’; top ‘New spring’; right ‘Those who know the law don’t respect the law’ 76 91 Figure 3.1 Map of Tsukishima-Tsukuda, Tokyo Figure 3.2 Contested urban landscape in Tsukuda and Tsuk92 ishima, Tokyo 94 Figure 3.3 Contested urban landscape in Seoul 96 Figure 3.4 Map of Insadong and Ikseondong, Seoul 99 Figure 3.5 Alleyways in Tsukuda and Tsukishima, Tokyo 104 Figure 3.6 Alleyways in Ikseondong and Insadong, Seoul 121 Figure 4.1 Map of Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom in Bangkok Figure 4.2 Map of the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area showing the 126 variety of its cultural and creative sites Figure 4.3 Left Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery, a refurbished restaurant serving Thai cuisine in an intentionally nostalgic atmosphere; right Passport Bookshop, a pioneering bookshop and retailer of lifestyle goods, which also 130 hosts a co-working space and cultural activities Figure 4.4 Left Dialogue Coffee and Gallery, a well-known meeting place for educated youth, artists, and international tourists; right Kope Hya Tai Kee, at Phanfa, a cafe that blends reminiscence of the past with a celebration of modern lifestyles, presented as a Bangkokian sapa kafe132 Figure 4.5 Head in the Cloud, a mixed-use venue that serves young people interested in arts and cultural activities 134 in Bangkok’s Old Town Figure 5.1 The layout of a shikumen lilong143 147 Figure 5.2 Map of Tianzifang 147 Figure 5.3 Interior view of Tianzifang Figure 5.4 Overview of lilong houses in Chunyangli. The two rows of lilong houses in the front have been renovated. The houses in the rear row will be renovated soon. 153 Figure 6.1 Shida Night Market became a site of neighbourhood 161 conflicts in 2011 Figure 6.2 Map of the Shida Night Market and Gufeng neighbourhood. 1. White Hut; 2. Mango Herb Garden; 3. ‘BlackGold Plaza’; 4. Skyline Alley 167

Figure 6.3 Xiaobaiwu occupies a corner of an alleyway intersection, providing it with a prominent location to engage users170 Figure 6.4 The vacant space was transformed into an active makerspace and community hub with excellent visibility from the adjacent alleyways and street 168 Figure 6.5 Mango Herb Garden – an unused dormitory facing an alleyway was transformed into a welcoming garden and community space 170 Figure 6.6 Yishientian (一線天) Passageway – greening of a back alleyway with an irrigation system that can be controlled remotely via a mobile app 171 Figure 7.1 Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong 180 Figure 7.2 Third Street Playground, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2018 185 Figure 7.3 Public space in private development – Wang In Fong East Lane, Hong Kong, 2018 187 Figure 7.4 Typical Hong Kong alley, Sai Ying Pun, 2019 189 Figure 7.5 Sheung Fung Lane steps, City of Victoria, Department of Public Works, 1897 190 Figure 7.6 Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Yin Pun, Hong Kong, 2018 193 Figure 7.7 Toi Tei Kung Shrine, Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2018 197 Figure 7.8 Mid-Autumn Festival in Sheung Fung Lane, 2017 199 Tables Table 0.1 The diversity of Asian alleyways24 Table 5.1 Proportion of leased houses in Tianzifang, 2004-2013149

Acknowledgements We are grateful to all the contributors of this collective volume for their precious cooperation throughout the editing process. This work benefited from the logistical assistance and financial support of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) and University College London (UCL). This publication also benefited from the generous funding of the East Asian Studies Department (UFR LCAO) of the University of Paris, which allowed for a high-quality language editing of the manuscript. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and suggestions which sharpened individual chapters and the volume overall. Any errors remain our own. Within the International Institute of Asian Studies, our gratitude goes to Paul Rabé in his capacity as Asian Cities Series editor for his encouragement and his cogent comments on this volume, Paul van der Velde, the IIAS Publications Officer, and Mary Lynn van Dijk, our careful and very reactive Assistant Publications Officer, and all the people at AUP involved in the project, such as Saskia Gieling, the Commissioning Editor, and Jaap Wagenaar, the Production Editor.



Asian alleyways An urban vernacular in times of globalization Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai I hear the roaring and honking of cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes, the ringing of temple bells, shouting street traders selling their food. Perhaps I cannot read their signs, yet once getting lost in the maze of little street stalls lining up along the alleyway, I am totally submerged in this dense microcosmos. Turning right into a narrower alleyway, I encounter deteriorating structures, signs of poverty, and ordinary people working hard to make a living. A parked motor vehicle is blocking my way. I step into an obscure fluid gathering in little potholes and, trying to step aside, I almost crash into an old man sitting on the doorstep in front of his shophouse. Standing right beside him, I smell a heady odour: sweet garlic and a light dash of smoky tea, mixing with the aroma of fried oil coming from a small street stall. Behind a small counter, a tiny lady is wrapping some freshly fried rice cake in an old sheet of newspaper, handing the package over to a small girl who runs off as fast as she came. Trying to follow her, I trip over a stray cat lying beneath the stall. Immediately some kids surround me, edging me aside to check on the cat but not me. […] Observing the scene for some minutes, I realize that I’m sitting on the ground of this narrow alleyway, now not only dirty and sweaty but feeling the real pulse beat, the everyday life streaming through the veins of this city.

Asian alleyways fading in the shadow of towers Although a ubiquitous feature of cities in East Asia, alleyways remain often nameless places. These labyrinths, which function like inward spaces with their casual language, improvisation, and marginal uses, differ markedly from the more foreseeable main streets and boulevards that are designed with emphasis on order, control, and tidiness, according to the criteria of modern planning.

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_intro

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An alleyway 1 is ‘a narrow lane or path for pedestrians’, as defined by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2006), but its morphological characteristics and width may differ from one urban context to another. Etymologically, the word ‘alley’ comes from the French allée (‘a way to go’), which came to be used in the Anglo-American and German contexts. The related terms ‘blind alley’ (cul-de-sac), ‘back alley’, and ‘back street’ have negative connotations of illegal dealings or crime, dating back to their use in the eighteenth century. An alleyway is commonly found in an urbanized area, behind or branching off from main or side streets, or located behind or in between built structures, forming a shortcut, side-track, or dead-end. As alleyways are narrow and not always paved, it is often difficult to discern whether they are public or private property. This semi-public, semi-private character allows informal or even illegal uses of alleyways, which can result in their image as dark and dangerous places where a person might be attacked. Lacking an apparent order, alleyways follow an underlying hidden logic that makes these awry spaces difficult to capture. Moreover, in the current metropolitan transformations in East Asia, alleyways tend to hide more and more literally in the shadows of towers. It is often unclear to whom they belong, as they can be situated in between two premises, or used by different people for different purposes. Thus, they can be defined as ‘intermediate zones’ (Kurokawa 2006) or ‘liminal places’ (Jones 2007), being in the theoretical and spatial sense a place situated ‘in-between’ (Entrikin 1990). They can also be defined as hidden. Not having the spatial definition of streets or the importance of prominent landmarks, they are difficult to indicate as ‘specific places’ (Lynch 1960). As many voids and scars in the metropolitan matrix, they are spatially unstable and dependent on the existence of other places and boundaries for definition, a characteristic indicating the liminality of a place (McIntosh 2005). Alleyways also tend to fall into ‘the folds of the maps’ (Lancret 2001, 86), being often under-represented on official city maps, where they figure as many blank spaces. They remain out of the focus of the contemporary approach to urban planning, falling into disrepair and disappearing from the urban landscape (Martin 2001). As such, they might be referred to as the ‘interstices of global urbanism’ (McCann, Roy, and Ward 2013, 585). The lack of consideration and value attached to ancient neighbourhoods in many cities of Asia has led them to often be radically transformed by urban redevelopments, while their residents have been or are being displaced. With 1 In this volume, the terms ‘alleyway’ and ‘alley’ are used interchangeably to avoid a monotonous usage of language, if not stated otherwise.

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these massive changes, much of the local vernacular – such as communal life experiences and knowledge of the city – are being wiped out forever. Alleyway neighbourhoods are at substantial risk of fading into history, as global mega-projects with vast footprints, master plans, and large-scale privatization are killing much of the urban tissue of smaller urban spaces. Pursuing the ‘art of being global’ (Roy and Ong 2011), cities in Asia fall more and more within what can be called an ‘urbanism of projects’ (Goldblum 2015, 374), which leads to a rupture with their historical, organic urban growth. In that context, urban figures are given priority over urban texture. As noted by Renee Chow (2015, 4), ‘while the pieces of cities are occasionally spectacular, the parts do not add up to anything larger nor do they contribute to the extended setting’. The urbanism of projects also acknowledges the primacy of a ‘super urban network’ over local urban territories, opening the way for a ‘splintering urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin 2001). Once low rise and organic, cities in Asia have engaged in a verticalization process from a functionalist perspective, especially in new urbanized areas flourishing at their edge. These steady transformations affect social cohesion and lead to recompositions of the historical forms and structures of alleyway neighbourhoods (Gibert 2018b). These preliminary observations were the basis for the first international conference dedicated to ‘Lanes and Neighborhoods in Contemporary Cities in Asia’, at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) in Singapore in July 2016.2 This event found an urgent need for a humanistically informed approach to studying urban Asia, stressing the importance of a more localized, historically and culturally contextualized knowledge. Many aspects of urban experience – including those of history, heritage, urban populations, ways of life, and livelihoods – are indeed defined and shaped at the neighbourhood level. Yet, much of it remains overlooked by policymakers and many urban studies academics: the story of Asian cities remains largely recounted by dominant actors in urban redevelopment (i.e., central governments and real estate developers). After this conference, the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) founded the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) to stimulate alternative ways to read Asian urban environments and to disentangle a less-known city, a situated ‘urbanity’ that is currently under 2 This international conference was organized by Marie Gibert-Flutre and Mike Douglass and jointly funded by ari at the National University of Singapore, the International Institute of Asian Studies (iias), and the University College of London (ucl). It brought together 30 scholars around the concept and social meanings of one of the smallest social spheres of the city, the neighbourhood.

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threat. The publication of this book owes much to the efforts and findings of these two pioneering scientific events in addressing this urgent issue.

Asian cities upside down: Turning the theoretical approach to global cities on its head Our book reframes Asian alleyways in the context of globalization, at the interface of large-scale restructuring processes and micro-scale processes. It critically explores ‘global Asia’ and the metropolization process specifically from its alleyways, which are understood as ordinary neighbourhood landscapes providing the setting for everyday urban life and place-based identities being shaped by varied everyday practices, collective experiences, and forces. This turns the traditional approach to ‘global cities’ upside down and contributes to a renewed conception of metropolization as a highly situated process, where forces at play locally, in each alleyway neighbourhood, are both intertwined and labile. Beyond the mainstream, standardizing vision of the metropolization process, our book offers a nuanced overview of urban production in Asia at a time of great changes. Theoretically, our aim is to question the everyday nature of the urbanization process, from the specific perspective of cities in Asia, which are historically characterized by the ‘smallness’ of their plot division and the richness of alleyway appropriations, both leading to a specific sense of local territoriality (Gibert 2018a; Hou and Chalana 2016; Imai 2010, 2017). This focus allows for an original, multilayered portrait of contemporary urbanization in Asia beyond its spectacular aspects, providing multiple and alternative narratives of urban changes. It makes it possible to understand how vernacular places are transformed and helps us to renegotiate the function of different public spaces in cities. The American architect Michael Martin (2001, 79) stated: The character of alleyscapes transcends mere utility as they evolve over many years as odological environments of much richness, diversity and meaning because of their peculiarly intimate and highly variable relationship to the handful of dwellings inhabiting just one block. […] [T] he back-alley may have considerable importance as an interconnective social landscape.

In an earlier study, Martin (1996) argued that the qualities of an alley – ‘utility’, ‘hiddenness’, and ‘revealiness’ – draw people to make use of alleys and

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develop a hybrid approach to urban design that can incorporate the physical, social, and cultural values of the city. He also discussed the importance of other qualities of an alley, such as human scale, distinctive character, everyday usability, and cultural value (Martin 1996). The urban potential of alleyway neighbourhoods is at least threefold. First, despite their invisibility, alleyways remain the backdrop of the Asian city: their network guarantees the connectivity of most urban tissues in the region. Thus, they constitute the fine grain of the urban fabric. Second, an alleyway-based geography of the city provides an acknowledgement of diversity, in which marginalized populations are able to assert their agency in city-making (Sassen 2015). Third, as blind spots and relatively hidden spaces, alleyways offer the possibility of innovative ‘loosening spaces’ (Franck and Stevens 2007) and potential creative transgressions. Indeed, alleyways often work as places where regulations are less likely to be enforced. In this context, we conceptualize the alleyway as an ‘ordinary landscape’ shaped by different fields, actors, and users, framing it as a contested urban form (Groth 1997). They provide a good sample for assessing physical, corporeal, and social relations in the processes of micro-scale placemaking. The urban alleyway can be seen as a locus of historical and cultural knowledge regarding the personal encounters between people’s spatial routine of walking in and experiencing a small, enclosed urban place (Demerath and Levinger 2003). They are also the material expression of broader social struggles and the locus for generating, proclaiming, and negotiating different cultural subjects as aspects of contemporary urban life in Asia. Studying alleyways thus contributes to an alternative epistemology of the city (Boudreault-Fournier, Wees, and Radice 2017).

Asian alleyways: A cross-cultural approach Despite sharing common morphological settings and fostering a vivid social and cultural life, Asian alleyways are diverse, in terms of their historical development, as well as their architectural and social organization. They are versatile, particular places that vary in their typology and the extent of their usability, comfort, quality, size, scale, and form. For instance, the planned development of the Beijing and Shanghai alleyways in China (called hutong (胡同) and lilong (里弄), respectively) contrasts greatly with the self-production logic of the alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The housing conception of the developers of Shanghai’s lilong districts also contrasts with individual initiatives in the production, and perpetual

Map by Zdenka Havlova

Figure 0.1 Map of Asia

20  Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai

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transformation, of Bangkok’s trok (ตรอก) neighbourhoods. The square courtyard houses surrounded by walls in a Beijing hutong produce a very different urban atmosphere from the shophouses that are aligned and open out onto the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. This calls first for a historicization of this urban form, grounded in the historical development of each city in which they were produced. Alleyway neighbourhoods – especially when they were informally produced – often lack a formal history, which fully contributes to their marginalization. Moreover, alleyways are also the main component of most informal settlements, which are still prominent in many cities across the region, providing another type of Asian alleyways on its own. In this volume, the alleyways we introduce in our case studies are indeed located in areas that may or may not be fully formal. However, by not focusing exclusively on informal settlement alleyways, our aim is to reflect on the complexity and diversity of Asian alleyways as on their circulation as an urban model transnationally. In Beijing, the old alleyways offer a glimpse into the rich culture and long history of the city. Hutong alleyways are formed by a row of siheyuan (四合院), a complex of houses built around a common courtyard, and originates from the word hottog for ‘well’ (in reference to communities of inhabitants historically grouped around a common well). Most hutongs were established under the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), followed by many variations based on their founding model, particularly under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Historical records show that a normal street was 36 metres wide, a small street was 18 metres wide, and a narrow street was a 9-metre-wide lane or alley called a hutong. In reality, however, a hutong can range from a few centimetres to a few metres wide. They take all kind of forms and shapes, often resulting in maze-like neighbourhoods that fulfil all kinds of social functions: as a hideaway, a safe everyday environment for the elderly and children, and a place for microeconomic activities. There are still thousands of hutongs to be found in Beijing, but similar to the lilongs in Shanghai and the golmoks (골목) in Korea, they are under threat, and local communities have become aware of the need to protect some of them, even if it is in many cases already too late, as they have often been turned from everyday life spaces into commercialized and commodified spaces (Yantai and Wang 1997). Conversely, unlike the hutongs in Beijing, the lilongs in Shanghai do not correspond in any way to an ancient heritage with geomantic foundations and layouts. They date back to the era of foreign concessions (1842-1943) and were planned and designed in connection with the commercial vocation of the city. The lilongs were constructed within a city block and

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are a combination of the Western row house and the traditional Chinese courtyard house. Since the 1840s, these standardized neighbourhoods became the home of many migrants who moved to the city. Many thousands of lilongs were built, which offered both communal life and possibilities to socialize in front of domestic and more private space (Li 2014). Alongside the two-storey lilong called shikumen (石库门), many other typologies appeared; most do not exist anymore and are only recorded in historical documents, showing the richness of this housing and alley type, especially between the 1920s and 1940s, when new typologies such as the garden lilong emerged (Bracken 2013). The lilongs were home to many different members of society, including unskilled workers, small merchants, politicians, and a few foreigners, artists, and anarchists. By the 1940s, lilongs made up 60 per cent of the urban fabric of the city. After the Second World War, the city fell into economic recession, and many people preferred to move into modern, Soviet-inspired housing blocks. Yet, some lilongs survived the Cultural Revolution and urban transformation processes and now exist side by side with Shanghai’s rising skyscrapers, attracting people from all walks of life (Arkaraprasertkul 2016; Zhao 2004). Two historical models of alleyways also exist in Vietnam: in Hanoi, where alleyways are mostly the result of the spatial structures of traditional urban villages, wider alleyways are based on the traditional pattern of pathways alongside rice fields or large ponds, and smaller alleyways developed during more recent densification processes. In recent years, many alleyways have been paved, numbered, named, and enlarged to make them safer and able to deal with more newcomers who have moved into the neighbourhood. The mechanisms of alleyway development, together with the citywide phenomenon of illegal encroachments by house constructions, explain the extremely narrow width of the alleys today (Gibert and Son Pham Thai 2016). In Hanoi, 90 per cent of the alleyways are less than 4 metres wide. In Ho Chi Minh City, the urbanization process differed from the thousand-year-old city of Hanoi: the urban structure is based on the juxtaposition of different composite urban fabrics. Beyond the planned production of the historical city centre, the very dense network of alleyways – locally known as hẻm – was born out of the city dwellers’ pragmatism during uncertain times: urban growth took place following a spontaneous and linear logic, first guided by the main trading axes, and later by a process of densification behind them. The ubiquity of the alleyways in Ho Chi Minh City’s urban structure has led to the development of a sense of local territoriality and a vibrant social life, with a complex intersection between economic life, private family life, and collective social life. However, Vietnamese alleyways are also more and

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more at risk of losing their social meaning as mediators between public and private functions and as everyday space that facilitates micro-scale social, economic, and political interactions (Gibert 2014; 2018a). In Thailand, the Bangkok delta site explains that an extensive network of canals formed the city’s main transport network until the Second World War. Until then, only the Royal Palace and the Chinese merchant districts were served by small land streets and tree-lined passages, known as trok, the first form of alleyway in Bangkok (Cohen 1985). Major roads (thanon) were built in the late 1940s, but they only formed a loose and incomplete grid, leaving many parcels and lands apart. This makes Bangkok an interesting comparison with Ho Chi Minh City. Bangkok also fosters a super-block structure and countless residential alleyways and cul-de-sacs of private initiative, locally known as soi (ซอย), which serve the many parcels away from any access to main roads (Charmes 1998). The trok and soi are considered an extension of the private – often half-brick, half-wooden – houses along them. In Taipei, most historical alleyways (shang-nong, 巷弄) were initially primary streets dating from the early days of the city’s development. Their narrowness and gateways were meant to protect against potential invaders. In the early twentieth century, during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945), many of these primary streets became secondary roads or alleyways, as a regular street grid was implemented in the city. Alleyways became a widespread feature during the colonial era, in neighbourhoods located beyond the historical city core. Once lined with single-storey, Japanese-style residences, these neighbourhoods now feature four- to six-storey apartment buildings with entrances facing the alleys. Alleyways (roji, 路地) in cities in Japan were often of mixed use and typically part of the smallest neighbourhood unit, the chō. This neighbourhood unit first appeared during the development of Heian-kyō, contemporary Kyoto, as Kyoto was divided into rectangular blocks following a Chinese grid pattern. The block structure was based on a 120 × 120 metre grid, the foundations of which are still visible today despite several modifications over the centuries. In the sixteenth century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (the feudal lord who completed the unification of Japan) issued a law that resulted in the division of the block into a 60 × 120 metre grid and the increasing urbanization of the inner block structure (Nitschke 2003). Both the housing units fronting the street and the street space formed the neighbourhood unit, also known as ryōgawachō (両側長), which was accessed via a side street (yokochō, 横丁) and often ended in the form of blind alleys ( fukurokōji, 袋小路). The side streets and alleyways were the central meeting and

An urban structure based on the juxtaposition of different composite urban fabrics: mostly spontaneous development, with very few planned alleyway neighbourhoods Many resulted from private initiatives, as organic forms based on old waterways and walkways; trok networks are generally used for more intimate/ communal purposes than the soi, which tend to be slightly larger and more accessible by cars

From the era of foreign concessions (1842-1943)

Mostly during the 20th century

Trok: many date back to the late 18th century but have been transformed through modernization and urbanization Soi: mostly after the Second World War

Most historical alleyways were initially primary streets dating from the early days of the city; they later became a widespread feature during the colonial era (1895-1945)

Lilong (里弄)

Hẻm

Trok (ตรอก) and soi (ซอย)

Shang-nong (巷弄)

Roji (路地)

Golmok (골목)

Shanghai

Ho Chi Minh City

Bangkok

Taipei

Tokyo

Seoul

Especially before Korea’s large-scale urban modernization, they were the everyday space in different Korean cities

Date back to 16th-century Kyoto, with more intense use as a central place of everyday life and social interaction in the neighbourhood during the late Edo, Meiji, and Taisho periods (1820s-1920s)

Initially were planned urban forms but then took all kinds of forms and shapes, often resulting in maze-like neighbourhoods

Mostly from the 13th and 14th centuries, followed by many variations, particularly during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644)

Hutong (胡同)

Beijing

Most common is the hanok (한옥), the traditional Korean house, designed and built in the 14th century during the Joseon dynasty

Most common typologies are the machiya (町屋, wooden townhouse, owned by merchants) and nagaya (長屋 row or long houses, rented by workers)

Mainly unplanned, most commonly appeared inside the block or behind the main or side streets, as a place for collective activities around small shrines, local shops, and bathhouses Appeared inside the block or behind the main or side streets, as a place for collective activities around small shrines, local shops, and bathhouses

Once lined with single-storey, Japanese-style residences but now feature four- to six-storey apartment buildings with entrances facing the alleys

Often half-brick, half-wooden houses along alleyways

Aligned and open on the street, shophouses, locally called ‘tube houses’

Constructed within a city block: a combination of the Western row house and the traditional Chinese courtyard house

Siheyuan (四合院): complex of houses built around a common courtyard

Building typology

During the colonial era, many initial streets became secondary roads or alleyways

Initially were planned and standardized neighbourhoods, but many other typologies appeared later

Modes of production

Local name for History alleyways

City

Table 0.1 The diversity of Asian alleyways

24  Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai

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gathering place of the local community, now at the centre of the neighbourhood unit (Salastie 2001, 133). Although the spatial organization of Edo-Tokyo was based on the grid or jōbō system, after which Kyoto or Nara were divided, the result was different (Tanaka 2015). Hidenobu Jinnai (1995, 121) has argued that this might be because of the complex topography of the area on which Edo castle was constructed, characterized by the hilly Yamanote areas in the west and shitamachi (下町) districts in the lower areas. In particular, in the shitamachi districts, commoners lived in the dense neighbourhood units along narrow alleyways interacting very closely with each other, and ‘it was in such micro-spaces in which a certain degree of self-government took shape’ (Jinnai 1995, 125; Sensui and Manui 2014). In cities in Korea, most alleyways (golmoks) are framed by residential buildings, traditionally, single-storey housing. In general, different types of alleyways can be distinguished, especially those connecting two side streets through which people can walk or take a shortcut and those that are dead-ends (Suh 2015). Historically not found in many cultures, including China, the dead-end alleyway was developed as the typical approach to independent houses, which was the predominant dwelling in cities in Korea during its early urbanization phase (Han 2013, 60). Yet, Kim (2012) introduced the work of urban planner K.-C. Lee (especially from the 1990s), who analysed the urban transformation and changes in the dense, historical neighbourhoods in Seoul, including the history of urban alleyways. Lee’s research identified different types of streets, alleyways, and access lanes to residential buildings, explaining the influence of planning regulations on these urban forms (cited in Kim 2012, 155-157). Beyond their different historical trajectories, Asian alleyways face common issues in times of globalization. In presenting an ethnographic study of the current transformations of different urban alleyways in cities in Asia, our book aims to engage in an original cross-cultural dialogue.

An urban vernacular in times of globalization: Common ground and core issues Our collective book sets out to develop a multidisciplinary body of knowledge on cities in Asia by focusing on the culturally and historically grounded methodological framework of the alleyway. Beyond common research axes, the different chapters are cohesive with their shared methodology, based on grounded, long-term research and in-depth fieldwork. They discuss recently

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collected data covering all fields of urban studies, utilizing for the analysis a multidimensional, multisited, and multivocal perspective. Our goal is to combine ethnographic data with theoretical findings to reconceptualize marginalized alleyways and their potential to ameliorate the adverse effects of metropolization. Each chapter is based on a different case study across East Asian cites. Our results are grounded in local experiences garnered through collaboration and dialogue between nine researchers, from Asia and other parts of the world. We do not aim to provide a holistic perspective but to offer vivid snapshots and in-depth portraits of cities, their ordinary places and people inhabiting them. This volume provides insights into the everyday life of different neighbourhoods and their alleyways, which will be used to paint a bigger picture of the spatial and social transformation of cities in Asia, especially highlighting the rising interest in, and importance of, vernacular places understood as alternative and creative niches enabling the emergence of different lifestyles, hybrid cultures, and commodities. The chapters are generally organized from social and political research to spatial theory. Alleyways as liminal spaces and time reservoirs In this book, we understand the alleyway as an ordinary landscape providing the setting for everyday urban life and place-based identities being shaped by varied everyday practices, collective experiences, and forces. The alleyway marks the intersection between public and private forms of use and habitation, which can allow us to understand the sociospatial, personal, and cultural dimensions of urban realities (Carmona et al. 2003). As liminal spaces, we argue that alleyways offer the potential to become the vehicle of different intellectual, artistic, cultural, economic, and political discourses. As such, they provide multiple narratives of change (Imai 2015; Jones 2007; McIntosh 2005; Mukherji 2011; Williams 2007). In her chapter on Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways, Marie Gibert-Flutre draws on the conception of the alleyway at the interface of ‘network’ and ‘territory’ functions (Lévy 1997): as a network, alleyways connect together different neighbourhoods, but, as a local territory, they also foster a vibrant urban life and are highly appropriated by the inhabitants. Alleyways are not only part of a bigger network, but also places of countless small businesses and activities. Thus, alleyways are ‘in-between’ spaces, at the interface of domestic and public life. They are also places where people come to experience their first sense of belonging to a growing metropolis and often work as ‘launch pads’ from which to explore the city as a whole.

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In her chapter on alleyways in Tokyo and Seoul, Heide Imai envisions alleyways as ‘boundary spaces’ between past and present and as a precious reservoir of time, offering ‘alternative landscapes of reminiscence’. Alleyways are places of memory and ‘palimpsests’ in the city, where ancient architectural settings and social practices regain visibility if we observe them carefully (Imai 2013). This feature is an indicator of their iterative modes of production and adaptation through time. It raises the question of the contemporary value given to this urban heritage across Asian cities today. The various trajectories of destruction/valorization through heritage policy or commodification that characterize alleyways in modern cities are described and analysed in the chapters by Heide Imai (Tokyo and Seoul) and Wimonrart Issarathumnoon (Bangkok). ‘Creative districts’ policies have indeed led to privileged sites of development in Asian alleyways, with mitigated results. In these urban revitalization programmes, alleyways are often reduced to an empty pastiche of a mystified past, serving mainly consumption purposes. Personal narratives presented in both chapters show that local inhabitants and small entrepreneurs apprehend these recent changes differently. Despite threats of different natures, alleyways are places of continued evolution, renewal, and increasingly, revival. Alleyways as appropriated and multifunctional spaces Alleyways are places where people can interact with each other on a daily basis without having to overcome spatial boundaries or hierarchies. The intimate scale, realm, and atmosphere of the alleyway allows all owners to take part in the creation, shaping, and maintenance of a common space as people relate to familiar objects and details such as pot plants, cobblestone pavements, or crafted fences – the personal details that help us to identify with the city. Thus, alleyways are great spaces of escape from the busyness of the city. They are incubators for new ideas in supporting a variety of uses and small-scale enterprises such as galleries, cafes, and different workshops, which blend together with different forms of dwellings. Despite their small dimensions, alleyways foster multiple and hybrid identities and hold immense potential for a more integrative city. Focusing on Taipei, Jeffrey Hou’s chapter shows how alleyways are privileged spaces of collective experience and places for encounters and social innovation. Both their spatial characteristics and relationships recall the traditional role of alleyways as a form of ‘urban commons’. This dimension is also illustrated in Hendrik Tieben and Melissa Cate Christ’s chapter on alleyways in Hong Kong, where a pilot placemaking project, called Magic

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Lanes, engages local residents in the co-creation of community places. Due to limited land resources, hilly topography, rapid population growth, building restrictions, and land policies, Hong Kong’s building and population densities are indeed among the highest in the world. Interstitial spaces such as alleyways serve as major public (or quasi-public) spaces for local residents and visitors, and have become key locations for bottom-up placemaking projects. Asian alleyways are also highly multifunctional: as fluid and shifting spaces, they allow a great reversibility in their urban functions throughout the day and the year. In alleyways, the capacity to welcome diverse activities in a very narrow space can be explained through a temporal analysis: the rotation of each type of activity throughout the day often allows a better access to the street as a resource for a larger number of urban dwellers (Gibert 2018a). Beyond the long-term processes of urbanization, daily urban practices contribute greatly to the production and continual adaptation of the urban fabric. An ethnographic approach to alleyways allows for the re-evaluation of urban dwellers’ daily activities and their capacity to inject new functions and new meanings into places, and thus to produce urbanity (Hou 2010). Therefore, alleyways challenge the public/private dichotomy inherited from the Western conception of urban spaces, showcasing the richness of the buffer zone and intermediate semi-public spaces at the interface of housing and the street. They give rise to a conception of the public or private nature of a space as a matter of degree, which varies depending on the time of the day. As shown in Marie Gibert-Flutre’s chapter, an anthropological exploration of the daily functioning of ordinary alleyways calls for a better acknowledgement of the social value of ephemeral public spaces, which are constantly renewed by the uses to which neighbourhood residents put them and the interplay between these uses. Reconsidering the diversity and versatility of the alleyway can help us to create and maintain ordinary living places, which can be considered as desired alternatives to disintegrating global city terrains and their mega-projects. Alleyways as contested and political spaces As highly appropriated spaces, alleyways are also contested spaces, where many ‘forces’ and micro-local power networks interact and sometimes oppose each other. Thus, they can reveal tensions between different populations and activities, being the material expression of broader social struggles. Judith Audin’s chapter on everyday politics in Beijing shows how alleyways constitute privileged sites of street-level politics, with residents coping with, complying with, reinventing, or resisting state discipline. Indeed, alleyways

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can be envisioned as sites of power as well as sites of everyday resistance. This raises the question of the everyday management and gouvernementalité (‘governmentality’) (Foucault 1978) of such places. By this notion, Michel Foucault intended to objectify the practices of power, beyond a holistic or strictly legal approach of the State, which had long prevailed in the political and social sciences. Government, understood as a process – as the art of governing – is thus conceived in a relational logic, as a set of interacting forces, whose articulated system forms governmentality. In this perspective, government is not ‘universal and general, but necessarily local and particular’ (Crowley 2003, 57), and the understanding of governmentality is based on a new understanding of power through the framing of everyday social practices (Lascoumes 2004). In their chapter on the contemporary Shanghai lilong, Xiaohua Zhong and Jiayu Ding envision alleyways as increasingly ‘conceived’ spaces, that is, spaces for the practices of social and political power, as opposed to ‘lived spaces’. Thus, they highlight and analyse how Shanghai’s traditional lilong neighbourhoods are currently being converted from residential use to dynamic leisure destinations for both citizens and tourists. This leads to new tensions between opposite models and modes of appropriation.

Reconsidering the versatility of the alleyway in times of globalization: What does the future hold for Asian alleyways? Most traditional spatial alleyway neighbourhoods in Asian cities appear to be in danger of fading, eroding further, and sometimes even vanishing from the contemporary urban landscape, marginalized by new forms of housing and public spaces. But, in some cases, the urban alleyway is also recently experiencing a ‘revival’, when considered as a promising ‘path for urban revitalization’ of inner-city areas, as illustrated in Heide Imai’s chapter on Tokyo and Seoul and in Wimonrart Issarathumnoon’s chapter on Bangkok. In the latter, the author shows how vernacular alleyways have recently been reappropriated by different fields, including new art, design, and architectural concepts, and reinvented by the contemporary urban design discourse. But will this form of revival lead to the reintegration of the alleyway into the current urban discourse or result in the creation of monofunctional, sanitized public spaces that are not increasing the quality of social life and mix of diverse users? To analyse the potential and future of the alleyway, it is necessary to define its character and qualities to determine whether this urban form can lead to urban revitalization starting at the grassroots level, as exemplified by Hendrik Tieben and Melissa Cate Christ’s case study of Hong Kong.

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—. 2018b. ‘Rethinking Metropolitan Production from Its Underside: A View from the Alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City.’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 (3): 589-607. Gibert, Marie, and Son Pham Thai. 2016. ‘Understanding the Vietnamese Urban Fabric from the Inside: A View from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City Alleyway Neighbourhoods.’ The IIAS Newsletter 73: 32-33. Goldblum, Charles. 2015. ‘Territoires de projets: L’Asie orientale à l’épreuve d’un nouveau “régime de production urbaine”?’ In Territoires de l’urbain en Asie. Une nouvelle modernité?, edited by Manuelle Franck and Thierry Sanjuan, 373-396. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Groth, Paul. 1997. ‘Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study.’ In Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, edited by Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi, 1-24. New Haven: Yale University Press. Han, Pilwon. 2013. ‘Axes and Alleyways: The Tradition of Duality in Contemporary Korean Cities.’ In The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanism, edited by Vinayak Bharne, 56-65. London: Routledge. Hou, Jeffrey, ed. 2010. Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. London: Routledge. Hou, Jeffrey, and Manish Chalana. 2016. ‘Untangling the “Messy” Asian City.’ In Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia, edited by Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou, 1-21. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Imai, Heide. 2010. ‘Sensing Tokyo’s Alleyways: Everyday Life and Sensory Encounters in the Alleyways of a City in Transition.’ In Everyday Life in Asia: Social Perspectives on the Senses, edited by Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Kelvin E.Y. Low, 48-68. London: Routledge. —. 2013. ‘The Liminal Nature of Alleyways: Understanding the Alleyway Roji as a ‘Boundary’ between Past and Present.’ Cities 34: 58-66. —. 2015. ‘Preserving Tokyo’s Alleyways: From Marginal to Neighbourhood Place?’ GIS Journal: The Hosei Journal of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies, 1-18. —. 2017. Tokyo Roji: The Diversity and Versatility of Alleys in a City in Transition. London: Routledge. Jinnai, Hidenobu. 1995. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology. Translated by K. Nishimura. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jones, G.A. 2007. ‘Liminal Cities: Global Spaces, Everyday Lives.’ In The Global Challenge and Marginalization, edited by Márcio Moraes Valença, E.L. Nel and Walter Leimgruber, 209-225. New York: Nova Science. Kim, Kwang-Joong. 2012. ‘The Study of Urban Form in South Korea.’ Urban Morphology 16 (2): 149-164.

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Kurokawa, Kishō. 2006. Toshi kakumei. Kōyū kara kyōyū e [Revolution of the city: From public to joint ownership]. Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha. Lancret, Nathalie. 2001. ‘La représentation de l’espace urbain en Asie du sud-est.’ In Hanoi, le cycle des métamorphoses: Formes architecturales et urbaines, edited by Pierre Clément and Nathalie Lancret, 73-88. Paris: Éditions Recherches/Ipraus. Lascoumes, Pierre. 2004.‘La gouvernementalité : de la critique de l’État aux technologies du pouvoir.’ Le Portique. Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines 13-14. Lévy, Jacques. 1997. ‘De territoires et de réseaux.’ Quaderni 31 (1): 135-139. Li, Jie. 2014. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Martin, Michael. 1996. ‘Back-Alley as Community Landscape.’ Landscape Journal 15 (2): 138-153. —. 2001. ‘The Question of Alleys, Revisited.’ Urban Design International 6 (2): 76-92. McCann, Eugene, Ananya Roy and Kevin Ward. 2013. ‘Urban Pulse, Assembling/ Worlding Cities.’ Urban Geography 34 (5): 581-589. McIntosh, Leanne. 2005. Liminal Space. Lantzville: Oolichan Books. Mukherji, Subha, ed. 2011. Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. London: Anthem Press. Nitschke, Günter. 2003. ‘Kyoto Cho, Street or Neighbourhood.’ Kyoto Journal 55. Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Salastie, Ritta. 2001. ‘Living Tradition or Panda’s Cage? An Analysis of the Urban Conservation in Kyoto: Case Study: 35 Yamahako Neighbourhoods.’ PhD dissertation, Helsinki University of Technology. Sassen, Saskia. 2015. ‘Who Owns Our Cities – and Why This Urban Takeover Should Concern Us All.’ The Guardian (UK edition), 24 November. Accessed 24  November  2015. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/24/ who-owns-our-cities-and-why-this-urban-takeover-should-concern-us-all. Sensui, Hanako, and Namiko Manui. 2014. ‘Alleys as a Part of Living Space: A Case Study of Zoshigaya.’ Paper presented at the International Symposium on City Planning, 7 November 2014, Hanoi, Vietnam. Suh, Kuee-Sook. 2015. ‘Analysis on the Types and Characters of Alley in Seochon District in Seoul.’ Journal of the Korean Housing Association 26 (4): 63-73. Tanaka, Toru. 2015. Kyō no roji ura shokubutsuen [Small green in Kyoto’s back alleys]. Kyoto: Tankōsha. Williams, Allison. 2007. Therapeutic Landscapes. Aldershot: Ashgate. Yantai, Shen, and Wang Changqing. 1997. Life in Hutongs: Through Intricate Alleyways in Beijing [in Chinese]. Beijing: Foreign Language Press. Zhao, Chunlan. 2004. ‘From Shikumen to New-Style: A Rereading of Lilong Housing in Modern Shanghai.’ The Journal of Architecture 9 (1): 49-76.

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Between ‘network’ and ‘territory’ Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways as challenged liminal spaces Marie Gibert-Flutre Abstract By their spatial organization and social appropriations, the alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City provide a model of highly multifunctional urban spaces. This chapter analyses the mechanisms of production of such a model, and how it is facing a breaking point in times of globalization. Theoretically, I draw on the conception of the alleyway at the interface of ‘network’ and ‘territory’ functions. As a network, Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways connect different neighbourhoods together and support growing flows of motorized circulations. As a local territory, however, each alleyway also fosters a vibrant urban life. This precarious balance guarantees the sustainability of an inclusive and vibrant urban environment, on a daily basis, even though this integrative model is currently being challenged. Keywords: alleyway, network, territory, public space, multifunctional urban space, Ho Chi Minh City

Introduction With around 85 per cent of its average ten million inhabitants still living along an alleyway, Ho Chi Minh City is a city of interstices. The emergence of this distinctive feature is linked with the historical war context in Vietnam between the 1940s and 1970s, during which the city grew tremendously without any planning or public management. Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways – known locally as hẻm – have mostly been self-produced by the city dwellers during uncertain times and, with very few exceptions, do not result from any formalized projects. Beyond the limited planned production of the historical city centres (both the colonial one in District 1 and the Chinese one in Chợ Lớn), the urban

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch01

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growth actually took place following a spontaneous logic, first guided by the main axes, before being associated with an informal densification process beyond these axes. This urbanization process differs from the thousandyear-old city of Hanoi, where most of the alleyways have been developing based on the spatial structure of ancient rural villages (làng). Thus, in Hanoi, main alleyways often correspond to the ancient road pattern leading to the village hamlets (thôn) or to the pathways between ancient rice fields or on the edges of large ponds. In contrast, in Ho Chi Minh City, the urban structure remains based on the juxtaposition of different composite urban fabrics. Morphologically, each alleyway is made up of free-standing attached shophouses, often called ‘tube houses’ (nhà ống) because of their narrow shape and their height, which keeps increasing nowadays. This reveals an organic urbanization process, historically characterized by tight plot divisions and a high population density. The inner city is estimated to house on average 28,000 people per square kilometre, with some highs of 50,000 or more people per square kilometre (Downes et al. 2016, 90). The ubiquity of the alleyways in Ho Chi Minh City’s urban structure has led to the development of a strong sense of local territoriality and a vibrant social life. The alleyway is a strong sociospatial apparatus, at the interface of public and private life, of built environment and open space, of anonymity and inter-acquaintance, of movement and parking, of metropolitan and local scales, of physical and social dimensions (Figure 1.1). Combined together, these dimensions stand at the very heart of the ‘urbanity’ quality that contributes to define what makes a city (Lussault 2003, 966). Indeed, a good balance among all these dimensions guarantees the sustainability of an inclusive and vibrant urban environment. By their spatial organization and social appropriations, the alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City provide a model of highly multifunctional and lively urban spaces. In this chapter, I analyse the mechanisms of production and daily functioning of such a model, and how it has come to face a breaking point in times of globalization.

Understanding the alleyway at the interface of ‘network’ and ‘territory’ Theoretically, I draw on the conception of the alleyway at the interface of ‘network’ and ‘territory’ functions (Lévy 1997). Understanding and conceptualizing geographical space as ‘a set of distance relationships’, Lévy (1997, 135) stressed the difference between the spatial discontinuity of a network

Be t ween ‘ne t work’ and ‘ territory’

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Figure 1.1 The alleyway as a metropolitan liminal space

Source: Marie Gibert-Flutre, 2018

– organized around structuring hubs and intersections – and the spatial continuity of a living territory. As a network, Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways connect different neighbourhoods together and support growing flows of motorized circulations. As a local territory, however, each alleyway also fosters a vibrant urban life, with a complex intersection between economic life, private family life, and collective social life. As such, alleyways are places where people come to experience a sense of social belonging in a bustling metropolis (Gibert 2018b). Indeed, the alleyways are not only part of a bigger urban network, but also places of countless small businesses, and residents have become accustomed to considering their doorstep as a natural extension of their own home. Beyond the evidence of their linear form, the interactions between alleyways and their adjacent built environment are essential to the daily functioning and general structure of the neighbourhood.

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The strong articulation of network and territory functions in the alleyways generates local frictions between circulatory flows and local activities on their sides. The more the alleyways foster bordering socio-economic activities, the higher its riveraineté (Brès 2006). This concept highlights the richness of the interactions between a street and its sides and could be translated as ‘borderability’. A flight route, for instance, has no riveraineté, as the passengers on board have no direct contact with the territories they cross; a highway has a poor riveraineté, as it is specif ically designed to maximize the speed of circulation, with a clear and material separation from the crossed territories. On the contrary, among all sorts of roads and streets, urban alleyways benefit from a very high level of riveraineté, with various uses at play along its sides, and as many reasons to stop along them. In this framework, the thresholds of shophouses have the highest potential for urbanity. Such a conceptualization allows for critical reflections on the nature of the alleyway as a sociospatial apparatus and a liminal space in the city, supporting a variety of typologies, practices, and scales. In times of globalization, however, this riveraineté faces new challenges, as Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways increasingly tend to be regarded as necessary connectors within a larger road system, to the detriment of their local territorial functions. Once dedicated to providing local access, the alleyways are now performing new roles for through traffic, linking the different districts of an increasingly large metropolis. This trend leads to a fierce competition and a progressive disconnect between circulatory and territorial functions, whose articulation used to be the dominant frame of the Vietnamese urban fabric. The response of the authorities has been to schedule alleyway-widening schemes, coupled with new regulations that aim to control and restrict street trading. Nevertheless, beyond this evolution, alternative transformations need to be considered. A closer analysis shows new reconnection processes, mainly through the daily practices of urban dwellers, which contribute to injecting new functions and meanings into places (Hou 2010). Indeed, local inhabitants constantly demonstrate their capacity to influence the production of their metropolis by means of a creative ‘hybrid urbanism’.

The case of two alleyway neighbourhoods in District 3 of Ho Chi Minh City This research is based on an in-depth exploration of two alleyway neighbourhoods in Ho Chi Minh City: Wards 1 and 3 in the south of District 3. These two wards benefit from a central and strategic location in the metropolis,

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Figure 1.2 Location map of Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City

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close to the Điện Biên Phủ and Lý Thái Tổ main arteries, and to a major seven-street roundabout (Figure 1.2). They were developed in the 1940s and 100 200 1960s, respectively, in different urban planning contexts. This explains their different profiles today, both morphologically and socially. Ward 1 is among the most precarious in the city, while neighbouring Ward 3 is a very lively commercial area, with a reputation well beyond its boundaries. In Ward 1, alleyways have an often informal and winding layout, but Ward 3 benefits from a well-organized and checkerboard layout with larger alleyways. Despite their different historical trajectories, both these wards are under pressure today. Their good locations increase the local land values tremendously and encourages new real estate projects, mostly in the form of high-rise buildings. Thus, the sociospatial organization of the alleyways is facing new challenges that call into question the articulation of their historical functions as network and territory.

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Research methodology This research relies on a meticulous urban morphology analysis – based on maps, cadastral documents, and site surveys of each land plot – an extensive

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participative observation in Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City (captured in field notes), and qualitative ethnographic interviews. I conducted interviews with 35 urban dwellers (using a snowball technique that allowed access to various profiles of residents), five representatives of the urban authorities, and two urban project designers, during several long research stays in Vietnam between 2008 and 2017. This long-term study allows the analysis of local changes across ten years of metropolitan transformations to rethink globalization in the Vietnamese urban context from its interstices. The results presented in this chapter are therefore at the interface of spatial and social analysis. In this chapter, I decipher the historical sociospatial apparatus of the alleyways in Ho Chi Minh City as a multifunctional space, combining a variety of practices and scales. I then expand on how the alleyways are facing new challenges in times of metropolization, especially with regard to their ability to balance their network and territorial functions. Lastly, I examine how metropolitan Vietnamese alleyways are reinventing themselves today as hybrid models and the conditions under which the riveraineté can finally strike back.

Alleyways: Standing on the threshold of the metropolis As a local network stretching deep into residential areas, Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways have long lacked official recognition and remained underrepresented on official city maps. Alleyways are often depicted as blank ‘empty spaces’ apart from the main streets and boulevards. Their narrowness, coupled with their informal and – for a long time – undocumented history, also means they are understudied in the field of urban studies. Yet their historical development can help us to capture and understand the variety of urban patterns in a growing metropolis. Furthermore, beyond their peculiar historical process, alleyways are appropriated territories, supporting and articulating together a wide variety of functions and scales. They welcome local traffic, various modes of trade – such as local markets, shops, and street stalls – economic production, social gatherings, and many domestic activities while, at the same time, are deeply embedded in the metropolitan backbone. Revaluing this ordinary neighbourhood landscape offers a much-needed focus on articulations of network and territory in an emerging metropolis.

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At the crossroads of planned and spontaneous historical development The production of the urban fabric of Ho Chi Minh City has historically been characterized by a combination of the planned (main axes) and the spontaneous (widespread alleyways). Only the colonial grid pattern, covering District 1 and part of District 3, together with the traditional Chinese neighbourhood of Chợ Lớn, were planned under colonial rule (Lê and Dovert 1998; Nguyễn 1976). In that period, the main street network was considered to be the matrix of the urbanization process. Beyond the production of this loose matrix, urban growth took place following a spontaneous logic, by a process of densification in the absence of any realistic planning (Huynh 2015b, 12). This unplanned process explains why the urban fabric of Ho Chi Minh City is dominated by very large blocks. Secondary streets are often missing, with small alleyways connecting directly to the main axes. The further we get from the structured main streets, the more random the alleyway grid becomes, revealing the historical interweaving between the planned and the spontaneous in Ho Chi Minh City’s urban production. As a result, the urban structure is based on the juxtaposition of composite urban fabrics. The south of District 3 is a good example of this historical process and its mixed outputs. Although contiguous, Wards 1 and 3 of this district offer two distinct patterns of alleyway neighbourhoods. Alleyways in Ward 3 – also known as the Bàn Cờ market area – benefit from a formal grid planned in the 1960s and from a good connection with the commercial street Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, which opened in that period. The alleyway grid in this ward consequently takes the form of a well-organized checkerboard, standardized and hierarchized by the municipal authorities of the time: the main alleyways are 7 to 8 metres wide, opening onto secondary alleyways that are 3 to 4 metres wide. This organized hierarchy avoids dead-end alleyways and eases local traffic. The central alley – named hẻm Bàn Cờ – is even wide enough for permanent market stalls. Within this urban texture, the different blocks are not structured around any central plaza. The idea of centrality is indeed linearly embodied by the main alleyway, which constitutes the backbone of the local structure and is the most socially and commercially dynamic place in the neighbourhood. Along each alleyway stand attached shophouses, or ‘tube houses’, which are rectangular, very narrow, and deep (around 3 to 4 metres wide and 15 to 25 metres deep). They are built perpendicularly to the alleyway onto which they open directly, but only on one side. This serves to optimize residents’ commercial access to the street. In the Bàn Cờ market area, most of the shophouses located along main alleyways feature shops on their ground

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floor. In this ward, most shophouses also display a similar width, which reinforces the impression of uniformity in the local landscape. Only a few metres down south from Ward 3 lies Ward 1, whose alleyways offer a completely different urban landscape. This ward was initially planned in the late 1940s to accommodate railway workers’ families (cư xáđường sắt) in small social dwellings, but it rapidly increased in density as the inhabitants informally added rooms to their original houses. Some of them are still made of precarious materials, with wooden walls and sheet metal roofs. This spontaneous process led to a constant reduction in street space, eventually resulting in the winding, extremely narrow alleyways – mostly under 2 metres in width – of the present day. Today, this ward no longer benefits from any readable formal grid and instead presents many dead-end alleyways. This helps to explain its very high population density, with around 15,000 inhabitants sharing 14 hectares, which represents 110,000 inhabitants per square kilometre. Moreover, behind the alleyways of Ward 1 stands a set of eleven mid-rise buildings from the 1960s, which have been constantly densified and pauperized since its creation. Partly financed by American aid, they were added to the railway workers’ barracks and called the Nguyễn Thiện Nguyễn complex. Unlike the commercial and quite prosperous Ward 3, Ward 1 remains one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city centre. In that regard, this ward is comparable with the Mả Lạng (District 1) neighbourhood, which was infamous for its precarious community and drug addicts despite its golden location in the city. The Mả Lạng alleyway neighbourhood has very recently been reclaimed by the local authorities, with evictions in the name of urban renewal and the ‘modernization’ of the city centre. Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 reveal the variety of alleyway neighbourhoods in Ho Chi Minh City. While sharing similar attributes – such as the general narrowness of their street network and the unifying presence of shophouses along their sides – they call for first-hand observations of their daily economic and social functioning. The alleyway as a multifunctional urban object Both the narrowness of Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways and the ‘smallness’ of the division of plots along them lead to a specific sense of local territoriality. At the crossroads of ‘network’ – as circulated spaces – and ‘territory’ – as lived spaces – alleyways foster and articulate together five urban subfunctions: traffic, trade, economic production, sociability, and domestic life (Gibert 2018b). When properly balanced, these different subfunctions result in a very high degree of riveraineté and a vivid socio-economic local life. Long-term

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Figure 1.3 Bàn Cờ alleyway and its bustling market in Ward 3 of District 3 in Ho Chi Minh City

Source: Mari Gibert-Flutre, 2014

observations in the dense microcosms of Wards 1 and 3 in District 3 reveal a great reversibility depending on the time of the day and the type of alleyway. Large alleyways in Ward 3 are mostly famous for their vibrant commercial activities. Hẻm Bàn Cờ, for instance, fosters a renowned daily market taking place directly on the alleyway and its sides, on the threshold of every shophouse, with goods spilling out onto the street (Figure 1.3). Residents have indeed become accustomed to considering their doorstep as a natural extension of their own home or shop (Drummond 2000). In the meantime, adjacent alleyways are chosen locations for welcoming large food stalls, offering many different specialities around lunchtime. Local interviews reveal that this market and the adjacent food stalls attract not only the local residents, but also a wider public, coming from other wards and districts. At their acme – in the morning hours – commercial activities occupy nearly all the space of the alleyway, leaving only a narrow passage for the circulation of customers, on foot or motorbike. Every blank wall becomes a possible location to be freely used for trade or a temporary neighbourhood gathering. Alleyway crossroads are the most valued locations in this commercial ward.

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In addition to shop or stall owners, street vendors converge on the ward to benefit from its good reputation. Secondary alleyways are their favourite spots to display various kinds of temporary stalls, with the installation of street furniture, such as small tables and benches. However, they must always negotiate their temporary presence with local shop owners and residents. This might require the payment of an informal small rent, especially if they need to access water or electricity. Consequently, despite their apparent constant mobility, street vendors actually occupy the same alleyway or follow the same tour every day. In the morning, the neighbourhood atmosphere is bustling, and local frictions are at their highest in Ward 3’s alleyways, with many customers stopping by, combined with the comings and goings of suppliers and street vendors. The soundscape is quite vivid, though in a different way from the main axes where motorized traffic has become overwhelming over the past decade. In the afternoon, only the main shops and a few stalls remain open, while children and the elderly become important players in the local sociability, transforming the alleyway into a playground supervised by the residents and a place for gathering. With reception rooms located in front of shophouses, residents generally receive visitors within view of others, oftentimes directly on their threshold, where neighbours frequently drop by as well. As a result, in Ward 3, alleyways function as fluid and shifting spaces, at the interface of local traffic and various commercial activities, as well as social and domestic functions. These interstitial urban spaces are thus highly multifunctional and multirhythmic, with the staggering of each type of activity over the course of the day. This allows for better access to the alleyway-as-resource for a larger number of urban dwellers (Gibert 2018b). Ward 1 of District 3 illustrates a different kind of riveraineté in its alleyways, with another combination of daily activities. If this ward also fosters small shops and various commercial activities, they are far less known on the city scale, attracting mostly local residents. Many of these residents are disadvantaged people with low incomes or a precarious administrative status. Many of them are rural migrants who integrate into the urban economy through a collective, but informal, production of fruit comfits and jams (mứt), which are very popular during the New Year celebration (Tết). During the months preceding the Tết, the different steps involved in the production of comfits and jams are carried out directly in the narrow local alleys. Many families share the work, one peeling the fruits while another soaks them, before they cook and macerate the fruits in big jars and finally pack the fruit paste in individual packets (Figure 1.4). Most of the alleyways are nearly fully occupied by these activities, as are many rooftops, which

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Figure 1.4 The production of comfit (mứt) in the alleyways of District 3 in Ward 1 of Ho Chi Minh City

Source: Marie Gibert-Flutre, 2012 and 2019

are regarded as a good place to dry the fruits in a neighbourhood where open space is desperately missing. In this ward, alleyways play a major role in economic production for an important part of the year, as many families live in very small dwellings and do not have enough space to produce the comfits in their home. Furthermore, very few residents have a formal job outside of the ward. Hence, alleyway interstitial spaces represent a key economic and social resource for local inhabitants. For the same reason, various domestic activities, such as cooking, doing laundry, installing ornamental plants, or burning votive objects, often take place directly on the alleyways in this ward. This results in a deep sense of community along alleyways where each family knows each other. Thus, Ward 1 displays a high prevalence of the territorial functions – in the sense of a strong appropriation of local territories – over the network functions of alleyways. In this ward, traffic remains exclusively local and driving requires familiarity with its winding alleyways: strangers easily get lost or stuck in small, dead-end alleyways. The narrowness of most alleyways enables only pedestrians, bicycles, and motorbikes to go through. This causes fire hazards at the heart of the neighbourhood, as economic activities can disturb the passage of emergency vehicles along such narrow alleyways. These two wards in District 3 illustrate two different capacities for articulating local and metropolitan scales. Ward 3, with its commercially active and wealthy alleyways, efficiently articulates local and metropolitan scales. Alleyways are not only a place of residence and life for local inhabitants, but also an attractive destination for many city dwellers coming from other districts. Moreover, it is a ‘crossed territory’ for motorbikes going from pericentral districts to the city centre, thanks to its wide alleyway grid. Conversely, despite its very central location, a few metres only from one of the

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biggest roundabouts of the central metropolis and its proximity to the main arteries Điện Biên Phủ and Lý Thái Tổ, Ward 1 remains quite disconnected from the metropolitan street system. As a network, its alleyways remain isolated, almost as though in a closed circuit. Yet, through its economic production of comfits and jam, Ward 1 tends to be – informally, yet de facto – well integrated in the metropolitan economy. Indeed, many city markets get their comfit supply from this ward. The daily functioning of alleyways in Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 reveals the multifunctional and vibrant urban spaces in Vietnam. Despite their interstitial dimension, Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways sustain a highly inclusive and dynamic urban ecosystem, at the crossroads of network and territorial functions, and of metropolitan and local scales.

Alleyways in times of metropolization: Towards a disrupted balance of network and territory? ‘Metropolization’ refers to the process by which people, activities, and wealth are increasingly concentrated in major cities such that their forms and functions are both affected. It notably relates to the attractiveness and accessibility of cities to communication networks on various scales. In particular, metropolization integrates cities into the networks of the global economy. This global process has a major impact by transforming the local urban fabric and neighbourhood life: new global forces have indeed entered the local game. Thus, the social agreement that sustains a balance between the network and territorial functions of Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways is increasingly being challenged. New challenges After decades of de-urbanization under the socialist regime, the urban population is now exploding in Vietnam (3 per cent per year since 2010) and a large part of this growth is occurring in Ho Chi Minh City (which has received 30 per cent of the rural-urban migrants of this period) (OECD 2018, 18). With the fast development of new housing estates in the metropolitan outskirts, the urban sprawl has progressed rapidly, and both the inner city and its outskirts were densified. While the metropolitan authorities deal with planned adjustment phases to frame the construction of modern transportation infrastructures, spontaneous urban development continues, and individual motorized transport explodes. The number of motorbikes and

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cars has risen sharply in recent years, with only seven per cent of commuter trips being made by means of public transport. According to the Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Transport and Communications (DTC 2015), there were more than six million motorbikes and already 500,000 cars registered in the city in 2015, causing severe daily congestion. The explosion in metropolitan mobilities is due to both the daily commuting of urban dwellers from the outskirts to the city centre and inner-city travel (Gubry and Lê Hô Phong 2010). While many people used to live and work at the same place – mostly through the individual spatial and economic model of the shophouse – the number of salaried workers is swiftly growing. This process directly contributes to the explosion of daily commuting. The lack of secondary roads in Ho Chi Minh City, as well as its loose grid of a few main axes directly connected on endless alleyways, explains why these alleyways are increasingly used by motorbike riders and, for the largest of them, even by car drivers, during morning and evening peak hours. When main roads are congested, motorists spontaneously use local alleyways as shortcuts to bypass traffic, valuing their network function over their territorial dimension. This practice transforms the alleyways from local services into transit roads. Urgent usage conflicts have emerged from the competition between road traffic and commercial or social uses. Local residents complain about safety issues due to the increase of traffic accidents, as well as the air pollution and noise generated by this traffic. Congestion is damaging for local business and the alleyways’ reputation in general. Beyond this spontaneous trend of drivers’ practices, metropolitan authorities have decided to improve the quality of city traffic by undertaking a project to widen the alleyways, coupled with tighter regulation of their side uses in what is envisioned as a ‘street recapture process’. References to the functionalist movement are indeed recurrent in interviews with district leaders and officials of the Department of Transport and Communications. Besides congestion, other forces are at stake in the alleyway-widening scheme (Gibert 2018a). Because the value of land plots is directly linked to the accessibility of the street in Ho Chi Minh City, enlarging the alleyways results in an immediate increase in value of their adjacent urban plots. Real estate dynamics are therefore an unavoidable global force involved in the metropolitan transformation of alleyways. Moreover, enlarging alleyways and better controlling their uses are a means of regulating and controlling the administrative status of the inhabitants, as well as their land tenure. Indeed, unclear tenancy status and properties with mixed titles continue to be a challenge for the authorities. This is partly a legacy of the city’s chaotic

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history. Ward 1 of District 3 provides many examples of inhabitants with weak economic and social standing who are not the official title holders of the properties in which they live. After decades of laissez-faire attitudes towards urban growth, the city authorities have expressed their intention to regulate and plan the urbanization process. This has resulted in the multiplication of new mega-projects, mostly located in peri-urban districts (Douglass and Huang 2007; Harms 2012; Huynh 2015a) and in the launching of a systematic widening and general upgrading of every alleyway of the metropolis. With their strategic locations on the metropolitan scale, Wards 1 and 3 of District 3 face a particularly tremendous increase in their land values and the emergence of radical real estate projects. Therefore, they offer good examples of challenges faced by alleyways in times of globalization and metropolization. ‘Civilizing’, ‘modernizing’, and widening alleyways The metropolitan authorities’ efforts to regulate, control, and plan the urbanization process in the alleyways are twofold. This f irst occurred through new regulations regarding the alleyways’ uses, breaking with several former practices. Then, for the last ten years, city authorities have been conducting an ambitious programme of urban renewal, which aims at systematically enlarging the alleyways to alleviate the recurring problems of street congestion (Gibert 2018a). The final goal is to increase the rationalization of urban space and to promote a ‘civilized and modern city’ (đô thị văn minh, hiện đại) (Harms 2012). This promotion reflects the rise of a neo-functionalist perspective in the urban achievement of ‘modernity’, ‘civilization’, and ‘urban beauty’. These expressions are widely relayed through propaganda campaigns. They are important evidence of the country’s entrance into the market economy since the economic reforms at the end of the 1980s. The ideological rhetoric of the ‘New Man’ gave way to the idea of a ‘civilized urban dweller’. This leitmotif refers to the vision of an ‘urban project of civilization’ in line with the Singaporean model and, more and more, the Chinese model, which are thought of as tutelary figures in contemporary Vietnamese master plans (Nikken Sekkei and UPI 2007). In these models, the modern city is characterized by land development control, a functionalist zoning, and the global support of urban dwellers for a shared social order (Nikken Sekkei and UPI 2007). In particular, urban authorities seek to regulate the commercial uses of the alleyways, and this poses a direct threat to the livelihood of street

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sellers whose widespread presence in each local neighbourhood is seen as antithetical to the metropolitan pretensions of Ho Chi Minh City (Kim 2015). The official will to implement new regulations in the alleyways dates back to the late 1990s, with the launch of the official propaganda campaign ‘Building cultural neighbourhoods’ (Xây dựng khu phố văn hoá). Its goal was to systematize adherence to social criteria concerning what is and is not appropriate in the alleyways. This programme clarifies, for instance, what must stay in the domestic sphere. In this way, it constitutes an agreement on the ‘cultural’ (văn hoá) necessity to decrease the footprint of roadside stalls by following the ‘new urban rules of civilization’. The rules are displayed on the street near the local news board and, if a household meets at least 80 per cent of the programme requirements, it is declared a ‘cultural family’ and rewarded with an official certificate. A neighbourhood in which more than 80 per cent of households have been designated cultural families is recognized as a ‘cultural neighbourhood’ and awarded a conspicuous sign, which is placed at its entrance. The effects of this official programme are nevertheless undermined by the fact that, once a neighbourhood has been rewarded with such a sign, it is never taken down. In addition, an investigation among different real estate developers reveals that status as a cultural neighbourhood does not affect land prices. Ward 3 in District 3 was one of the first neighbourhoods to advertise and implement the new rules. First, despite its high population density (around 15,000 people in 15 hectares), the social profile of this ward is relatively homogenous and wealthy. Hence, the project was not understood as a manifestation of top-down pressure, but rather as an opportunity to improve urban conditions and affluence in the neighbourhood. Moreover, the local authorities focused mostly on the prevention of criminal activities – such as drug deals, drug consumption, or prostitution – but were much more flexible in the control of commercial activities. This explains the current paradoxical situation with many conspicuous official blue signs saying ‘People from Ward 3 of District 3 build a cultural neighbourhood’ (Figure 1.5) positioned right in front of informal stalls, which are supposedly banned under the new regulations. The alleyways’ uses remain mainly a topic of negotiation and local arrangements (Koh 2008). Furthermore, this programme was mainly an incentive and not really coercive – except for criminal activities. This explains why Ward 1 largely remained out of it. For a long time, the new incentive rules were displayed along the main local alleyway, but nobody really cared about them. However, this programme marked the beginning of a general trend of exclusion of various urban dwellers on the fringes of the metropolis, such as informal

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Figure 1.5 A sign rewarding the neighbourhood as part of the ‘cultural neighbourhood’ campaign, in Ward 3 of District 3

Source: Marie Gibert-Flutre, 2012

small producers, rural migrants, and street traders. ‘Urban civilization’ discourses have largely been exploited to standardize urban practices and exclude part of the urban population judged as ‘deviant’ or at least ‘uncivilized’. In this regard, the population of Ward 1 is increasingly under threat, and so are its activities of comfit production. The latter is nowadays seen as inappropriate in the city centre and too polluting. In general, these new urban regulations favour the network dimension of alleyways and restrain their territorial functions. In addition to these new urban regulations, city authorities launched an urban renewal project that aimed to upgrade the alleyways by systematically widening them. While this project may seem modest in comparison to the massive infrastructure upgrades going on at the same time in Ho Chi Minh City, it is in fact very ambitious, as it affects the entire city and most of its inhabitants. In this project, alleyways are only seen as elements of a bigger street network, and their local social and economic life is neither mentioned nor taken into consideration (official directive 88/2007/QD-UBND). The alleyway-widening scheme (quy hoạch việc mở hẻm), launched some two decades ago, was initially perceived as highly unrealistic. The initial version called for the width of each alleyway to be tripled, but gave no specific provisions for funding. Since 2008, the project has mostly been funded and

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executed directly by the local districts, within the framework of the Ho Chi Minh People’s Committee. Its implementation has been quite different from one ward to another (Gibert 2018a). This project did not directly threaten the alleyways in Ward 3 of District 3, where they are large enough, displayed as a formal grid. Conversely, it has contributed significantly to uncertainty about the future of Ward 1. As the city has expanded, this ward has become prime real estate, enhanced by its contiguity to both main arteries at the edge of the historical colonial centre. Attracting the interest of urban developers and investors, the zone is now listed by the city’s Department of Architecture and Planning as one of the ‘golden lands’, top locations for urban redevelopment and new high-rise buildings (Harms 2016, 253). Instead of a simple widening of local alleyways, this ward is now under threat by a more radical redevelopment project that envisions the destruction of the entire historical urban fabric to make way for mid-rise and high-rise buildings. In this context, the local authorities have no intention of funding the implementation of the alleyway-widening scheme. While this redevelopment has not been launched yet – because of its high costs and the lack of interested investors – it directly threatens the survival of the alleyway neighbourhoods and its current inhabitants in the medium term. Interviews with local residents revealed both a sense of fatalism and a strong will to continue to benefit from neighbourhood amenities on a daily basis until they are finally forced to leave, and their local territory has disappeared. Metropolization processes tend to transform the alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City into transit roads and threaten their territorial function in the name of a new ‘urban civilization’. Consequently, the alleyways, which used to be multifunctional urban objects, are increasingly dedicated entirely to the purposes of transit. However, a closer analysis shows new reconnection processes, mainly through the daily practices of urban dwellers. Local inhabitants constantly demonstrate their capacity to influence the production of their metropolis by means of a creative ‘hybrid urbanism’.

Metropolitan Vietnamese alleyways: Towards a hybrid model The new urban practices of the emerging middle class The resilience of local communities is challenged during the metropolization process, with tensions rising over new local regulations between households that can and cannot sustain the cost of losing a part of their dwelling to enlarge the alleyway (Gibert 2018b). Harms (2012) underlined the growing

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convergence between the authorities’ desire to control and ‘recapture’ the street space with the new aspirations of the middle class – having acquired new property rights, especially following the land laws of 2003 and 2013 – to protect their own interests. The most visible spatial incarnations of this trend are the ostentatious gates that certain households erect in front of their shophouses. The border between public and domestic spaces is now fixed and unambiguous. Most of the families erecting such gates commute daily to their work in offices and do not own a shop along the alleyway. Their lifestyle has become different from that of traditional small business owners. The gates, while being a symbolic marker of wealth, also show a different connection to the alleyway. The previous habits of leaving the front door constantly open has been abandoned and, with it, most of the vision of the alleyway as a natural territorial extension of one’s home. Households keep their daily life more private and many of them have an air conditioning system that also prevents them from leaving their front door open. The engines of local transformations are then multiple and combined, from social considerations to more pragmatic evolutions. Alleyways are thus functioning less and less as a liminal space at the interface of network and territory. Their riveraineté is directly challenged, as the sides of the street, when consisting of aligned gates, do not call for people to stop anymore. Conversely, motorized traffic is facilitated, which prevents the development of other local uses, such as children playing or elderly residents gathering. Residential strategies are also changing among members of the middle class who are seeking larger plots and high-value urban land investments, especially in the central districts, such as District 3. The increased land values along main alleyways – and along newly enlarged ones – have already forced many families to move to more peripheral neighbourhoods where land remains more affordable. In the meantime, new real estate products have appeared locally, such as offices for rent and mid-rise buildings divided into apartments. This challenges the previous model of individual shophouses as the only residential option in alleyway neighbourhoods. These options attract a new population with a weaker attachment to the idea of local community along the alleyway. They are generally more mobile and ‘plural’ (Lahire 1998), as they are able to navigate between different social spheres and urban spaces, looking for more anonymity. Hand in hand with these new real estate products goes a progressive individuation of ways of life and the growing extraversion of alleyway communities.

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When the riveraineté strikes back in the alleyways The metropolization process is still incomplete in Ho Chi Minh City today, and the current transformations create many hybrid cases. An office worker who has installed a gate in front of their shophouse and works in the city centre might continue to start their morning with a coffee at a coffee stand in the alleyway. A shop owner who installs a window to close off their open shop front might still continue to display certain goods in the alleyway. In a period of radical metropolitan transformations, the multitude of individual actions carried out day after day generates strong links between the people and their local environment. These small actions recreate as many reasons to stop along the alleyways, directly contributing to the revival of their riveraineté. They illustrate the strength of anthropological continuities in the midst of great metropolitan changes (Hou 2010). Michel de Certeau’s (1988) idea of ‘tactic’ helps to decipher the dwellers’ everyday modes of action to impose their vision of the alleyway in the current metropolization context. This notion embraces all the small day-to-day actions and negotiations that urban dwellers undertake to deal with an urban condition they mostly suffer from, without official capacities of decision. ‘Tactics’ are then opposed to ‘strategy’, which instead presumes control and power. Michel de Certeau (1988) does not understand tactics as a simple subset of strategy, but as a true capacity of adaptation to the environment, which has been framed by the strategies of the powerful. Drawing theoretically on the distinction of tactics and strategy facilitates a renewed understanding of the metropolization process on the local alleyway scale. By altering the alleyway, by continuously adapting it to their needs, local residents remain involved in the construction of the metropolis itself. In this way, they manage to establish a form of continuity in their habits during a period of significant rupture with the past. It is precisely through these habits that the ‘production’ of the city, in Lefebvre’s (1991) understanding of the term, takes place in Ho Chi Minh City. An example of these tactics is the implementation of first-floor balconies by the inhabitants of the widened alleyways. In doing this, they take advantage of loopholes in urban regulations and only respect the compulsory new width on the ground floor. At a time when high-rise buildings are emerging as new residential models in Ho Chi Minh City, alleyways can also inspire a form of urban nostalgia and generate quite a new reflection in Vietnam on the importance of urban heritage. For instance, street food associated with alleyway culture in Ho Chi Minh City is becoming valued and has given rise to the creation of a section called ‘hẻm gem’ (literally, ‘gem of the alleyways’) in the online

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English lifestyle magazine Saigoneer. This section celebrates the diversity of everyday culinary art in Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyways and its ephemeral, yet pervasive, transformation of the street. The recent recognition of an alleyway’s way of life has even led to the opening of a popular food court called ‘Saigon Garden’ in the central business district, where the ground floor is designed to look like a typical Ho Chi Minh City’s alleyway. This place is motorbike-free and celebrates the alleyway as a place of social gathering with a convivial atmosphere. In this case, the alleyway is reduced to its sole function of urban territory and does not function as a network anymore, except for pedestrians. As lifestyles become more individualized, alleyways are being seen as original reservoirs of a vibrant territorial culture.

Conclusion Their ubiquity, peculiar historical growth, and specific spatiality make alleyways one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most defining features. Beyond their importance as a local network – still representing 85 per cent of the length of all streets in the metropolis – alleyways are sociospatial apparatuses and liminal spaces that combine together to balance their network and territorial functions. This combination goes hand in hand with a high degree of riveraineté, with various uses at play along their sides and as many reasons to stop along them. As such, alleyway neighbourhoods participate fully in defining Ho Chi Minh City’s urbanity: they allow the articulation of two key elements, ‘density’ and ‘diversity’, which stand at the very heart of what makes a city a city (Lévy 2003, 988). However, in times of metropolization, this historical integrative model is being challenged as alleyways tend to be increasingly regarded as necessary connectors within a larger road system, to the detriment of their territorial functions. This new trend is due to the evolution of the city dwellers’ way of life – with an increase of daily mobilities and a more individualized daily life – and is also in accordance with the will of the metropolitan authorities in search of a more ‘civilized’ and functionalist city. New regulations and urban renewal projects of different natures have led to a greater separation of the different urban functions: circulation, trade, economic production, and social life, when alleyways used to combine all of them in their interstitial spaces thanks to a temporal rotation through the day. In this process, the city loses irreparably some important elements of its ‘urbanity’ and ‘diversity’.

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The long-term ethnographic exploration of Wards 1 and 3 in District 3 shows how both intended and unintended effects, locally and globally driven processes, interact and transform the liminal space of the alleyway, offering theoretical challenges to social scientists, in their conception of local neighbourhoods in times of globalization, and to the Vietnamese public authorities. Yet, it is also evident that under certain conditions, Vietnamese alleyways can reinvent themselves as hybrid models, so that the riveraineté can finally strike back, providing an alternative and more integrative model of metropolitan urban spaces. Beyond these Vietnamese neighbourhoods, this case emphasizes the need to consider the riveraineté as a key element of a city. It shows how local alleyways, despite their interstitial features, can stand at the very heart of the ‘production’ of a truly dense and diverse city.

References Brès, Antoine. 2006. ‘De la voirie à la rue: Riveraineté et attrition. Des stratégies d’inscription territoriale des mobilités périurbaines.’ Flux 4 (66-67): 87-95. Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Douglass, Mike, and Liling Huang. 2007. ‘Globalising the City in Southeast Asia: Utopia on the Urban Edge: The Case of Phu My Hung, Saigon.’ International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3 (2): 1-42. Downes, Nigel, Harry Storch, Michael Schmidt, Thi Cam Van Nguyen, Can Lê Dinh, Tran Thong Nhat and Hoa Lê Thanh. 2016. ‘Understanding Ho Chi Minh City’s Urban Structures for Urban Land-Use Monitoring and Risk-Adapted Land-Use Planning.’ In Sustainable Ho Chi Minh City: Climate Policies for Emerging Mega Cities, edited by Antje Katzschner, Michael Waibel, Dirk Schwede, Lutz Katzschner, Michael Schmidt and Harry Storch, 89-116. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Drummond, Lisa Barbara Welch. 2000. ‘Street Scenes: Practices of Public and Private Space in Urban Vietnam.’ Urban Studies 37 (12): 2377-2391. DTC (Département des Transports et des Communications de Hô Chi Minh Ville). 2015. Evolution Du Nombre de Véhicules Motorisés à Hô Chi Minh Ville (Automobiles et Motos) Entre 2001 et 2015, Document Interne. Ho Chi Minh City. Gibert, Marie. 2018a. ‘Alleyway Neighborhoods in Ho Chi Minh City.’ In Routledge Handbook on Urbanization in Southeast Asia, edited by Rita Padawangi, 420-432. London: Routledge.

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—. 2018b. ‘Rethinking Metropolitan Production from Its Underside: A View from the Alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City.’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 (3): 589-607. Gubry, Patrick, and Linh Lê Hô Phong. 2010. ‘Niveau de vie et déplacements dans les métropoles Vietnamiennes: Hô Chi Minh Ville et Hanoi.’ Tiers Monde 1 (201): 107-129. Harms, Erik. 2012. ‘Beauty as Control in the New Saigon: Eviction, New Urban Zones, and Atomized Dissent in a Southeast Asian City.’ American Ethnologist 39 (4): 735-750. —. 2016. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon. Oakland: University of California Press. Hou, Jeffrey, ed. 2010. Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. London: Routledge. Huynh, Du. 2015a. ‘The Misuse of Urban Planning in Ho Chi Minh City.’ Habitat International 48: 11-19. —. 2015b. ‘Phu My Hung New Urban Development in Ho Chi Minh City: Only a Partial Success of a Broader Landscape.’ International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment 4 (1): 125-135. Kim, Annette M. 2015. Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koh, David W.H. 2008. ‘The Pavement as Civic Space: History and Dynamics in the City of Hanoi.’ In Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia, edited by Michael Douglass, K.C. Ho and Giok Ling Ooi, 145-174. London: Routledge. Lahire, Bernard. 1998. L’homme pluriel: Les ressorts de l’action. Paris: Nathan. Lê, Quang Ninh, and Stéphane Dovert, eds. 1998. Saigon 1698-1998: Architectures, urbanisme. Ho Chi Minh City: Nhà xuất bản Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell. Lévy, Jacques. 1997. ‘De territoires et de réseaux.’ Quaderni 31 (1): 135-139. Lussault, Michel. 2003. ‘Urbanité.’ In Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des Sociétés, n.p. Paris: Belin. Nguyễn, Khắc Viện. 1976. ‘Saigon (I): Des origines à 1945.’ Études Vietnamiennes 45: 207. Nikken Sekkei and UPI (Urban Planning Institute of HCMC). 2007. Study on the Adjustment of Ho Chi Minh City Master Plan up to 2025. Final Report. Ho Chi Minh City: UPI. OECD. 2018. OECD Urban Policy Reviews: Viet Nam. Paris: OECD Publishing.

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About the author Marie Gibert-Flutre is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of East Asia Studies (LCAO) at the University of Paris. Her research deals with the dynamics of public and private spaces in the production and appropriation of urban space in Vietnam. Her work uses a combination of process-oriented and social agency perspectives to explore the encounters between state intentions, governing practices, and everyday life during the urbanization process. As Principal Investigator, she manages the Ho Chi Minh City case study of the International SEANNET (Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network) research programme. She has recently published Les envers de la métropolisation: Les ruelles de Ho Chi Minh Ville (Vietnam) (CNRS Edition, 2019).

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Street-corner society and everyday politics in the Beijing hutong Ethnographic perspectives Judith Audin

Abstract This chapter studies the politics of everyday life and social change in the Beijing hutong (胡同) through an ethnographic lens. Unlike the political experience of the urban middle class in new housing compounds, the hutong presents specific localized power configurations inherited from a long-term evolution of everyday social interactions with the urban fabric. Coping with the alteration of the social fabric – the loss of local references in the face of growing anonymity – hutong residents invent tactics of resistance through discrete ‘arts of making’ to resist the biopolitics of urban redevelopment, while at the same time, participate in the official, state-led, neighbourhood political life in the context of growing anonymity. Keywords: Beijing street life; social change; subaltern politics; biopolitics; resistance; marginalization

Street-corner politics in Beijing: Political control, everyday creativity, and social change in hutong alleyways The hutong (胡同) is the traditional alleyway of Beijing. These narrow lanes offer a particular setting of vernacular architecture. The social identity of the hutong contrasts with the anonymity of the public space. Hutong streetlife constitutes an intermediate space, between the private space of the traditional courtyard house (siheyuan, 四合院) and the public space of the main streets. This chapter conceives the hutong as a place of appropriation and anchorage, a place of memory and history, but also a place of power

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch02

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circulation and political interactions, shaping specific local practices and meanings. The hutong forms a spatial entity structuring the residential areas of the historical city centre. On both sides of these lanes, oriented from east to west so as to protect from northern winds and allow direct sunlight, hutong residents live in one-storey houses (pingfang, 平房), that are located in (often shared) courtyard houses. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, these spaces have changed in their materiality and their social practices, from the planned economy through the reforms towards the market economy, on to the 2008 Olympic Games. This chapter focuses on the impact of such social and spatial changes on the configurations of political life in the hutong. Hutong street life and housing space are evolving, adaptive, and flexible urban forms. The imperial city of Beijing was conceived as a spatial projection of power relations. Hutongs were structured according to gated courtyard houses, forming a chessboard-shaped urban fabric. The architecture of the courtyard house reflected the social position of the residents. In the house, each room was designed for a specific social position in the family order. During the twentieth century, the evolution of social and spatial practices in the hutong conf irmed the diversity and variation of these lanes. The image of the ‘palimpsest’, developed by Jie Li (2014), shows the possibilities of adaptation and reinvention of the hutong, from the siheyuan of the imperial era to the collectivization of housing during the Maoist era and the development of ‘cluttered yards’ (dazayuan, 大杂院). From 1949, Mao’s regime focused on transforming ‘cities of consumption’ (xiaofei chengshi, 消费城市) into ‘cities of production’ (shengchan chengshi, 生产城市). Urban housing in Beijing received a small proportion of public investment, as a massive population settled in the capital city. The industrialization of the city thus neglected the housing issue, which resulted in decreasing living standards for the residents. The rising population density in hutongs led to the occupation of any available space, turning bathrooms, storage rooms, and kitchens into rooms for families. Housing provision was controlled by the public sector, following the nationalization of private houses of former Nationalist Party members and anti-revolutionaries. A low-rent policy was introduced in 1956 and implemented in Beijing two years later. Because of the low rents, the lack of funding to renovate and maintain housing led to further deterioration (Wu 1999, 50) and conflicts over housing property, some of which remain unresolved in the twenty-first century (Hsing 2010). During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the average housing space per person became extremely low. The political campaign against the ‘four old’ (si jiu, 四旧) destroyed pre-communist cultural heritage,

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including elements of hutong architecture (temples, etc.). The 1976 Tangshan earthquake led to a more serious housing crisis in Beijing. The lack of housing space encouraged housing extensions, and courtyard houses became known as ‘cluttered yards’ (dazayuan). Courtyard housing was crowded and dilapidated, but the collective of neighbours constituted a heterogeneous yet close-knit community of personalized relationships (guanxi, 关系). Political activism was based on these systematized social ties. In the Mao era, resident-activists ( jijifenzi) were selected to serve as delegates in residents’ committees ( juweihui, 居委会) – a grassroots mass organization in inner-city neighbourhoods (Audin 2017). Taking responsibility for the execution of state policies and Communist Party propaganda, residents’ committee activists also relied on and reinforced personalized relationships between all hutong residents as a way to mobilize the masses, as well as to foster mutual help and resolve conflicts (Whyte and Parish 1984, 337-339). After the implementation of land and housing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, Beijing’s cityscape changed rapidly. The 2000s accelerated the city’s urban development through mega-event urbanism (Chong 2013; Broudehoux 2017). The selection of Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games triggered a real estate boom, resulting in a rise in housing prices, as well as campaigns of urban makeover (Broudehoux 2004). Along with these profound transformations, hutong architecture and politics evolved. Nowadays, the alleyways are still densely populated with single-storey houses and low-income residents, but the local ‘activists’ no longer control families’ lives for ideological purposes. The norms of ‘the good life’ have also changed with the reforms – now, as a young couple considers it important to buy a new house and a private car before getting married, the hutong does not belong in this urban middleclass ideal. This was reinforced by the adoption of the 2007 Real Property Law (wuquanfa, 物权法), which clarified the rights of homeowners in new housing compounds (Pow 2009; Zhang 2010). While homeowners’ organizations were seen as a progressive political force in the 2000s (Tomba 2015, 117-140), the politics of hutong street life was overlooked. Due to the diversity of housing property types and contrasting social situations between neighbours, the widespread conception of hutong lanes is that of a ‘messy’ urbanity and conflicting social situations. There are indeed three types of home ownership in Beijing’s inner-city districts: 1 Public housing (gong fang, 公房) was introduced under the socialist system with a low monthly rent, from 30 yuan to 100 yuan in 2008. This rent system stopped after the housing reform at the end of the 1990s,

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but pre-reform tenants still benefit from it and can transfer the lease to their family members. 2 Work-unit housing (danwei fang, 单位房) is also a legacy of the socialist system, allocated by the work unit to its workers, under a low-rent system. Since the housing reform at the end of the 1990s, the inhabitants were given the choice to purchase their house or continue to rent it. As a consequence of the market reform, since the early 2000s, the tenants of these first two categories of housing can sublease their low-rent house at market price while they live elsewhere in Beijing. 3 Private housing (si fang, 私房). If the courtyard belongs to one family, the doors on the hutong are often closed. Some of these houses have been owned since the pre-communist era. Tourism development and increasing land values in the city centre have given private owners the possibility to renovate and rent out their house, in part or in totality. Some rent them out to tenants who turn them into small shops or restaurants. The spatial distribution of these three types of property is spread out in today’s hutong, as all three types can coexist in one lane (and even in one yard). Owing to financial difficulties and demographic pressures during the twentieth century, inner-city historical housing has deteriorated and altered. Most houses are officially labelled as ‘dangerous’ (weijiu fangwu, 危旧房屋). The damaged local architecture and unclear forms of housing property brought the hutong to the centre of debate over urban planning and heritagization policies. While redevelopment projects involved large-scale demolition of the urban fabric, a parallel movement also led to a policy of historical heritage preservation (Wu 1999). According to Jun Wang (2011, 15), ‘members of the Chinese intelligentsia hold diametrically antagonistic views on the fate of hutongs, on what should be done with those narrow lanes and alleys seen by many as a most salient cultural feature of this ancient capital’. The issue of housing preservation/regeneration is present in state policies, but how does it impact the residents’ daily life? This chapter adopts an ethnographic perspective, ‘from below’, on the politics of hutong life in post-Olympic Beijing. Inner-city neighbourhoods still provide an important range of welfare and sociocultural services and close social networks to low-income, less mobile residents. Moreover, hutong alleyways are still governed according to a territorial framework by professional residents’ committees (Audin 2015), which are now in charge of administrative work and keep a close watch on the lanes. Inherited from the socialist era, how does this ‘collective’ reinvent itself in the global megalopolis?

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Figure 2.1 Map of Shichahai area in 2019

West Di’anmen St

Houhai Lake

Qianhai Lake

Drum Tower Outer Di’anmen St

Line 8, Beijing Subway

BEIJING 0

50

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Map by Nancy Ji

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Research in architecture and urban studies has already shed light on courtyard houses and the hutong as emblematic forms of ‘composite architecture’ (Sorkin 2008) and vernacular housing (Wu 1999; Zhang 1997), but the political dimension of social life and micro-local power networks in the liminal space of the alleyway has been overlooked. Moreover, community studies are more focused on Shanghai than on Beijing (Cheval 2018; Li 2014; Shao 2013; Zhu 2010). Beijing-based studies have already underlined the vanishing ‘old Beijing’ traditions erased by ‘modernity’ (see Meyer 2008; Yang 2015). Studies in urban geography focus on the development of tourism (Gu and Ryan 2008) and gentrification (Shin 2010), as well as urban protests (Hsing 2010; Shin and Li 2013). In this chapter, I analyse everyday life in these shared spaces and the micropolitics of hutong alleyways, documented by long-term ethnographic fieldwork (conducted in 2006-2009, 2012, 2015-2018) using direct observation, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with residents and neighbourhood workers in Shichahai, which is located in the north-eastern part of Beijing’s inner-city districts (Figure 2.1). The hutong is a site of street-level politics, where the long-term residents’ everyday creativity copes with, complies with, reinvents, or resists state discipline. State policies, measures of social control, and capital accumulation following the real estate reform have had an impact on the everyday 50 100 200

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lifestyles of long-term Beijing locals (lao Beijing, 老北京) and ‘ordinary Chinese citizens’ (laobaixing, 老百姓), confronted with demolition and urban renewal, acting through and coping with tourism and commercial gentrification. In hutong alleyways, daily routines and local sociability can be seen as ‘arts of making’ (Certeau 1984) that constitute forms of everyday creativity and, sometimes, develop into either tacit or more open forms of resistance. The residents’ popular practices (cooking, speaking) draw a link between subaltern housing property, daily routines, and open forms of resistance in the alleyway, similar to the findings of studies in France (Giroud 2007), Japan (Pinet 2016), and the Middle East: ‘Here the outdoor spaces (back alleys, public parks, squares, and the main streets) serve as indispensable assets in the economic livelihood and social/cultural reproduction of a vast segment of the urban population, and, consequently, as fertile ground for the expression of street politics’ (Bayart 2010, 12). This ethnographic study shows how different groups of people (long-term residents, tourists, business owners, government bodies) reinvent everyday lifestyles, social networks, and power relations in the hutong. Inspired by ethnographic studies in Shanghai’s lilong (里弄) alleyways (Cheval 2018; Zhu 2010), this chapter analyses the hutong as a social unit with specific ‘street-corner politics’ in the post-Olympic city. By studying social control and resistance in the Beijing hutong it sheds insight on how these traditional alleyways create complex processes of solidarity, fragmentation, and conflict. In this chapter, I first focus on the politics of placemaking in hutong life, showing how imbricated spaces turn the alleyway into an extension of home. Hutong alleyways are composed of heterogeneous forms of housing property, hosting diverse social groups coexisting in spatial proximity and social distance. Hutong political life and public order are framed by residents’ committees and other policing actors, such as policemen ( jingcha, 警察) and agents in charge of street control (chengguan, 城管). Daily interactions between these agents and long-term residents show how they reinvent local social norms of order, (dis)comfort, and sociability. I analyse the forms of coexistence of heterogeneous social groups in spatial and temporal dimensions, showing how the hutong is shared by residents, public workers, government bodies, visitors, and shop owners according to different time frames and uses. In the second part, I explore hutong alleyways as sites of social control and resistance. Civilization campaigns by the state led to people being labelled as lower or higher ‘quality’ (suzhi, 素质). Real estate development confirms the power of urban planning on the social fabric, leading to fast and profound change through redevelopment projects, demolition, or rehabilitation. The

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ways in which the last residents experience the destructuration of the social fabric reveal interesting forms of agency and subjectivity.

The politics of placemaking: Local appropriations and social differentiation in the hutong As witnesses of the city’s complex urban history, hutongs are the emblematic alleyways of Beijing. With their grey brick walls and red doors, these lanes are connected to the typical residential architecture of the historic city centre. One can notice the vitality of street life, with residents shopping or sitting in the lane and chatting with neighbours, nearby employees passing through, as well as street vendors, and small shop owners standing in the window frames opening to the outside. These busy maze-like lanes host altered courtyard houses, originally occupied by high-ranking families that have become overcrowded and uncomfortable after decades of degradation and lack of maintenance. From the outside, one can just see a door and a wall, but once inside, one can discover a shady courtyard full of plants such as the jujube tree or the calabash: the peaceful atmosphere contrasts with the intensity of the hutong activity outside. Three imbricated spaces (house/yard/lane) producing a sense of place There are close connections between Beijing lanes and courtyard houses, following the imbrications of three spaces: house/yard/lane ( fang/yuan/ hutong, 房/院/胡同). Local residents use the lane as an extension of their homes (see also Yang 2015, 115). Uncomfortable and cramped housing tends to push residents out, towards the yard and further into the lane. The long-term use of such living spaces has given way to individual and collective adaptations. Older forms of housing property are not fully protected in Beijing. Due to unclear property rights, owners and residents are not incentivized to rehabilitate or redecorate their house. In this context, local norms of use exist between siheyuan and dazayuan. In a dazayuan, the entrance door to the yard generally stays open when one resident is present. Inside the yard, the space is occupied by the various extensions built by the residents, as new rooms after their children were married, or simply used as kitchens or storage rooms. The lack of space in the rooms results in objects and activities overflowing outside. Extensions are made out of sheet metal, bricks, or wood. The courtyard is reduced to a narrow pathway between the imbricated extensions on both sides (Figure 2.2).

64  Figure 2.2 No more courtyard in Shichahai

Source: Judith Audin, November 2012

Judith Audin

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The dazayuan has a relatively negative image – messy (luan, 乱), dirty (zang, 脏), and noisy (chao, 吵). The public authorities especially fear the risk of fire. A lawyer volunteering for the hutong community considered ‘illegal architecture’ (weifa jianzhu, 违法建筑) as one of the main issues he had to deal with: ‘The most recurrent issue is illegal architecture, that is to say the houses or housing extensions built without authorization in the courtyards. It is possible to use this space because it does not belong to anybody in particular. But it is illegal’ (interview by author, 1 July 2008). These cramped, collective living conditions have consequences on local sociability. Overcrowded housing and lower living standards produce a desire to move out, but they also foster social interactions, conflicts, and a sense of solidarity among families. These lifestyles constitute ‘arts of making’ (Certeau 1984). The notion of the ‘routinisation of lifestyles’ (Bayart 2008, 19) illustrates the complex process of daily habits. In the Beijing city centre, the routinization of discomfort describes the ways the residents adapt to their environment. Daily habits are not just repetitions of gestures and body positions: these norms are in perpetual reinvention. The perception of comfort is relative and subjective. Apparent forms of discomfort can be ‘discreet comfort’, different from the dominant codes of material comfort in urban China. The material know-how and sociabilities of discomfort produce local self-help practices in the neighbourhood. Overcrowded yards are lived as collective, open spaces. Owing to the small size of houses, the frontiers between public and private are less clear. Chess and poker players put chairs, stools, and used sofas outside. The residents of small houses extend their daily domestic or leisure activities into the lane. This is due to the lack of facilities for intimate activities (toilets, bathroom, or kitchen) in cluttered yards. In such discomfort, it is still common to see people washing the dishes, their hair, or their teeth outside or in the yard, with a water bucket located under the tap. This shows the capacity of residents to appropriate the hutong space. Because they adjusted to this collective lifestyle, long-term residents seem less embarrassed, or at least less preoccupied, by how they appear in public (Figure 2.3). The various extensions and overcrowded houses also represent sources of tension and conflict among families. In some cases, extensions block the neighbour’s sunlight or air circulation, or there may be conflicts about stolen property or noise: In this yard, do you see this tree? Well there, you can find the things of everyone; each family puts their stuff there, especially the food, which

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Figure 2.3 Hanging the laundry outside is a common practice in Shichahai

Source: Judith Audin, November 2012

is stored outside. So sometimes, we notice strange situations […] like the amount of food we have put there seems to have reduced. In that case we go see the nearby family because there is a problem. Or our cat goes and eats the fish put outside by another family, and this time, it is them who are angry with us. This kind of conflict is very simple and frequent in our everyday life in the hutong. (Resident in a dazayuan, interview by author, 11 April 2007)

There are tensions between long-term residents and newcomers, especially migrant workers, who look for low rents and live in such small rooms: The problem in crowded yards developed in time. At f irst, there was a harmonious community (hexie, 和谐), but now…. (Hutong resident, interview by author, 3 April 2007)

The constant presence of neighbours can be difficult to bear when they observe and comment on all facts and behaviours. In fact, the presence of the group is both reassuring and constraining. Each resident organizes his or her own possessions indoors and in the collective yard. Under the watchful eye of others, the location of each piece of furniture and object is all the more carefully thought out. Inside dazayuan rooms, space is tight, but the

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residents put their personal objects under the bed, in closets, drawers, or on top of a shelf, to protect intimate objects from the neighbours. In the hutong, the local community still has local residents-delegates, aware of neighbourhood affairs, and watchful of the daily movements of locals and non-locals. During my fieldwork in non-touristy alleyways, older residents sitting on the threshold of their yard stared at me. If I took more time to observe a detail near a door, they would immediately ask me what I was doing there and if I was lost. These practices are emblematic of tight local communities where everyone knows everyone. But just like the careful arrangement of intimate objects, the social differences between long-term residents are managed with careful attitudes of tolerance and avoidance. The strength of social ties and social control by the long-term residents has been a characteristic element of everyday hutong life since the first years of communism. The yard and the alleyway are communal spaces where local norms emerge. Many residents told me they preferred ‘being outside during the day rather than staying inside’. Elderly residents are not embarrassed to go shopping in their pyjamas or with their slippers on. These popular conceptions of simplicity, rooted in hutong areas, suggest forms of anti-discipline resisting the new morals of the Party state promoting ‘civilized behaviours’ (Tomba 2015, 141-164), while reinforcing the civic duty of popular street-watch. Outside, these old residents find a form of protection in the presence of their neighbours, which reinforces the involvement and participation of everyone in the vitality of local life and the continuity of local practices. The residential lanes are public spaces, but neighbours consider them more as a common space. Collective life in the yards contributes to developing a territorial identity shared by long-term neighbours. Outdoor kitchens are often a way to chat about cooking recipes or opportunities to share meals between families. The idealized vision of the community of inhabitants is a way to symbolically erase material discomfort and maintain a ‘collective’ in times of social change: Life in a yard is like life in a big family ( jia, 家). To me, there are no bad aspects; everyone can help one another. (Resident, interview by author, 3 April 2007)

There is a strong affective element in the Chinese notion of jia (家, ‘family’ or ‘home’) that overrides the material dimension of fang (房, ‘house’ or ‘housing’).

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The scale of these houses, on one or two floors, but also with the outdoor spaces of the collective yard and the lane, fits the sizes of residents and pedestrians, reinforcing the social network of the local community. Facilities for daily life are within walking or cycling distance: small convenience stores, schools, and public toilets. Before 1949, courtyard houses had bathrooms and private toilets, but after the massive population increase in the city centre, there was no more space for restrooms. Public toilets became essential extensions of people’s homes and became places for local sociability. Their importance for daily communal interactions declined in recent years: nowadays, many hutong residents have now reintroduced private showers and toilets in their houses. Nevertheless, the role of public toilets in many of the lower-income residents’ daily lives remains significant; public toilets initiate daily itineraries that reinforce encounters with neighbours on the way. The human scale of the lane, which fits the size of its residents, is one of the specificities of hutong alleyways. Everyday practices reveal the appropriation of the lane as an extension of the house, and of the collective yard. The frontiers of private life are more flexible than in other residential neighbourhoods, but the residents keep control of their intimacy. Beyond the image of crowdedness, dirtiness, and messiness, hutong residents conceive their private space as imbricated in the physical network of lanes and in the social network of neighbours. Living through spatial proximity and social distance A strong social hierarchy exists through the distinction between siheyuan and dazayuan. The owners of the former use architectural heritage as a form of social distinction, but the social heterogeneity of the lanes goes beyond this distinction. Many ‘old Beijingers’ (lao Beijing ren, 老北京人) in Shichahai still live a modest lifestyle in dazayuan. There is a sizeable proportion of dibao (低保) households – urban residents who receive a minimum living allowance. Disadvantaged groups such as unemployed residents, poor retirees or disabled people spend most of their time in the hutong area where they develop small businesses or spend the day. People who have lived in Beijing since the 1950s or before use the expression lao Beijing (‘old Beijing’) as a form of distinction from newcomers as a tactic to cope with their low-income situation by keeping up a symbolic status. As a consequence of the lower rents of the small rooms in dilapidated pingfang, migrant workers also rent such houses, for shorter leases. With a wave of older inhabitants leaving

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the neighbourhood during urban renewal operations, strong boundaries arise between old and new inhabitants, between the ‘established’ and the ‘outsiders’ (Elias and Scotson 1965). The loss of traditional references in a fast-changing urban landscape, the growing sense of insecurity, and the search for dignity explain the social stigmatization and discrimination of younger migrant tenants by ‘old Beijingers’. The latter emphasize their local identity by all sorts of ordinary dispositions: speaking the Beijing dialect, cooking Beijing noodles, taking pride in taking their birds out for a walk, and other visible characteristics of the lao Beijing ethos. Despite these economic, symbolic, and socioprofessional divisions, over time and with the common living conditions in dazayuan, these two groups still build social ties. Other new residents increase social distance, with urban renewal further transforming the social fabric of the lanes. For example, one hutong near Houhai is divided in two parts. The first half of the lane is composed of brand-new courtyard houses exhibiting the traditional architectural style of the siheyuan but equipped with new amenities (security system and parking spaces). Sold at a very high price, they were designed for a transnational elite. The social uses of the lane also evolve along with these new luxury houses. The homeowners are almost never visible, except when driving their car, and they rarely shop at the nearby shops. Sometimes, their domestic helpers can be spotted in the lane. A sociospatial border between two worlds, geographically close but socially opposed, fractures the lane: These new houses are for rich people, different from this yard’s residents. We are ordinary people (laobaixing, 老百姓); all the houses belong to the Housing Bureau. We have no contact with the new residents. We are not from the same world; we don’t speak the same language. (Long-term hutong resident, interview by author, 16 May 2009)

A little further away, there is an unfinished construction site. Daily life goes on around this wasteland. The price of the luxury siheyuan was set at 50,000 yuan per square metre (Zou Huan, urban planner, Tsinghua University, interview by author, 17 May 2007). Taking the notion of heritage preservation as a new marketing strategy, real estate developers build luxurious replicas of traditional housing. One resident thinks that the neighbourhood had changed ‘after rich people bought and redecorated traditional homes but keep their door closed permanently. It’s a pity to see this new mentality develop in the lane’ (interview by author, 5 May 2007). Hutong housing is also much appreciated by foreign expats attracted by ‘old Beijing’ lifestyles (interviews by author, September 2015). They rent

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pingfang in conditions better than average: the houses are redecorated, equipped with private bathrooms and kitchens, and safe locks are put on doors. White-collar foreigners enjoy local life for the lively atmosphere, the view of lanes and trees, the little restaurants and shops: for them, hutong areas are well located and are more ‘authentic’. The Shichahai area has a high symbolic status in Beijing, in contrast to ‘neglected’ Dashilanr, studied by Harriett Evans (2014). The area has become a site of cultural heritage protection but also of mass tourism: ‘Shichahai has become a label (pinpai, 品牌)’ (director of a residents’ committee, interview by author, 21 May 2008). The development of tourism and commercial activities leads to a commodification of ‘old Beijing culture’. The residents in public or private housing contribute to social change by renting their houses through diverse intermediaries (real estate agencies, public ads, and social networks). When they move out, older residents make way for gentrification, folk commerce, and tourism activities (Shin 2010). Many local residents’ homes and amenities (markets) have been replaced by youth hostels, bars, and shops. Shichahai stimulates entrepreneurial designer projects. The number of commercial activities associated with tourism keeps increasing: the lanes are now full of coffee shops and bars for young, hip Chinese customers, but also souvenir and fashion shops. Most public signs have English language translations. The folk customs of old Beijing became a key product, especially during and after the 2008 Olympics. There is now a projected image of hutong neighbourhood life, an ideal type of local culture that includes the imaginary of lively social groups, traditional small shops, and lifestyles. But this imaginary is rooted in a reconstruction of courtyard houses as new, sophisticated, clean, and ‘modern’ – or rather, it is commercialized as such. If the development of tourism helps develop historical heritage protection of hutongs, it also encourages increased prices and commercial effects with the branding of ‘authenticity’ (Zukin 2008). In 2007, dozens of cycling rickshaws offered hutong tours by calling out to tourists. Most of the vehicles were ‘illegal’ (heiche, 黑车); most of the drivers did not come from Beijing, but were working as guides to old Beijing. During the 2008 Olympic Games, the municipality regulated and rationalized the tourist agencies: hutong tour vehicles had to get official car numbers. Tourism and gentrified commercial activity are especially visible in Yandai Xiejie, Nanluoguxiang, Gulou East Street, and on the shores of the three lakes in the Shichahai area. The local authorities have participated in the planning of these streets, resulting in the commodification of land use and the promotion of the cultural value of the hutong.

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The bars, teahouses, restaurants, hostels, and hotels mainly target foreign and Chinese tourists, new expats, and young wealthy Chinese residents. These customers express a desire for authentic Beijing culture, but their – socially different – tastes transform the commercial life in the hutong. Consequently, the different social groups do not interact, just like in other gentrif ied areas in the world. Gentrif ication processes are reinforced by Beijing’s planned ‘cultural urbanism’, turning the remaining factory sites into new ‘cultural hubs’ and design off ices. Hutong architecture attracts new entrepreneurial projects for Chinese and foreign companies. While some initiatives in the creative economy, such as Design Week, involve the local actors and residents, the promotion of hutong street life as a positive label remains rather focused on the image, and less on the social networks and deeper issues of the area. This affects the neighbourhood ‘collective’, and it generates new politics of interactions. The politics of interactions: Temporalities and spatialities of hutong use Alleyways have a diversity of social interactions and social temporalities. Different social groups create different spatial uses of the hutong, showing diversity – and sometimes conflict – in the functions and meanings of the neighbourhood. 1 Long-term hutong residents wake up with the sunlight. They can be seen in the lane from 5 am until sunset. Older residents usually exercise or take a walk around the lakes before breakfast. They take their meals in the yard. During hot summers, residents also like to take a walk after dinner, or to exercise. The state encourages this outdoor sport culture with a park pass policy (Farquhar 2009) and the installation of exercise equipment in the hutong. There is a strong need to stay active, to spend time outside, and to make oneself useful for the grandchildren. Cultural or sport activities create opportunities to socialize with the neighbours; the hutong is a central space for gossiping (Figure 2.4; see also Li 2014, 149-163). 2 Grassroots organizations are open to the public in the hutong from 8:30 am until 5 pm. An important institution at the street level is still the residents’ committee, active since the Maoist era. Acting as an unofficial administration, residents’ committee members are in charge of implementing the policies of the street office – the local branch of the city government – in the neighbourhood and must pay special attention to the most ‘vulnerable’ residents (poor and unemployed families,

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Figure 2.4  Lao Beijing residents install chairs and tables to play chess, go, cards or mah-jong in Shichahai

Source: Judith Audin, April 2008

retirees, and sick or disabled residents). In the context of personalized neighbourhood social networks, they strive to obtain legitimacy in the hutong area and hold elections every three years. Many charismatic residents’ committee directors and Party committee secretaries live nearby and use their double identity – as local residents and as employees – to establish, maintain, and develop their network. They organize regular collective sociocultural activities for their constituents, such as choirs, sport groups, theatre plays, and day trips to the suburban parks or to nearby cities, etc. Residents’ committee employees still intervene as mediators in case of neighbourly conflicts (see also Guo and Klein 2005). Moreover, residents’ committee staff give special attention to ‘vulnerable groups’ (ruoshi qunti, 弱势群体) and low-income families (kunnan jiating, 困难家庭), creating an inclusive local community (Audin 2015). Although the local political system is not fully participative, the production of a hutong ‘community’ (shequ, 社区) narrative is based on a network of selected ‘residents-volunteers’ (Audin 2017). Residents’ committee agents recruit and supervise patrols of ‘residents-volunteers’ to watch the streets during the day (Audin 2017). In spite of their old age, the neighbourhood watch patrols are particularly active in the hutong, between gossiping, relaxing, playing, and watching the area.

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In each street, several lao Beijing residents occupy the public space like ‘corner boys’ accustomed to owning the space in William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943). Many of them wear a red armband, others do not, but they all sit near their houses to spend time, chat with other volunteers, and comment on street life. Many local residents respect the presence of volunteers in the area to prevent robbery and other unwanted nuisances. The residents’ committee thus still constitutes a major local organization in times of social change. 3 Shop owners, business owners, and street vendors are involved in the lane’s daily life. Informal work has been flourishing since the 1980s, and fieldwork led me to interact with many migrant shop owners, street cleaners and street vendors. As a large proportion of residents moved away to newer apartment buildings, hutong rooms became small shops: hair salons, canteens, convenience shops (xiaomaibu, 小卖部), or hotels. Street vending also developed, with migrant workers selling all sorts of goods, from fruits and vegetables, to cold noodles and barbecue to mobile phone accessories, jewellery, and DVDs. After the 2008 Olympics, street vending became more formalized and regulated by chengguan, local government law enforcement agents in charge of implementing public order and controlling illicit commercial activities. This formalization process has led to the institutionalization of ‘acceptable’ street commerce supervised by the street office and residents’ committees, for example, bicycle repair stalls and other small ‘service shops’ (bianmin, 便民). Moreover, waste picking is an important local activity carried out by migrant entrepreneurs. Local residents are encouraged to recycle because they can earn a small income in return for their waste. Yet, social segregation is visible: old Beijingers criticize migrant workers for their ‘dirty’, ‘suspicious’, and ‘rude’ manners, while migrant residents retaliate by criticizing urban residents for being lazy and relying on state welfare. 4 Tourists and visitors walk in the hutong between 11 am and 9 pm. Tourism development creates constraints and opportunities for the local residents, generating new forms of income and prestige, but also conflicts of coexistence. Local residents dislike the noise around Lakes Qianhai and Houhai due to the presence of bars opening from 7 pm to 2 am: Shichahai area, peaceful and quiet, no longer exists. From morning to evening, it’s all noise and disorganization. Especially at night, the residents have no way to rest at home. The noise often lasts until

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dawn. The nearby residents all agree with this issue but until today, nobody listens to us or cares about us. We don’t know where to go to complain or who to talk to!!! Public letter put on the alleyway walls by a resident, in author’s possession, Spring 2007

During my fieldwork in September 2015, the residents also mentioned their dissatisfaction and feelings of intrusion when tourists entered their yards to take photos without permission. Despite existing compromises of coexistence, the lower-income residents tend to feel marginalized. Between urban renewal and opportunities of renting the places out, the local neighbourhood becomes increasingly anonymous and diverse, which is why the marginalized lao Beijing residents develop strong desires for order and dignity.

State control and subaltern forms of resistance Invisible power over space has an important effect on social practices. Physically absent, real estate developers and local administrators transform hutong architecture and modify, or even break up, the social fabric. With its ‘escape lanes’ (Amar 2011, 91-92), the maze-like hutong fabric has provided the residents and shop owners with multiple sources of itineraries and spatial practices. Urban renewal operations transform this fabric and impose new movements. Hutong demolition thus constitutes a ‘technology of power’ (Foucault 1994, 523). Biopolitical Beijing: Sanitizing, reshaping, and civilizing the alleyways There is a coherent local community. […] But sometimes demolition is useful and necessary. There are just too many risks: when it rains here, the residents’ houses are flooded. There are also risks of fire. (Director of a residents’ committee, interview by author, 27 June 2015)

In the context of rising land value in the city centre, dilapidated housing in Beijing has become the object of urban renewal. Since the 1980s, the symbol ‘to demolish’ (chai, 拆) has become a banal visual element in the hutong. I witnessed, in 2009, the announcement of a demolition/relocation (chaiqian, 拆迁) project for the construction of Beijing Subway’s Line 6 and Line 8. The demolition notice had a performative effect. As soon as the notices were on walls, the project was put in motion. The notice listed all the buildings targeted for demolition and the deadlines for applying for

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financial compensation to move out. On the weekend following the eviction notice, the agents of a demolition company carried out surveys and met with the families. The period for compensation was short: two months. The residents were worried because the problem was not only how much one could get, but also where to go: Dibao recipients are luckier because the government will allocate social housing or something. But we are not rich, either. Nobody cares about us. We only get financial compensation depending on our current housing surface and we will have to find a solution. (Hutong resident, interview by author, 16 May 2009)

A few days later, eviction notices had been written over or taken down, as a sign of protest. Even if the majority of homeowners/residents agreed to move, either in acknowledgement of futility or a desire for a larger home, others – especially private tenants and local business owners – felt they were considerably disadvantaged. Being evicted from areas where the physical space, but also the local communities, had been constructed over many decades remains a traumatic experience, which Qin Shao (2013) calls ‘domicide’, with violent episodes of forced eviction carried out by ‘thugs’ (Ong 2018). In urban China, open resistance to demolition is difficult, but the local residents have developed many ways to protect their rights – through legal action, petition, or appealing to the media. Resistance was also produced directly in the hutong space. One local tactic of resistance is to use the walls to publish protest messages, in a perpetuation of the dazibao (大字报, ‘big-character poster’) tradition (Figure 2.5). In parallel to demolition, a powerful state campaign has actively promoted ‘civilized behaviours’ (wenming xingwei, 文明行为) since the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It was actively implemented in the hutong by the city government. Between social exclusion and hygiene measures, the civilizing campaign aims to show the world a clean and modern Beijing not only in terms of space, but also of behaviours (Broudehoux 2017). As part of this civilizing campaign, the ‘camouflage’ campaign (Broudehoux 2004) attends to urban aesthetics through the official notion of ‘urban appearance’ (shirong, 市容). The image of Olympic Beijing as a global city mandates clear measures against all elements disturbing this ideal urban landscape, seeking to eliminate – or at least conceal – dirtiness, migrants, street vendors, and prostitution. The aestheticization of the city centre involves many actors. Street cleaning opened a growing sector of recruitment of migrant workers for public

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Figure 2.5 Resisting with Spring Festival poems (chunlian, 春聯) in Shichahai; left ‘Those who implement the law don’t guard the law’; top ‘New spring’; right ‘Those who know the law don’t respect the law’

Source: Judith Audin, April 2015

hygiene and for the ‘greening’ (lühua, 绿化) of streets. But the civilizing campaign also meant social cleaning, as migrant workers and other stigmatized groups tended to become the undesirable components of cities promoting the attraction of talents (rencai, 人才). ‘Civilization pacts’ appeared in the

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1990s during the emergence of the population of migrant workers from less developed provinces and the problem of their urban integration. In the 2000s, this ‘spectacle’ (Broudehoux 2007) also impacted inner-city inhabitants. The preparation for the Olympics accelerated and intensified this campaign for the civic and physical education of the population: residents’ committee staff not only promoted good manners in ‘cluttered yards’ – against spitting, slang, etc. – but also edited and distributed booklets, posters, and activities on the theme of ‘civilized behaviour’. They put up posters, red banners, and notices on hutong walls and doors, promoting ‘good behaviour’. In the streets, yard doors carry such signs: ‘civilized and hygienic lane’ (wenming weisheng jiexiang, 文明卫生街巷) and ‘healthy family’ ( jiankang jiating, 健康家庭). Police officers and chengguan watched and evacuated unwanted social groups before the Olympics. For example, prostitution in hairdressing and massage salons was formerly a visible activity in the hutong, but has since disappeared (observation, July 2006-May 2008). The civilizing policy in hutong alleyways aims to encourage good behaviour by promoting cleanliness, politeness, and discretion. It also takes the form of hygiene policies, such as the ‘public toilet revolution’, or the replacement of coal by the provision of electric heating (observation, November 2008), less polluting and less dangerous. Many initiatives to rebuild or rehabilitate dilapidated housing in hutong areas have been implemented in line with the residents’ needs (observation, April 2009). However, the clean-up has a camouflage dimension and can also accelerate housing demolition. Fences are then used to hide ongoing demolition and construction sites. The same logic was applied in the fast destruction of ‘urban villages’ (chengzhongcun, 城中村) where many migrant workers used to live. In recent years, there have been regular controls of ‘illegal architecture’ leading to the demolition of housing and the eviction of residents and shop owners. More direct measures were implemented in 2017, with the publication of a plan to limit the total population of Beijing to 23 million and measures to limit the ‘low-end population’ (diduan renkou, 低端人口). Inner-city district authorities in Shichahai started a new campaign of ‘beautification’ and urban appearance with the large-scale renovation, demolition, and the bricking up of all hutong shops (observations, December 2017; May 2018), targeting migrant workers’ small businesses (Liu 2017). This has led to mixed reactions. Some lao Beijing residents consider themselves as more legitimate than migrant workers on hutong territory and they welcome this effort of bringing order; others regret the disappearance of the small shops and convenient services in their street (interviews by author, July 2019).

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Resisting through inhabiting? Neighbourhood attachment and the pingfang-loufang opposition Despite the alteration of the close-knit social fabric, the residents’ presence in the hutong creates a daily continuity of resisting in and with the space. Street practices in Beijing display notable forms of agency. Their minor behaviours constitute ‘arts of making’ rooted in everyday life, supported by their long-lasting residential experience. Social groups make idiosyncratic appropriations in the alleyways. Being at the same time victims and actors of social change, long-term residents invent daily practices and arts of resisting official norms. Local practices have institutionalized places of social interactions that cannot be erased by urban renewal, the civilizing policies, or touristic gentrification. For example, in Lakes Qianhai and Houhai, swimming and recreational fishing constitute daily hobbies. My observations confirm that people meet at the same spot and keep coming back. In another form of spatial presence, a couple of old hutong inhabitants continues to sell, at the same spot, their spicy soup, everyday from 5 pm to midnight: My husband was born in this hutong. But our house was demolished so we had to move out. […] Before, I lived right here, so when I sold spicy soup, I used to stand here, in front of my house. You see, this used to be the door of my yard. […] Even after the demolition, I did not change my spot. […] It’s easier because everybody knows me here. (Street vendor of spicy soup, interview by author, 4 June 2008)

Their physical presence demonstrates their attachment to the local lifestyle. This indirect form of resistance illustrates the dynamic of placemaking and urban familiarities. However, this balance is precarious. When I returned to the same spot in 2015, the street vendor was gone. Residents from the lower-middle classes display attachment to their neighbourhood, in spite of the low living standards. This attachment comes from the long-term social fabric of the neighbourhood, where they are part of a ‘place’. Most of the inhabitants who refuse to leave are over 40 years old. Mobility factors reinforce positive visions of the neighbourhood, against the peripheral residential compounds, which carry negative representations. The hutongs are praised for having efficient public transportation and services (schools, parks, museums, and hospitals), but the city centre is also criticized for its traffic issues. People

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with mobility issues appreciate the centrality of their location and the nearby public parks. Moreover, the proximity of fresh markets and small convenience stores allows the elderly to feel autonomous. If the historic city centre and the hutongs are often presented as a ‘village in the city’ to tourists, it is also because the long-term residents have produced a discourse about local lifestyles and authentic ‘old Beijing culture’, explaining all the local symbols of their home dating back to the imperial era, such as door piers (men dun, 门礅) or the specific meanings of hutong names only understood if one speaks the local Beijing dialect. The physical connection to a rich history and to a tourist site is part of the strong attachment. The shared space and local social relations between inhabitants, passers-by, and local shop owners and workers reinforce the link to this urban setting. The quality of the social network matters greatly to these residents, and at least as much as the physical appearance of the neighbourhood. More importantly, the subjectivity and attachment to hutong life, particularly for older residents, appears in the difference between living in a pingfang and living in an apartment building. Their ‘adherence to the ground’ (Coing 1966, 47) is confirmed by medical arguments: ‘in the pingfang, we are closer to the earth, to the vital energy of the earth, so it is better for the health’, said one resident (interview by author, 16 May 2009). This living style, directly open to the outside, is all the more reassuring for the older generations of residents, who prefer being close to their neighbours should problems arise. The immediate connection between the house and the outside constitutes an important factor of attachment that impels the residents to reject the idea of life in an apartment building, which is also noted by Colette Pétonnet (1979, 162) in her ethnography of slums in France. There is a generational effect in neighbourhood attachment. For teenagers, collective life is less tolerable following the rising standards of comfort in urban China. Younger generations follow the norm of social achievement of home ownership in new residential compounds, even if that ‘paradise’ (Zhang 2010) means moving to the periphery of Beijing. Nevertheless, a wave of young adults now enjoys living in hutongs as a hip lifestyle. A young musician I interviewed on 16 May 2009 told me he lived with his father in a small private house in a yard. Although they shared a small space, they led vastly different lifestyles. He was active at night, listened to rock music, and slept late in the morning, while his father followed the ascetic lifestyle of old Beijing residents, waking up at dawn, eating simple local food, and going to bed early. Without conflict, the father and son organized their home into two different rooms. Both of them appreciated the neighbourhood

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despite having different tastes. Other long-term residents also mentioned several times that they enjoy living next to their foreign neighbours (who have been there for ten years) because they both shared a connection to this local history (interviews by author, 11 August 2016). On the other hand, the local rooting is also linked to the fact that the main sources of income or social welfare for disadvantaged groups are located nearby. For the residents in need, moving out would signify a diff icult transition in terms of livelihood. For the welfare recipients, moving out would mean losing these social services, since the neighbourhood provides most of their life support. Recipients of the minimum allowance (dibao, 低保) must prove their lack of resources. Being a dazayuan resident with low living standards constitutes an objective proof of their poverty and explains why impoverished long-term residents still rely on the residents’ committees for social assistance. Ultimately, multiple reasons motivate the residents to remain in hutongs, including the ‘family of neighbours’ and the ‘beautiful surroundings’. Hutong residents reinvent a part of Chinese tradition in the fields of health and well-being by activating cultural elements of urban planning such as feng shui. A new homeowner in the periphery of Beijing, who had always lived in a hutong and was forced to move out because of an urban renewal project, told me that his father died because of the brutal change of housing (interview by author, 22 March 2007). This rumour is widely shared among older hutong residents who fear moving out, especially for those who have spent their entire life in the neighbourhood and know all of its details. Being attached to the place is also a way to justify the material incapacity of moving out. Moving to a new place – both a new location and a new style of housing – is moving into the unknown. The resistance – and sometimes hostility – towards change and towards the introduction of ‘modern’ housing is a common characteristic of elderly residents from older working-class backgrounds. These residents who stay in place because they have no other choice reinvent their preferences and develop an idealized attachment to the pingfang. Aware of their limited economic capital, these residents rely on their local territory and its history as forms of resilience. Marginalization of the ‘collective’ and exit from the hutong Hutong living creates various constraints and uncertainties for the local residents – unsafe, cramped, ruled by pre-reform property rights – and does not invite them to invest in a future there. Among the frequently raised issues, outside disturbances by vehicles is often mentioned. In 2007 and

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2008, some of the lanes were widened to allow more cars to pass through. However, walking and cycling are still the main modes of transportation in the hutong. The residents also complained of the noise and disturbance from the construction sites near their homes. In another lane, conflict broke out between the residents and a developer who started work on a construction site nearby, billowing dust and creating substantial noise pollution (observation, May 2009). According to the director of a residents’ committee, the company gave each family a small amount of money (200 yuan) for their inconvenience; such financial compensation represents a way to resolve local conflicts. A few years before the Olympics, demolition became a common condition in hutong areas where the insecurity of housing property, even for private housing, created substantial amounts of stress. The residents criticized the lack of transparency in the projects. They were also given very little time to move out and negotiate proper compensation. As a consequence of the financial compensation norm in urban renewal projects, resistance against demolition became a matter of ‘bargain’ (Ho 2013) rather than a matter of lifestyle or heritage preservation. The ever present fear of urban renewal projects and the concomitant forced evictions has created a powerful panoptical effect. Hutong residents live under the invisible pressure of potential urban planning, and express a deep anxiety of being evicted. The ‘fear of demolition’ (Wang 2008, 258-259) results from this invisible power of urban planning. Urban authorities in China have become ‘landlords’ under the ‘neo-socialist’ property regime (Ho 2015); residents possess only land-use rights that do not offer any protection against forced demolition. The experience of being evicted from one’s home remains painful for disadvantaged groups, even if it represents one of the few opportunities to move to a more comfortable environment and become a homeowner. Therefore, while evicted families regret the loss of their neighbourhood and of their quality of life in the city centre, urban change is understood as inevitable to access better conditions, clearer property rights, and control over the residential space (Ho 2015). The remaining long-term inhabitants live with a constant risk: urban renewal projects can start at any point and they will have little time to pack up and move. With this heavy uncertainty about their future and the disappearance of convenient amenities of the neighbourhood, where high-standard shops and services are increasingly provided, the lower-class and especially older inhabitants, continue to live their daily lives while it lasts. Tourism creates opportunities for the local residents because they can rent out their houses. Many owner-occupants rent out or sublet their homes and move away. The income generated is not used for maintaining or repairing

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the buildings, however. The families who can afford better housing indeed move out. The last long-term occupants still living in the hutongs constitute a minority. In the city centre, the continuity of their presence constitutes a resource for mobilization in itself, but it is more an informal ‘art of making’ than a formal strategy against domination. The shared experience of ‘hutong life’ is being replaced by other residential standards. The nostalgia for demolished lanes paradoxically combines with the increased access to comfortable housing. The evolution of social practices comes with an enhanced mobility of the residents – even the more senior – in the city, beyond the lane.

Conclusion This ethnographic study of the Beijing hutong demonstrates how the ordinary practices of long-term residents contribute to the production of social (dis) orders, and define not only subjectivities but also tactics of resistance. Beijing alleyways shape the spatialized politics of everyday life. With their pedestrian, low-scale buildings and close-quartered communities of residents, these alleyways constitute an exception in the concrete jungle of the Chinese megalopolis. There, everyday life is rich and lively, full of various activities, from commercial activity to residential sociability. Due to long-term cohabitation in one yard and in one street, hutong residents developed close ties with their neighbours and were able to cope with challenging living conditions for several decades. Fast social change after reforms to real estate practices and the 2008 Olympics introduced new living standards and property rights that marginalized the low-income families in the inner-city districts. Growing tourism development and commercial gentrification of the hutongs brought them new opportunities, such as the rise of the inner-city land value making their territory more prestigious, but it also modified the social fabric. In the face of growing anonymity among hutong users, lao Beijing residents’ daily practices of dwelling, speaking, or cooking serve as tactics for maintaining a high profile and a territorial identity. On a micro-scale, everyday life in the hutong – especially in shared courtyard houses – is a combination of social diversity, small conflicts, and (in)tolerance. The lively appropriation of common spaces constitutes tactics of anti-discipline in an increasingly cosmetic area. The search for meaning and the struggle for dignity also explain why elderly lao Beijing residents continue to defer to official agents of order, such as residents’ committees,

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to maintain communities of neighbours, characterized by local knowledge. The alleyways of Shichahai still provide resources for the last long-term lao Beijing residents. However, the combined effects of mass tourism and gentrification, the pressure of increasing land market value, the difficulty experienced by residents to protect property and renting rights, as well as recent state campaigns of ‘beautification’ assault the characteristics of the social and spatial fabric of the hutong, destroying the plurality of its uses and architectures and reducing the function of alleyways to the leisure industry. This evolution reinforces the vulnerability of hutong street life collectives. In the absence of strong local initiatives involving all stakeholders in finding solutions in order to ensure more sustainable street practices and cultural heritage protection of vernacular hutong architecture, the ongoing trends of development in Beijing’s city centre mainly highlight the marginalization and exit strategies of the most deeply rooted social groups. Yet, the less visible ‘arts of making’ studied in this chapter remain relevant tactics in local politics.

References Amar, Nathanel. 2011. ‘Contester et réguler. Mutations de pouvoir, reorganization urbaine et résistance à Pékin.’ MA thesis, Sciences Po, Paris. Audin, Judith. 2015. ‘Governing through the Neighbourhood Community (shequ) in China: An Ethnography of the Participative Bureaucratisation of Residents’ Committees in Beijing.’ Revue française de science politique 65: 85-110. —. 2017. ‘Civic Duty, Moral Responsibility, and Reciprocity: An Ethnographic Study on Resident-Volunteers in the Neighborhoods of Beijing.’ China Perspectives 3: 47-56. Bayart, Jean-François. 2008. ‘Comparer par le bas.’ Sociétés politiques compares, 1-25. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. 2004. The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge. —. 2007. ‘Spectacular Beijing: The Conspicuous Construction of an Olympic Metropolis.’ Journal of Urban Affairs 29 (4): 383-399. —. 2017. Mega-Events and Urban Image Construction: Beijing and Rio de Janeiro. New York: Routledge. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cheval, Jérémy. 2018. ‘Shanghai shikumen lilong: Socio-spatial Transformations of Human Settlement: Appropriations in Shared Spaces beyond Destruction.’ PhD dissertation, Tongji University, Shanghai.

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Chong, Gladys Pak Lei. 2013. ‘Claiming the Past, Presenting the Present, Selling the Future: Imagining a New Beijing, Great Olympics.’ In Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture, edited by Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen, 135-156. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Coing, Henri. 1966. Rénovation urbaine et changement social. Paris: Éditions ouvrières. Elias, Norbert, and John L. Scotson. 1965. The Established and the Outsiders. London: Franck Cass and Co. Evans, Harriett. 2014. ‘Neglect of a Neighbourhood: Oral Accounts of Life in “Old Beijing” since the Eve of the People’s Republic.’ Urban History 41 (4): 686-704. Farquhar, Judith. 2009. ‘The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing.’ Public Culture 21 (3): 551-576. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Dits et écrits, vol. 2: 1970-1975. Paris: Gallimard. Giroud, Matthieu. 2007. ‘Résister en habitant? Renouvellement urbain et continuités populaires en centre ancien (Berriat Saint-Bruno à Grenoble et Alcântara à Lisbonne).’ PhD dissertation, Université de Poitiers. Gu, Huimin, and Chris Ryan. 2008. ‘Place Attachment, Identity and Community Impacts of Tourism: The Case of a Beijing Hutong.’ Tourism Management 29 (4): 637-647. Guo, Haini, and Bradley Klein. 2005. ‘Bargaining in the Shadow of the Community: Neighborly Dispute Resolution in Beijing Hutongs.’ Ohio State Journal on Conflict Resolution 20 (3): 825-909. Ho, Cheuk-Yuet. 2013. ‘Bargaining Demolition in China: A Practice of Distrust.’ Critique of Anthropology 33 (4): 412-428. —. 2015. Neo-Socialist Property Rights: The Predicament of Housing Ownership in China. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hsing, You-tien. 2010. ‘Urban Housing Mobilisations.’ In Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism, edited by You-tien Hsing and Ching Kwan Lee, 17-41. London: Routledge. Li, Jie. 2014. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Liu, Jady. 2017. ‘Beijing’s Year of Demolition.’ Supchina, 19 December. Accessed 8 September 2019. http://supchina.com/2017/12/19/photos-beijings-year-of-demolition/. Meyer, Michael. 2009. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. New York: Walker. Ong, Lynette H. 2018. ‘Thugs and Outsourcing of State Repression in China.’ The China Journal 80 (1): 94-110. Pétonnet, Colette. 1979. On est tous dans le brouillard: Ethnologie des banlieues. Paris: Galilée.

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Pinet, Nicolas. 2016. ‘Pratiques politiques subalternes dans un quartier populaire de Tokyo: Des formes de résistance?’ Cultures & Conflits 101: 35-56. Pow, Choon-Piew. 2009. Gated Communities in China: Class, Privilege, and the Moral Politics of the Good Life. London: Routledge. Shao, Qin. 2013. Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Shin, Hyun Bang. 2010. ‘Urban Conservation and Revalorisation of Dilapidated Historic Quarters: The Case of Nanluoguxiang in Beijing.’ Cities 27 (Supplement 1): S43-S54. Shin, Hyun Bang, and Bingqin Li. 2013. ‘Whose Games? The Costs of Being “Olympic Citizens” in Beijing.’ Environment and Urbanization 25 (2): 559-576. Sorkin, Michael. 2008. ‘Learning from the Hutong of Beijing and the Lilong of Shanghai.’ Architectural Record, 16 July. Tomba, Luigi. 2015. The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wang, Jun. 2008. The City in an Interview Notebook [in Chinese]. Beijing: Sanlian Shudian. —. 2011. Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern Beijing. Hackensack: World Scientific. Whyte, Martin K., and William L. Parish. 1984. Urban Life in Contemporary China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1943. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wu, Liangyong. 1999. Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing: A Project in the Ju’er Hutong. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Yang, Qiqing. 2015. Space Modernization and Social Interaction: A Comparative Study of Living Space in Beijing. Heidelberg: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing and Springer-Verlag. Zhang, Jie. 1997. ‘Informal Construction in Beijing’s Old Neighborhoods.’ Cities 14 (2): 85-94. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zhu, Jiangang 朱健刚. 2010. Guo yu jia zhijian: Shanghai linli de shimin tuanti yu shequ yundong de minzuzhi (国与家之间：上海邻里的市民团体与社区 运动的民族志) [Between the family and the state: An ethnography of the neighbourhood associations and community movements in a Shanghai lilong neighbourhood]. Beijing: Shehuikexue wenxian chubanshe. Zukin, Sharon. 2008. ‘Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means of Exclusion.’ Cultural Studies 22 (5): 724-748.

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About the author Dr Judith Audin is a researcher at CEFC Hong Kong and the chief editor of the journal China Perspectives. Her research focuses on socio-political networks and residents’ committees in Beijing’s urban neighbourhoods, the ethnography of the coal transition in Datong (Shanxi), and abandoned places and contemporary ruins in China.

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Alleyways between urban renewal, cultural innovation, and social integration The cases of Tokyo and Seoul Heide Imai

Abstract In times of globalization, ordinary places are increasingly contested and fragmented urban experiences, resulting in these places being left behind yet rediscovered, excluded yet revived, forgotten yet remembered. This chapter explores alleyway networks in contemporary Tokyo and Seoul, focusing on the roji (路地) and the golmok (골목) and the experiences of the people who make use of these places, to offer an in-depth, sociological portrait of these two contested cities. Providing multiple narratives of urban change and renewal, the chapter questions the future of the alleyways, its new actors, and its new possibilities, arguing that extraordinary cities should reconsider ordinary places to develop sustainable and inclusive urban areas. Keywords: Tokyo, Seoul, roji, golmok, nostalgia, gentrification, urban narratives

Introduction In this chapter, taking into account the realities and conditions of contemporary urban voids, I emphasize the need to deepen our understanding of urban blind spots, such as the vanishing alleyways that often function as interstitial places featuring different modes and processes in the contemporary city. In particular, aiming to understand the nature and potential of the alleyway as

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch03

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a ‘boundary’ between past and present, I critically evaluate the recent urban conditions of the alleyways in Japan and Korea – the roji (路地) and golmok (골목), respectively – by exploring the multiple and hybrid perspectives of local residents on this liminal space. To this end, I introduce and discuss personal narratives, experiences, and everyday life practices of locals and visitors encountered in the alleyways of Tsukuda-Tsukishima, Tokyo, and Insadong-Ikseondong, Seoul, both of which are areas experiencing an increasing level of redevelopment and urban transformation. Tsukuda was chosen because it is in close proximity to the alleys of the lively Tsukishima district, offering a mix of different types of alleyways, and is a place for residential and business activities (Kibe 2003). Ikseondong was chosen because it is a neighbourhood in which long-time locals still live and work, alongside newcomers. The busy and trendy area of Insadong, which borders Ikseondong in the south-west, has experienced different attempts at modernization, upgrading, and gentrification, being especially promoted as a cultural district by different official bodies (Kim 2011, 144). Conceptualized as a contested place and boundary between past and present (lifestyles), the alleyway can be viewed as the material expression for broader social struggles, and a locus for generating, proclaiming, and negotiating different cultural subjects, which are aspects of contemporary urban life. Within this framework, I examine how different urban transformation processes affect the transformation of vernacular urban forms and everyday urban life at the micro level. Through this study of the changing life patterns and everyday practices observed in the alleyways of Tokyo and Seoul, I aim to further our understanding of the future potential of the alleyway, which could be revitalized as an active part of everyday urban life or function as an alternative landscape of reminiscence, remaining as social space or, at its best, as common space.

The alleyways in Tokyo and Seoul: A realistic revival of the alleyway? The urban alleyway is experiencing a revival in different cultural contexts around the world, where it is considered: 1) a suitable concept for the recreation of small-scale public spaces into new, suburban neighbourhoods, as favoured by new urbanism, and 2) a path for the urban revitalization of inner-city areas. Yet, it is questionable if these forms of revival will lead to the reintegration of the alleyway and their original qualities into the current

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urban discourse, or if they will steadily result in the creation of monofunctional, sanitized public spaces that do not increase the quality of social life, but rather exacerbate the inequalities between different users, caused by intensifying gentrification, commercialization, and commodification processes (Barker 2005). Highlighting the rising tensions between different users, I will introduce the evolution of the alleyway in Tokyo and Seoul to consider what problems, possibilities, and potentials exist and how they can be resolved, handled, or used in future urban revitalization processes. The case of the roji in contemporary Tokyo The roji was historically a central place of everyday life and social interaction in a neighbourhood (especially during the late Edo, Meiji, and Taisho periods, 1820s-1920s), but is now considered a marginalized urban form, increasingly crushed between diverse competing interests and contests (City & Life 2005; Waley 2002). The roji can be described as a mostly narrow and winding alleyway or neighbourhood unit in traditional wooden low-rise neighbourhoods, which no car can enter and which are only wide enough to allow one person to walk or cycle through (Kobata and Tadokoro 2000; Nishimura 2006). The roji was formed historically inside the block or behind the main streets or side streets, as a ‘semi-public, semi-private’ realm, which was a place for collective activities around small shrines, local shops, and bathhouses (Bestor 1993; Hō 2006; Jinnai 1995). The enclosed environment of the alleyways became the stage for shared, intimate neighbourhood relations and local daily life, connecting public and private activities in a kind of communal space (Nishimura 2006). Nakano and Hirayama (2007) argue that roji are safe places, which offer a feeling of protection and of home, based on the narrowness and the human scale of the alley. The roji was, in contrast to a street, not based on the use of a car and traditionally supported pedestrian and small-scale usage, as well as intense social interaction. Furthermore, many roji have a maze-like character offering unexpected encounters because of their complicated shape, which is identified by the architect Amos Rappoport (1982) as a quality of alleyways. Tokyo alleyways are vanishing from the urban landscape as they increasingly make space for the new large- and small-scale residential complexes that have been appearing (especially in response to the rising demand for one-room apartments since the late 1990s) inside the remaining dense and low-rise neighbourhoods (Yukikuni 2007). With the modernization of Tokyo being reflected in new forms of urban living and individual lifestyles, the alleyway has turned into a marginal urban form, being recently rediscovered,

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reinterpreted, and reappropriated by different fields, actors, and users to promote different strategies and ideas (Hashizume 2005; Tōkyōjin 2005). The roji is recognized not only as a vulnerable, vanishing urban form or a place of alternative counter discourse of urban planning but also increasingly as an interstitial passage of the ‘good old days’, fulfilling the desire to remember and celebrate the past and places of familiarity, warmth, and simple urban life (City & Life 2005; Hashizume 2005; Nishimura 2006; Tōkyōjin 2005). In general, Tokyo is often depicted as a city where dark-suited masses of office workers march to work every morning, commute in jam-packed trains, and leave work for home on the last train. Yet, this is clearly a stereotype left over from the 1980s, when most people had to commute for more than 90 minutes to work, as high land prices meant they could only afford to live in a remote suburb of the city (Sassen 2001, 91). Since the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, rent and land prices have significantly decreased, encouraged by the shrinking Japanese population and demand for residential buildings; yet, since 2016 land prices have risen again due to the influx of foreign tourists and the rising need for land for hotels, shops, and plots to accommodate the necessary facilities for hosting the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 (J-Cast 2008; Reuters 2017). The number of empty houses in the Tokyo area is, however, an increasing problem, and many local governments now face serious challenges in maintaining the safety of the people, buildings, and public places, as seen in the case of Tsukuda. The case of Tsukuda and Tsukishima, Tokyo Tsukuda is located in central Tokyo, approximately 3 kilometres east of Tokyo Station, on an island called Tsukishima in Tokyo Bay. In 2017, Tsukishima had approximately 56,000 inhabitants (over an area of circa 2.3 km2), the majority of whom were increasingly younger residents living in newly constructed high-rise complexes (Chuo Ward Office 2017; Meiji University 2005). The neighbourhood of Tsukuda, characterized by the layout of a small fishing village, is built on reclaimed land. The name Tsukuda means ‘cultivated rice fields’, referring to a rural area near Osaka from where the first fishing folk came to inhabit this island (Waley 1991, 104). The reclamation work finished in 1893 (Meiji period), as the islands of Tsukuda and Tsukishima were joined together and made up the urban form it has today. The Tsukuda Ōhashi Bridge, built in 1964, was the first direct connection between the mainland and the island and, almost contemporaneously, the last ferry ceased operating between Ginza and Tsukishima (Yomota 2007). Having survived the fires of the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 and the bombing

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Figure 3.1 Map of Tsukishima-Tsukuda, Tokyo

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of the Second World War, one can still find old wooden houses along the roji, the narrow alleyways that made up the first urban structure, when the area started to become urbanized. Cheap housing and craft shops for the fishing community were built during the Edo period (1603-1868) along the Sumida River. Today, the waterfront and area are especially known for specialties like monja-yaki (a special fried mix of flour, egg, and vegetables) and tsukudani (small pieces of seafood, meat, or seaweed, simmered in soy sauce), as well as the Edo-style cruise boats that start their tours from here (Yabuno 2005). Since the 1980s, Tsukuda and Tsukishima have faced increasing redevelopment in the form of new high-rise buildings on different scales, as proximity to the city centre and the opening of the Yūrakuchō and Toei Ōedo subway lines made it an attractive area for real estate developers and new residents (Meiji University 2005). From 1988 onwards, the northern part of Tsukishima was transformed into a new high-rise residential area when a vacated plot of the former Ishikawajima-Harima Company became the site of a large-scale project called Ōkawabata River City 21. North-east of the historical sites and traditional neighbourhoods of fish merchants, small-scale businesses, and low-rise, single-family houses along the narrow alleyways is the traditional, close-knit community of Tsukuda 1-chōme (Yoshida 2010). The development of River City 21 and other recent high-rise buildings around Tsukishima

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Figure 3.2 Contested urban landscape in Tsukuda and Tsukishima, Tokyo

Source: Heide Imai, 2018

Station (Figure 3.1) represents the ongoing construction and destruction of the traditional urban landscape; in particular, the narrow alley with its cheap, aging, and somehow poor inhabitants stand in sharp contrast to the new community of the modern high-rise, where hip video features like the Egg of Winds by Tōyō Itō (1994) are screened at night. Next to the urban redevelopment project of River City 21, newer, pencil-like towers – including the Famille Tsukishima Grand Suite Tower (2002), the Crest Tower (2004), and Lions Tower Tsukishima (2006) – rise up next to the neighbourhood of Tsukuda 1-chōme and inside Tsukuda 2-chōme (Figure 3.2). Additionally, new developments like the I-Mark Tower (2003) or Moon Island Tower (2002), south of Tsukishima Station, indicate the ongoing restructuring of the neighbourhood since the 2000s (Yabuno 2005; Yoshida 2010). In the case of Tsukishima-Tsukuda, the local government of the Chūō Ward has developed plans to reconstruct houses on existing plots along the narrow alleyways to avoid further fragmentation of the area caused by large-scale developments in the form of high-rise buildings and to keep/ attract more residents to the area (Nishimura 2006). Existing houses can be reconstructed up to three storeys high if the roji is extended from 3.3 to 4 metres, creating an 0.3-metre setback along each side (Nishimura 2006, 212). The central problem is caused by the fact that all inhabitants of the alley have to agree to the changes and widening of the roji, which in reality often

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fails because of financial problems, unsolved conditions of ownership, or disagreement between old and new tenants (Kawasaki 2006). Although the attempts of the local ward and revitalization group to preserve Tsukuda’s historical townscape exemplify a balanced urban revitalization plan (Kawasaki 2006; Kibe 2003), it is important to critically analyse the effects of different attempts to reintegrate the alleyway. Aiming to offer more insights into questions such as whether the revitalization of the alleyway is desired and how it can be achieved, I present some of the voices that are lost when presenting a homogeneous view on community-based urban revitalization attempts (City & Life 2005; Nishimura 2006). The case of the golmok in contemporary Seoul Similar to the roji, the golmok is a narrow alleyway, which was in the past (especially before Seoul’s large-scale modernization process) the everyday living space for many people living in different Korean cities (Yi 1994). There are several types of alleyways, yet most are framed by mainly residential buildings, traditionally single-storey housing. Mainly, we can distinguish between two types of golmok: the golmok connecting two side streets, through which people can walk or take a shortcut, and the dead-end golmok (Suh 2015). Both types have equally been part of the urban fabric, even though the dead-end type is not historically found in many cultures, including cities in China on which those in Korea are partly based. Nonetheless, dead-end or cul-de-sac type alleyways are found in many cities in Korea, often forming the only access to free-standing houses (Han 2013, 60). Yet, both types of golmok have especially disappeared on a large scale in cities like Seoul, where the speed of urban change especially accelerated between the late 1950s and 1980s and is the result of the ongoing (economic) transformation of the city and the country as whole. To realize new urban projects, mega-structures are constructed along major and wider streets (Joo 2019). Consequently, many narrow alleyways are cut off from each other, whole urban clusters fragmented, or, in the worst case, whole neighbourhoods knocked down. Smaller cities still have, to some extent, the tools to preserve some of these urban alleyway networks, resulting in different urban patterns (Han 2013, 63). After state-led industrialization, diverse democratization movements, and being hit by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the capital, Seoul, is facing a new phase of restructuring and modernization, in which stakeholders draw heavily on cultural and creative policies to turn it into a global city, building up new, cutting-edge knowledge and creative industries. However, there are continuing problems, often the result of large-scale economic

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Figure 3.3 Contested urban landscape in Seoul

Source: Heide Imai, 2018

and social restructuring processes, such as large-scale lay-offs, decreasing birth rates, a shrinking population, and increasing economic and societal pressures, especially those put on women, who often feel stuck between traditional expectations and modern lifestyles in which individuals try to boost their own potential and happiness. How are residents of Seoul, especially young Seoulites, dealing with these new urban realities? How are they navigating the changing spaces of this advancing city and what kind of lifestyles, motives, and spirit drives them to find their place in the city (Joo 2019; Lee 2015; Shin and Kim 2016)? In the last two decades, many historic neighbourhoods in Seoul have experienced urban renewal processes in its transformation from an industrial city into a new, hip, and dynamic one (Hwang 2014; Yun 2014). The city’s image is changing (Figure 3.3), with pressures from different governmental bodies to replace traditional urban patterns with modern urban mega-projects or to redevelop, rebrand, and promote traditional working districts into cultural, creative, or other hip districts, to increase their appeal as tourist destinations and in turn increase their economic value (Chung 2019; Gelézeau 1997; Kim 2016; Park et al. 2012). Therefore, it is not surprising that the remaining hanok (한옥, traditional Korean house) and alleyways are at risk of being turned from everyday residential spaces into commercialized and commodified spaces (Kwon and Joo 2016).

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The case of Insadong and Ikseondong, Seoul, Korea Next to popular Seoul neighbourhoods such as Gangnam, Hongdae, and Apgujeong is Insadong – dong (동) means neighbourhood – known as an art, coffee, and pedestrian paradise, located in the Jongno-gu district. The neighbourhood’s main street, Insadong-gil, functions like the main artery connecting multiple alleyways with each other. Wandering down the alleyways, one can reach the deeper parts of the district and discover small, modern galleries and hip coffee, tea, and craft shops, often situated in one of the remaining hanok buildings. In the past, the area was the largest market for art and antique work. Newer buildings house typical Korean teahouses, eateries, and shops selling traditional goods like pottery, handmade hanji paper or hanbok dresses. The neighbourhood covers 12.7 hectares and is bordered by Gwanhundong to the north, Nagwondong to the east, Jongno 2-ga and Jeokseondong to the south, and Gongpyeongdong to the west (Figure 3.4). In Insadong, approximately 3000 people work, which is a small number compared to the number of visitors each day (on average 85,000), whereas even fewer people remain to live and work in the area (Kim 2011, 143). The name Insa is made up of two syllabi, ‘in’ and ‘sa’, which are the last letters of two towns that were located here in the past. Under the 700-metre-long Insadong-gil ran a river that in the past divided the area into two parts. In the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897) the area became known as the home of government officials, merchants, and bureaucrats. During the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), the wealthy residents who had owned most of the buildings for several hundred years were forced to move out and sell their belongings. As a result, the neighbourhood became an art Mecca, known for trading different kinds of antiques, including paintings, sculptures, pottery, and porcelain. After the Korean War ended in 1953, many art galleries moved into the traditional hanok buildings located in the neighbourhood, and nowadays we can find more than 100 galleries, cafes, and shops featuring traditional and modern Korean art. During the 1960s, the area also became famous as a spot for foreign tourists, and since the late 1980s (especially around 1988 and the Seoul Olympics) it experienced several attempts at upgrading, resistance, and change (Douglass 2016, 151). In 2000, the city decided to renovate parts of the area and, despite being halted for two years, new redevelopment attempts soon followed (Krich 2000). Since then, the alleyways and the neighbourhood as a whole have been further altered, gentrified, and commodified, due to the influx of hip

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Figure 3.4 Map of Insadong and Ikseondong, Seoul

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cafes, restaurants, and traditional Korean- and Airbnb-style accommodations, following the latest trends and drawing on the approaches of creative cities and cultural economy (Usher 2017, 183). These developments have urged officials to promote the further upgrading of the area, causing new struggles and conflicts between locals and visitors, between preservation activists and developers, and between small, independent merchants and large-scale shopping complexes (Kim, Kim and Choi 2009; Kwon and Joo 2016; Song 2011). These clashes have been occurring not only in Insadong but also in many other parts of the city. South of Insadong and the restored Cheonggyecheon stream, we find Seoul’s oldest neighbourhood, Euljiro, which was redeveloped between 2003 and 2005 following a top-down approach. This resulted in environmental upgrading but also gentrification, social stratification (a well-known flea market disappeared, and 30,000 street vendors were pushed out), and reimagining instead with a restoration of the area (Kim and Jung 2018; Lee and Anderson 2013). Euljiro looks like an ordinary neighbourhood, but once entering one of the tiny alleyways one is soon lost in a maze of little lanes lined up with thousands of crammed shops selling bolts, rubber tubes, gauges, wires, switches, and similar objects. The neighbourhood is known as a place where more than 50,000 tradespeople have worked since

Seoul

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the 1950s; having played a big part in the economic recovery of the country, they still produce custom-made parts for the country’s major manufacturers, such as Samsung and LG. Yet in late 2018 the government decided to knock down the area and its 10,000 shops, planning to erect high-rise buildings instead, thus most likely replacing dirty and noisy renters with wealthier ones. The redevelopment of the area is a hot political topic, involving not only governmental bodies but also a major construction company, landlords, and different local community leaders fighting for the rights of the traders who mainly lease their shops. The traders are often threatened with illegal methods (e.g., letters demanding double rent), but similar cases have shown in the past that people are not afraid to fight back in organizing protests that have sometimes resulted in violent outbursts, which is what the government is most afraid of. These outbreaks might, however, still follow if stakeholders do not compromise with a plan to restore, keep, or revitalize larger parts of the neighbourhood, to increase the location value and historical image of Seoul (Eom and An 2018). Being on the brink of disappearance, as the demolition process has already started, Euljiro is in the news and many social media channels increasingly recognize its value as a place of living working-class history. In the last months, the neighbourhood has seen a rising number of visitors who hope to document the everyday life along then narrow alleyways, knowing that – facing demolition, gentrification, or commercialization – it will not remain as such in the future (Chung 2019; Hong 2018). Coming back to the case of Insadong, many lanes and alleyways are turned into a pedestrian area on weekends, attracting even more visitors (on some Sundays 100,000 visitors were counted) than it already does on normal days. A shopping mall called Ssamzigil opened in 2004, mainly specializing in handcraft and traditional products. Yet, the construction of this facility also renewed and deepened existing conflicts between locals, visitors, and city stakeholders who all pursue different goals (Douglass 2016, 152). Not yet as busy is Ikseondong, a quaint, traditional neighbourhood, located north-east of the Insadong neighbourhood. The area is characterized by a close-knit alleyway or golmok network and a large number of hanok houses built during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), which can be considered cultural and historical heritage despite being only about a century old. The area is especially experiencing the vanishing and/or transformation of these hanok houses into new retail businesses or other tourist attractions. One reason for this could be that Ikseondong is located right next to Insadong and thus the direct focus of young artists and entrepreneurs who have started to open more and more small ateliers and businesses there.

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Ikseondong’s Hanok Village first appeared in the 1920s, and over time the traditional architecture merged with modern Korean cultural elements, turning Ikseondong into a charming neighbourhood where many people still live, not just visit for sightseeing, shopping, or other purposes. Yet, increasing pressures caused by the influx of tourists (e.g., rising land and rent prices) are also affecting the everyday life of the locals who (have to) try to survive and feel the need to redefine their original livelihood and identity, adapting their business concepts or everyday life patterns to be featured in the newest city magazine or on Instagram to attract enough new customers. The many streets and traditional houses, which to some extent look unchanged, also attract many new residents, especially young people who want to become independent entrepreneurs by opening shops, cafes, and workshops, keeping the traditional hanok alive. Nevertheless, these people are also aware of the ongoing conflicts that are becoming visible in Ikseondong. One of the appealing points of Ikseondong is its walkability, as the streets and alleyways are narrow, and the buildings are part of a fine-grained urban fabric (measuring on average 30 m2). Increasingly, people looking for a place to work and live in a dense and historic neighbourhood in central Seoul are discovering the atmosphere of Ikseondong, bringing different kinds of stakeholders onto the scene. For those reasons, it might be just a matter of time before this area experiences the same destiny as Insadong or the Bukchon neighbourhood, another famous tourist destination, located just 3 kilometres north of Ikseondong (Kim 2016; Koh 2017; Kyung 2011; Yoon and Park 2018).

Urban narratives of everyday life in Tokyo Inside a residential block in the case study area of Tsukuda, one can observe how ‘old’ and ‘new’ exist next to each other (Figure 3.5). Residents living in the low-rise houses define the border with their new neighbours by placing potted plants along the alleyway or continuing to raise chickens, extending their private territory and activities out onto the street space. In contrast, a sign at the entrance of the newly created green space surrounding the 32-storey high-rise apartment block indicates how this ‘public, privately owned space’ can be used, resulting in the limited use and interaction of new and old residents in the public space connecting both livelihoods (Imai 2010).

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Figure 3.5 Alleyways in Tsukuda and Tsukishima, Tokyo

Source: Heide Imai, 2018

During the interviews conducted, participants were asked how they experience the neighbourhood and life in the alleyway on a day-to-day basis. Some residents talked about different positive and negative aspects, drawing on traditional features such as close social ties, friendship, daily gossip among neighbours, trust, and a sense of voluntary obligation. They also discussed how these features are changing in times of rapid modernization and urban restructuring, resulting in new and sometimes unseen spatial and social realities. Kanazawa-san, a long-standing resident who runs a kimono shop in the area of Tsukuda, has experienced and recognized different kinds of changes that affect her family business. The demand for traditional fabrics is shrinking because kimonos are not worn as much on a daily basis. Furthermore, making a kimono requires special skills, which makes it an expensive item.

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When asked about her private life and how she makes a living nowadays, she answered that her father-in-law had multiple businesses and was successful. She continued that ‘these days I do not only make kimonos but also small interior decorations. However, it is not easy to survive, thus 20 years ago I opened a gallery in the Tsukishima area nearby, where modern art made by young artists is exhibited’ (Interview 1, 26 August 2015).1 This shows how Kanazawa-san was able to adapt to the changes. Visiting Kanazawa-san again in 2017 during a festival, I was surprised to hear that, as a result of the ongoing restructuring of the neighbourhood, many newcomers had moved into her street in the last years. Kanazawa-san soon showed interest in developing a good relationship with her new neighbours, as well as with visitors to the area on weekends and during festivals. I heard that she is sometimes surprised by the spontaneous visits of newcomers to her shop. She welcomes most people who are interested in the history of the old dwelling, as this also helps to preserve the alleyways (Interview 1, 25 October 2017). She concluded our talk with the thought that the roji is used today in ways different from those in the past, as she rarely sees children out in the alleyway, but since the new neighbours moved in they all make use of the place in different ways, considering the alleyway as common space, and sharing the responsibilities and pleasures of having an open space right in front of their house. Her neighbour, Amano-san, a woman in her late 30s and a newcomer to the area, considers the roji in a different way. She has just rented an old shop and opened a new cafe with her partner, but she lives in a new residential high-rise building nearby. Asked why she is not directly living and working in the alleyway, she stated that many people want to visit the old neighbourhood famous for its delicacies, so she opened a small cafe. Yet, in her eyes, the neighbourhood has changed a lot and as a newcomer she prefers to be in a modern building block with all facilities nearby (Interview 2, 10 September 2015).2 Visiting her again in 2017, I asked her once more about the reasons why she moved to the area some years ago. She replied that she was attracted by the charm of the old neighbourhood, as well as its proximity to downtown Tokyo and its many new residential housing options and facilities. She stated that she likes the traditional and ‘old-fashioned pattern of everyday life’, but also likes to maintain a good relationship with newcomers, as she does not feel connected to the elderly people living nearby. The house 1 2

Interview 1, Kanazawa, local resident, Tsukuda (26 August 2015; 25 October 2017). Interview 2, Amano, newcomer, Tsukuda (10 September 2015; 27 October 2017).

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next to her cafe is occupied by Tamura-san, who has been running a small sushi shop for 50 years. When asked if she had ever visited the place next door, she stated that she feels a communication and age gap between them, even though she has never talked to him directly (Interview 2, 27 October 2017). Talking to Tamura-san some days later, I found that he thinks that newcomers are too polite or shy; he does not really know what it is. Yet, as the area and shops along the local shopping street and this alleyway are changing, he feels the competition, as now even fewer people come here for lunch or dinner. Cafes might be the new trend, but he argued that Japanese should not forget about the traditions of making and serving sushi, which he had learned and mastered now for so many years. His wife had died some years ago and his son is not interested in taking over the place, despite being a sushi chef himself. Tamura-san became sentimental when talking about the old times, especially wondering how much longer he will be able to keep his business. But as he has not done anything else day in, day out for the last 50 years, he is afraid of being bored and lonely at home, so he keeps the shop doors open, even though on some days only five to ten customers come in (Interview 3, 26 October 2017).3 In a neighbouring alley, Otsuki-san (a woman in her early 60s) is maintaining a small flower-pot garden, located in front of an old wooden house her father had built more than 50 years ago. During our first interview she explained that, on the first floor of the house a carpentry shop was located until her father died some ten years ago. She stated that she has lived in this house all her life, working later in a nearby shop selling traditional pickles. She feels ‘rooted’ in the neighbourhood, as she has vivid memories when talking about the everyday life activities that filled the alleyway in the past. This might have been one reason why she still lives in the area, even though her children have asked her to move out of the old house. If the weather allows, she sits outside her house, using the small garden she maintains as a ‘place’ to meet other people who pass by, complimenting her green thumb or asking questions about the different flowers and plants she is growing. Most people are surprised by the fact that she is even growing a small passion fruit tree (Interview 4, 10 September 2015). 4 Trying to reach her in 2017, I had trouble finding her place as the alleyway and house looked so different, almost abandoned. Ringing her doorbell, it took a while for her to open the door. Sitting down for a coffee in the 3 4

Interview 3, Tamura, local resident, Tsukuda (10 September 2015; 26 October 2017). Interview 4, Otsuki, local resident, Tsukishima (10 September 2015; 29 October 2017).

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back of her house, she told me that during the last year alone three elderly neighbours had died or moved away. She is missing the spirit of the old community and disillusioned about what will happen to her and the house in the coming years. One close friend told her about an elderly care facility nearby, yet she did not feel ready for such a change or ready to accept that she might be too old to live in this house alone. Her reaction seemed like she was surrendering and accepting the fact that the area has changed so much during the last years. Yet, when I asked her for the real reasons she was not moving to a more convenient place, she stated that she wants to stay connected to the past, longing for her place where she can retrace her life and memories (Interview 4, 29 October 2017). Some inhabitants of an almost unrecognizable alleyway nearby have to deal with different problems. Shimoda-san is a woman in her 80s, living in a nagaya (長, old wooden longhouse), located next door to Yamamoto-san, who is in his 40s, a jazz lover and owner of a nearby bar. I had the chance to meet them both in 2015, while standing inside the alleyway discussing which soil should be used to cover the space between the stepping stones. Yamamoto-san had just moved into the old house of his parents with his wife and small child, yet felt responsible for maintaining communication with his neighbours, as they all live so close to each other. He hoped his family could feel at home there, especially his child, who should learn to play outside instead of being glued to a screen or TV. Shimoda-san was very happy about such a young family moving into the area, also since they were not afraid of the duties that have to be performed when moving into a community like this. Both wanted to preserve the alleyway, in the hope that it would serve as a place to feel the warmth and qualities of a close-knit community, which has become so rare (Interviews 5 and 6, 13 October 2015).5 From their interviews, it was clear that these neighbours felt uncertain about the future of the roji, which in turn urged them to react and engage with each other, to do something to prevent or halt the ongoing fragmentation of the community at least in this alleyway. When I met them again in 2017, Shimoda-san, now 89, explained that she has observed many houses along this alleyway being demolished in the last year. The remaining empty plots were turned into small parking lots or just stayed empty, showing that landowners felt the pressure to demolish the old buildings, but had no idea what to do with the land, which was too small to attract real estate or construct larger apartment blocks (Interviews 5 and 6, November 2017). 5 Interview 5, Yamamoto, returnee, Tsukishima (13 October 2015; 7 November 2017); Interview 6, Shimoda, local resident, Tsukishima (13 October 2015, 7 November 2017).

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The different interviews show that our perspective depends on whom we encounter in the alleyway and how they perceive urban change. The redevelopment and gentrif ication processes have had, to some extent, positive effects on the spatial and social structure of the area, as new people moved into the old houses and alleyways. Yet, disparities between long-time residents and newcomers continue to exist and are often mirrored in the way people define their community, personal network, and individual preferences.

Urban narratives of everyday life in Seoul Walking along one of the alleyways in Ikseondong, I discovered a small shop that Junseo, a local, is running. In our interview, he tells me that he successfully fought to keep his shop and house (inherited from his grandmother) for a low rent. However, cases like his shop are rare, as urban renewal projects are increasingly sweeping across Seoul. Old buildings are being replaced with modern commercial and residential buildings, increasing the risk for local neighbourhoods like Ikseondong of losing the fight against globally operating companies that mainly aim to milk the area until it is time to move on to the next trendy hot spot, just leaving expensive coffee chains and generic souvenir shops behind. Forgetting the history in the face of these rapid changes is not the only danger, as more and more traditional neighbourhoods are facing the cultural rebound of these developments. Locals like Junseo have preserved and reinvented Ikseondong at the same time. He is documenting the personal stories of the residents on his weekly blog, offering tours to reveal the hidden inner history of the neighbourhood, reminding people of its rich past, yet also offering a warning that local life and traditions will die out if tourists do not learn to respect the everyday life, customs, and spaces of the people living here for so long (Interview 7, 12 August 2018).6 Walking around the alleyways of Ikseondong, I see guesthouses and co-working and gallery spaces sprouting up on each corner, increasing the appeal of the area to tourists, yet destroying the historical character, washed away by the money-making hunger of tourist businesses. Turning into the next alley, I soon feel carried back into the past. Most alleyways are narrow, guiding the visitor along traditional hanok buildings that are becoming home to stylish restaurants and shops, or cheap accommodation like Airbnbs (Figure 3.5). 6 Interview 7, Junseo, local resident and shop owner, Ikseondong (12 August 2018).

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Figure 3.6 Alleyways in Ikseondong and Insadong, Seoul

Source: Heide Imai, 2018

To create a space where local people can mingle with young entrepreneurs and artists who want to work and settle down in this district, Junseo’s neighbour, Ms Kim (56), opened a small eatery selling gimbap (Korean-style sushi rolls) and Korean herb tea blends such as mugwort or pine-leaf tea. Despite a stable number of daily customers, she worries about the future, because from the next fiscal year the current owner has asked her to pay 25 per cent more rent. ‘My current contract will end in January and I am not sure what to do then’, she replied very hesitantly to my question, knowing very well that already many of her neighbours faced a similar dilemma and were forced to move away, into one of the modern suburbs where they have nothing to do anymore. ‘I am too young to retire, and I feel the urge to keep the “soul” of

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this neighbourhood alive. Things might have changed but if I am also forced to leave, then we really have lost the fight’ (Interview 8, 13 August 2018).7 Her words echoing in my ears, I left her small eatery and came across the neighbouring shop that deals with vintage, retro, and handmade products like clothing and kitchenware. The shop owner Jang-mi is in her late 20s and studied at the well-known Yonsei University, but had not felt satisfied with her office job. Eventually she jumped at a chance her friend offered her, to rent the space her father used as a traditional rice-paper shop. Her passion for interior decoration is visible in the colourfully decorated showcase in which she displays a fine line of vintage-style clothing and interior items. She offers most goods at reasonable prices, knowing that many young people come to this neighbourhood aiming to indulge in shopping, but do not have the budget of shoppers in wealthy areas such as Gangnam or Apgujeong. Jang-mi is not alone, as many young female entrepreneurs have started their own businesses in the area. She told me in our interview that in the past mostly high-end, middle-aged customers used to come looking for antiques, but nowadays many more young Seoulites come to discover one of the remaining hanok neighbourhoods (Figure 3.6). Thanks to her friend, she is able to keep the rent low, but she was not sure for how long. Talking about her everyday life in the neighbourhood, she stated that she lives in a small, rented room above the shop. She explained that she knows that this is a lucky situation, as most people want to work and live in the area but cannot afford to purchase or even rent there (Interview 9, 13 August 2018).8 Due to rising prices and the changing clientele, many traditional shops like tea shops, paintbrush, and picture-mounting businesses have been replaced by hip cafes, galleries, and shops offering all kind of kitsch, a trend that is especially visible in Insadong, which I reached walking some minutes to the south-west. Arriving in Insadong, I came across a small hotteok stall, a vendor selling a traditional Korean sweet made out of chewy rice, nowadays often filled with honey and peanut butter. Jung-il (35) was first surprised by my order, as mainly young students line up for this relatively cheap snack. When I asked him how many years he had been running the stall, he said that he had started in 2009, having learned the art of making the sweets from his mother, who had to close down her own street stall near Dongdaemun after the area lost many customers to a new shopping mall. In Insadong she occasionally helps out, and Jung-il is happy to have some support because 7 8

Interview 8, Kim, owner of small eatery, Ikseondong (13 August 2018). Interview 9, Jang-mi, owner of vintage shop, Ikseondong (13 August 2018).

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especially on weekends he cannot keep up with demand, as lines formed in front of his stall. When I asked him about his relationship with his neighbours, he complained that many street vendors tend to just sell cheap kitsch, plastic gadgets, or crap, as he called it. He is also trying to make money, but not at the cost of the customers. Later, he stated that he might get more money if he offered sweets that were easier and faster to make or needed fewer ingredients. Yet, for him it is about not just the money but also his memory of hotteok, especially in his childhood days, when he had gotten some coins from his mother to buy small treats like this. We talked about his childhood and how he had walked down the alleyways in Anguk (just north of Insadong), contemplating what to buy, maybe a patbingsu (shaved ice flakes that come with various toppings such as sweet red beans, condensed milk, and fruit syrup) on summer days or songpyeon (rice cakes), eaten traditionally in autumn. At the end of our talk, he stated that he had recently noticed more and more shops offering fancy creations, such as ice cream with chilli or spicy chicken flavour. He concluded with the comment, ‘Why is it that things cannot stay the same? It feels like nothing has value anymore’ (Interview 10, 14 August 2018).9 Leaving his food stall behind, I walked past some alleyways, and stopped at a corner where a man was sitting on the ground doing calligraphy with a big black brush. After I asked some bystanders about the man, Mr Ho got up and introduced himself. He was running a paintbrush shop just down the alley, and had lived in the neighbourhood for more than 50 years. His family had been running the shop since 1913, now in the fourth generation, selling brushes, ink, paper, and ink stones. Yet, in the last few years he had been selling less and less, so he had decided to try to promote this art. His son was standing behind the counter, and once we entered the shop, he confirmed what his father had told me. More and more people were looking for a cheap place to buy some souvenirs, yet do not know how much work goes into the production of such traditional items as calligraphy brushes (Interview 11, 14 August 2018).10 The direct neighbour of the Ho family, So-hee, who is running her own shop, had a slightly different view. She was sitting on the stairs in front of her shop, drinking tea. Once we started talking, I learned that she had just moved to the Insadong neighbourhood. She had studied art at a prestigious university, but was looking for new ways to use her skills. She has offered 9 Interview 10, Jung-Il, street vendor, Insadong (14 August 2018). 10 Interview 11, Ho, owner of paintbrush shop, Insadong (14 August 2018).

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art and calligraphy courses at different institutions for five years, including a cultural centre run by the city of Seoul. She stated that over the last few years she has met many young people visiting Insadong for diverse reasons. Most people come to Insadong to enjoy some shopping, but once they see So-hee practicing modern calligraphy in her atelier, which is visible through the shop window, they are attracted and want to find out more. A small sign invites the visitors inside. After a brief introduction to the technique, during which So-hee explained that first water is added to a solid block of ink until the right consistency is reached, people could start to paint their first strokes. The entire process was slow and laborious, yet during the work most people became very calm and felt that calligraphy was almost a form of meditation. So-hee explained that for some months her courses have been regularly fully booked, and she wondered why. Some friends commented that her recent success maybe had something to do with the recent popularity of historical dramas such as Saimdang, the Herstory, which aired on SBS in 2016. The drama depicts the life of Shin Saimdang (1504-1551), who is often featured practicing or reading calligraphy. So-hee, who does not follow such historical dramas, was first rather stunned by this recent demand but is actually now very happy to preserve the traditions of calligraphy. Many people come to the atelier as they realize that regularly practicing calligraphy helps them to stay mentally active, meditate, and calm the mind. So-hee concluded our talk with the comment that ‘it’s not just the thickness of the ink, the surface of the paper, and type of brush one chooses, as with every brush stroke and with every sign which appears on the paper, people rediscover their own abilities, often lost in the digital age and the daily use of smartphones’ (Interview 12, 15 August 2018).11 Young people, artists, and entrepreneurs are often seen as the solution to attracting new, ideally more long-term residents, who can afford to work and live in the traditional areas like Insadong-Ikseondong or what is left of it. In 2017, the city set up a special funding programme to help small entrepreneurs to rent low-cost and small derelict spaces. The program offers landowners incentives of up to 30 million won (circa €24,000), asking them in return to keep the rent at an affordable level for a specific time frame, aiming to allow all kinds of alternative and young people to move into the neighbourhood. If people really struggle to pay their rent once the time frame is up, the programme offers a low-interest loan system so that they can purchase a building of their own. Only time will tell if the programme 11 Interview 12, So-hee, calligraphy atelier, Insadong, (15 August 2018).

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will help to slow down the current gentrification wave, but the number of volunteers, counsellors, and people who are interested in supporting the movement is showing that a balance between everyday life spaces and new urban hot spots is desired and needed to keep urban living in the city at an affordable level.

Discussion The alleyway is, in times of urban fragmentation and increasing differences between social groups, the base for different forms of place identities, interests, and experiences; however, the different actors all make use of the same place (Wood 2009). Thus, multiple and hybrid identities coexist in the same place, as observed in the cases of Tsukuda-Tsukishima and Insadong-Ikseondong, and it depends on the perspective of the individual as to how an everyday place like the alleyway is perceived and valued. This is often reflected in the different degrees of personal use and social interaction. To understand changing place identities and senses of place, we should draw on the individual everyday practices, experiences, and memories of the users, as well as on the wider network of different forces in and outside that place (Entrikin 1990). The case of Tokyo As people perceive the roji from a certain distance, a distance caused by the shift from the low-rise wooden house to a modern high-rise apartment, these places have lost their pragmatic function and have become aesthetic or fictional boundaries of different memories, fears, and hopes. The abandoned alleys have, in different ways, been reappropriated to respond to people’s longing for the past with the repressed subconscious of modernity, turning ordinary, everyday, and familiar places into ‘secret’ places (Shields 1991). As the interview with Otsuki-san showed, the alleyway turns into a space that forms an imaginative boundary between past and present, allowing her to remember certain moments of her past and re-encounter places of her childhood. Long-standing neighbours like Shimoda-san share this kind of sentiment when walking, experiencing, and reflecting on the past. Nevertheless, newcomers such as Amano-san and other entrepreneurs see the alleyway in a different way, when they make use of the nostalgic spirit to attract customers but do not want to live like in the ‘good old days’.

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For them, the alleyway fulfils especially an economic function, supporting their local business and hybrid lifestyle, as they embody past and present elements in a modern lifestyle. The case of Seoul The changes occurring in Ikseondong-Insadong mirror different processes of gentrification, commodification, and commercialization that are common in contemporary Seoul, where traditional neighbourhoods are often turned into generic shopping areas. These forms of urban renewal drive property values and land prices up (by up to 40 per cent), changing the diversity of urban places and identity of the city as whole. While the city has promoted neighbourhoods such as Bukchon, Seochon, and Insadong as new tourist attractions for years, recently more voices are heard asking for anti-gentrification measurements to secure some kind of balance between old and new (Yoon and Park 2018). However, as in the case of Insadong, it might be almost too late to revive the area’s vernacular identity and the urban alleyways as lanes of everyday life, as most locals have moved and are gone for good. Yet, the neighbourhood of Ikseondong might have a last chance if it is able to attract small-scale businesses, with new residents who do not just move there to make money. People look for a quaint, everyday place and are driven by a nostalgic desire to live along a narrow alleyway, while at the same time maintaining the neighbourhood from inside.

Conclusion Modernity and the increasing speed of globalization pushes people to search for such ‘urban borderlands’ or interstitial spaces that become re-embodied places of resistance, retreat, and compensation (Iossifova 2013). Moreover, rejecting an overly predetermined view, the research suggests the possibility of understanding such places by paying attention to ‘the analytical lens of a “politics of forgetting” integral to globalisation processes’ (Lee and Yeoh 2004, 2296) – in other words, it reveals the politics of forgetting works to smooth over the uneven histories of ‘urban borderlands’ and shows that such places are shaped at the global and local levels. In particular, by not taking it as a given fact that interstitial places exist and disappear, as ‘no space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local’ (Lefebvre, quoted in Brenner 1997, 144), the research

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suggests that we draw on concepts such as co-presence, multiplicity, and scale in reconceptualizing ‘urban borderlands’ as central to the ways in which globalization works and takes hold in a city, rather than being written off as passive counterparts or irrelevant peripheral phenomena (Brenner 1997; Lee and Yeoh 2004). In this context, the alleyway stands for the decline and progressive gentrif ication of traditional neighbourhoods and their traditional elements of urban life, which people experience as most distinctive at the moment they vanish from the urban landscape. They try to capture this moment of disappearance in walking the city and searching for places like the alleyway – chronologically and geographically at the boundary – and in ways similar to those applied by the ‘flâneur’ (Burton 1994). Places like the roji and the golmok fulf il new roles and are desired and needed to express local voices, thoughts, and personal opinions about political, economic, or social changes. Yet, the alleyway – as an integral part of everyday urban life – looks set to disappear from the urban landscapes of Tokyo and Seoul, leaving traces of the past to be covered by new, modern urban developments that stand for the ongoing destruction and reconstruction of these and other places in the twenty-f irst century. Nevertheless, they continue to exist as imaginary and, in this sense, continue to have a shared or social presence. As a mental space, the alleyway forms a boundary between past and present and an alternative landscape of reminiscence.

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Jinnai, Hidenobu. 1995. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Joo, Yu-Min. 2019. Megacity Seoul: Urbanization and the Development of Modern South Korea. London: Routledge. Kawasaki, Kota. 2006. ‘A Study on the Improvement of Residential Environments with Alleys in the High Density Built-up Urban Area-Early-Stage Achievements and Effects of District Planning Utilizing the 42-3 Road in Tsukishima District in Chuo City, Tokyo.’ Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan 41 (3): 1013-1018. Kibe, Shige. 2003. ‘Tsukishima chiiki ni okeru machinami yūdogata chiku keikaku: Roji kūkan Tsukishima-rashisa wo ikashita machizukuri’ [Townscape inducement-style district plan in the Tsukishima district: Community planning that makes the best of Tsukishima’s typical alleyways]. Machinami 31: 12. Kim, Ann Meejung. 2016. ‘Marketing the Past: Rhetorical Presentation of Bukchon in Tourist Literature.’ Korean Journal 56 (3): 136-172. Kim, Hyungkyoo, and Yoonhee Jung. 2018. ‘Is Cheonggyecheon Sustainable? A Systematic Literature Review of a Stream Restoration in Seoul, South Korea.’ Sustainable Cities and Society 45: 59-69. Kim, Won Bae. 2011. ‘The Viability of Cultural Districts in Seoul.’ City, Culture and Society 2 (3): 141-150. Kim, Yun-Geum, Hai-Gyoung Kim and Key-Soo Choi. 2009. ‘An Interpretation of the Insa-dong Landscape from a Social Construction Viewpoint.’ Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture 36 (6): 91-101. Kobata, Seiji, and Koichiro Tadokoro. 2000. ‘Āban tisshū to shite no roji/yokochō/ machi kado no kanōsei’ [Roji/yokochō/machikado as urban tissue]. Summaries of Technical Papers of Annual Meeting Architectural Institute of Japan, F: Urban Planning, Building Economics and Housing Problems, History and Theory of Architecture (September): 437-438. Koh, Yoonjee. 2017. ‘Living Heritage: Streams of Consciousness in Buk-Chon.’ MASKS, the Journal 63. Krich, John. 2000. ‘Decision to Stop Building in Insadong Triggers a Battle over What to Save.’ Wall Street Journal, 4 April. Accessed 8 October 2019. https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB955042222985600822?mod=googlewsj. Kwon, Yoonku, and Shinha Joo. 2016. ‘Interpreting Sense of Place in Insa-dong, a Cultural District in Seoul.’ Journal of East Asian Landscape Studies 10 (4): 15-27. Kyung, Shinwon. 2011. ‘“State-Facilitated Gentrification” in Seoul, South Korea: For Whom, by Whom and with What Result?’ Paper presented at the International RC21 Conference, Amsterdam, 7-9 July. Accessed 8 October 2019. http://www. rc21.org/conferences/amsterdam2011/edocs/Session%202/2-1-Kyung.pdf. Lee, Hyunjoo. 2015. ‘Branding the Design City: Cultural Policy and Creative Events in Seoul.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 21 (1): 1-19.

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Lee, Jong Youl, and Chad David Anderson. 2013. ‘The Restored Cheonggyecheon and the Quality of Life in Seoul.’ Journal of Urban Technology 20 (4): 3-22. Lee, Yong-Sook, and Brenda Yeoh. 2004. ‘Introduction: Globalisation and Politics of Forgetting.’ Urban Studies 41 (12): 2295-2301. Meiji University. 2005. ‘Tsukuda-Tsukishima jyūmin ankēto chōsa shūkei kekka’ [Tsukuda-Tsukishima: Results of the analysis of residents’ questionnaires]. Accessed 28 November 2019. http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~jukankyo/tt.pdf. Nakano, Tsuneaki, and Emiko Hirayama. 2007. ‘Jūtakuchi to shōgyōchi ni okeru rekishi roji kūkan no fukken no keikō’ [Tendencies of the reconstruction of the historical roji space in residential and commercial areas]. Accessed 10 January 2019. http://www.itailab.se.shibaura-it.ac.jp/kenken/kenken2007/ kougai2007/data/pdf/r03058.pdf. Nishimura, Yukio. 2006. Roji kara no machizukuri [Town making starting from the roji]. Tokyo: Gakugei Shuppansha. Park, Dongwook, Dai Nakagawa, Ryoji Matsunaka and Tetsuharu Oba. 2012. ‘Structural Relationship about Pedestrian Vibrancy and Street Environment in Central Areas of Kyoto, Seoul, Beijing and Florence.’ Journal of Urban Sciences 16 (2): 187-202. Rappoport, Amos. 1982. The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach. Beverly Hills: SAGE. Reuters. 2017. ‘Japan Land Prices Edge up in 2016 on Tourism Boom.’ 21 March. Accessed 21 March 2018. http://www.reuters.com/article/japan-land-idUSL3N1GT3YZ. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Shin, Hyun Bang, and Soo-Hyun Kim. 2016. ‘The Developmental State, Speculative Urbanisation and the Politics of Displacement in Gentrifying Seoul.’ Journal of Urban Studies 53 (3): 540-559. Song, Jinsun. 2011. ‘Tradition and Commerce in Cultural Districts: A Case Study of Insadong in Seoul, Korea.’ MA thesis, University of Waterloo, Canada. Suh, Kuee-Sook. 2015. ‘Analysis on the Types and Characters of Alley in Seochon District in Seoul.’ Journal of the Korean Housing Association 26 (4): 63-73. Tōkyōjin. 2005. ‘Tōkyō no roji’ [Rojis of Tokyo]. In ‘Tōkyō no roji, daijiten’ [Rojis of Tokyo, big encyclopaedia]. Special issue, 211 (February): 12-13. Usher, Charles. 2017. Seoul Sub-urban. Seoul: Seoul Selection. Waley, Paul. 1991. Tokyo: City of Stories. New York: Weatherhill. —. 2002. ‘Moving the Margins of Tokyo.’ Urban Studies 39 (9): 1533-1550. Wood, Andrew F. 2009. City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia. Cresskill: Hampton.

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Yabuno, Ken. 2005. ‘Tsukishima, Tsukuda’ [in Japanese]. Tōkyōjin, Tōkyō no roji daijiten 211 (February): 99-103. Yi, Kyŏng-hŭi. 1994. Back Alleys in Seoul: Essays by Lee Kyung-hee. Seoul: Shin Young Media. Yomota, Inuhiko. 2007. Tsukishima monogatari, futatabi [The Tsukishima story, a second time]. Tokyo: Kōsakusha. Yoon, Yoonchae, and Jina Park. 2018. ‘Stage Classif ication and Characteristics Analysis of Commercial Gentrification in Seoul.’ Sustainability 10 (7): 2440. Yoshida, Akira. 2010. Nokosareta genfuukei Toukyou Tsukuda Tsukishima kaiwai [Leftover scenery Tokyo: Tsukuda Tsukishima neighbourhood]. Tokyo: Nihon Shashin Kikaku. Yukikuni, Hikaru. 2007. Tōkyō no roji wa ima: Iromachi, shitamachi, kioku no machi [Contemporary Tokyo roji: Red-light, low-town and retrospect areas]. Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō. Yun, Jieheerah. 2014. ‘Construction of the World Design Capital: Detournement of Spectacle in Dongdaemun Design Park & Plaza in Seoul.’ Journal of Asian Architecture Building Engineering 13 (1): 17-24.

About the author Dr Heide Imai is Associate Professor at Senshu University, Faculty of Intercultural Communication, Tokyo, Japan. She holds a PhD in Urban Sociology from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA (2005) in Cultural Studies from Oxford Brookes University. Dr Imai has taught at different universities in Japan, the UK and Germany and has researched widely about vernacular landscapes, cultural identities, and urban practices in times of globalization. She is currently working on new projects in Japan, Korea and China and has published widely, including Tokyo Roji (Routledge, 2017) and Creativity in Tokyo (with M. Ursic, Palgrave, 2020). For more information, see https://heideimai.com/.

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The transformation of ‘urban ordinaries’ into creative places A case study of Bangkok’s alleyway neighbourhoods Wimonrart Issarathumnoon

Abstract Traditional alleyway (trok, ตรอก) neighbourhoods in Bangkok are ideal examples of Asian ‘urban ordinaries’ that have been converted into cultural and creative sites. This chapter explores the transformation of a local shopping street, the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen (พระอาทิ ตย์ -พระสุ เมรุ) corridor in Bangkok’s Old Town, a part of the Banglamphu (บางลำ �พู ) and Baan Phanthom (บ้ านพานถม) neighbourhoods in the northern precinct of Bangkok’s heritage core. It provides insights into the process of spontaneous regeneration through the organic expansion of shops with new creative uses. This dynamic can reduce controversy among potentially competing agendas – the daily needs of residents and shopkeepers, heritage conservation, and creative placemaking. The study highlights how the negative consequences of urban change can be mitigated by promoting venues for creative exchange and learning. Keywords: alleyway neighbourhood, urban ordinaries, creative place, urban regeneration, gentrification

Introduction Over the last two decades, ordinary urban landscapes, particularly dense, walkable neighbourhoods in a variety of countries, have experienced rapid changes and hold great promise to be transformed into creative clusters. Strong historical legacies, spatial identity, local traditions or ways of life, and forms of creative expression rooted in ordinary communities are crucial

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch04

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resources for creative potential. These resources represent the soil from which creativity can emerge and grow and provide momentum for development (Landry 2000, cited in INTELI 2011, 21). Pratt (2005, 35) supports the idea that a creative place can be established from a pre-existing cultural ecology, as ‘a creative city cannot be founded like some cathedrals in the desert; it needs to be linked to, and to be part of, an already existing cultural environment’ (quoted in Rodwell 2014, 21). In alleyway neighbourhoods, physical spaces embrace the traces of longestablished physical and spatial structures, such as small-scale spaces, built forms, and other hard infrastructures. Some redundant or disused housing stock or industrial buildings provide affordable spaces for inventive uses (INTELI 2011, 21-22; Rodwell 2014, 21-22). In such communities, soft infrastructures are social conditions and networks that include local cultures, the ordinary rituals of daily living, and the dynamic networks among local groups and newcomers, which help to facilitate good communication and exchange between local residents and newcomers who identify as belonging to the creative industries (INTELI 2011, 21-22; Rodwell 2014, 21-22). Creative places formed from a bottom-up approach In consideration of the emergence of cultural and creative clusters over the past several years, it can be seen that in earlier periods, such as during the 1950s and 1960s, cultural and creative quarters, especially in the United States, were initiated and sustained by state-led urban regeneration policies. In the 1970s, the general methodology guiding the construction of cultural sites prescribed the reuse and revitalization of old workplaces for creative production. One of the best instances of the formation of a creative district is the emergence of SoHo as a pioneering creative hub in an industrial area of New York City. Zukin and Braslow (2011) have pointed out that the SoHo area in Manhattan represents the natural formation of a creative place with live-work studios, art studios, and art galleries scattered organically throughout the hub. Through the efforts of artists, designers, and other creative residents, old industrial buildings in the vacant loft districts were gradually converted into artists’ live-work spaces.1 1 The creative hub, like SoHo, is an example of a creative place that displays its own life cycle, with dynamic changes and consequences. In SoHo, the gentrification process occurred sequentially. The initial phase began when artists and creatives moved into vacant lofts; later phases were triggered when artists’ live-work spaces were gradually replaced by higher-priced housing units and commerce (Zukin and Braslow 2011).

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Over the past three decades, creative place policies have been widely implemented in many parts of the world. These policies encouraged the reuse and restoration of small urban spaces for various kinds of creative activity (Zukin and Braslow 2011). Additionally, the concept of creative clustering has been used as a strategy for the regeneration of former industrial districts and buildings that were once used for craft production (Marques 2017). These places have been redeveloped to house creative businesses and activities. In contrast to the cluster initiatives implemented with top-down strategies, a bottom-up approach can also be effective. As noted by Lénia Marques (2017), such creative places seem more authentic, more organically developed, and often unstructured. Many studies point out recurring features responsible for jump-starting the transformation of a locality into a creative cluster. These include three aspects: 1) a distinctive characteristic of the ‘built-form’ as in, for example, a dense urban fabric or blurred geographic and social boundaries brought about by the permeability of the streetscape; 2) a diversity of uses, consisting of a primary use, such as residential, and a secondary or tertiary use serving production, consumption, and/or exhibition; and 3) the ‘meaning of place’, in particular, an enduring sense of history that serves as the basis for a strong identity and imaginary (Marques 2017; Montgomery 2003). A key point is that some features that have jump-started creative transformations are recognized as cultural quarters. Such quarters are not designated heritage districts but ordinary neighbourhoods that showcase authentic living and attract creative and entrepreneurial activities. Spontaneous creative places in Asian contexts Recently, several quarters in cities in Asia have been celebrated because they mediate the day-to-day activities of contemporary urban life and local traditions. Conversely, other ordinary neighbourhoods have been rapidly gentrified and function more and more like open-air museums than offering a platform for ordinary neighbourhood life to take place. In these instances, public spaces that support everyday activities among residents and local commerce and institutions have been gradually replaced by leisure and entertainment attractions such as cafes, art galleries, and shopping malls (Kayden 2000, cited in Imai 2017b). Yanaka, a unique historical area in Tokyo, is an excellent example of a process of gentrification that begets tourism without sacrificing the everyday priorities of local residents and businesses. In this alleyway neighbourhood, residents conduct their ordinary everyday activities against a backdrop of

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local traditions, which include artisan crafts. The neighbourhood’s unique atmosphere helps newcomers like artists and owners of alternative businesses express their alternative lifestyles and to combine work and living (Imai 2012, 2017a). Bangkok’s alleyway (trok, ตรอก) neighbourhoods located in cultural districts are good case studies of how ongoing changes can lead to the emergence of district-wide creative potential. In this chapter, I selected the area of a local shopping street known as Phra Athit-Phra Sumen (พระอาทิ ตย์ พระสุ เมรุ), a part of the Banglamphu (บางลำ �พู ) and Baan Phanthom (บ้ าน พานถม) neighbourhoods in the northern precinct of Bangkok’s heritage core. The reason for choosing this area is that this shopping street area has been widely perceived as a part of the alleyway neighbourhoods. Considering mainly the physical aspects, the shophouses in the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen shopping street area are the backbone of the residential communities located inside the blocks. From a socio-economic viewpoint, this local shopping street has functioned as the commercial area – in particular, by supporting everyday activities. Moreover, this local shopping street has been used as a public space where the social life of people takes place. Indeed, evidence shows that the local people in this neighbourhood have a strong attachment to the shopping street area. Additionally, the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen corridor is chosen to represent the alleyway neighbourhood since it shows the intense transformation from an ordinary neighbourhood to a creative cluster. This corridor has been a well-known cultural and creative quarter since the 1970s and also the subject of the first cultural street programme initiated by the city government at the end of the 1990s. In this chapter, I examine how this shopping street, which encompasses a network of interconnected neighbourhoods layered atop the traces of indigenous urban villages, has organically generated a cultural ecosystem that aggregates a multiplicity of creative spaces and uses. The challenge is to try to comprehend how such an area still maintains its place-based identities while advancing its creative dynamism. Chapter outline and research methodology I begin by describing the process of transformation of urban spaces and the vital factors that contribute to change over time. I consider the conditions that induced spontaneous growth, as well as the dynamics of the city and the consequences of urban planning strategies and policies. Next, I analyse the narratives of residents and shop owners in terms of how they have built

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resilience in adapting to social, economic, and environmental changes. I conclude with a discussion of how we can identify a set of essential conditions that help turn ordinary neighbourhood landscapes into emerging creative milieus (Montgomery 2003).2 While dynamic changes can bring economic and environmental life back to a cultural area, they also cause social exclusion and displace less wealthy, long-time residents (Moore 2013; Pokharatsiri 2012; Pratt 2017). I focus on strategies, including interventions and public policies, that will ensure that ordinary neighbourhoods undergoing transformation do so at a pace that accommodates or coexists with current residents’ everyday life cycles. Study methods include a review of related academic literature, long-term surveys, and an analysis of the narratives of local residents and entrepreneurs. I employ data collected from several studies I have conducted since 2008. I also surveyed local stakeholders from April 2018 to January 2019. Additional observation and participation in local events supplemented the study methods.

Transformation processes of ordinary neighbourhoods in the cultural quarter of Bangkok Bangkok superbly demonstrates the coexistence of both the grand and modest traditions of urban life, reflected especially in the overlap and adjacency of the royal citadel and its surrounding urban villages (Askew 2002, 285). In Krung Rattanakosin (กรุ งรั ตนโกสิ นทร์ ), the Bangkok heritage core (Figure 4.1), the royal citadel covers royal palaces, the residences of nobility, compounds housing servants and staff, and royal temples from the early Rattanakosin period (1782-1851). Surrounding these sites, urban villages were formed in labyrinthine spatial arrangements, making close-knit, village-like communities (chumchon, ชุมชน). Many of these chumchon are long-established urban communities that reflect old settlements that were formed in the Ayutthaya period, before the initial creation of Bangkok as a capital in 1782. These communities have changed over time. Today, the communities in Bangkok’s inner core still 2 Referring to the works of Evans (2009) and Montgomery (2003), Marques (2017, 351-35-) describes the Bairro Alto area as an emergent type of cluster, ‘an urban space which has developed historically in different ways, now undergoing a process of gentrification while, at the same time, affirming clearly its positioning as an emergent creative cluster, tolerant, open and diverse, where tradition, history, change and innovation go hand in hand, not always without tensions and conflicts’.

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retain some essential characteristics. They are dense areas with small-scale buildings packed tightly within alleyways – trok, which are narrow walkways for private, informal, or communal uses – and soi (ซอย), which tend to be slightly wider and more accessible for cars. There is a mixture of building styles. The broader scale of the urban precinct can be referred to as neighbourhoods (yarn, ย่าน) (Askew 1996; Issarathumnoon 2011, 2013; O’Conner 1983). The alleyway neighbourhoods contain diverse ethnic groups, including Mon, Laotian, Muslim, and Chinese communities. The social and religious centres of the neighbourhoods were temples, churches, or mosques. The centres of economic activities were markets, shopping streets, and hubs of craft production that commonly encompass the softcore communities. Today, the residents often encounter threats to their way of life. Some areas have lost their diversity and character, while others have become predominantly low-income with a corresponding set of social problems. The Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom alleyway neighbourhoods, including the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area, run along the Old Town wall at the edge of the Chao Phraya River and the Old Town moat called Banglamphu Canal (Figure 4.1). Initially, the area functioned as a royal hub of palaces and housing for servants that served the king in the Early Rattanakosin period. After the rapid changes to the country’s political administration in 1932, it was transformed into a residential area for bureaucrats as well as a mixed-use residential-commercial area interspersed with entertainment venues. Modernization and urbanization Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom have changed on account of two crucial factors: modernization and rapid urbanization after the Second World War. In the mid-nineteenth century, during the reign of King Rama V, Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom became a residential area mainly serving government officers, owing to its proximity to palaces that functioned as government offices. The effects of new transportation infrastructures, such as roads and railways, also contributed to the transformation of the urban fabric of the Old Town. In that period, the demolition of the old city wall along Phra Athit Road connected Banglamphu to Baan Phanthom and caused rapid urban growth throughout the northern areas of the Banglamphu Canal. The construction of the road along the Chao Phraya River and the development of the road and tram networks in Bangkok’s Old Town, in addition to the construction

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Figure 4.1 Map of Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom in Bangkok

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of Phra Athit Road and Phra Sumen Road, developed the Banglamphu area into a modern commercial city centre. It accommodated a trolley transit station, many department stores, and three fresh markets – Talad Yod, Talad Nana, and Talad Durian. Connected to the Chinatown market and other commercial districts in Bangkok by the waterways and the railway network, the retail area in Banglamphu sold a massive range of merchandise, such as craft products, clothes, and a variety of fresh and instant foods. A number of shophouses were built along the main passages. Shophouses, the new urban features at that time, have served for ‘everyday’ uses of the200local inhabitants. Since then, shopping street areas have become a crucial part of the alleyway neighbourhoods. They helped to construct urban function and cultural identity (Issarathumnoon 2009, 66). However, urban development had little impact on existing communities, because development activity mainly took place on or along the main passages that edged the blocks, the interiors of which housed the residential clusters. Wooden or half-brick, half-wooden houses were still tightly packed along the alleys inside the block (Issarathumnoon 2016, 17-18). After the Second World War, the Banglamphu to Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods still maintained the physical characteristics of Bangkok Old Town’s traditional communities, with waterway and alleyway networks

Bangkok

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and slight congestion. Following the country’s first National Economic Development Plan (1961-1966), however, the Old Town’s districts were rapidly transformed to serve the political and commercial development agenda. Banglamphu became a new commercial centre for the city. Subsequently, Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom became residential options for people working in the vicinity of the districts. State-led urban regeneration, tourism, grassroots conservation efforts, and creative city policies Between the 1970s and 1990s, the Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods were gradually transformed into a cultural and tourist quarter owing to several key developments. These include: 1) a decree on land-use regulations that affected the inner and outer Rattanakosin zones; 2) the introduction of a conservation master plan and projects; 3) the implementation of local and national tourism policies; and 4) the evolution of grassroots conservation efforts and creative city policies. During the late 1970s, an official master plan was developed for conserving Bangkok’s Old Town, which is the historical core of the city known as the Rattanakosin area. In the early 1980s, with the initiation of a state-led conservation revitalization plan, it was designated a conservation area and has since been controlled by government conservation policies. The plan has not only had a direct impact on the physical elements of the area, but also had an unintended effect on local economic conditions, in limiting business and commercial activities within the area to reduce the density of activities in the historical centre. The plan also proposed the relocation of government offices in the Old Town to the outer parts of the city. The implementation of the policy therefore caused considerable changes to the social and commercial atmosphere of the districts, and business and commercial activities at the time appeared to slow down. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, a series of building codes and local regulations were enacted. In 1994, the conservation master plan was approved and has since been enforced through the implementation of 20 revitalization projects. One of them was the revitalization of the Phra Sumen Fortress, which aimed to reclaim land and transform redundant warehouses and a rundown section of the neighbourhood into a public park. In 1999, the project moved forward, and the park has since become a leading public space at the centre of the Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods. The emergence of international tourism has also been an essential factor in influencing change in the conservation area, as tourism-related

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activities and infrastructures have replaced many local businesses and traditional living environments. After the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the Banglamphu district became a tourist destination because of the influx of foreigners and American soldiers who served in the Vietnam War. The development of tourism as a national economic strategy was also prioritized by the government. Banglamphu, together with several cultural districts, gained a new role in the nation’s tourism economy. Banglamphu was transformed from a neighbourhood of low-density, aristocratic, residential compounds into higher-density housing clusters. Some of the residential properties were converted for modern tourism and commercial purposes, and some parts of the district, especially Khaosan Road, became a tourist corridor offering affordable accommodation to tourists visiting the Rattanakosin area. At the time, many residential properties were converted into guesthouses for backpackers, a specific class of tourists interested in engaging with local culture and discovering authentic local ways of living (Orasri Silpi, interview by author, 9 July 2018). In the 1990s, the primary development that spurred considerable change in the districts was the expansion of international tourism activities from Khaosan Road to Phra Athit-Phra Sumen Roads. The surrounding traditional communities started to be exploited by tourism-associated businesses. Since then, there has also been a rising trend in creative placemaking as a way of revitalizing the community under the local government’s plans, as well as a trend towards bottom-up, stakeholder-engaged approaches to heritage conservation. The grassroots conservation movement in the Rattanakosin conservation area, particularly in the Banglamphu neighbourhood in the late 1990s, was recognized as Bangkok’s pioneering conservation effort towards local community involvement and participation. This movement was supported by public policies, which included the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s application of the ‘Healthy City’ development framework and the national ‘Creative Economy’ policy. During that time, the Banglamphu Civic Society (Prachakom Banglamphu, ประชาคมบางลำ �พู ) was founded to work on the conservation and revitalization of the district collaboratively with non-governmental organizations and the local community, especially those middle-class residents and stakeholders who were interested in local history, arts, and culture. The most influential work of this civic group was focused on opposing the demolition of the Kurusapa Press building from 1998 to 1999. The group’s f irst public project was the cultural street festival along Phra Athit Road in January 1998. The Phra Athit neighbourhood’s street

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festival was unique because it was the product of a civic engagement project pursued under government policy. Several studies have identified the project as a catalyst in transforming neighbourhoods along the Phra Athit Road into a creative ‘cultural street’. The Banglamphu and Phra Athit civic groups also leveraged the Suan Santi Chai Prakarn public park, created under the Phra Sumen Fortress revitalization project in 1999, as their central green space. The street festival demonstrates how existing cultural traditions can be reused and adapted to generate new cultural activities that are responsive to middle-class consumers. The success of the festival indicated local acceptance of the concept of intangible cultural heritage – as opposed to tangible heritage artefacts like architecture – in the interpretation of place. The festival promoted local and folk culture, instead of the ‘high’ culture associated with museums. It featured local elements such as street food, music, arts, and crafts as an expression of the district’s value. Gentrification of the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area Today, the Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods accommodate local community members, merchants, government officials, and civil servants who work in the district and surrounding areas. Although the neighbourhoods have been gradually transforming into commercial and market districts since the reign of King Rama V and faced enormous changes after the Second World War, they have survived modern development and urbanization. They are recognized as a cultural quarter, where visitors not only can sample elevated cultural experiences, museums, and galleries, but also enjoy local lifestyles, like shopping in markets and specialty shops. The Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area is particularly renowned as an artistic and creative corridor. The gentrification processes of the area can be described in three phases. It initially took place during the 1970s-1980s, as the Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods gradually changed into mixed-use areas that served the needs of local residents and a creative-leaning middle class, as well as tourists. Subsequently, a creative quarter along Phra Athit Road became gentrified in the early 1990s, concurrent with the expansion of international tourism activities from Khaosan Road to Phra Athit Road and the introduction of the Phra Athit Street Festival (Worasingsuk, Kulsirirorat and Sudchaya 2001). This first wave of gentrification was initiated by well-educated young people, who opened art galleries, fashion boutiques, restaurants, and cafes in historical shophouses on Phra Athit Road. The

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nostalgic and artistic atmosphere of the area attracted college students, the middle class, and foreign tourists. In the first phase, social connections between business owners in the Phra Athit shopping street and the Banglamphu Civic Society, an organization assembling communities in the district, were strong.3 Some newcomers participated in the activities of community groups and helped to organize and support festivals in the late 1990s. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, further transformation was triggered by the opening of bars serving alcoholic beverages, a profitable business model that could afford the increasing rates on subleases, which became challenging for the first wave of businesses (Pokharatsiri 2012). The second stage of gentrif ication occurred in the mid-2000s. After the rapid increase in rents that stimulated the conversion of businesses along Phra Athit Road into bars, the number of existing retail storefronts selling arts and crafts and other cultural products decreased, as did the number of art galleries and restaurants. The tenants who still ran such businesses started to relocate their shops to another historical shophouse area on Phra Sumen Road. The owner of the Passport Bookshop was one of the first business owners to do so. With new art galleries, restaurants, and cafes opening in the Phra Sumen Road area, it gained a reputation as a ‘hipsterville’. A network of entrepreneurs in the area was formed, but the social connection between newcomers and existing residents gradually declined. Since the 2010s, the gentrified area along the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen corridor has been revitalized with local restaurants as well as antique and craft shops. Moreover, the area has been linked to cultural and creative institutions and facilities, such as the Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall on Rajdamneon Avenue, hostels, and tourism-related businesses. Today, some traditional handicraft-manufacturing shops and artisan studios, restaurants, and grocery stores can still be found operating in the area. The area also embraces various kinds of creative places and facilities, which include: places of cultural production in crafts, jewellery, metal, and local gastronomy; places of creative production in the 3 The Banglamphu Civic Society is an organization that was created in 1997 based on the Creative Economy policy. The organization members were the formal and informal representatives from the community organizations in Banglamphu. Its main role is to revitalize local cultures. It can be said that the Banglamphu Civic Society is a social group that re-connects the complex networks of longstanding communities (chumchon, ชุ มชน), including Khian Niwat-Trok Kai Chae, Chakrapongse Mosque, Wat Sangvej Witsayaram, and Wat Sam Phraya, and a broader perceived area (yarn, ย่าน) that includes shopping streets and market places.

126 Wimonr art Issar athumnoon Figure 4.2 Map of the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area showing the variety of its cultural and creative sites

Source: Wimonrart Issarathumnoon, 2019

form of workshops and studios; places of cultural consumption, such as retail shops and restaurants; and places for exhibiting arts and crafts (Figure 4.2). Tourists and visitors are attracted to the rituals of everyday life, the nostalgic atmosphere of a community from an earlier period, the scale of the neighbourhood fostering intimacy and friendliness, and the close-knit physical fabric of shophouses and local household ephemera. Currently, the area attracts visitors from within Bangkok and other Thai cities, including youth, as well as art-oriented customers seeking specific items.

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Narratives of local residents and shop owners I will now analyse the narratives of local families and entrepreneurs who have observed, experienced, and adapted to the above-mentioned dynamic changes that have occurred in the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen shopping street, caused by urbanization, modernization, and gentrification. To afford the various adaptations needed for their businesses to survive and thrive, local entrepreneurs have translated the neighbourhoods’ cultural identities and shared traditions, particularly those involving everyday practices, for the creation of products, practices, and place. Businesses have been rehabilitated to more faithfully reflect traditional systems intersected with newer factors linked to change. Residents and entrepreneurs have engaged in new patterns of sociocultural interaction and cultural exchange. Yet, conf licts arise over the coexistence of new and old uses among local stakeholders, whose desires range from a return to a typical neighbourhood system of living and passive heritage consumption to active placemaking and creative clustering. In each narrative below, I discuss the practices of creative reuse of each business, followed by their social interactions, cultural exchange efforts, and challenges. Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery Krua Nopparat, or Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery, was initially established in the 1980s. The restaurant owner, Orasri Silpi, is an offspring of the owner of the famous, long-established Nopparat Shirt Store also located in the neighbourhood. The restaurant is one of the most well-known on Phra Athit Road. It had been operating for over 30 years before it closed down in the 2010s. Then, in 2017, Orasri decided to reopen the restaurant again under the same Thai name, along with the English name of Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery (Figure 4.3). This business is now operated by her children, who are the third and fourth generations of the Nopparat Shirt Store’s owners (Orasri Silpi, interview by author, 9 July 2018). Tip-apa Yingchareon, the daughter of Orasri Silpi and currently the supervisor of the restaurant’s day-to-day operations, pointed out that the idea for reopening the restaurant germinated from a desire to revisit the reputation of the ‘Phra Athit Road Cultural Street’, dating from the 1990s. The other supporting ideas, she stressed, were to maintain the unique flavours of local cuisine, a manifestation of a living heritage tradition, while also creating additional space for artistic and cultural activities (Tip-apa

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Yingchareon, interview by author, 9 July 2018). The gallery was added to the upper floor to exhibit the works of emerging artists. The owner put great effort into retaining a broad spectrum of customers, from teenagers to tourists and families, who formed the customer base of the restaurant’s previous iteration. Tip-apa considers herself a resident of Banglamphu neighbourhood, as well as a resident of Khian Niwat-Trok Kai Chae Community. This is because her mother has long been resident in the neighbourhood and was President of the Banglamphu Civic Society, the main social group of the alleyway neighbourhood that combined all local communities inside the bounded shopping street areas, for over sixteen years (interview by author, 9 July 2018). Tip-apa’s family is one of the households in Banglamphu neighbourhood that have maintained their traditional ways of life. This family has a primary house in an adjacent community while using a shophouse for business purposes. It can be a representative of the local families which recognize that their communities and the shopping street area have been well connected. According to this point, Tip-apa revealed that when the restaurant was first established, most of the business owners along Phra Athit Road had close relationships and were familiar with people in the local communities. 4 However, these characteristics have been lost today (interview by author, 9 July 2018). These days, current business owners have not formed any substantial social bonds. As the commercial environment along Phra Athit Road further changed on account of the higher sublease rental rate that triggered the arrival of new restaurants and bars, art-and-culture shops tried unsuccessfully to develop new creative programming by leveraging neighbourhood identity. They ultimately closed down and relocated to other areas, and were replaced by new businesses that could afford to pay the higher rents. This resulted in the loss of a swathe of businesses, which included handicraft producers and locally oriented commerce, as well as place-based identities and creative activities.5

4 To open the restaurant, Orasri rented the space directly from the Crown Property Bureau. Krua Nopparat, in its first run, was intimately connected with a network of business owners in the Phra Athit shopping street. 5 The sublease rental rate was raised by tenants who signed the original lease without concern for the community, because the original tenants had already moved out of the Phra Athit area and lost their social connection and bonds with the community.

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Passport Bookshop The Passport Bookshop is a small bookstore specializing in books on travel, philosophy, history, arts, and culture (Figure 4.3). The shop was originally located on Phra Athit Road, and its owner was one of the very first business owners to create a relationship with the community’s conservation network, particularly the Banglamphu Civic Society, during the grassroots conservation movement of the late 1990s. Passport Bookshop has become a central part of the communities around the Phra Athit neighbourhood. In the mid-2000s, when the commercial tenants of the shophouses were threatened by the new sublease rental rate, Amnat Rattanamanee, the second owner of the bookstore, was one of the first to relocate the business further down towards Rajdamneon Avenue, which is its current location on Phra Sumen Road (interview by author, 14 July 2018). The owner adapted the shophouse into a bookstore and meeting place for people with common interests, a group that could be loosely categorized as ‘creative citizens’, which includes intellectuals, university students, people interested in art, employees of nearby local businesses, and foreign tourists. The two-storey shophouse was well maintained with traditional architectural elements. On the first floor, the owner combined the bookshop with a tiny cafe, and the upper-floor area is a co-working space and venue for holding cultural activities, such as art exhibitions, book launches, talks, or discussions. In Amnat’s point of view, Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom, where the shop is located, are living historical neighbourhoods that still play host to existing long-established businesses like restaurants, arts and crafts’ shops, and small, traditional manufacturing facilities (interview by author, 14 July 2018). These old businesses have helped enhance the neighbourhoods’ unique atmosphere and encouraged new people to open creative businesses. Even though new stores in the neighbourhoods have distinct identities that reflect each owner’s passion and skill, the businesses themselves appear unified and blend well together in the framework of the neighbourhoods’ authentic identities. The historical atmosphere of the neighbourhoods has thus helped to foster a sense of ‘shared identity’ (Amnat Rattanamanee, interview by author, 14 July 2018). Amnat considers himself middle class. In his opinion, middle-class residents and entrepreneurs moved into the area and attempted to make changes to the neighbourhood for the better. He views the middle class as having significant potential and ambition to transform and revitalize Bangkok in a creative direction (Amnat Rattanamanee, interview by author,

130 Wimonr art Issar athumnoon Figure 4.3  Left Nopparat Cuisine & Gallery, a refurbished restaurant serving Thai cuisine in an intentionally nostalgic atmosphere; right Passport Bookshop, a pioneering bookshop and retailer of lifestyle goods, which also hosts a co-working space and cultural activities

Source: Wimonrart Issarathumnoon, 2019

14 July 2018). The opening of the bookshop contributed to seeding a new area focused on the creative industries. The owner devoted space to intellectual and cultural activities and supported groups in the exchange of ideas and expression of creativity. Apart from creating a platform to connect members of the creative class, the bookshop owner also showed interest in co-hosting cultural activities geared towards other local shop owners and community members when such opportunities arose. One of the events that will be proposed is a community walking trip. From Amnat’s point of view, this event helps the visitors to gain a better understanding of the community living patterns. As well, it helps to build local pride and community spirit. Dialogue Coffee and Gallery Dialogue Coffee and Gallery has been operating in the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area for about six years. After Passport Bookshop settled into Phra Sumen Road, Dialogue Coffee and Gallery opened up nearby. This occurred within the second gentrification stage that took place around Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom. Narin Chutijirawong, the co-founder of the cafe, pointed out that Dialogue Coffee and Gallery has a distinct identity as a place for cultural activities (interview by author, 14 July 2018). Similar to the Passport Bookshop, it

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has become a meeting place for university students, nearby employees, and art-oriented individuals. Its target customers are outsiders, not local community members, which is reflected in the business’s branding and activities. The cafe serves meals, coffee, and baked goods during the day and alcoholic beverages alongside live bands at night. The upper floor of the shop functions as an art gallery (Figure 4.4). Narin considers himself an outsider who has been in the community for so long that some people believe him to be an insider and part of the community (interview by author, 14 July 2018). The shop does not market itself to locals and from the beginning had the intention of attracting outsiders to the area to experience the local community’s unique atmosphere and the historical district. On a downstairs wall of the cafe, there is a large ‘Food ’n’ Foot Map’ that pinpoints the locations of food stores around the neighbourhood. Leaflets featuring the map are available for the cafe’s customers. Kope Hya Tai Kee, at Phanfa Kope Hya Tai Kee, at Phanfa, is a Chinese-style cafe and restaurant on Phra Sumen Road (Figure 4.4). The original business was a family-owned grocery store with a small attached cafe. The business was founded in 1952 in the Wisutkasat neighbourhood and became a standby local meeting place, termed the ‘sapa kafe’ (‘community council cafe’, สภากาแฟ). Later on, when the cafe was passed down to the family’s third generation, it was modified to serve breakfast along with coffee. Finally, two new branches of Kope were launched at new locations in the Old Town area, the Giant Swing and Phra Sumen areas. The two shops have been maintained by Suwicharn Camanathamkomol, a member of the family’s fourth generation. Not long ago, Kope Hya Tai Kee shops opened in other locations outside the Old Town (Suwicharn Camanathamkomol, interview by author, 19 July 2018). The creative reuse strategy of Kope Hya Tai Kee was to present a narrative about ‘eating culture’, especially the traditional breakfast with coffee, through a nostalgic lens of ‘the good old days’. The owner claims that the design of the shop is not singularly aimed at telling the shop’s history, but also encourages customers, especially families, to share their own family’s stories of life and leisure in the alleyway neighbourhoods of the Old Town (Suwicharn Camanathamkomol, interview by author, 19 July 2018). The shop also hosts many foreign tourists, who like to learn about or immerse themselves in the local lifestyle.

132 Wimonr art Issar athumnoon Figure 4.4  Left Dialogue Coffee and Gallery, a well-known meeting place for educated youth, artists, and international tourists; right Kope Hya Tai Kee, at Phanfa, a cafe that blends reminiscence of the past with a celebration of modern lifestyles, presented as a Bangkokian sapa kafe

Source: Wimonrart Issarathumnoon, 2019

The shop occupies two units of an 80-year-old shophouse. The cafe is on the ground floor, and along one wall are photographs depicting the local history, old townscape, and historical practices of everyday life, which enhance the nostalgic atmosphere. The second floor is set aside for conferences and seminars organized by the shop’s affiliated businesses. In the future, this space may be open to the general public. Suwicharn, the restaurant owner, considers himself an insider of the traditional alleyway neighbourhoods, as he has lived in Bangkok’s Old Town since he was born, has always felt bonded to it, and has never thought of moving away (interview by author, 19 July 2018). It is of interest that, while the previous two case studies of Passport Bookshop and Dialogue Coffee and Gallery assert themselves to be places that are supportive of cultural and intellectual exchange and the circulation of ideas among individuals, Kope Hya Tai Kee’s owner views his cafe as a place for cultural exchange among different groups – between generations and between individuals and communities from different cultures. By his explanation, the restaurant encourages people who used to live in the Old Town area to share their experiences of everyday life in the past (Suwicharn Camanathamkomol, interview by author, 19 July 2018). The invention of the Kope Hya Tai Kee cafe is, in fact, the development of a brand identity steeped in both the contemporary pop culture and the strong historical identity of the Old Town to convey a set of associations

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that paint the past as something coherent and desirable. The cafe is a new place in a traditional alleyway neighbourhood that has embraced local traditions and new subcultures fed by artists and intellectuals owning or patronizing the area’s creative shops. Despite its long connection to the community, this cafe has also exerted a gentrifying force that has contributed to the transformation of an ordinary neighbourhood into a creative place. Head in the Cloud Head in the Cloud is a mixed-use venue consisting of a cafe, art workshop, art gallery, and art school that serves a younger generation of patrons (Figure 4.5). Its owners are young people educated in the arts. One is Yaporn Phromnorakij, who is the niece of the owner of a traditional dressmaking shop. After graduating in 2017, she immersed herself in the project of revitalizing a shop into a place that contributed to artistic creation and served as a venue of exchange for artists. Head in the Cloud was developed in the latest stage of gentrification, bridging with the present day, as the revitalized shophouses have expanded from the most high-intensity areas of Phra Athit and Phra Sumen to the more local commercial areas in the corridor’s midsection. The first floor of Head in the Cloud is a retro-style cafe. It welcomes the younger generation that appreciates spending time in Bangkok’s Old Town to exchange ideas. There is also a space for exhibiting artworks produced by freelance artists. The second floor is used as an art gallery, and the third floor is an art school mainly serving local students. Yaporn Phromnorakij pointed out that the creative ideas that informed the decoration of the venue came from a mix-and-match of retro styles, the indigenous styles of local neighbourhood shops and craft-making studios, and inspiration from artists (interview by author, 6 December 2018). Yaporn Phromnorakij considers herself a local resident since her grandmother used to live in the Baan Phanthom alleyway neighbourhood (interview by author, 6 December 2018). She used to visit the dressmaker’s shop often when she was in high school and university. Moreover, she now lives and works locally. She thus has a strong sense of belonging. In her mind, she can serve as a link between gentrifiers, people identifying with the creative class, new users of the neighbourhood, and local residents. She has currently joined a loose network of newcomers to the neighbourhoods. This network tries to instigate art and cultural events to stimulate more active and attractive activities in the heritage core of Bangkok.

134 Wimonr art Issar athumnoon Figure 4.5 Head in the Cloud, a mixed-use venue that serves young people interested in arts and cultural activities in Bangkok’s Old Town

Source: Wimonrart Issarathumnoon, 2019

Conclusion The Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area, as a part of Banglamphu and Baan Phanthom neighbourhoods, illustrates the phenomenon of ordinary alleyway neighbourhoods in Asian cities that have been rapidly transformed by a variety of policies, as well as organic, bottom-up factors. In the case of Bangkok’s cultural quarters, national urban policies and unplanned regeneration activities initiated by the local community or single actors have been implemented with different objectives and strategies. Moreover, the various stakeholder groups have different concepts of neighbourhood revitalization. Sometimes, actions taken at cross purposes cause unintended conflicts. Considerable changes to Bangkok’s Old Town have been caused by government-led revitalization programmes aimed at preservation by designating conservation areas at the national level. Local regulations were enacted to control physical development. As a result, top-down urban regeneration plans and legal controls protect architectural monuments but may hinder the proliferation of organic, creative practices in traditional alleyway neighbourhoods. Additionally, some government policies aimed at promoting mass tourism and massive urban facilities have demoted charming local sites into characterless, formal, and unnecessarily monumental projects. However, one set of government policies, which aimed to foster a creative city, has helped to initiate a bottom-up approach to conservation. It has

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encouraged newcomers to share a role in regenerating an area with the participation of local stakeholders. Another redevelopment strategy was the unplanned and spontaneous regeneration of contemporary uses serving public and creative activities since the mid-2000s (in the second and the third waves of gentrification). Some new uses introduced during that time, particularly entertainment activities and facilities for mass tourism, had a negative impact on the daily living patterns of local residents and businesses, which still depend on strong community assets to support local commerce, social activities, and communal life. Facilities for tourism replaced services for local residents. However, since the decline of night-time activities in the early 2010s, a new trend of spontaneous regeneration has turned to more balanced options. The interviews conducted with long-established shop owners and new entrepreneurs reaff irm this position. The interviews help to identify and clarify the various adaptive methods employed by businesses to mediate among a new creative class, tourists, and local residents. Based on the interviews, the inheritors of family businesses declared their pride in their family’s rootedness in the neighbourhoods. They have invested heavily in modifying their businesses to blend in with the area’s local traditions, particularly the showcasing of local cuisines. They have paid attention to cultivating an atmosphere that gestured to the ‘good old days’. Moreover, they are curious about how to make their neighbourhood socially and culturally sustainable. The interviews with the newcomer-business owners revealed that each has expended significant effort to promote a fresh subculture that attracted younger consumers, visitors with an affinity for art and culture, and people identifying with the creative class. In their perspective, cultural practices in the neighbourhood, such as craft production, are key ingredients in the foundation of the area’s creative mythology. Even though they are newcomers, the length of time they have been in the neighbourhood has helped to facilitate positive social interactions. An opportunity that has yet to be built upon is the establishment of a cultural or art event that is the collaboration between local groups and middle-class customers. To sum up, the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen area is a case of an ordinary alleyway neighbourhood in an Asian context that has been experiencing ongoing change. It has, however, retained a distinct urban identity starting with spatial complexity: a pattern of indigenous urban villages coexisting with and adjacent to aristocratic quarters. The intensity of activities in these neighbourhoods, the density of built forms, a mixture of building types,

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and uncertain vernacular streetscapes provide opportunities for creative energies while nurturing authentic social life and collective memory. A harmonious blend of ordinary activities, playful cultural events, and attractively designed retail shops, workshops, and studios helps to support social and cultural intermingling among residents, local visitors, and foreign tourists. Visitors and consumers have been drawn to the neighbourhoods to consume and participate in reproducing unique cultural and creative products and experiences. Collaborative works of local community members and new shop owners, supported by various kinds of loose and formal local organizations, help to develop shared values of the neighbourhoods. Moreover, the local residents show strong place attachment. The results of the study confirm the close relationship between people and their neighbourhoods in many dimensions and scales. Some local families have associated with their close-knitted communities (chumchon), as well as recognized their place attachment with the wider scale, the neighbourhood (yarn, that include the shopping street area. The analysis shows that spontaneous reuse and regeneration of small built forms and urban spaces in the context of alleyway neighbourhoods begets softer changes that are less harmful to existing residents’ patterns of living. This kind of regeneration might help to reduce conflict among various groups of stakeholders. However, to ensure that spontaneous regeneration will not bring about adverse effects to an area, the characteristics of Bangkok’s alleyway neighbourhoods – complexity, diversity, and cultural richness – should be enhanced to appeal to visitors seeking distinctiveness and culture. Moreover, creative venues that support intellectual and cultural exchanges among various groups of people from diverse backgrounds should be sustained. It will help to strengthen understanding among groups and lessen conflict and controversy over the coexistence of uses.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my special gratitude to the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, for their great help, cooperation, and encouragement. The assistance provided by staff, research assistants, and students is much appreciated. I also wish to express my deepest thanks to the local people of the Phra Athit-Phra Sumen neighbourhoods for their valuable support towards the completion of this research.

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References Askew, Marc. 1996. ‘The Rise of Moradok and the Decline of the Yarn: Heritage and Cultural Construction in Urban Thailand.’ Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 11 (2): 183-210. —. 2002. Bangkok: Place, Practice and Representation. London: Psychology Press. Evans, Graeme L. 2009. ‘From Cultural Quarters to Creative Clusters: Creative Spaces in the New City Economy.’ In The Sustainability and Development of Cultural Quarters: International Perspectives, edited by M. Legner, 32-59. Stockholm: Institute of Urban History. Imai, Heide. 2012. ‘Small Urban Niches Rediscovered: Defining Tokyo’s Cultural and Alternative Landscape.’ In Small Tokyo, edited by Darko Radovic and Davisi Boontharm, 88-95. Tokyo: Ichii Shobou. —. 2017a. ‘Back to the City: Creativity and Sustainability as a New Approach to Revive the City from the Inside.’ In Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics, edited by Lauren Curtright and Doris Bremm, 113-142. Lanham: Lexington Books. —. 2017b. Tokyo Roji: The Diversity and Versatility of Alleys in a City in Transition. London: Routledge. INTELI (Inteligência em Inovação, Centro de Inovação). 2011. Creative-Based Strategies in Small and Medium-Sized Cities: Guidelines for Local Authorities. Lisbon: INTELI. Accessed 8 September 2018. http://urbact.eu/sites/default/files/ import/Projects/Creative_Clusters/documents_media/URBACTCreativeClusters_TAP_INTELI_Final_01.pdf. Issarathumnoon, Wimonrart. 2009. Traditional Urban Community and Its Roles in Heritage Planning, A Case of Bangkok Heritage Core. Doctoral Thesis of the Department of Urban Engineering, Engineering Graduate School of the University of Tokyo. —. 2011. ‘Banglamphu: Fluidity in Form, Practice and Meaning.’ IKI Mn’M Symposium Measuring the Non-Measurable. 2 November, Leio University. —. 2013. ‘Bangkok Urban Intensities: A Contribution of Vivid and Fluid Public/ Private Interfaces.’ In Mn’M Workbook 1 Intensities in Ten Cities, edited by Darko Radovic, 18-23. Tokyo: Flick Studio. —. 2016. The Urban Conservation Plan for the Banglamphu Canal Cultural Heritage Corridor. Bangkok: Parbpim Limited Partnership. Landry, Charles. 2000. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan. Marques, Lénia. 2017. ‘Creative Clusters in Urban Spaces.’ In The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies, edited by John Hannigan and Greg Richards, 343-356. London: SAGE.

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Montgomery, John. 2003. ‘Cultural Quarters as Mechanisms for Urban Regeneration. Part 1: Conceptualising Cultural Quarters.’ Planning, Practice & Research 18: 293-306. Moore, Russell. 2013. ‘Understanding “Gentrification” in Southeast and East Asia.’ Mahidol University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies Journal 13: 116-127. O’Conner, Richard. 1983. A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Pokharatsiri, Jaturong. 2012. ‘Bangkok Old Town in Dissonance: Heritage, Tourism and Gentrif ication.’ NAJUA History of Architecture and Thai Architecture 9: 120-135. Pratt, Andy C. 2005. ‘Creative Cities?’ Urban Design Journal 105: 35. —. 2017. ‘How Can a City Rely Less on Its Past and Make Itself More Creative?’ British Council Voice Magazine, 23 May. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www. britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-can-city-make-itself-more-creative. Rodwell, Dennis. 2014. ‘Heritage as a Driver for Creative Cities.’ In Proceedings of the Idea of Creative City/The Urban Policy Debate, 11-26. Kokani, Macedonia: European Scientific Institute. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.academia. edu/6866531/Heritage_as_a_Driver_for_Creative_Cities_2014_04. Worasingsuk, Jirapa, Piti Kulsirirorat, and Chuwit Sudchaya. 2001. Kānsưksā prawattisāt khō̜ ng thanonphraʻathit [A study of the history of Phra Athit Road]. Bangkok: Office of the National Culture Commission. Zukin, Sharon, and Laura Braslow. 2011. ‘The Life Cycle of New York’s Creative Districts: Reflections on the Unanticipated Consequences of Unplanned Cultural Zones.’ City, Culture and Society 2: 131-134.

About the author Wimonrart Issarathumnoon obtained her PhD from the Department of Urban Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, in 2009. Since 2001, she has worked as a full-time lecturer in the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Her main topic of interest is architectural and urban conservation, focusing on public participation in heritage management.

5 Shanghai lilong From everyday life to conceived space Jiayu Ding and Xiaohua Zhong Abstract The lilong (里弄) is the typical form of residential alley in Shanghai, with two essential spatial features: multifunctionality and a semi-public character. However, this spatial characterization has undergone significant changes in the modernization and urbanization process of Shanghai. The cognitive value of the lilong has transitioned from residential to commodity, and finally to cultural. This study addresses this transformation, adopting Lefebvre’s triad spatial framework to interpret the sociospatial dynamics of the lilong. Tianzifang (田子坊) is used as a case study area, as it is the subject of a community-initiated regeneration that has changed the deteriorating alley residence into a mixed-use commercial and residential creative cluster. Keywords: Shanghai lilong (里弄), everyday life, conceived space, globalization

Introduction Living alleys in downtown areas, evoking intensity at the core of urban life, space, and capital, have become sites for the convergence of diverse global processes (Peterson and McDonogh 2012). Old alleys that have adapted and transformed over time are the epitome of urban development. In social and cultural terms, alleys in their varied uses are embodiments of homogeneous groups, races, and classes as the symbols of lifestyle and urban culture. Furthermore, in the context of post-urbanization and globalization, enormous social and spatial changes have occurred in alleys as a result of the production of space.

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch05

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Henri Lefebvre (1991) broadened the concept of production to social production, proposing a sociospatial theory of a dialectical connection between space and social relations. Social space can be seen as a social product, based on a dialectical process of production involving three fundamental dimensions: ‘perceived space’, followed by ‘conceived space’ and ‘lived space’. Perceived space, as the first dimension, brings back the spatial concern in social science. The perceived space represents ‘the practical basis of the perception of the outside world’ (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Conceived space can be interpreted as the conceptualized space, dominated by political power and professional elites like scientists, urbanists, and architects. According to Lefebvre (1991, 222), ‘a conceived space is a place for the practices of social and political power; in essence, it is these spaces that are designed to manipulate those who exist within them’. However, the conceived space does not show how people experience space: the ‘lived space’ denounces the dominant thinking about space in a practical way. In this chapter, we use the sociospatial dialect and the three dimensions of space to tell the Shanghai alley story both temporally and spatially. The history of Shanghai lilong (里弄) residences can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. During this epoch, they were largely constructed in the concession area in the wake of the arrival of a tide of refugees between 1898 and 1938 (Wang and Chen 1987, 6-20). From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, ‘approximately 70 to 80 per cent of Shanghai residents lived in lilong houses’ (Shanghai Bureau of Statistics 1989, 437-438). This particular type of residence acts as a symbol of memories collectively shared by the citizens. Therefore, with the high residential population in alleyway houses in the twentieth century, ‘what mattered most in daily life was the petty but vigorous commerce and activities conducted in an area within walking distance from home’ (Lu 1999, 243). As the recipient communities for the influx of migrants during wartime, lilongs became the everyday living stage for over half of the city’s inhabitants during the industrialized period. The ‘compound’ was therefore a mixture not only of many different kinds of establishments, but also many different kinds of people. Within lilongs, factory workers, teachers, doctors, and officials lived together. They also housed a mass of small shops, small manufacturing establishments, publishers, and schools. People lived and worked together, shared living spaces (such as kitchens and bathrooms), and interacted with each other in the narrow alleys, creating a communal and identity-rooted space (Yu 2017). Since the 1990s, most lilong dwellings have been destroyed by rapid urban renewal, and most lilong residents

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have been resettled to newly built high-rise apartments. However, the value of lilongs was re-identified after the success of the real estate case of Xintiandi,1 which preserved the physical space but changed the residential use into commercial use. The lilong has since been recognized as conceived heritage, mostly driven by the economic interests of real estate developers or state-sponsored gentrification (He and Wu 2005; Ren 2014). To explore the argument that the lilong is being transformed from an everyday lived space to a conceived space, we engaged in an intensive case study of a representative neighbourhood in Shanghai, which was converted from a traditional lilong neighbourhood as living space to a dynamic leisure destination for both citizens and tourists. This study is based on repeated in-depth observation from 2008 to 2015. A close, long-term relationship was established between the researchers and the participants. In addition, the study uses the results of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were sampled according to the study purpose in order to ensure the representativeness of each one. Interviewees included policymakers from three levels of government (municipality, district, and subdistrict), professionals and experts (including planners and architects), residents involved in this process, developers, and business people. Documentary materials, including several editions of development plans for the case study neighbourhood and the policy regarding lilong neighbourhoods, were collected. The purpose of this research was to conduct an in-depth study to address the transformation of the dynamic values of the alley and the resultant spatial and social structural changes. Although numerous neighbourhoodlevel studies have been conducted, the intention of this study is not only to describe the changes in the alley from its physical or social aspects, but also to identify and chronicle the historical conditions and social mechanisms leading to the transformation of the alley. Through the narrative of the Shanghai alley, we explore how, at a micro level, the dynamics of spatial characters – including the physical space, conceived space, and lived space – are socially produced. 1 Xintiandi used to be a typical shikumen lilong neighbourhood. From the late 1990s, the Shui-on Company from Hong Kong started the Xintiandi redevelopment project. Only some buildings were preserved and all the other shikumen lilong houses were demolished and rebuilt in a four- to f ive-storey historical style for commercial use. The Shui-on Company achieved great commercial success with the Xintiandi project. Subsequently, this ‘Xintiandi model’ was adopted by many other cities for the redevelopment of historical districts. However, more and more people have begun to reflect on its destruction of the historical environment and social structure of the city.

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Lilong: Narrative of the Shanghai alley Shanghai grew from a f ishing village to the largest city in China, with a population exceeding 25 million. Its fascinating urban history spans about 200 years. It underwent a series of urbanization episodes, the first of which began at the end of the nineteenth century, while the second wave occurred in the 1920s under Western colonial influence. In the first half of the twentieth century, Shanghai was known as the ‘Eastern Paris’. One hundred years later, Shanghai put forward the development goal of building ‘an excellent global city’ with its new urban master plan (Shanghai Planning Department 2017). Undeniably, Shanghai has an urban landscape comparable to that of the world’s foremost cities. The central business district of Lujiazui (陆家嘴) offers a skyline as ambitious as that of New York’s Manhattan. The mansions alongside the Huangpu River are as luxurious as those built along the River Thames in London. However, in this chapter, instead of focusing on the grandest places and mega-development goals, we examine the transformation of the micro-scale social space of alleys. Multifunctionality and a semi-public character are two essential spatial features that contribute to the formation of community-based living in lilong neighbourhoods, which differs from the inward family-centred living that characterizes traditional courtyard houses. When such a structure was implemented in urban blocks, the result was an urban public space reduced to a minimum, as a semi-public or collective space was provided at the neighbourhood level. In other words, the lilong constituted the main stage of citizens’ everyday life, and in lilong neighbourhoods, the branching alleys formed between two rows of lilong housing performed this transitional role. Besides its traffic function, it became a shared living room for the community dwelling there. The lilong’s history of emergence, development, and transformation can be divided into three stages as follows. Arrival of migrants in the modernization of Shanghai (1900s-1950s) Lilong housing was first conceived to accommodate the arrival of migrants during the modernization and cosmopolitanization of Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. Shanghai’s port opened in 1843, marking a profound change in the social environment. In particular, the use of the concession system laid the foundations for the urbanization of modern Shanghai. The Xiaodaohui (小刀会) movement in 1853 and the Taiping Tianguo (太平天国) movement in the 1860s were responsible for the influx of a large number of

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Figure 5.1 The layout of a shikumen lilong

Source: Jiayu Ding

refugees into Shanghai (Tang and Shen 1989). This presented a substantial business opportunity for foreigners engaging in real estate speculation. A new housing form – low-level and high-density wooden houses – arose at this historic moment. It combined the characteristics of the overall European townhouse layout and the internal spatial organization of the traditional Chinese residential building, becoming the prototype for the Shanghai lilong (Shen 1993). A typical lilong consists of two basic elements – a row of shophouses along the street and several rows of lilong houses standing behind, which can be accessed only via a general path located between the shophouses (Figure 5.1). In the small businesses in lilong neighbourhoods, the merchandise and services most closely related to daily life could be purchased within a block of one’s home (Lu 1995; Zhao 2004). Furthermore, these shops were always operated by the residents living in the lilong neighbourhood. In other words, many migrants earned their living in the same block in which they lived. Shanghai could not have accommodated this large influx of migrants had it not developed a commercial infrastructure of numerous local shops (Yu, Chen and Zhong 2015). With the rapid urbanization, the lilong was socially produced from the conceived space of capital accumulation, becoming the residents’ representation of living space. The main alley became a compact commercial space

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based on neighbourhood needs, and the narrow sub-lanes turned into a social space through gathering, encountering, and interaction. Cramped units and equalized everyday life in the industrialization of Shanghai (1960s-1990s) The 1950s were the turning point for the lilong. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the construction of new lilongs was halted. However, the lilong house was still the principal form of residence in the city at the time, accounting for approximately 64 per cent of the total area of residential buildings in Shanghai (Office of Shanghai Chronicles 2004). A series of subsequent political movements had a substantial impact. The majority of lilong houses went through state-private operation during the transition to state socialism. Lilong housing was shifted from private to state ownership. A government-organized committee took over the spatial governance power, and residents were registered in certain households according to the hukou (户口) system. The lilong then became collective compounds with little social mobility (Li 2014). From the late 1950s, everyday life was constrained by the restricted planning system, which led to the disappearance of most of the private lilong small businesses. In contrast, the population of the lilongs increased dramatically because of natural reproduction and the wave of returning citizens following the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Due to the severe housing and social service shortages caused by the regulations, the residents themselves reproduced the space by subdividing the original single-family lilong houses into smaller units or adding temporary huts in the shared alley space. This reality was satirized in 72 Tenants (72 jia fangke), a well-known farce about the sharing of rooms in a crowded lilong house in Shanghai, as well as a strategic extension of the conceived ‘spatial compression’ (Harvey 1990). In 1978, China commenced its economic reforms, precipitating rapid economic development and a process of urban renewal. In the 1980s, Shanghai lilongs, which had suffered severe internal and external extrusions, began to lose the ability to self-repair and gradually became the social fringe of the central city. The ‘isolated island’ phenomenon of the lilong neighbourhoods became increasingly obvious. Tall modern buildings had sprung up in the areas surrounding lilongs. Isolation belts on both sides of the road isolated these neighbourhoods. The interior lilong space became increasingly closed. The activity and communication space for residents shrank. Overall, traditional life in these neighbourhoods began to disintegrate.

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Imagined built heritage in a market economy and the globalization of Shanghai (post-2000) With rapid spatiophysical development, urban modernization, and the replacement of social strata, lilong neighbourhoods became the lowest form of living in the city. On the one hand, lilong houses had suffered serious material deterioration due to long-term overuse. On the other hand, since the 1990s, many lilong residents had gradually moved out after purchasing newly built commercial high-rise apartments, while the older and inferior lilong houses were rented to low-income migrants. The number of lilongs in Shanghai signif icantly declined from over 9200 sites in the 1950s to approximately 1900 in 2012 (Zhang 2014). In addition to state concerns and the dynamism of the market economy, years of mass demolition for real estate development also led to the formation of a preservation movement (Zhong and Chen 2017). The value of urban heritage was recognized after the success of Xintiandi, a real estate project completed with international cooperation. Meanwhile, progrowth coalitions between local government and real estate developers also empowered the original residents with awareness and knowledge of the economic value of the heritage community, resulting in many individuals seeking their own economic benef it by becoming renters. Nevertheless, neither formal nor informal interventions can lead to the socially sustainable goal of heritage renewal. In the process of urban redevelopment and heritage preservation, social reproduction and interest distribution lagged behind economic development and spatial upgrading. The heritage communities located in the downtown area have suffered from growing problems related to urban deprivation, poverty, and a poorly built environment. The above three stages show the sociospatial changes experienced by the lilong, in terms of both the macro-level transition of the state and city, as well as the micro-level practices of space users. From the compact and flowing arrival of people into the neighbourhood to the cramped but equal community, and the commercialized and reimagined cultural heritage, lilongs began with conceived capitalist motives, experienced the representations of ordinary people in the periods of modernization, cosmopolitanism, and industrialization, and then returned to a conceived space in the global and neoliberal era. Is this the inevitable samsara of history, or are there other alternatives for the future of the Shanghai alley?

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Locating Tianzifang in the Shanghai lilong Tianzifang (田子坊) was selected as a case study for this research as it’s a dramatic and thriving neighbourhood located in the centre of the old city of Shanghai: the former French concession (Figure 5.2). With its dynamic and modern character, it is one of the most famous shopping and leisure destinations in Shanghai. The neighbourhood is densely packed with lilong factory buildings. However, nowadays, the former lilong houses are occupied by galleries, studios, fashionable restaurants, cafes, and clothing stores. Tianzifang is well known for its foreign goods, exotic restaurants, tiny cafes, and bars. The more attractive elements are the narrow alleys, the laundry hanging from the second floors, and the authentic local life. In the alley, neighbours encounter each other in the early morning, tourists and visitors jostle in the crowds during the day, and customers drink noisily late into the evening (Figure 5.3). In fact, at the beginning of this century, Tianzifang was just an ordinary lilong in Shanghai, where residents had lived for more than a hundred years. While the case differs in some respects from other alleyways in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, it also reveals some essential features of the transformation of the traditional alleyways, in varying degrees. Although Tianzifang is slightly more complicated due to its history of redevelopment and changes in the redevelopment plan, the experience of this neighbourhood can be generalized to aid our understanding of other traditional neighbourhoods in China because it represents a new trend of neighbourhood changes and redevelopment. There are three main reasons for choosing this neighbourhood as a representative case in this study. First, this case shares similarities with other inner-city neighbourhoods with varying building types and functions. Second, this neighbourhood is located in a central transitional district of the city, situated between Shangzhijiao (上只角) and Xiazhijiao (下只角), which means the residents come from a variety of social strata.2 Third, unlike the state-dominated redevelopment mode of most other Chinese neighbourhoods, this case exhibits the ‘bottom-up’ redevelopment mode, 2 These areas form part of an important social-spatial concept in old Shanghai. In Shangzhijiao (上只角), the original concession area, the buildings are good quality, the living environment is beautiful, and the residents generally have a high social status. Conversely, in Xiazhijiao (下只角), the area outside the concession area, especially north of the Suzhou River, the building quality and living environment are much worse. Residents are mainly immigrants and people at the bottom of society.

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Figure 5.2 Map of Tianzifang

Map by Nancy Ji

Figure 5.3 Interior view of Tianzifang

Source: Jiayu Ding

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whereby some artists and local residents have worked hard to improve their own fate and that of their neighbourhood. Tianzifang occupies about 7.2 hectares of land. It lies adjacent to a commercial centre, the Riyueguang Shopping Centre (日月光购物中心). The urban block is bounded by Sinan Road (思南路), Ruijin Road (瑞金路), Jianguo Road (建国路), and Taikang Road (泰康路). The neighbourhood as seen today originated in 1847 and was formed during the extension of the French concession from 1900 to 1914. Many small factories have been built along the roadway due to its location near the port on the Huangpu River. Before 1998, the neighbourhood itself contained dilapidated factories, lilong residences with poor living conditions, and accommodated a ‘dirty’ vegetable market on Taikang Road outside the neighbourhood (Zhong 2016). Spontaneous creativity: Transforming the abandoned factories into galleries Hit by the 1997 Southeast Asian financial crisis, the real estate industry in China suffered a setback, and the creative industry began to show increasing importance as an emerging sector in the urban transformation of Beijing and Shanghai. In search of new sources of economic growth, local governments adopted a relatively tolerant attitude towards the new phenomenon by encouraging innovative initiatives. In 1998, the neighbourhood office rented a workshop and transformed it into an indoor wet market. After the clearance of the street, the well-known painter Chen Yifei opened a studio in an empty workshop at Lane 210, Taikang Road. Soon, all the empty workshops were being used by artists and designers. Thereafter, Tianzifang’s brand was tied to Lane 210. The local officials, former factory owners, and artists could have celebrated the success. However, the municipality had decided to demolish and rebuild this area, positioning it as a regional business centre after the economic recovery. Communal entrepreneurship: Transforming residences into stores In 2003, the district government leased the land in the Tianzifang neighbourhood to Taiwanese developers for large-scale commercial real estate development. Following the zoning plan compiled in 2003, the original old-style lane was demolished and replaced with new high-rise buildings, which mixed commercial office space with residences, a typical mode of government-led government-enterprise cooperation projects. In order to preserve the lilong character as well as the newly branded place, a number

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Table 5.1 Proportion of leased houses in Tianzifang, 2004-2013

Source: Compiled by Xiaohua Zhong from field interviews, June 2014

of initiators, including community officials, persuaded the residents nearby to rent out their houses for cultural and commercial use (Table 5.1). Later, Tianzifang was legally preserved. By the end of 2011, 137 commercial establishments had opened in old factories and 188 in residential buildings. In this previously ordinary neighbourhood living space, with a great mix of stakeholders, there used to be many interactions and social relations. But, at this stage, the stakeholders put forward their own ideas and sought to protect their own interests, forming a conceived space full of drama and conflict. Legitimizing space: Official rezoning and governmental management Since the expansion of its boundaries, Tianzifang is not merely the name of a place; it also denotes a communal alliance among various stakeholders, including local officials, artists, residents, business owners, and customers. To support the bottom-up regeneration, in 2008, the district government periodically stopped the original demolition plan and turned to conservation development with the aim of fostering creative and cultural industries. Tianzifang today occupies several interconnected narrow lanes filled with art galleries and studios, trendy restaurants and cafes, and boutiques selling clothing and decorative objects. While this spatial layout technically makes Tianzifang a shopping zone as opposed to a linear shopping street, with businesses sprawling into the interiors of lilongs, the words ‘street’ and ‘zone’ are used interchangeably. The legitimation process also resulted in

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a government-appointed committee taking over the space to regulate the rezoning, house leasing, and refurbishment. While the role of the local government has been augmented to bring some order to Tianzifang, it is not signif icantly altering the shopping street’s entrenched and somewhat distorted market logic. Indeed, the state’s improvements to the utility infrastructure and permit procedure facilitate market forces. Rising rents threaten to displace some of the early creative entrepreneurs or, at least, push them to change their business model. Moreover, as some of the initial commercial tenants have left, they have been replaced by retailers selling mass-market merchandise because they can afford to pay the high rents.

Discussion Unlike the ‘private market-driven and state-facilitated growth model’ of urban regeneration (Wu 2016, 632), the story of Tianzifang illustrates a more complicated mechanism. The bottom-up resistance, the conflicts among different stakeholders and within groups, and the sociospatial changes in the lilongs provide insight into the structural conditions of the urbanized and globalized Shanghai. The various stakeholders have jointly created a local space where an invaluable architectural form can be preserved, and ordinary daily life and creative industries can coexist. Conflicts within conceived space: Cultural asset or ‘hot land’ for real estate? Before the project started, the lilong neighbourhood in Taikang Road was completely preserved with its original residential function, just like the thousands of others in the city. At its earlier stage of development, a low-level government official was the prime initiator, endorsing a ‘romantic’ vision for Tianzifang as a cultural zone and encouraging the lease of lilong factory spaces to artists at a time of economic depression. However, following the economic recovery, the government at a higher level sought to play catch-up by leasing state-owned land to a large real estate developer. This precipitated conflict over the way in which the space was valued by political elites, that is, over whether lilongs were to be conceived as cultural assets or ideal locations for land-leasing revenue. Artists, as members of the cultural elite, also played a significant role in the early stages. From the late 1990s to the turn of the century, Chinese

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artists who had gone abroad in the 1980s returned to China. They enjoyed a certain social prestige and influence at the time. The gathering of artists in communal creative spaces is a natural phenomenon and generates economies of scale. Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan Painter Village (圆明园画家村), Songzhuang Artist Village (宋庄艺术村), and the 798 Art District are examples of early artistic settlements. Shanghai’s artist gathering area began in 1997, and Chen Yifei’s studio, located in Taikang Road, is one of its representatives. Once artists had entered the Taikang Road neighbourhood, it was imperative to update its spatial form. They recreated the abandoned factories and public space, renamed the place ‘Tianzifang’, and created sculptures as new landmarks within the space. The artists explored the historical and cultural information of the idle old factory space through their own cultural accomplishments and aesthetic interests. Through the transformation of material space, the establishment of nodal public space, and the naming of the transformed space, they have explored and created space value, created tangible and intangible space symbols, and given new meaning to these space transformations. In addition, artists set up a social gathering to mark the sense of space through gathering. Through organizational formation, they united their respective mobility and space rights to increase the influence of the artist community on the spatial transformation process of Tianzifang and achieve their expected spatial renewal goals. The cultural imagination of the artists undoubtedly resulted in place making value, which became the weapon to confront real estate redevelopment. Conflicts within lived space: Home to live in or rental income? After the first group of residents were persuaded to rent out their houses for cultural and commercial use, the residential area of the lilong was no longer a lived space for neighbours. By 2008, nearly one-third of the two- and three-storey buildings had been leased to merchants. After two years, the merchants held more than half of the buildings, and by 2013 they were in possession of 90 per cent of the space. More importantly, the various floors of the houses, belonging to different landlords, are also rented to different shop owners. The individual functional changes from living spaces to non-residential uses have also led to a divergence in residents’ interests. First, conflict arose between residents who advocated for the protection of long-term rental income and those who expected to receive compensation for demolition. The demolition of the Taikang Road plot was originally a

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certainty. In 2004, several official demolition mobilization meetings were held by residents. People who had been complaining of the low quality of life in the old houses were looking forward to the demolition. However, after more commercial functions occupied the original lived space, residents who rented out their lilong houses gained considerably from this functional replacement process, which led to uncertainty about the neighbourhood’s fate. In addition, the local government legitimized the functional change with a specific policy, which ensured the preservation of the block. Therefore, the group of residents who wanted compensation for demolition became very angry, resulting in conflicts between people who lived in the same neighbourhood. Second, the amount of rental income being received has also become a source of conflict among residents. In the lilongs, the most important functional spaces, such as the master bedroom and the wing room, are generally located on the second or third floor, which were originally used for residential purposes. However, the higher commercial value of ground-floor spaces meant that these now attract higher rents. This has caused residents who originally lived upstairs to perceive themselves as having suffered a significant injustice. At the same time, with the expansion of the scale of operations, many merchants hope to rent a multistorey or entire lilong, which is not easy to accomplish in lilong houses, with their widely dispersed usage rights. It is necessary to rent houses from multiple households at the same time. During the negotiation process between merchants and residents, when individual residents asked for higher rents than other residents, negotiations were at risk of breaking down. The residents asking for higher prices eventually became the ‘public enemy’ within the neighbourhood. These conflicts over lived space involve a struggle for rights and interests of space. The commercial activities occupied not only the indoor residential space but also the public alley, yet only some residents shared in the revenues of commercialization. Important questions went unanswered: Who owns the space? Who uses the space? Who benef its from the space? Similar conflicts have arisen in Chunyangli (春阳里), another neighbourhood in Shanghai (Figure 5.4).3 3 Chunyangli (春阳里) is the site of the latest and controversial lilong renovation project in which lilong houses protect the external walls, while the interior structure was redesigned and rebuilt. The original residents moved back after the physical renovation. The total budget for the project was 280 million RMB (about US$42.8 million), invested by the government, which has attracted criticism from experts who argue that such a renovation model is f inancially unsustainable (Hongkou District Government 2018).

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Figure 5.4 Overview of lilong houses in Chunyangli. The two rows of lilong houses in the front have been renovated. The houses in the rear row will be renovated soon.

Source: Jiayu Ding

Conflicts among conceived and lived space: Top-down regulation or self-governance? Following the decision to preserve the lilongs after years of resistance from the social alliance, official rezoning finally legalized the non-residential use of space. In the legitimation process, the district government contributed to upgrading the infrastructure, improving land-use planning, and adjusting housing standards and other governance procedures. Tianzifang became Shanghai’s only lilong area with an ‘AAA level tourism site’ designation. Following an approach similar to that of the 2010 Expo, the district government attempted to create Tianzifang as an urban cultural business area – a political achievement. Therefore, the attitude of the district government has evolved from one of initial opposition to one of protection, and from accepting protection to actively promoting protection. Furthermore, a government-based office was launched to govern the alley area, which aims to regulate the space users, especially newly arrived artists and shop owners. The intervention of the government provides evidence of the conceived value through policy and regulations, which have led to the upgrading and gentrification of the space.

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The earlier non-residential tenants, most of whom were outsiders and who valued the alley’s spatial characteristics and traditional architectural style, improved the low-quality alley by cautious preservation and contextual decoration, changing the lived space into a culturally imaged reuse. However, the conceived upgrade has increased rents dramatically, forcing out artists and small business owners. Fewer and fewer stores in Tianzifang are owned by original artists and personalized shops, accompanied by a reduction in the number of shops owned by foreigners. The gentrification effect produced by the rising rents has diminished Tianzifang’s most appealing attributes. The departure of the creative shops and other specialized businesses will ultimately lead to the disappearance of the consumers who enjoyed Tianzifang’s original ambiance and allure.

Conclusion The alley, with its narrow and semi-public fabric, is an important social space for interaction. As the most important architectural features and most common living space for both natives and migrants, the lilong, the unique alley form in Shanghai, was inextricably linked to the people’s life and collective memories. From its origins as a place for accommodating immigrants to the crowded residences for most Shanghainese, the lilong was a lived space for the city’s civilian life. With the advent of the market economy, the economic value of real property and cultural assets rose, turning lilongs into an imaged space for investors and the local state. In the case of Tianzifang, the lilong was reimagined as cultural heritage, as is happening worldwide, but it is not simply the embodiment of hegemonic elites, the alliance between power and capital. The spatial results turn out to be similar to those of gentrification in the West, yet the mechanisms are totally different. Besides the state-driven or market-driven mode, the story of Shanghai shows greater eagerness for informal revenue from the bottom and regularization from the top. This controversial process leads to both flexibility and ambiguity in sociospatial reproduction. In this chapter, we used the triad spatial framework to interpret the dynamic mechanisms of the Tianzifang case. In the first period of spontaneous renovation during the economic depression, the creative initiative launched by low-level officials and artists highlighted the lilongs as urban heritage. Through their strategic place branding, the lived space of the ordinary residents came to be managed as a cultural asset. Meanwhile, the newly conceived space faced the threat posed by the dominant redevelopment

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plan, which illustrated the conflicts within the conceived space produced by different entrepreneurial governments. The consequent process of resistance included more stakeholders and resulted in more complicated conflicts, such as those between the residential and commercial uses of space and between legitimation and accumulation. As a spatial product, the lilong changed from an ordinary living world to a creative industry cluster, and then to a tourist attraction. The newly produced space achieved diverse effects on the affected stakeholders. After mass demolition, the city has reflected on its own cultural identity and historical uniqueness. Lilongs have acquired the identity of urban heritage in addition to that of deteriorated urban districts. The task of urban historical protection has also been expanding and deepening incrementally, from single historical buildings to historical landscape districts, from public buildings with a unique history and artistic value to ordinary residential buildings. The transformation has been greatly influenced by urban experts and professionals. In January 2004, the Shanghai Historic and Cultural Preservation Area and Excellent Historical Building Protection Committee of Experts was established by the Shanghai city government, consisting of experts from fields such as planning, real estate, architecture, cultural relics, history, and economics. This committee provides recommendations to the municipal government on the nomination, adjustment, and delisting of the historic and cultural preservation area and historical buildings. It has a positive impact on related policymaking and urban heritage protection. Developers have also realized the economic value of protecting and renovating the lilong houses to tell the story of the culture and history of Shanghai to attract customers. Thus, several different modes of conserving lilongs have emerged. The first mode is commercial redevelopment. The Xintiandi project is representative of this method. The overall texture and external walls of most buildings were preserved, while the inner structures and spaces were gutted and completely redesigned to serve the requirements of restaurants and retail shops. Using lilongs as the symbol of local life in Shanghai and exploiting its geographical location near a high-end business area, the Xintiandi project integrated urban culture with real estate development. The second mode is adaptive reuse, which involves protecting the lilong houses and adapting them to serve other functions. Tianzifang, a typical case, was a bottom-up-raised, commercial lilong urban block. Various stakeholders jointly created a local space in which an invaluable architectural form could be preserved, and ordinary daily life and creative industries could coexist. Both of these examples were dominated by market motivations, which may

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replace the living value of the alley house with conceived heritage and the nostalgic discourse of the elites. Moreover, unsustainable renovation would lead to increasing gentrification and social inequality. However, in recent years, the drive to regenerate lilongs has also benefited from increasingly vocal and diverse voices and agendas for linking heritage conservation to urban governance and social sustainability, which have nudged the state to elevate the status of heritage conservation in its policy hierarchy. Then comes the third experimental mode: community-based rehabilitation, which aims to improve both heritage quality and living conditions without displacement and commercialization. Through efficient community participation, the requirement-based designs aim to refurbish and restore old lilong houses in order to improve and sustain their conditions and facilities, including washing old walls, improving internal living conditions, and, most importantly, installing separate kitchens and toilets. At its current stage of urban regeneration, Shanghai offers a continuing trial site for how a strong local state can be more effective and flexible in conserving urban heritage in a way that will contribute to overall sustainable development in the long term. After a century of vicissitudes, will the Shanghai alley again return to a lived space with cultural consciousness and sustainable self-preservation?

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all those who contributed to the interviews and those who helped to conduct the survey exercises.

References Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. He, Shenjing, and Fulong Wu. 2005. ‘Property-Led Redevelopment in Post-Reform China: A Case Study of Xintiandi Redevelopment Project in Shanghai.’ Journal of Urban Affairs 27: 1-23. Hongkou District Government. 2018. Report of Hongkou District Government. Hongkou, China. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Li, Yanbo. 2014. Shanghai lilong jiequ de jiazhi [The value of Shanghai lilongs]. Shanghai: Tongji University Press. Lu, Hanchao. 1995. ‘Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai.’ Journal of Asian Studies 54: 93-123. —. 1999. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Off ice of Shanghai Chronicles. 2004. Shanghai General Annual [in Chinese]. Shanghai: Shanghai Press. Peterson, Marina, and Gary McDonogh, eds. 2012. Global Downtowns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ren, Xuefei. 2014. ‘The Political Economy of Urban Ruins: Redeveloping Shanghai.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38: 1081-1091. Shanghai Bureau of Statistics. 1989. Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 1989 [in Chinese]. Shanghai: Shanghai Press. Shanghai Planning Department. 2017. Shanghai Master Plan 2017-2035. Shen, Hua. 1993. Shanghai lilong minju [Lilong dwelling in Shanghai]. Beijing: China Architecture & Building Industry Press. Tang, Zhenchang, and Hengchun Shen. 1989. Shanghai shi [History of Shanghai]. Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Press. Wang, Shaozhou, and Zhimin Chen. 1987. Lilong jianzhu [Lilong architecture]. Shanghai: Shanghai Science and Technology Press. Wu, Fulong. 2016. ‘State Dominance in Urban Redevelopment: Beyond Gentrification in Urban China.’ Urban Affairs Review 52: 631-658. Yu, Hai. 2017. ‘Back to the Living World and Lived Space’ [in Chinese]. Urban and Rural Planning 4: 94-100. Yu, Hai, Xiangming Chen and Xiaohua Zhong. 2015. ‘Commercial Development from Below: The Resilience of Local Shops in Shanghai.’ In Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, edited by Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen, 59-89. New York: Routledge. Zhang, Chenjie. 2014. ‘Research on the Heritage Value and Conservation Practice of Shanghai Lilong Residence’ [in Chinese]. PhD thesis, Tongji University, China. Zhao, Chunlan. 2004. ‘From Shikumen to New-Style: A Rereading of Lilong Housing in Modern Shanghai.’ The Journal of Architecture 9: 49-76. Zhong, Xiaohua. 2016. Tianzifang shi ruhe keneng de [How Tianzifang became possible: From the perspective of the actors’ spatial action]. Shanghai: Fudan University Press. Zhong, Xiaohua, and Xiangming Chen. 2017. ‘Demolition, Rehabilitation, and Conservation: Heritage in Shanghai’s Urban Regeneration, 1990-2015.’ Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 41: 82-91.

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About the authors Jiayu Ding is now engaged in a doctoral programme in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University, Shanghai, China. During this period, he gained an international perspective through visiting IUAV (Italy) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He had worked in two institutes for about five years with practical experience in urban planning. His research focuses on urban renewal and historic preservation. Xiaohua Zhong is Associate Professor of Sociology at Tongji University, Shanghai, China, and a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on urban regeneration, community governance, and heritage conservation. She has published on Shanghai lilong (里弄) regeneration and post-disaster reconstruction in western China. She is currently conducting research projects on neighbourhood social planning and community-based commerce in global context. She received her PhD in sociology from Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

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From conflicts to commoning Alleyways as sites for social innovations in Taipei Jeffrey Hou Abstract A ubiquitous feature of cities in East Asia, urban alleyways function often as a semi-public or semi-private space. In Taipei, alleyways (shang-nong, 巷弄) have recently become a contested space as excessive commercial activities are met by opposition from local residents. One such conflict occurred a few years ago in one of Taipei’s most popular night markets – the Shida Night Market (師大夜市). To ameliorate the situation, a team of ‘community workers’ began to organize a series of spatial and social experiments in the alleyways to create opportunities for social interactions. This chapter examines the process by which these experiments took place and reflects upon the implications of these outcomes for the future of alleyways in East Asia. Keywords: alleyway, commons, community building, social innovations, Taipei

Growing up in the alleyway Growing up in Taipei, life in the alleyways (shang-nong, 巷弄) could be central to one’s childhood memory, including my own. For many in my generation, alleyways were a place of play and an extension of our often small and cramped home. They were a place where we would meet our first childhood friends, where people of different ages would socialize with their peers, where neighbours might spy on or gossip with one another, where arguments and conflicts might occasionally break out. In those days, alleyways were also a space where taro ice cream vendors would come through at least once a day, followed or preceded by vendors selling

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch06

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daohuei (a sweet tofu dessert), grilled sweet potatoes, soup noodles, and late at night bazan (glutinous rice wrapped with various ingredients in bamboo leaves). Each day, these different vendors would announce their presence using a variety of techniques – a bamboo instrument by the sweet potato vendors, a rubber bulb horn by the taro ice cream vendor, and a chorus by the bazan vendor. One would know who had just arrived by the sound (and aroma) coming from the alleyway. Today, much has changed in Taipei as the city has developed and modernized. The networks of alleyways now serve as vestiges of vernacular, everyday activities in the otherwise globalized city. Though literally in the shadows of tall towers, however, alleyways still play a significant role in the city. With street vendors (of different kinds), small shops, eateries, and informal places of gatherings, alleyways are f ine-grained spaces, distinct from the city’s busy main thoroughfares, boulevards, and modern plazas. As an out-of-sight space where regulations are lax or less likely to be enforced, alleyways are also sites where spatial transgressions happen on a regular basis. Such transgression or ‘loosening’ of space (Franck and Stevens 2007) is commonly accepted or tolerated given the city’s hyperdensity. Occasionally, however, conflicts and tensions do erupt when such transgressions reach a certain threshold. One such conflict occurred a few years ago in one of Taipei’s trendiest and most popular night markets – the Shida Night Market (師大夜市), which occupies a network of alleyways close to the campus of a local university and a predominantly residential neighbourhood (Figure 6.1). The conflicts at the Shida Night Market and the community-building experiments that took place shortly after are the focus of this chapter. Initially a place of contention and contestation, the neighbourhood and its alleyways have since become a place of experimental commoning that puts the neighbourhood at the forefront of an emerging movement in Taiwan. Based on field observations and semi-structured interviews with key actors conducted from 2015 to 2018, I examine the process by which these experiments took place. Following a detailed description of the case and a thematic analysis of the fieldwork materials, I reflect upon the implications of these outcomes for the future of alleyways as a distinct type of urban space in East Asia. In particular, the outcomes suggest that alleyways with their unique spatial and physical characteristics can function as sites of social innovations in community building. These innovations in turn rearticulate or expand the role of alleyways as an urban commons, serving as connective tissues against the social and physical fragmentation in today’s city and society.

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Figure 6.1 Shida Night Market became a site of neighbourhood conflicts in 2011

Source: Jeffrey Hou

Alleyways as urban commons in East Asia Alleyways have long been a distinct type of urban space in East Asia that straddles between public and private realms. In Japanese cities, narrow alleyways, or roji (路地), function historically as a ‘semi-public, semi-private’ realm inside a block or behind main streets (Imai 2017). In Edo-Tokyo, for example, they were the space of everyday life for the commoners, who ‘ranged from carpenters, plasterers, fish vendors, and grocers, to physicians, palm readers, and calligraphy teachers’ (Jinnai 1995, 124). Alleyways were also micro-spaces where a certain degree of self-government took shape, and ‘the foundation of stable society was laid’ (Jinnai 1995, 125). They provided the backdrop for much of urban life in Edo (Mateo-Babiano and Ieda 2005). Regardless of the specific typology and location, alleyways in East Asian cities commonly foster close-knit communities and contribute to their social life. In Korean cities, the cul-de-sac type of golmok (골목) functions as an informal neighbourhood gathering space and a children’s play space, ‘a semi-private communal space mediating private houses and public arterials’ (Han 2013, 62). In Japan, the roji is ‘recognized as the locus of the neighbourhood’ – a place of daily activities, a space for neighbours to chat during the day, and a playground for children (Morokuma 2016, 66). They provide people with a safe and walkable environment that contributes to building tight-knit

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communities over time (Yoshii 2016). In Beijing, the maze-like lanes of hutong (胡同) neighbourhoods were places of traditional family life (Gu and Ryan 2008). In Shanghai, long-tang (弄堂), an interconnected alleyway between rows of lilong (里弄) housing, became a distinct neighbourhood social space (Qiu 2008). The historical use of alleyways and streets as a social space might reflect the fact that open urban spaces have been lacking categorically in the Chinese tradition of city planning (Heng 2007; Zhu 2004). Instead of the squares and plazas of Europe, nodes such as street intersections functioned as ‘foci of a local social life’ (Zhu 2004, 52). As these instances demonstrate, alleyways function as an informal yet important urban commons in an otherwise regimented urban environment. They provide a setting that enables sharing and community building, where households and individuals benefit from their proximity to each other. Alleyways also provide opportunities for economic activities, where street vendors and informal businesses thrive on the basis of tacit agreement and self-organization, away from law enforcement in central public spaces. As such, alleyways serve as a resource commons in the social and economic sense (see Ostrom 1990). Their role as informal social and economic commons speaks to the renewed interest in urban commons that exist outside of the conf ines of state and market (see Dellenbaugh et al. 2015; Hardt and Negri 2009; Kip et al. 2015), a global movement that f inds many parallels in East Asia, including Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo, despite notable differences in their political and institutional contexts (Hou 2017).

Alleyways in evolution in East Asia In recent decades, however, urban development in East Asia has threatened the functions and vital role of the alleyways. In Beijing, over half a million residents were displaced from their old neighbourhoods in the city centre between 1998 and 2001 due to new developments (Meyer 2009). Just before the 2008 Summer Olympics, several hundred thousand more people were relocated as entire hutong neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for new office, commercial, and residential projects (Friedmann 2010). In Tokyo, alleyways have also been vanishing due to the increasing construction of new office and residential complexes in dense and low-rise neighbourhoods (Yukikuni 2007, cited in Imai 2013). In Korean cities, with the widening of arterial streets and urban redevelopment, ‘entire golmoks have been erased

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along with the communal atmosphere they traditionally sustained’ (Han 2013, 64). Even if the urban fabric is still retained in parts of the city, traditional activities have been purged from alleyways. In Hong Kong, for instance, the government has stopped issuing new licences for street vendors. In 2016, unlicensed street vendors were removed by the police during the Lunar New Year holidays, resulting in a violent confrontation between police and protesters in what came to be known as the ‘Fishball Revolution’ (Farrer 2017). Such threats to alleyways are often connected with their negative connotations. For instance, despite their social importance, alleyways have long been considered health and fire hazards (Jinnai 1995), associated with an image of backwardness (Gibert 2018), and seen as an inefficient use of land (Morokuma 2016). They represent ‘compositions and processes that are often hidden, disguised, underappreciated, or dismissed as simply messy or undeveloped’ (Hou and Chalana 2016, 4). As such, neighbourhoods with an abundance of alleyways have become targets for redevelopment. Despite these threats, alleyways are also a place of continued evolution, renewal, and, increasingly, revival. In Tokyo, alleyways as relics of the past have attracted many new customers, especially women and tourists, seeking to discover their nostalgic and unique atmosphere (Imai 2017). The social meaning of roji, has been ‘re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures, and new social movements to fit hybrid and multiple concepts of living and lifestyles’ (Imai 2017, 58). Indeed, the roji has become a subject of respect and preservation in cities including Kyoto and Osaka, and a national organization was established in 2004 to promote their preservation and rejuvenation (Morokuma 2016). In Beijing, hutong neighbourhoods have become popular tourist destinations. In the Sichahai (什剎海) district, for instance, homes of wealthy families from the imperial era were converted into hotels and restaurants (Gu and Ryan 2008). In Shanghai, the lilong neighbourhood of Tianzifang (田子坊) is regarded as a successful example of community-led redevelopment that incorporates new businesses and activities without losing its unique spatial fabric (Yung, Chan and Xu 2014). In Matsudo City, just outside Tokyo, Edible Way is a project that transforms local alleyways into sites of urban food production and social interactions through the use of portable planters adopted by neighbours (Hou 2018a). In Koenji, a neighbourhood in Tokyo, a narrow shopping street even served as a site of the city’s first large-scale protest after the triple disaster in March 2011, as ‘shops, and the public space of the streets around them, offered a ready-made “scene”’ (Hattori, Kim and Machimura 2016, 171).

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Changing alleyways in Taipei The fate of alleyways in Taipei has mirrored that of their counterparts in East Asia in terms of their social and cultural significance, decline, recent revival, and continued struggles. Historically, many of the older alleyways in Taipei were actually primary streets in the early days of the city’s development. Designed for defence against rival settlers and invaders, these passageways were often windy and narrow, and protected by gateways. In the early twentieth century, as regular street grids were imposed by Japanese planners during the colonial era (1895-1945), many of these premodern streets became secondary roads or alleyways, serving the immediate households and neighbourhoods. Bopiliao (剝皮寮), or Skin-Peeling Alley, was one such case. Currently, what seemed like a narrow path cut diagonally inside an urban block in the district of Wanhua (萬華) was once a busy street lined with businesses and shops. Slated for demolition at one point to make way for the expansion of an adjacent elementary school, the alleyway was the focus of an intense preservation movement in Taipei. In the end, the alleyway and its abutting buildings were preserved as historic properties. However, the residents and shop owners have long been evicted, leaving behind empty structures still awaiting meaningful uses (Kang 2013). Found not just in the historical core of the city, alleyways are also a prominent feature in new neighbourhoods planned and developed during the colonial era. Once lined with single-storey, Japanese-style residences, these neighbourhoods now feature four- to six-storey apartment buildings with entrances facing the alleyways. Though varying by location, a great degree of mixed use is common in these neighbourhoods, with ground-level units converted into shops, restaurants, and cafes, while the upper storeys remain residential. Depending on the degree and types of mixed uses, these businesses can be seen as a convenience or a nuisance with the associated crowding, traffic, noises, and smells. Parking also presents a challenge. With limited parking on the main streets, alleyways are often cramped with automobiles and motorcycles, making the space unfriendly to residents and pedestrians. The situation has been relieved somewhat in recent years as the Taipei City government has been implementing an initiative to make parking illegal in selected alleyways and installing painted pedestrian lanes in place of parking. Despite their historical and contemporary prominence, there has been relatively little scholarly research on alleyways in Taiwanese cities. Such a lack of attention and research reflects the neglect and biases against them as important urban and civic spaces in the first place. The fate of Bopiliao,

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as mentioned above, serves as a stark reminder. Nevertheless, similar to other cities in East Asia, there has been a revival of sorts for alleyways in Taipei in recent years. This revival was, in part, an outcome of a series of efforts by local entrepreneurs and cultural advocates, as well as national and local governments. The earliest examples included the Very Fun Park (粉樂町), an art festival taking place in streets and alleyways instead of museums and galleries, starting in 2000, building on the ‘charms’ of the urban neighbourhoods (Kao 2014). Since 2010 or so, the term ‘alleyway culture’ (巷弄文化) has become a buzzword in the popular literature and discourses in Taipei. For a capital city that is considered relatively young and lacking in monumental landmarks compared with its counterparts in Asia, alleyway culture and the focus on everyday landscapes have been marketed as a distinct place identity and lifestyle, as well as an opportunity for creative industries. Specifically, through the concept of a ‘creative neighbourhood’ and ‘neighbourhoodism’ (街區主義), alleyway revival has been incorporated into the discourse of the ‘creative city’ in Taipei as a way to attract young talents and creative individuals to the city (Liao 2011). As alleyway culture emerged as a popular concept, it has also become a focus of specific government initiatives in Taipei. Towards the end of 2010, for example, the Taipei City Department of Tourism collaborated with local entrepreneurs to publish a tourist guide focusing on distinctive shops in the neighbourhood of Yungkang Street (永康街), Chintien Street (青田街), and Longchuan Street (龍泉街) to promote tourism. In 2011, the Council of Cultural Affairs at the national level organized an international creative industries expo with a branch exhibition in the same Shida neighbourhood. There were also publications introducing the culture of alleyways in the neighbourhood (Jan 2012). In 2012, one of the leading advocates of alleyway culture in the city, Professor Wei-Gong Liu of Soochow University, was appointed the director of the Department of Cultural Affairs in Taipei. Under Liu, ‘alleyway culture’ became the focus of the department’s initiatives (Shan 2017). ‘We are not like Shanghai. Unlike the model of the newly developing countries using large-scale projects, […] we should focus on the micro-transformation of everyday life’, said Liu (2016). As recently as 2018, long after Liu’s departure, the department continued to fund events and activities as part of its ‘Culture is in the Alleyway’ programme in selected neighbourhoods throughout the city.1 Today, a growing number of trendy restaurants, cafes, and shops can be found in alleyways in older neighbourhoods in Taipei, taking advantage 1

See https://www.travel.taipei/zh-tw/event-calendar/details/9321 (Accessed 8 January 2019).

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of their unique ambiance and often lower rent. While large-scale redevelopment projects are still being pursued, the Taipei City government has rolled out programmes focusing on small-scale, acupuncture-style urban regeneration, with many projects located in residential alleyways. The Open Green Matching Fund Program, developed and administered by the city’s Office of Urban Regeneration, is one such programme that provides funding for community-initiated projects focusing on placemaking and activation of vacant properties (Lien and Hou 2019). The activation of these spaces through physical transformation and active programming has been envisioned as a way to revitalize neighbourhoods experiencing social and economic challenges. The Gufeng (古風) neighbourhood, as the epicentre of a neighbourhood contestation and the focus of this case study, has served as one of the early action sites under the initiative.

From conflicts to commoning: Shida Night Market and the Gufeng neighbourhood Located next to the campus of the National Taiwan Normal University (aka Shida 師大), the Shida Night Market has been around for decades, serving mainly the local neighbourhood and the student population. Similar to their counterparts in the city, the market occupies existing streets and alleyways in a neighbourhood rather than a building or a plaza (Figure 6.2). The market underwent a dramatic transformation around 2010. Through TV promotions and an attempt to rebrand the area as the ‘South Village’ based on its bohemian vibe, the popularity of the market soared. The Taipei City government and the Tourism Bureau of the central government sought to capitalize on the area’s new popularity by designating it as a key tourist spot. With the arrival of more tourists and customers, the number of businesses grew quickly from approximately 200 to over 700 in just two years (Huang 2012). As more visitors and businesses flooded the alleyways and narrow streets, the neighbourhood became congested. To fight back against the sprawling night markets and the associated crowd, noises, trash, and potential fire hazards, a group of residents in the adjacent neighbourhoods, including Gufeng, began to organize and file complaints with the city authority. Large protest banners were hung from the top of nearby apartment buildings, visible from afar. Given the market’s visibility and reputation, the conflict was soon reported in the media (Hou 2018b). Under pressure, the Taipei City government sought to enforce a legal clause barring commercial uses

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Figure 6.2 Map of the Shida Night Market and Gufeng neighbourhood. 1. White

Shida Road

Hut; 2. Mango Herb Garden; 3. ‘Black-Gold Plaza’; 4. Skyline Alley

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TAIPEI 0 50 100 Map by Nancy Ji

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in streets less than 6 metres wide, one that few people had known about 100 200 before. Caught off guard and squeezed by neighbourhood opposition and legal enforcement, the merchants also organized and fought back, accusing the neighbours’ organization of being a front for developers interested in building up market apartment buildings in the area. To raise public awareness of their plight, the merchants staged a silent protest by closing down their businesses and shutting off store lights for 30 minutes on a busy Saturday evening (Chung 2012). Seeking to resolve the conflict, the Taipei City government commissioned a team of ‘community workers’ specializing in event planning and outreach to station in the neighbourhood, engage the local residents in community-building activities, and report to the city.2 First, the team rented a space in an alleyway and transformed it into a community living room for residents to use. They began by experimenting with everyday activities, such as neighbourhood greening, composting, and recycling,

50

Taipei

2 The reporting task became a sensitive issue, and the team stopped doing so in the later phase of the project to avoid suspicion and backlash from the community (personal communication, 13 July 2015).

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to attract the participation of residents, particularly housewives. These everyday, non-confrontational activities turned out to be successful and attracted a group of regular participants and volunteers in the neighbourhood. From these everyday interactions, the team soon developed working relationships with both the local residents and merchants, many of whom were also long-time neighbours. The team’s role as a third-party outsider seems to have helped as well. Activities such as using coffee grounds collected from local cafes for composting have also facilitated interactions and built trust and social relations between neighbourhood residents and cafe owners. Xiaobaiwu as a social and spatial experiment With neighbourhood improvement as a focus, the community workers worked with the neighbourhood manager, or lizhang (里長),3 in the Gufeng neighbourhood to gain access to a vacant two-storey building at the corner of an alleyway intersection. The space served as a new location for community engagement after the lease for their former location was up. As the team moved to the new location, they realized that they had accumulated a sizable collection of hand and machine tools over the past year. This realization sparked an idea to create a community tool library, an amenity that would benefit ordinary residents who often did not have access to an extensive collection of tools. Using the white two-storey building, affectionately named Xiaobaiwu (White Hut, 小白屋), as a base, a series of experiments in the neighbourhood began to unfold. Initially envisioned as a tool library, the space soon became a community repair shop-cum-makerspace, an idea that had actually come up before in an earlier phase of the community initiative. An Open Green Matching Fund grant allowed the team, which renamed itself Ludiandiandiandian (Green Map, 綠點點點點), to refurbish the space with the help of local residents and volunteers. 4 To fulf il the goal of a community repair shop, a retired government engineer, Mr Wen, was recruited to offer service and technical support during the weekend repair hours. Rather than offering free repair services, he would teach visitors how to repair simple household appliances and furniture 3 A lizhang can also be translated as the head of a neighbourhood, which is an elected position with a four-year term. Reporting to the district office and residents in a neighbourhood, a lizhang facilitates local improvements and social services, as well as emergency responses. 4 As a requirement for the grant, the space needs to be kept open to the public during opening hours.

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on their own, with the intention to promote a more sustainable lifestyle by reducing consumption and waste. Initially just watching and observing from a distance, residents soon began to visit on a regular basis with their broken household appliances. The service was particularly popular among the older residents who were often attached to the appliances or furniture they had used for many years. Exceptionally knowledgeable and charismatic, Mr Wen soon built a significant following, with more volunteers joining, including neighbourhood residents and those from far away. To attract distinct social groups in the neighbourhood, different programmes were scheduled on different days at different times, including urban farming on Wednesdays, soap making with used cooking oils on Thursday afternoons, and woodcraft on Thursday evenings (later moved to weekends). Unlike most community activities that tend to attract female adults only, the variety of activities at the White Hut has attracted people of all ages and genders (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The repair activities and classes, which by nature require repeat visits, further deepen the relationships among volunteers and local residents. As the first space of its kind in Taipei, Xiaobaiwu soon attracted media attention. With the help of media exposure, it now draws visitors across Taipei and even those from Hong Kong. After four years, Xiaobaiwu continued to be operated entirely by volunteers with the involvement of the Green Map staff on a pro bono basis. The volunteers include neighbourhood residents as well as those from outside the community. For example, Ken is a volunteer who lives across the river in New Taipei City. Trained as an electrical engineer, he was hooked by his experience at the White Hut, starting with repairing a refrigerator (Ken, personal communication, 18 July 2015). He has continued to volunteer at Xiaobaiwu and other events organized by Green Map to this day. The collection of tools also grew rapidly through donations from both locals and those outside the community. Initially worried and sceptical about the influx of outsiders, the neighbourhood manager became convinced that such people, particularly volunteers, were an important asset to the community and did not object to the use of the space by outsiders (personal communication, 13 July 2015). The corner location of the White Hut has been critical to its popularity. With its garage door rolled up, one side of the building becomes almost completely open to the alleyway. The entire space, only about 3 metres deep, is easily visible from outside. Owing to the limited space inside the building, activities often spilled into the adjacent alleyway, creating a bustling and engaging atmosphere. In addition to serving as a community makerspace, Xiaobaiwu has hosted classes, training workshops, and social events. In the evenings especially, lights and sounds from the building

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Figure 6.3 Xiaobaiwu occupies a corner of an alleyway intersection, providing it with a prominent location to engage users

Source: Jeffrey Hou

Figure 6.4 The vacant space was transformed into an active makerspace and ­community hub with excellent visibility from the adjacent alleyways and street

Source: Jeffrey Hou

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bring life to the otherwise dim and quiet alleyway intersection. In my many visits to the place, I often saw passers-by peering into the space, and it seemed natural for local residents and volunteers to greet each other as they cross paths at the building. Asked about the role of the alleyway in the success of Xiaobaiwu, a staff member of Green Map said, ‘By having things happen in the alleyway, they became visible to the people’ (personal communication, 5 July 2018). As the two-storey building is technically still a government property, no financial transaction is allowed at the premise according to official regulations. This limitation has turned out to be a blessing, as it enables the White Hut to operate truly as a community commons, focusing on the sharing of knowledge, resources, and social connections among neighbours and non-neighbours. Because the volunteers cannot accept payment for their service, people find other ways of expressing their gratitude, often by donating materials and supplies or bringing food to share. Thus, ‘Xiao­ baiwu became more like a community co-op’, said a member of the Green Map team (personal communication, 13 July 2015). As neighbours, visitors, and volunteers work together to solve repair problems and find solutions, they begin to form friendships and bonds. ‘Sharing Tools, Returning with More’ (工具分享、加倍奉還) became a motto at Xiaobaiwu, signifying the importance of sharing, reciprocity, and community building (TURI 2018). Branching out through the alleyways With the growing number of materials and supplies as well as programmes and participants, Xiaobaiwu was soon in need of expansion. Fortunately, there were several more vacant spaces in the neighbourhood, including the ground floor of an old dormitory of a government news agency. With another Open Green Matching Fund grant and help from the neighbourhood manager, the team refurbished a ground-floor unit with a garden facing the alleyway. The place was affectionately named Mango Herb Garden (芒果香草園), after a mango tree planted in the garden by a former resident (Figure 6.5). The concrete exterior wall separating the garden and the alleyway was replaced with a wrought iron fence, creating greater transparency and visibility from the alleyway. As a dormitory that came equipped with a kitchen, cooking, eating, and sharing food became a focus for this new space. Food-related activities that previously took place at Xiaobaiwu have since moved here, freeing up space for other uses. Programmes such as meal-sharing have been organized on a regular basis as a way of connecting older, long-time residents and providing opportunities for socializing. The

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Figure 6.5 Mango Herb Garden – an unused dormitory facing an alleyway was transformed into a welcoming garden and community space

Source: Jeffrey Hou

location also serves as a shared space for a variety of community events and activities, such as classes and workshops. With the new location in full operation, a second ground-floor unit was acquired to be used as a knitting and weaving workshop and storage space. To avoid conflicting activities between the two units, the Green Map team applied for and received yet another Open Green grant to refurbish a back alleyway and create a secondary entrance. Using a variety of shade-tolerant plants as a primary element, the refurbished passageway became a secret garden and a neighbourhood amenity, no longer an eyesore (Figure 6.6). This project was followed by an expansion of Xiaobaiwu itself into the vacant property right next door. Formerly a storage yard of a state-owned telecommunications company, the property was vacated in 2018. Again, with the help of the neighbourhood manager, the Green Map team now occupies the property, which serves as a large outdoor work area with a storage shed and composting bins. Complementing Xiaobaiwu (White Hut), the new site was named Heijin Guanchan (Black-Gold Plaza) in reference to the composting operation. In describing how Xiaobaiwu has evolved over the years, a Green Map staff member used the analogy of vegetation: ‘We were forced to grow and

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Figure 6.6 Yishientian (一線天) Passageway – greening of a back alleyway with an irrigation system that can be controlled remotely via a mobile app

Source: Jeffrey Hou

branch out, like a plant. Xiaobaiwu became too full, and the only way for us to thrive was to branch out’ (personal communication, 5 July 2018). Branching out has since become a significant aspect of the project. In addition to the Gufeng neighbourhood, the Green Map team has been assisting

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other communities in Taipei, and more recently even other cities such as Hsinchu and Keelung. In the Datung District in Taipei, the team provided assistance for the establishment of another community makerspace, Xiochaiwu (Timber Hut, 小柴屋), also a formerly abandoned structure in the neighbourhood. In the South Airport neighbourhood in Taipei, the Green Map team helped set up a community hub called Nanji Rice (南機拌飯). Located in the basement of a large resettlement apartment complex in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, Nanji Rice serves as the home of several social start-ups that provide services and support to marginalized social groups. Besides a community kitchen, Nanji Rice also hosts a monthly community repair hour with the help of volunteers, similar to Xiaobaiwu. In the Gufeng neighbourhood, with improved relationships between local residents and business owners, the tensions with the night market have subsided. The Taipei City government has been working with individual businesses to meet codes and regulations, and the night market has continued to thrive, although many businesses have left the area due to enforcement and competition. Mindful of complaints from the neighbours, the remaining merchants have engaged in various forms of self-regulation to minimize their impact, including removing excessive outdoor lighting and scaling back on additional structures, such as signage and canopies, to avoid blocking fire exits. The rampant transgression by vendors into private spaces, including entrances and staircases, no longer occurs. While a group of organized residents that seeks to eradicate commercial activity in the area still exists, it does not seem to represent the majority voice in the community.

Alleyways as space of commoning and innovations: Lessons and implications As highlighted in the literature review above, urban alleyways function often as a semi-public or semi-private space in East Asia (Gu and Ryan 2008; Han 2013; Imai 2017; Jinnai 1995; Nuijsink 2012). They have been described as an ambiguous urban form (Imai 2017), and as a liminal space, ‘a contested space and boundary between past and present (lifestyle)’ (Imai 2013, 59). Historically a space of community gathering or a centre of community life (Friedmann 2010; Gu and Ryan 2008; Han 2013; Imai 2017; Mateo-Babiano and Ieda 2005), alleyways have faced increasing threats in recent years, mainly as a result of urban regeneration and redevelopment. Nevertheless, at least in some cities in East Asia, the liminal and interstitial quality of alleyways

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is still present. Informal and layered uses of alleyway spaces continue to be prevalent given the hyper-density in the region. The informal, and sometimes formal, uses of spaces, such as the extension of canopies, constant flows of movement, and spillover of residential and commercial activities from private properties into the public realm in the form of appropriation and minor transgressions, all contribute to a blurring of boundaries at multiple levels in time and space. The distinct characteristic of alleyways, including the fluid boundaries between the public and the private, contribute to making them a space of encounters and possibilities. The case of the Gufeng neighbourhood in Taipei is significant and informative in this sense. The alleyways as an interstitial space and a space of encounters have been important to a number of social experiments for community building in the neighbourhood. Specifically, the alleyways have enabled the activities at Xiaobaiwu and other locations to be highly visible and accessible to the community. The ability to spill over from private spaces into the public realm has afforded possibilities for encounters that would not have materialized if the activities had occurred elsewhere. As the initiative has expanded and leapfrogged to other locations in the neighbourhood, the network of alleyways provides an important physical and spatial connectivity, which in turn infuses the interior locations of these initiatives with a public persona. Such spatial characteristics and relationships recall the traditional role of alleyways as a form of urban commons. They also exemplify the practice of commoning, building on a notion of urban commons that has been associated with new kinds of political subjectivation (Stavrides 2013), with a focus on ‘the practice of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, viii). The initiatives and activities in Gufeng are also significant in terms of their social inclusivity, blurring yet another important boundary, between insiders and outsiders, residents and non-residents, old-timers and newcomers, skilled professionals and ordinary citizens. As such, they serve as a new form of urban commons that breaks down the social and institutional barriers that have resulted from the social, physical, and economic inequality and fragmentation in today’s society (Hou 2017). In conclusion, as evident in the Gufeng case in Taipei, alleyways can be an important site for social and spatial innovations in East Asia, rather than just a subject of nostalgia and reminiscence. In Taipei, while acts of transgression can lead to tensions and conflicts, the blurring of boundaries can also engender social interactions and community building. Whereas the ongoing transformation of alleyways can be a source of conflict in the dense fabric of East Asian cities, such conflicts can provide opportunities for

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reform and innovations. In the case of the Shida Night Market, the conflicts eventually forced the municipality to adopt a more nuanced approach to managing the informal use of urban space, by working closely with individual businesses and property owners to meet the legal requirements rather than resorting to forced eviction, fines, and displacement. The city’s support for community building also led to important experimentations and innovations. As such, while the spatial characteristics of the alleyways and the physical location of the initiatives are critical to the success of these initiatives, it is important to note that institutional and professional support can play a critical role as well. Specifically, the initiatives in Gufeng have benefited from multiple municipal grants for placemaking and community development. The long-standing support for community development by the Taipei City government must therefore not be discounted.5 In other words, while spatial and physical attributes are important for the future of alleyways as an urban fabric, one must not overlook the importance of community planning and development practices that can be leveraged for a renaissance of alleyways as a distinct urban form and social space. To this end, the case of the Gufeng neighbourhood in Taipei offers important lessons and inspirations.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the support from Fulbright Taiwan, for the f ieldwork conducted in 2015, and a travel grant from the East Asia Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, for the f ieldwork conducted in summer 2018. He also wishes to thank all those interviewed for this study.

References Chung, Jay. 2012. ‘Shida Area Shuts off Lights in Protest.’ Taipei Times 26 February. Accessed 8 January 2019. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2 012/02/26/2003526389hf Dellenbaugh, Mary, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Müller and Martin Schwegman, eds. 2015. Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH. 5

See Lien and Hou (2019) for background on the community-building initiatives in Taipei.

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Farrer, James. 2017. ‘Urban Foodways: A Research Agenda.’ In A Research Agenda for Cities, edited by John R. Short, 98-109. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Franck, Karen, and Quentin Stevens, eds. 2007. Loose Space: Possibilities and Diversity in Urban Life. London: Routledge. Friedmann, John. 2010. ‘Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective.’ Planning Theory & Practice 11 (2): 149-165. Gibert, Marie. 2018. ‘Rethinking Metropolitan Production from Its Underside: A View from the Alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City.’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 (3): 589-607. Gu, Huimin, and Chris Ryan. 2008. ‘Place Attachment, Identity and Community Impacts of Tourism: The Case of a Beijing Hutong.’ Tourism Management 29 (4): 637-647. Han, Pilwon. 2013. ‘Axes and Alleyways: The Tradition of Duality in Contemporary Korean Cities.’ In The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities and Urbanisms, edited by Vinayak Bharne, 56-65. London: Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hattori, Keiro, Sunmee Kim and Takashi Machimura. 2016. ‘Tokyo’s “Living” Shopping Streets: The Paradox of Globalized Authenticity.’ In Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, edited by Sharon Zubin, Philip Kainite and Qingming Chen, 170-194. London: Routledge. Heng, Chey Kiang. 2007. ‘Chinese Public Space: A Brief Account.’ In Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia, edited by Mike Douglass, K.C. Ho and Giok Ling Ooi, 79-103. London: Routledge. Hou, Jeffrey. 2017. ‘Urban Commoning, against City Divided: Field Notes from Taipei and Hong Kong.’ Perspecta 50: 292-301. —. 2018a. ‘Bottom-Up Placemaking.’ Landscape Architecture Australia 157: 77-81. —. 2018b. ‘Rupturing, Accreting, and Bridging: From Everyday Insurgencies to Emancipatory City-Making in East Asia.’ In Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition, edited by Sabine Knierbein and Tihomir Viderman, 85-98. London: Routledge. Hou, Jeffrey, and Manish Chalana. 2016. ‘Untangling the “Messy” Asian City.’ In Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia, edited by Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou, 1-21. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Huang, C.Y. 2012. ‘Who Killed Shida Night Market?’ [in Chinese]. China Times Magazine. Accessed 8 January 2019. http://mag.chinatimes.com/print.aspx?artid=12680. Imai, Heide. 2013. ‘The Liminal Nature of Alleyways: Understanding the Alleyway Roji as a “Boundary” between Past and Present.’ Cities 34: 58-66. —. 2017. Tokyo Roji: The Diversity and Versatility of Alleys in a City in Transition. London: Routledge.

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Jan, Yichen. 2012. ‘Seeing Different Values in Taipei’ [in Chinese]. The Journalist. 27 February. Accessed 8 January 2019. https://www.new7.com.tw/coverStory/ overView.aspx?NUM=1303&i=TXT201202221607391I1. Jinnai, Hidenobu. 1995. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, Translated by K. Nishimura. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kang. Min Jay. 2013. ‘From Sin City to Cine City: Re-peeling of Taipei’s Skin-Peeling Alley.’ In The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration, edited by Michael E. Leary and John McCarthy, 421-432. London: Routledge. Kao, Shin-Shuan. 2014. ‘A Study on Urban Charm: An Example of “Very Fun Park” District (Zhongxiaoliding) of Taipei City’ [in Chinese]. MA thesis, National Taipei University of Technology. Kip, Markus, Majken Bieniok, Mary Dellenbaugh, Agnes Katharina Müller and Martin Schwegman. 2015. ‘Seizing the (Every)Day: Welcome to the Urban Commons!’ In Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market, edited by Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Müller and Martin Schwegman, 9-25. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH. Liao, Yun-Shuan. 2011. ‘City Attractiveness: A Case Study of Innovative Reconstruction in the Street District of Taipei and Tainan’ [in Chinese]. FCU Epaper. Taichung: Feng Chia University. Lien, Chen Yu, and Jeffrey Hou. 2019. ‘Open Green: Placemaking Beyond Placebound Communities in Taipei.’ In Public Space Design and Social Cohesion: An International Comparison, edited by Patricia Aelbrecht and Quentin Stevens, 178-196. London: Routledge. Liu, Wei-Gong. 2016. ‘City-Art Matters: Seeing the Very Fun Park Lecture Series 5: Reading the City’ [in Chinese]. Accessed 8 January 2019. http://www.fubonart. org.tw/VFPknowhow/data/城市%E2%80%A7藝事─看見粉樂町%20系列講 座五：城市走讀.doc. Mateo-Babiano, Iderlina, and Hitoshi Ieda. 2005. ‘Street Space Renaissance: A Spatio-Historical Survey of Two Asian Cities.’ Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies 6: 4317-4332. Meyer, Michael. 2009. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. New York: Walker. Morokuma, Benika. 2016. ‘Preservation of Urban Cultural Landscape: Case Study of Roji in Kagurazaka, Tokyo.’ Planning Malaysia: Journal of Malaysian Institute of Planners, Special Issue, 4: 61-74. Nuijsink, Chathelijne. 2012. ‘Customizing the Ginza City Block.’ Measuring the Non-Measurable 1: 48-63. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institution for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Qiu, Weigang. 2008. ‘Boys of “Long-Tang”.’ In Shanghai Transforming: The Changing Physical, Economic, Social and Environmental Conditions of a Global Metropolis, edited by Iker Gil, 212-213. Barcelona: Actar. Shan, Feng. 2017. ‘Finding Space and Making Alley Culture in Gufeng’ [in Chinese], Peo Po: Citizen Journal, 29 July 2017. Stavrides, Stavros. 2013. ‘Re-inventing Spaces of Commoning: Occupied Squares in Movement.’ Quaderns-e 18 (2): 40-52. TURI (Taipei Urban Regeneration Institute). 2018. ‘Free is the Most Expensive: From the White Hut to the Hut Coalition/Teacher Yu Way’ [in Chinese]. Accessed 8 January 2019. https://www.facebook.com/notes/臺北市都市再生 學苑-taipei-urban-regeneration-institute/免費的最貴從小白屋到小屋串聯 計畫-虞葳-老師/903687976508393/. Yoshii, Yu. 2016. ‘Preserving Alleyways to Increase Walkability of Historic Japanese Cities.’ Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 216: 603-609. Yukikuni, Hikaru. 2007. Tokyo no roji wa ima: Iromachi, shitamachi, kioku no machi [Contemporary Tokyo roji: Red-light, low-town and retrospect areas]. Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, Yung, Esther H.K., Edwin H.W. Chan and Ying Xu. 2014. ‘Community-Initiated Adaptive Reuse of Historic Buildings and Sustainable Development in the Inner City of Shanghai.’ Journal of Urban Planning and Development 140 (3): 1-13. Zhu, Jianfei. 2004. Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing 1420-1911. London: Routledge.

About the author Jeffrey Hou, PhD, is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hou is recognized for his work on guerrilla urbanism and bottom-up placemaking, with publications including Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Routledge, 2010) and Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2016).

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Magic Lanes A placemaking approach for laneway spaces in Hong Kong Melissa Cate Christ and Hendrik Tieben Abstract With one of the highest population densities in the world, Hong Kong suffers from a lack of public open space. Despite this situation, open spaces provided by government authorities or private developers often do not meet residents’ needs or include residents in the planning and design process. To explore one way that this issue is being addressed, this chapter describes an ongoing placemaking project within Hong Kong’s interstitial network of laneways (里) and alleys (巷). The key historical, sociocultural, and physical features, opportunities, and constraints of these in-between spaces are discussed. This is followed by an in-depth exploration of the case study Magic Lanes, a pilot project that aims to provide more inclusive public open spaces through placemaking and community co-creation. Keywords: Hong Kong, public space, alleys and lanes, placemaking, co-creation

Introduction This chapter investigates how placemaking in alley (巷) and lane/laneway (里) spaces can allow Hong Kong residents to reclaim their fundamental and democratic right that they hold in common ‘to make and remake [their] cities and [them]selves’ (Harvey 2008, 23). It does this by first describing the context and issues surrounding open space provision in Hong Kong. The chapter then discusses placemaking and its emerging role in Hong Kong in substantially including residents in historically hegemonic and top-down development processes. The chapter then describes the history and current

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_ch07

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Figure 7.1 Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong

Sheung Fung Lane

Source: Hendrik Tieben

conditions of alleys and lanes in Hong Kong. This is followed by the main focus of the chapter, the case study project Magic Lanes, which aims to test ways to provide more inclusive public open spaces through placemaking and community co-creation. The project is located in Sai Ying Pun, one of Hong Kong’s oldest districts. This densely populated area is rapidly transforming due to the recent completion of a new Mass Transit Railway (MTR) line and two government-initiated urban renewal projects (Island Crest and The Nova), with rents exceeding two times the average household income in the neighbourhood. To understand and evaluate the case study, the practices and actions of participants have been researched through participant observation, non-structured interviews, and resident surveys. The primary research questions were: ‘What physical, social, cultural, and economic needs and factors contribute to engaging residents in placemaking processes?’ and ‘What relation do these processes and factors have to the physical location of the placemaking efforts?’ The preliminary results of this ongoing project demonstrate that alleys and laneways (里) in Hong Kong house an alternate narrative of community needs and engagement in open space interventions, uses, and development. Therefore, this chapter argues that interstitial spaces such as laneways, although

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unrecognized as countable open space by the city, serve as important public (or quasi-public) spaces for local residents and visitors, and can become key locations for bottom-up placemaking projects.1 The chapter concludes with a critical evaluation of the ongoing case study project, highlighting key lessons learned with respect to recognizing, valuing, and incorporating these open spaces and their surrounding communities within the future city. The lack of open space in Hong Kong’s high-density urban areas Due to limited land resources, hilly topography, rapid population growth, building restrictions, and land policies (Yeh 2000; Zhang 2000), Hong Kong’s building and population densities are among the highest in the world. The city’s 7.4 million inhabitants live in just 24.3 per cent of Hong Kong’s total land area of 1111 km² (HKSAR Planning Department 2016), with an average flat size of 45 m² and countable open space averaging only 2.7 m² per person (Lai 2017) across all districts.2 This is much less than in other highly urbanized Asian cities such as Shanghai (7.6 m²), Singapore (7.4 m²), and Tokyo (5.8 m²) (Lai 2017, 29). The official requirement for countable open space in Hong Kong is only 2 m² total: 1 m² of local open space (LOS) and 1 m² of district open space (DOS). LOS is intended for neighbourhood use, is at least 500 m² in size, and is ideally less than 400 m from a person’s residence. DOS is intended to serve the populations of each of Hong Kong’s eighteen districts and is ideally at least 1 ha in size (HKSAR Planning Department 2017, 17). In some of Hong Kong’s districts the average countable open space is lower than the overall average of 2.7 m², particularly in the older urban areas of Hong Kong Island, such as Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun in the Central and Western District. In these areas, countable open space per person is 1.1 m² (0.6 m² LOS + 0.5 m² DOS), and 2.1 m² (0.6 m² LOS + 1.5 m² DOS) in the Central and Western District as a whole (Lai 2017, 20-25). However, it is important to keep in mind that in Hong Kong, countable open space includes only managed passive and active recreation areas such as parks, sitting out areas, and playgrounds.3 Other interstitial spaces, such as sidewalks, alleys, and stairways, are excluded from the calculation, 1 See Note 2, below, regarding countable open space. 2 See Carine Lai (2017, 14), for a full accounting of what constitutes ‘countable open space’ in Hong Kong. In this chapter, we will primarily discuss LOS and spaces smaller than those accounted for in the official definition of LOS. 3 These spaces are provided by both the public and private sector, with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department providing over half (54 per cent and the Housing Authority around 35 per cent) as part of public housing developments. The private sector provides around two percent

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as they are not regarded as designated countable open space (Lai 2017) and consequently not maintained to the same standards for hygiene and accessibility. 4 Nevertheless, these interstitial spaces are a crucial, if not officially acknowledged, part of the overall public open space network of the city, as they are in many cities, particularly in Asia (Matos 2014; Stanley et al. 2012, 1104-1105). They also play a key role in placemaking, allowing residents to reclaim their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996) by making their own places from these in-between and often overlooked city spaces within the context of urban redevelopment and processes of gentrification. This need for reclamation can be seen particularly in the Central and Western District, which has experienced a steep increase in property prices and development density in the last decade. Placemaking, the right to the city, and the lack of citizen power Developed conceptually over the last 50 years and promoted assertively by organizations such as the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), processes of placemaking have been utilized by an increasingly wide variety of actors worldwide. These actors cover diverse sectors such as development, retail, and community services, all of which employ placemaking for various social, cultural, and economic ends (Beske 2018; Friedman 2010; PPS n.d.; Richards 2017). In this chapter, placemaking is understood as ‘a socio-political and geo-specific community engagement process where the value and meaning of a setting are used as a platform to achieve positive public space related outcomes in relation to the (re)development of social and physical settings in the public sphere’ (Beza and Hernández-Garcia 2018, 193). Namely, placemaking is understood as a way to involve local residents in valuing, contributing to, and taking ownership of their urban environment to increase their involvement and participation in their local community, both physically and socioculturally. In this way, placemaking is an enabler of Lefebvre’s (1996, 158) concept of the ‘right to the city’, originally framed as a ‘right to urban life’ given to all of society, but primarily to those who inhabit the city. Combined with notions of placemaking, this ‘right to the city’ can also be extended to the ability to access and productively use public open space of countable open space as privately owned public open space (POPS). The remaining nine per cent is private open space within large residential developments (Cai 2017, 14-16). 4 It should also be noted that other green or conservation areas are not included in the calculation, as they are not specifically designated for active or passive recreation. Those include ‘incidental’ landscaped amenity areas, green belts, countryside conservation areas, country parks, and coastal protection areas (HKSAR Planning Department 2015, 14-15).

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for self-determined, organized, serious, casual, and project-based leisure activities (Stebbins 2015). Understanding that leisure is ‘time free from work or duties’ (MerriamWebster Online Dictionary 2019) and that places are constructed through leisure activities (Lin and Dong 2018), it has been shown that these activities are crucial for place creation, for both mental and physical health, and for social and cultural identity expression, among other benefits (Johnson and Glover 2013; Low, Taplin, and Scheld 2005). Unfortunately, this ability to participate in place construction is often usurped in Hong Kong by redevelopment projects, which transform neighbourhoods and open spaces both physically and economically with only minimal processes of public participation (Ng 2017). These redevelopments often lead to the displacement of residents and businesses, and to the creation of open spaces that do not meet the needs of the inhabitants of the area. This disconnect can be attributed to the varying degree of tokenism within public consultation processes in Hong Kong, with informing, consultation, or placation (Arnstein 1969) processes often reinforcing the existing hegemonic social and political structure of the city (Tang, Lee and Ying 2012). This inability to substantially contribute to decision-making processes has resulted in feelings of alienation and a lack of perceived agency on the part of local residents (Ng 2017), particularly with respect to urban redevelopment and heritage preservation. In response to this, as the pace of redevelopment and urban renewal quickened in the twenty-first century, residents began to form ‘concern groups’ to fight against government and/or developer-led projects. Some notable failures, despite their lack of success, still led to an energized and activated populace. An often-cited example is the Urban Renewal Authority’s redevelopment of ‘Wedding Card Street’, which demolished a culturally significant local wedding card street market to create a privately owned public space (POPS) and high-end retail street despite active protest and engagement by the local community (Lai 2006, 2007). However, there were also some successes, such as the Blue House project, and an equal, if not greater, number of draws (Ng 2018). The role of placemaking and asset-based community development To counter these exclusionary processes, placemaking and, in particular, citizen-driven placemaking, has been shown to provide residents with a sense of agency in the co-creation of public spaces (Normoyle and Christian 2016). Shared projects and activities build upon each other to establish community resources, re-establish intangible and tangible heritage and cultural identities, and provide valued and needed leisure opportunities.

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These activities ultimately construct places from what were otherwise ignored, misused, or underused circulation or interstitial spaces. In view of the degree of citizen involvement, these projects fall between agency-driven placemaking, citizen-inclusive placemaking, and citizen-driven placemaking (Normoyle and Christian 2016) or ‘user-generated urbanism’, as coined by John Bela (2015) of REBAR, one of the founders of PARK(ing) Day. When combined with principles of asset-based community development – a strategy based on identifying existing, yet undervalued or unidentified assets, rather than concentrating only on their unmet needs (Collaborative for Neighborhood Transformation n.d.) – agency-driven placemaking activities can be more inclusive and successful. These activities are undertaken as a way to empower residents to eventually undertake citizen-driven placemaking projects, as can be seen in Hong Kong’s Pokfulam Village through the efforts of Caritas-Hong Kong, the primary social services agency involved in the case study that is the subject of this chapter. A key example of citizen-driven placemaking in Hong Kong is the student-led 2014 Umbrella Movement, which demanded that Hong Kong citizens be given the right to choose the candidates for the position of Chief Executive (Normoyle and Christian 2016). Although the main political goal of the movement was not achieved, the two-month-long occupation of major roads and highways and the wide range of self-organized placemaking activities demonstrated many alternative potential uses for public spaces in Hong Kong (Bertollini 2015). These potentials, as well as the connections and affinities discovered between protesters, were further explored and built upon by different organizations in the following years, often without explicit reference to the earlier political demands. However, these political demands for universal suffrage publicly resurfaced as one of the ‘five demands, not one less’ (Lam 2019) requested by protestors in 2019 after several initial large scale antiextradition bill marches were unsuccessful, leading to months of sometimes violent clashes between Hong Kong police and protestors. However, in 2019 and 2020 protesters have used temporary spatial interventions as part of their tactics. These therefore have not served a similar placemaking role as the more long-term occupations did during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Existing open space conditions and issues Although the Hong Kong government intends to address the lack of DOS in the Central and Western District with the ‘promenade’ of the New Central Harbour front development (HKSAR Planning Department 2011), recent government or public/private initiatives for LOS production or redevelopment

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Figure 7.2 Third Street Playground, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2018

Source: Hendrik Tieben

have often resulted in sanitized and highly controlled spaces, as design and management regulations tend to restrict access and the types of activities. A key problem with these spaces is their separation from adjacent buildings by fences or walls (Figure 7.2). Without active street frontages with cafes, shops, and restaurants, or entrances to residential buildings, the spaces remain separated from everyday neighbourhood life and lack ‘eyes on the street’, a crucial component for a space to feel safe and part of the community and neighbourhood (Jacobs 1961). With respect to the provision of POPS, Hong Kong has a bonus system to motivate the private sector to provide and manage them. Such spaces can result from requirements to provide public access or facilities as a term of a land sale or lease, as a way to exempt floor space from the gross floor area (GFA) calculation, or to acquire bonus GFA (known as a plot ratio bonus or transfer) (HKSAR Development Bureau 2015). These POPS are divided into five types according to the HKSAR Development Bureau’s (2011) Public Open Space in Private Developments (POSPD) guidelines: public green; plaza; courtyard; pocket space; and promenade.5 The guidelines 5 The guidelines are further defined for each type according to their design intent and their morphological characteristics: shape; street frontage; width/length ratio; major/minor space ratio; visibility; openness to the sky; slope/gradient; and green coverage.

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specify allowable types of activities,6 operational standards, and other general responsibilities: hours of operation (a minimum of 13 hours/day is required); owners can decide whether they allow busking, dogs, and/ or smoking; and owners’ responsibilities for maintenance are subject to their lease conditions. These guidelines are ‘not meant in general for public passageways in private developments provided under leases or Deed of Dedication’, but they do stipulate that ‘POSPD as key passages in [a] local pedestrian system or waterfront promenade should be open 24 hours a day’, unless an exemption is granted for security or public safety reasons (HKSAR Development Bureau 2011, 30-32). These rules, although intended to ensure that the public has access to and a use for these spaces, allow little room for more informal or spontaneous uses or community involvement, as they are frequently monitored by private management companies (Figure 7.3). In practice, many activities are restricted for ‘public safety’, or for the ease of maintenance or management, leaving no room for the ‘messiness’ (Chalana and Hou 2016) or grit of true urbanity. It depends on POSPD owners whether or not their spaces can function as truly public spaces. A recent survey conducted by the Hong Kong Public Space Initiative (2018) highlighted the unsatisfying condition of these spaces, even after the implementation of the 2011 POSPD guidelines. However, even in public open spaces, a similar feeling of restriction exists, along with a limited range of allowable activities. The main regulatory instrument in public open spaces managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department is the ‘Pleasure Grounds Regulation’, which can prohibit activities as diverse as dog walking, singing, walking on the grass, playing with balls, bicycling, scooting and skateboarding, lying down on benches or other areas, touching plants (which are often treated with chemical pesticides and insecticides), gambling, and kite flying, among others (Hong Kong Government 1960). The resulting lack of freedom is often attributed to the Hong Kong government’s concern for safety and liability, tendency to be overcautious in reaction to complaints (Cheung 2009), and desire to keep maintenance costs low. In the shadow of this mentality, residents are disempowered to govern their own actions and/or to negotiate with each other as to what is an acceptable use of public space. This balancing act, between personal responsibility, regulation, and freedom, is an essential part of living in an urban environment and can be observed in spaces where these regulations do not exist, such as in alleys and laneways. 6 Activities can be always permissible; charity/non-commercial; and commercial.

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Figure 7.3 Public space in private development – Wang In Fong East Lane, Hong Kong, 2018

Source: Hendrik Tieben

Conditions and potentials of Hong Kong’s alley, laneway, and terrace open space network Owing to the above-mentioned restrictions on what is allowed in managed public spaces, as well as the nature of Hong Kong’s private living spaces (small and often lacking access to exterior space), residents have come to occupy less-regulated outdoor spaces, such as alleys, laneways, and terraces (平台), for many of their activities. Uses vary widely and include: storing goods and cleaning supplies; washing clothes and dishes; taking work or smoke breaks; sitting and napping; engaging in intimate encounters; growing plants; drying clothes, traditional Chinese medicines, vegetables, or fish; playing chess or mah-jong; riding scooters and bicycles; practicing yoga; accessing restaurants, bars, and clubs; and operating small shops such as real estate agencies, clothes vendors, barbers, newspaper stalls, and key makers, to name only a few (Borio and Wüthrich 2015; Feustel 2016, 7; Wolf 2016). In other words, these unmanaged open spaces are co-created by their users and used to fill in the gaps of what is not allowed in the open spaces managed by the government and private developers. Despite their ‘messiness’ (Chalana and Hou 2016), these are crucial spaces of inhabitation in Hong Kong. Due to the very lack of management that allows for

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their varied use, these alleys can be dirty and dank. However, in spite of these conditions, they are occupied by a wide variety of bottom-up uses and depicted in the drawings of architects Geraldine Borio and Caroline Wüthrich (2015) in their book Hong Kong In-between and in the photos of Michael Wolf (2016) in his book Informal Solutions. In both books, alleys are understood as housing the true identity of Hong Kong, based on both the city’s planning history and the ingenuity of residents in making these public in-between and service spaces useful for their private, commercial, and community-related purposes. History of alleys and lanes in Hong Kong In Hong Kong, alleys and lanes emerged in tandem with the Chinese shophouse, known in Cantonese as tong lau. In Tai Ping Shan, the first Chinese neighbourhood built after the British colonization of Hong Kong in the mid-nineteenth century, these houses were initially built back to back rather than with a shared ‘backyard’ space, as were their contemporary structures in Southern China (DiStefano and Lee 2016). This resulting lack of space to deal with household and human waste, as well as the lack of light and ventilation, led to sanitation issues, including rat infestations, and eventually to the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Tai Ping Shan in 1894. In a partial response to this situation, the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance of 1903 required ‘scavenger lanes’ to be built at least six feet wide and ‘continuous and open onto public thoroughfares’ (DiStefano and Lee 2016, 84). Today, some of these early lanes have been lost in the urban transformation process, which consolidates lots for large office and residential towers, often on top of large podiums that can take up an entire city block. However, the statutory requirement to provide back lanes has left its mark on many areas of the city, constituting a network of shortcuts and places for back-of-house activities. Thus, these activities occur in transition zones between the private spaces of the buildings and the public spaces of the streets (街/街道). What was originally planned to provide service access to the back of the buildings developed over time into access points for smaller businesses and residences, which found more affordable rents, quieter environments, or more secluded locations along alleys and lanes (Figure 7.4). Although there are alleys and lanes in many of Hong Kong’s urban districts and villages, a specific urban laneway morphology exists in older districts along the northern shore of Hong Kong Island between the grid defined by the wide streets and roads. Here alleys and lanes can be found both on

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Figure 7.4 Typical Hong Kong alley, Sai Ying Pun, 2019

Source: Melissa Cate Christ

the flat, reclaimed land extending north from Queen’s Road,7 as well as extending uphill to the south of Queen’s Road (Figure 7.5). 7 Queen’s Road was the first road built in Hong Kong (1841-18-3) and it followed the original shoreline of Hong Kong Island. Most of the land currently existing north of Queen’s Road has been reclaimed, whereas the land south (and upslope) of Queen’s Road is part of the original landform of Hong Kong Island.

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Figure 7.5 Sheung Fung Lane steps, City of Victoria, Department of Public Works, 1897

Source: National Archives, ref. MPHH1/412; reproduced with permission

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Located on unconsolidated granite slopes, some of the lanes in these areas go back to the mid-nineteenth century, the earliest days of the colonial settlement. Streets and lanes here form a primary and secondary spatial network that is adapted to the steep topography. In Sai Ying Pun (Cantonese for ‘west military encampment’), a sub-district on the western end of Hong Kong Island that was initially laid out in a grid pattern for British military housing, streets played an active role as community spaces, public markets, and gathering places. One example is the 150-year-old street market along Centre Street and its cross-streets. With the introduction of cars and their prioritization in successive planning regulations, the streets became dominated by vehicular traffic, leaving only narrow sidewalks with little room for casual chats and window-shopping. However, the lanes have remained free from vehicular traffic due to their steps, progressively becoming sites for a range of social activities. In addition, many historical traces can still be found along the lanes, such as old trees and shrines. One example is the shrine located on Sheung Fung Lane, which is the site of this chapter’s case study. This shrine, dedicated to the God of the Earth, To Tei Kung (literally translated from the Cantonese as ‘Soil Earth Grandpa’), goes back to the beginning of the district in the 1850s/1860s. The shrine is still visited daily by members of the surrounding community and was the site of rituals such as the Hungry Ghost Festival (Yulan in Cantonese). This traditional Buddhist and Taoist festival honours the visiting spirits of the dead with food offerings and the burning of incense and joss paper items. These festival activities were held in Sheung Fung Lane until the mid-2010s and are still practiced in locations in Central and Sheung Wan. Use, significance, and types of alleys and lanes in Hong Kong Although alleys and lanes can be found in many parts of Hong Kong, when these linear spaces include stairs (樓梯) at the ends or running throughout, as they do in the upslope area of Sai Ying Pun, their potential for occupation and use changes. According to research conducted by Melissa Cate Christ (2017) in the Hong Kong Stair Archive project, public stairs in Hong Kong fall into twelve basic types, three of which are most relevant in the context of this paper: street, curb, and alley stairs.8 8 The Hong Kong Stair Archive is a collaborative pilot project to document and study outdoor stairs, initially focusing on a selection of stairs located primarily in the Central and Western District of Hong Kong Island. It is part of Stair Culture, a long-term research and curatorial

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– Street stairs, also known as ladder streets (樓梯街), are stairs that replace the entire width of a street, making vehicular access impossible. Street stairs are crucial public places, are almost always named, and usually have a width of more than 3 metres, uniformly dimensioned steps, lighting, and at least one handrail (e.g., a Type 1 standard guardrail). Trees and benches are sometimes located on the stair landings, which often connect to adjacent building entrances, shops, or other streets, alleys, or lanes. Street stairs are usually continuous, with landings, cross-streets, or terraces between the sections. – Curb stairs are usually found on sidewalks adjacent to steep vehicular roads (路/道路), but they can also be found at the building edges of street or alley stairs in order to negotiate the grade between the street/alley and a building entrance. Often they are irregular in dimension, lack handrails, and are intermixed with slopes and short walls in relation to their adjacencies. – Alley stairs are usually found on either end or running throughout an alley. Usually unnamed, these alleys are flanked by building or retaining walls and are typically 2 to 3 metres wide with back entrances, building utilities, and/or ventilation and air conditioning units along their length. Although basic amenities like handrails, seating, and lighting are often absent, the stairs are used by smokers and nearby workers as seats, and by shop owners and residents for dishwashing or storage, blurring the boundary between public and private. Using this classif ication to look at lanes in Sai Ying Pun, it can be seen that some laneways are a mixture of the three types, whereas others fall under the classif ication of alley stairs, if only judging by their width. However, because they contain stairs, their utility as traditional alleys is complicated with respect to functions like vehicular deliveries and trash collection.9 Other lanes, such as Sheung Fung Lane, are morphologically more similar to street stairs, being wide and open, with several large landings, Type 1 guardrails, and shops or building entrances on at least one side (Figure 7.6). project undertaken by Melissa Cate Christ/transverse studio in collaboration with various artists, designers, students, curators, and cultural and educational institutions as a platform to investigate the role of stairs in defining the topographic urbanism of Hong Kong. 9 Many of these functions are facilitated by the ubiquitous handcart, or trolley, along with makeshift wooden ramps, which workers move from stair to stair as needed. See https://www. scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1324242/hong-kongs-handcarts-keep-city-roll (Accessed 8 September 2019).

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Figure 7.6 Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Yin Pun, Hong Kong, 2018

Source: Melissa Cate Christ

However, because of their extra width and frequent landings, as well as their somewhat unregulated, underused, or ambiguous status, lanes can function more like alleys in Hong Kong, with a range of activities taking place on them which fall in between the public and private domain. In these cases, adjacent social and commercial programmes extend into the lanes, taking advantage of their width, the lack of vehicular traffic and, in the case of Sheung Fung Lane in particular, the increasing foot traffic to and from the recently opened station of the MTR West Island Line. In these cases, being a shortcut (which is nevertheless inconvenient for some due to stairs and grade changes) offers an opportunity for increasing social, cultural, and community use since they can be overlooked by departments concerned primarily with either streets or open spaces, all the while literally remaining in the shadow of recent large commercial and residential developments along the primary streets. Many of the street and alley stairs function not just as pedestrian infrastructure or linear circulation spaces, but also as public spaces, as containers and reminders of Hong Kong’s tangible and intangible heritage, and as current and potential locations for green and blue infrastructure (Cate Christ 2017). These potentialities, in addition to the ones mentioned above, are exactly the qualities that the lanes can offer and possibly incorporate in future iterations in collaboration with their communities.

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Due to their steep terrain, they were left out from the competition for space and spatial exploitation by larger developments, allowing print shops, workshops, and social and cultural facilities to retreat to them as places that had more affordable rents and easier access to usable exterior space. However, their advantage is at the same time the challenge for their transformation into more inclusive open spaces (e.g., lane stairs are difficult for the elderly, young families, and people with disabilities to access), but on balance, they remain more affordable and are rich in diversity with respect to their potential functions, activities, and ecology. There are hundreds of similar spaces in the Central and Western District alone that could be used for community placemaking and the co-creation of new kinds of community open spaces. It is in this context that Magic Lanes was developed as a pilot project to explore the larger potential of lane spaces.

Magic Lanes, a pilot project for Hong Kong’s lane spaces The Magic Lanes project builds on the research of the two authors of this chapter: the community and placemaking action-research project Magic Carpet by Hendrik Tieben and the Hong Kong Stair Archive by Melissa Cate Christ.10 In 2017, the authors joined forces with Caritas-Hong Kong (henceforth, ‘Caritas’), a social services agency formed in Hong Kong in 1953 by the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong, and the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage to develop Magic Lanes.

10 Hendrik Tieben first studied the transformation of street blocks and building types in the Central and Western District (Tieben, Woo, and Yuet 2008), before focusing on the transformation of public spaces in the context of the construction of the MTR West Island Line (Tieben 2013). The research was supported by two General Research Fund grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council: ‘Measuring Community Benefit in Public Space Transformation in Older Urban Districts: A Case Study of Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun’ and ‘Measuring the Impact of the MTR West Island Line on Public Space and Community Life in Hong Kong’’ Western Districts’ (co-investigators: E. Baniassad, S. Govada, H. Grace and R. Ho), as well as two Knowledge Transfer Fund grants: ‘Re-envisioning Community Space in Sai Ying Pun’ (co-investigators: Anthony Fung and Colin Fournier). The Hong Kong Stair Archive project was supported by grants from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Research Grants Council [Project No. (olyU274002/14H). The exhibition portion of the project, ‘Always at the Edge of Things and between Places’, received additional support from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Cate Christ’s earlier research on the Pound Lane escalator was supported by the University of Hong Kong Knowledge Exchange Fund.

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From Magic Carpet to Magic Lanes Hendrik Tieben initiated the project Magic Carpet – Re-envisioning Community Space with Anthony Fung in Hong Kong in 2013, while a related project was launched at the same time by Min Jay Kang in Taipei (Tieben and Kang 2017). Sites for the Hong Kong project included Sai Ying Pun, the new town Tin Shui Wai in the New Territories, and To Kwa Wan in Kowloon. Combining qualitative research with community engagement, local secondary school student ‘community ambassadors’ interviewed local residents and shopkeepers about the rapid transformation of their neighbourhood. These videos are available online and were screened outdoors along Centre Street, an actively used public open space in the heart of the neighbourhood, which was the long-time site of the public street market mentioned earlier. The aims were twofold: 1) to enable local residents to become active agents in shaping their own community; and 2) to temporarily transform a public space to demonstrate that tangible improvements to the neighbourhood could be achieved with relatively simple means. The Magic Carpet events aligned with the Mid-Autumn Festival, a significant public holiday in Hong Kong where people gather in public spaces to celebrate, take part in community activities, and gaze at the moon. In the next stage of the project, Urban Studies students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong designed and built street furniture for a community event along Centre Street. This event included performances of a cappella groups from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as food and games, as a way to encourage old and new residents to socialize (Chen and Tieben 2006). After this Magic Carpet event, Caritas asked the project team to collaborate with them and local residents in a co-creative process to improve local community spaces. Drawing on the action-research model (Greenwood and Levin 2006), each successive project stage incorporated what was learned in earlier stages and aimed to further build trust in the local community, as well as foster the collaborative capacity of residents and Caritas’ social workers. At the same time, students active in the earlier projects worked as interns with Caritas to submit a grant proposal to the Urban Renewal Fund for Magic Lanes, a pilot project for placemaking activities and the co-design of more permanent improvements along Sheung Fung Lane, a street/alley stair near Centre Street in Sai Ying Pun.11 11 The Urban Renewal Fund is an independent organization that was formed to manage a HK$500 million endowment from the HKSAR government agency, the Urban Renewal Authority. Aligning with the 2011 Urban Renewal Strategy and the 2010 Policy Address of Hong Kong’s Chief

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Funding the Magic Lanes project One of six projects funded in 2016, the Urban Renewal Fund granted Caritas, the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong a budget of HK$5.9 million for a two-year project. The project proposes to ‘set up a placemaking centre and organize different kinds of community events in Sai Ying Pun […] [and to] incorporate the ideas of the public to turn Sheung Fung Lane into a community-friendly public space and set up the platform with the community members for the future management of the place’ (Urban Renewal Fund 2017, 20). The project budget includes funding for both hard and soft costs, with about half of the amount going to construction-related costs such as renovating a shop into a community studio, as well as to the physical improvements of the lane, and the other half to finance staff costs for placemakers and for engagement and co-design activities with the local residents and broader Sai Ying Pun community. Project aims Based on the responses and data collected through initial resident surveys, non-structured interviews, and on-site observation about the needs and issues of the physical space and surrounding community, as well as the project partners’ long-standing knowledge and engagement with the local community, key project aims and central goals were developed to guide the project. Magic Lanes is conceived as an intergenerational community placemaking project to create and sustain a playful, safe, and ecologically rich urban environment that is both culturally and socially inclusive. The selected site for the project, Sheung Fung Lane, has an area of approximately 400 m2 (43.5 m long x 9 m wide). It is located in Sai Ying Pun which, in addition to the history already discussed, has a long tradition of Chinese grassroots culture. However, the area is currently undergoing a redevelopment and gentrification process as a result of the newly opened MTR line, which is displacing long-standing residents both economically and physically. Thus, Executive, the Urban Renewal Fund (2017, 4) aims to: ‘provide an independent funding source to support the operation of Social Service Teams to provide assistance for residents affected by urban redevelopment projects implemented by the Urban Renewal Authority, to support social impact assessments and other related planning studies to be proposed by the DURF [District Urban Renewal Forum] and to support heritage preservation and district revitalization projects to be proposed by non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders in the overall context of urban renewal’.

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Figure 7.7 Toi Tei Kung Shrine, Sheung Fung Lane, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2018

Source: Melissa Cate Christ

one of the aims of the project is to rebuild a sense of community between the old and new residents through shared activities and spaces. Sheung Fung Lane was chosen as the project site for five primary reasons: 1 its strategic location as a shortcut between the new Sai Ying Pun MTR Exit B2 and the University of Hong Kong further up the hill; 2 the availability of an empty shop, which could be transformed into a community studio with direct visibility and access from the ground level; 3 the lane’s direct adjacency to an elderly home on one side and tutoring classes on the other, which allows the development of an intergenerational public space; 4 the presence of a traditional shrine dating back to the first years of the colony, which adds a cultural, spiritual, and social component to the project; and 5 the need to address drainage, sanitary, and accessibility issues in the lane. Another factor that played into the site selection was the complicated land tenure of the lane. While the upper portion of the lane at the top of the stairs is a ‘rest garden’ owned and managed by the HKSAR Home Affairs Department, the rest of the lane is owned by the two adjacent residential buildings, divided almost exactly down the middle. In addition, a historic shrine (Figure 7.7) is located on the lowest landing on private land.

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This complex assemblage of situations offers an excellent opportunity for the action-research and pilot project to include a wide range of stakeholders in the open space co-creation process, as well as to test what impact the public- or private-ness of the location has on efforts to engage residents in placemaking and (public) space co-creation. Process of the project In order to meet the aims mentioned above, the project focuses on f ive themes: 1) hygiene; 2) safety and accessibility; 3) intergenerational gathering; 4) cultural heritage preservation; and 5) ecological function and ‘greening’. These themes were selected based on issues uncovered and highlighted in the site research and in discussion with residents. After a vacant storefront was renovated into the Magic Lanes community studio, the project’s two ‘Placemakers’ started to work with local residents and other project partners on the co-design of the lane. They are supported by an advisory board that includes the authors as well as representatives from Caritas and the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage. Local leaders are involved in the progress of the project, including district councillors, representatives of different government departments, the shrine association, and the incorporated owners of the two adjacent buildings. Educational institutions are also involved in the project, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, as well as other groups. Specif ic activities undertaken included workshops between local residents and students from different years and disciplines (e.g., architecture, interior and environments design, and urban studies and design). This diversity of disciplines helped in envisioning the future of the site by organizing engagement activities, as well as producing site models, project strategies, and detailed design studies. Learning from the Magic Carpet approach, placemaking events and temporary interventions were organized to transform the lane for the 2017 Mid-Autumn Festival. These addressed one of the obstacles encountered in the ongoing engagement process: the residents’ reticence to make any changes to the existing laneway. This hesitation was expressed despite the lack of seating, an open drainage system that has caused flooding and hygienic problems, and a lack of vegetation. These were all issues that had been identified by the residents themselves in surveys and interviews. To help residents to imagine the impact of potential changes that would be implemented in a redesigned space, students transformed the lane for the

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Figure 7.8 Mid-Autumn Festival in Sheung Fung Lane, 2017

Source: Hendrik Tieben

Mid-Autumn Festival with large rented plants, self-made street furniture, lanterns, and games (Figure 7.8). Through these temporary tactical interventions, the project team was able to test potential layouts for the lane and to document their impact on circulation patterns and social behaviour. It had been observed under everyday conditions that while the lane is often used as a shortcut to reach the new MTR Station Exit B2, people will rarely stay very long, as there is almost no formal seating provided. The only benches in Sheung Fung Lane can be found in the ‘rest garden’ at the top of the stairs. It had also been observed that although tutoring classes for young students are regularly held in storefronts on one side of the lane, and the elderly home is on the other, neither young children nor the elderly use the space for activities other than passing through. Therefore, since the lane is quite wide, the test installations included temporary seating at different locations, as well as games, to see whether they would impede circulation or encourage people to stay longer. It was found that even though a large number of people attended the festivities, circulation was not impeded. It was also found that many people, and especially families, stayed for the entire afternoon and even into the evening, sitting on beanbags or seating provided on the stairs, and partaking of the festival food and atmosphere. In particular, a large number of children joined the festival and played in the lane, both

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by taking part in the games that the Magic Lanes team organized, but also by inventing their own games, such as piling up bean bags at the bottom of three steps and running and jumping into them, much like jumping into piles of fallen leaves in autumn. After this temporary transformation, the large plants and seating disappeared, but they remained with the community as experiences associated with the lane and in photos and videos shared on the Magic Carpet and Magic Lanes Facebook sites. After this experiential event, a series of focus groups were organized with residents to discuss the project’s design principles, as well as key issues. The Caritas placemakers, in collaboration with the advisory board, also began to plan for the physical renovation of the space, putting together requests for proposals and scopes for various professions needed in that process, such as surveyors and professionals to review drawings and make sure that the future project would comply with Hong Kong’s codes and regulations. Several other events were organized by Caritas to foster community pride, sharing, and relationships, such as a pot luck night, a community-map making workshop with iDiscover, a photo competition, and an exhibition called ‘Resilient Sai Ying Pun’ in the studio and the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage building, located upslope on Third Street, the street perpendicular to the south end of the lane. With respect to the project’s mission to empower local residents to get involved in shaping their own neighbourhood, residents formed a group called Friends of Sheung Fung Lane. The group began organizing their own activities to build a sense of community and to improve the space of the lane, beginning with workshops about ‘greening’ to share their knowledge about growing herbs and other plants in recycled containers, which they then hung along the handrail running up the steps of the lane. With the support of the Magic Lanes team, they also organized drawing and ceramic workshops as a means to highlight and nurture the artistic and social assets of the neighbourhood. These workshops have attracted families with children as well as the elderly, creating opportunities for interactions between different generations, which was one of the primary aims of the project. This kind of taking ownership and claiming back their right to participate in the use and activities undertaken in a shared exterior space has much in common with how alleys and other laneways are informally occupied in Hong Kong. However, in this case it is not just for the individual use of an adjacent resident or workers, but instead for the improvement of the space for everyone, thus showing the potential for these kinds of placemaking activities to be enacted in other similar spaces in Hong Kong.

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Conclusion While the Magic Lanes project is still ongoing, important changes to the way the residents view and engage in the lane can already be observed. In contrast to many open spaces designed and managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department or as POSPD, residents are taking an active role in creating and maintaining the open space of Sheung Fung Lane, demonstrating an increased sense of ownership. The presence of storefronts along the lane facilitates a range of self-organized cultural, educational, and social activities that have been additionally encouraged by the presence of the Magic Lanes studio on the ground floor. The studio itself attracts community members who pass by, as well as new residents and visitors, and thus has become a place for community gathering and bonding. Therefore, this case study shows that despite their limited size, steep topography, and often-neglected conditions, lane spaces can become meaningful community places that can address Hong Kong’s urgent need for more open space. Remaining opportunities and challenges in the Sheung Fung Lane renovation include overcoming the complex ownership situation of the lane. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, although currently seeming to be a completely public space, in fact the lane is a (non-officially designated) POPS, where the upper third is owned and managed by a government department and the lower two-thirds is evenly split longitudinally down the middle between the two adjacent buildings/groups of incorporated owners. On the one hand, private ownership allows for a more streamlined official process compared to a government-owned and -managed site. This circumstance makes it easier to go beyond limited government-specified design and maintenance requirements and regulation, if the private owners are willing to take on these roles, which is a significant long-term challenge in the case of Sheung Fung Lane. The private ownership also potentially affords residents a greater potential to co-create the lane as a community space according to their own needs and aspirations with limited oversight or interference from the government beyond meeting standard zoning regulations and approvals from various departments, as well as to incorporate a wider range of ecological functions into the lane. On the other hand, although government approvals must be undertaken, agreement on the design of the space remains with the many individual owners of the apartments in the neighbouring buildings, and with Caritas and its construction, design, and engagement team working to forge a constructive consensus about the future design, use, and maintenance of

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the space. This process is only in its beginning stages and is dependent upon additional funding, so an evaluation of the outcome of the physical space improvement process is likely two to five years in the future. Also, questions remain about how public this (mostly) privately owned space will be allowed to remain once renovations are made. Key to the process will be a continuing focus on, and discussion about, how to facilitate the design process without further depriving residents or the broader community of their ability to have a say in how this space is developed and used in the future. The benefits of a successful co-design process include building a stronger link between the surrounding community, the open space, and the commercial, cultural, and residential usages in the neighbouring buildings. The placemaking activities discussed in this chapter are laying the groundwork for this aim. The first outcomes of the Magic Lanes project allow reflection about the constraints and potentials of using lane spaces for more citizen-inclusive or citizen-driven placemaking projects in Hong Kong. While alley/laneway stairs can be difficult to make universally accessible, are somewhat limited in their commercial potential, and are often not maintained to the same hygiene standards as the more visible and recognized types of open spaces, they have a range of potentials, many of which are enabled by the ambiguity of their ownership. These lanes often have a strong sense of place and are closer to the daily life of the surrounding community. Their steepness keeps them free from vehicular traffic and keeps rents low(er)in adjacent stores and apartments, allowing more individually owned shops and community facilities to survive in these kinds of locations. Due to their ambiguous ownership, the stricter management rules of the government or private developers are often not enforced, making it easier for communities to appropriate them according to their own wishes and needs. With the highly controlled and unaffordable environment in Hong Kong, these advantages are rare. The Magic Lanes project builds on these potentials by operating a community studio in one of the vacant shops as a way to engage with nearby shop owners and residents, nurturing their interest and capacity for a collaborative placemaking project. Essential for the success of the project, however, is the relatively high funding from the Urban Renewal Fund and the long-term commitment and experience of organizations such as Caritas. While providing a positive first step, the opportunity to upscale this approach to other similar underused lane spaces in Hong Kong would need further elaboration. Key to upscaling would be to provide more funding opportunities for local communities or resident groups to propose their own projects, and a support framework to help with capacity building and realization, as well as with the management and maintenance of the projects

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after the initial funding periods. The question of long-term management is an important one to answer, as the ambiguous ownership of the lanes allows residents to appropriate them and give them meaning, but this is also the reason for the dilapidated condition of many of the lane spaces. In the Magic Lanes project, the creation of community groups such as the Friends of Sheung Fung Lane attempts to address this limitation by beginning to shift the responsibility and initiative for future projects to themselves. While the long-term sustainability of this approach remains to be seen, the project has become a reference for placemaking initiatives in Hong Kong (Lai 2018) and has started to attracted local and overseas groups such as Make a Difference (Hong Kong) and Plan B (Taipei) to collaborate with the Magic Lanes team.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the editors for their insights, comments, and guidance in developing this chapter; their collaborators, Edmond Wong, Benjamin Sin, Charon Lung, and Yi Pan Wong from Caritas-Hong Kong, and Min Jay Kang from NTU, Taipei; and the students, tutors, and community members who have contributed their insights and efforts to the project and the research.

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—. 2018. ’Sustainable Community Building in the Face of State-led Gentrification: The Story of the Blue House Cluster in Hong Kong.’ Town Planning Review 89 (5): 495-512. Normoyle, Catherine, and Cotter Christian. 2016. ‘A Catalyst for Change: Understanding Characteristics of Citizen-Driven Placemaking Endeavors across Diverse Communities.’ Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal – Annual Review 10 (1): 41-58. PPS (Project for Public Spaces). n.d. What Is Placemaking? Accessed 26 March 2019. https://www.pps.org/category/placemaking. Richards, Greg. 2017. ‘From Place Branding to Placemaking: The Role of Events.’ International Journal of Event and Festival Management 8 (1): 8-23. Stanley, Benjamin W., Barbara L. Stark, Katrina L. Johnston and Michael E. Smith. 2012. ‘Urban Open Spaces in Historical Perspective: A Transdisciplinary Typology and Analysis.’ Urban Geography 33 (8): 1089-1117. Stebbins, Robert. 2015. Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time. New Brunswick: Transaction. Tang, Wing-Shing, Joanna Wai Ying Lee and Mee Kam Ng. 2011. ‘Public Engagement as a Tool of Hegemony: The Case of Designing the New Central Harbour Front in Hong Kong.’ Critical Sociology 38 (1): 89-106. Tieben, Hendrik. 2013. ‘Public/Private Interfaces in Hong Kong: Observations in the Sai Ying Pun District.’ In Density & Intensity: Measuring the Non-Measurable, Work Book 1, edited by Darko Radović, 36-43. Tokyo: Flick Studio & International Keio Institute for Architecture and Urbanism. Tieben, Hendrik, and Min Jay Kang. 2017. Magic Carpet: Towards Community Benefit Plans for Regeneration in Taipei and Hong Kong. Taipei: Tonshan. Tieben, Hendrik, Woo Pui Leng and Yuet Tsang Chi. 2008. ‘Development or Destruction? The Transformation of Sai Ying Pun.’ In A Sense of Place: Hong Kong West of Pottinger Street, edited by Veronica Pearson and Tim-Keung Ko, 168-183. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Urban Renewal Fund. 2017. Urban Renewal Fund Annual Report 2016-2017. Hong Kong. Accessed 17 September 2018. http://www.urfund.org.hk/files/Annual_Report_2016-17_English.pdf. Wolf, Michael. 2016. Informal Solutions. Hong Kong: WE Press. Yeh, A.G. 2000. ‘The Planning and Management of a Better High Density Environment.’ In Planning for a Better Urban Living Environment in Asia, edited by M.K. Ng and A.G. Yeh, 116-143. Aldershot: Ashgate. Zhang, X.Q. 2000. ‘High-Rise and High-Density Compact Urban Form: The Development of Hong Kong.’ In Compact Cities: Sustainable Urban Developing Countries, edited by Rod Burgess and Mike Jenks, 245-254. London: Spon Press.

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About the authors Melissa Cate Christ is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala; a researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia; a studio instructor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS); a registered landscape architect in Ontario, Canada; and the founding director of transverse studio. She has a MLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto, Canada, and a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, USA. Hendrik Tieben is an Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on public space, placemaking, and community empowerment, and is published in a range of international journals. Since 2013, he has developed the project series Magic Carpet, which engages residents in the co-creation of community spaces.



The future of Asian alleyways Towards integrated and diverse alleyways Heide Imai and Marie Gibert-Flutre

Taking the case of different urban settings in Asia, this book has explored the transformation of vernacular urban alleyways, arguing for changing urban forms to be approached through the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions, and through the nuances and sequences that unfold between marginalization, reappropriation, and reinvention processes. The book has also attempted to show the relevance of understanding place as a social construct shaped by everyday practices and by ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (global) forces, pointing out how the lack of a thorough articulation of this notion, and of its theoretical and methodological implications, impoverishes the field of urban theory and social studies. The key objectives of this book were: 1 To perform ethnographic case studies of different urban alleyways in Asian cities, drawing attention to the mutuality of space, sociality, and imagination. 2 To develop theoretical understanding of the impact of uneven processes of global development on marginalized alleyways by applying the concepts of marginality and reintegration. 3 To combine ethnographic data with theoretical findings to reconceptualize marginalized alleyways and their potential to ameliorate the adverse effects of such processes. A central concern of the book was how to define the role and function of the alleyway and thus reflect on its future in the contemporary city, whether as a ‘catalyst’, a ‘threshold’, or a ‘social space’ of our personal or collective memory. The alleyway could be described as a liminal space that is in itself ambiguous, hybrid, and thus easily reappropriated and moulded to fit different changing modes of urban lifestyles and design concepts. Further marginalized in the physical sense, but in its societal

Gibert-Flutre, Marie, and Heide Imai (eds), Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463729604_concl

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and imaginative-intellectual meaning actively and multilayered in the urban mind, the urban alleyway could offer new possibilities to explore and transgress binaries, to not simply switch between the terms of public and private space when approaching marginalized urban forms. The different case studies and chapters have revealed that the traditional spatial alleyway networks are fading, further eroding, and vanishing from the contemporary urban landscape of cities in Asia, marginalized by the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, reappropriated by different fields, and reinvented by the contemporary urban design discourse. The social meaning attached to the alleyway is being reinterpreted to fit hybrid and multiple concepts of personal lifestyles; its historical and nostalgic image is being reappropriated by individuals, stakeholders, new social movements, subcultures, various fields such as media and fashion, and new architectural concepts to fulfil different human desires such as longing for and capturing the past. In conclusion, the different findings have revealed that the likelihood of a revival of the traditional alleyway is negligible, as urban designers in particular develop preferable new concepts of ‘neo-alleyways’, which have little in common with the traditional urban form. Furthermore, as public space is increasingly becoming a central element in urban strategies of modernization and urban renaissance worldwide, especially in Asian cities, recent urban planners have either eliminated or integrated the segmented vernacular urban alleyways into their ‘landscapes of power’ (Zukin 2002), reflected in the changing use and forms, or reappropriation and reinvention of the alleyways. From the creation of place myths in promoting the alleyways as the place of traditional urban life, seen for example in the cases of Seoul and Tokyo, and the reappropriation of the alleyway by mass media and cultural institutes, to the commercialization of the alleyway, the traditional concept has been transformed and turned into a commodity. Being in this sense modified and reinterpreted, the alleyways have finally been reinvented, reccurring as new versions of the hutong (胡同) or lilong (里弄), as seen in the cases of Beijing or Shanghai. Being omnipresent, an experience of place where multiple and hybrid concepts converge so that each individual locale appears as the manifestation of the whole, the alleyway is often used to respond to the new trends of an intensifying consumer culture and a commercially driven urban planning discourse. This results in an even shorter lifespan and the wear and tear of urban places, especially vernacular urban forms.

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The cycle of the alleyway The different cases have shown that the alleyway has lost its spatial, everyday use value and gained a new economic, symbolic, and commercial use value loaded with nostalgia, leaving limited chances for it to operate in its former incarnation. The consumption and commercialization of the alleyway has effectively reinforced its recognition as a commodity and decreased its practical usability – especially the ability to function as a common neighbourhood space. As people perceive the alleyway from a certain distance, a distance caused by the shift from the low-rise wooden house to a modern high-rise apartment flat, these places have lost their pragmatic function and became aesthetic or fictional objects of memory, connected to fears and hopes. The abandoned alleys have in different ways been reappropriated to respond to people’s longing for the past with the repressed subconscious of modernity, turning ordinary, everyday, and familiar places into ‘secret’ places (Shields 1991). Modernity and the increasing speed of development push us to search for such places that become re-embodied places of resistance, retreat, and compensation. Furthermore, the alleyway stands for the decline of other traditional elements of urban life, which people experience as most distinctive in the moment they vanish from the urban landscape. They try to capture this moment of disappearance in walking the city and searching for places like the alleyway – chronologically and geographically at the margins. These forms of rediscovering ‘alternative places’ turn from a ‘subculture’ into the cultural and popular mainstream as they are commercialized and consumed, resulting in the death and disruption of the spontaneous development of the vernacular urban form. The alleyway – as an integral part of everyday urban life – looks set to disappear from the urban landscape of different cities worldwide, leaving traces of the past to be covered by new, modern urban developments that stand for the ongoing destruction and reconstruction of cities in Asia and other places in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it continues to exist as an imaginary and, in this sense, continues to have a shared or social presence.

Common shared place or alternative landscape of reminiscence? The crucial question is whether alleyways with their diverse urban qualities can exist next to current macro-scale structures if the inhabitants find new

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ways to identify themselves and their daily urban rituals with urban places that remain between low and high rise. In other words, can such grassroots networks act as the key elements in Sassen’s (2000) ‘micro sites’? The linkage of such ‘alleyway zones’ might offer a map of public ‘micro-structures’ of the city, providing insights into the realities of urban life in between the mega-structures (Huang 2004). Additionally, by studying place as a social phenomenon that facilitates different modes and forms of urban life, can urban planners and architects develop urban design tools to facilitate better visions of everyday life lived at the human scale? The alleyway as marginal place The existing literature on globalization has mainly focused on the discussion of global cities and world city rankings, but rarely discussed the effects of globalization processes at the micro scale (Gibert 2018) or places that are excluded from globally influenced capitalist development. Emphasizing the political and power struggles of marginalized places in discussing the spatial, personal, popular, and cultural dimensions of change, this book has aimed to provide new ground to reflect on the derelict and abandoned places of urban society in terms of not only the outcomes but also the processes of global urban change. Sharon Zukin (2002, 197) discussed the notion of liminal space in arguing that vernacular elements are either eliminated or incorporated into a landscape of power. Nevertheless, rejecting an overly predetermined view, this book suggests the possibility of understanding such places by paying attention to ‘the analytical lens of a “politics of forgetting” integral to globalisation processes’ (Lee and Yeoh 2004, 2296) – in other words, it reveals how the politics of forgetting works to smooth over the uneven histories of place. In presenting an ethnographic study of the transformation of the different urban alleyways in cities in Asia and drawing on a wide range of perspectives, the authors have attempted to contribute to a constructive cross-cultural dialogue and the possibility of innovative urban planning approaches. In particular, by not taking it as a given that marginal places exist and disappear, as ‘no space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local’ (Lefebvre, quoted in Brenner 1997, 144), this book suggests that we draw on concepts such as co-presence, multiplicity, and scale in reconceptualizing vernacular places as central to the ways in which globalization works and takes hold in a city, rather than writing them off as passive counterparts or irrelevant peripheral phenomena (Brenner 1997).

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The alleyway as everyday place The different case studies were conducted to critically evaluate the recent revival of the alleyway in different cities in Asia. Moreover, the predominant Western-based concepts of ‘public’, ‘private’, and ‘semi-public’ space were tested to allow the critical evaluation of their transferability and applicability to other cultural contexts. The cross-cultural, interdisciplinary approach has allowed us to develop an understanding of everyday places whose potential and future cannot be described and captured if we focus mainly on the preset binary categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ places. Focusing on the urban form of the alleyway highlighted that the existence of ordinary places depends largely on the degree and level of social interaction they facilitate and on a theoretical approach to everyday place, which considers place as a social construct and shaped by everyday practice and different forces. Furthermore, it is important to understand how globalization caused the transformation of vernacular places in different cultural settings, as restructuring processes might be similar in different settings around the world, but the diverse outcomes and reactions are culturally specific. In particular, the research argued that an analysis of different cultural settings and alternative approaches can offer us new insights into how to deal with similar situations and contested urban areas in Europe or America. In this context, it is crucial to consider the experience of cities in Asia that have been traditionally characterized by mixed-use dense urban areas but now face huge transformations as urban planners increasingly follow an urban design approach that favours large-scale mega-projects (Mallas 2006). It is argued that after a phase of rapid urbanization and modernization, a new mentality is growing, recognizing the need to search for an original way to react to predominant and complex environmental and urban problems. With the emergence of new social movements and anti-movements, it might be possible to develop alternative urban planning approaches that consider factors such as a compact city form, local participation, pedestrian usage, human scale, and mixed uses, although the success of this approach depends to a large extent on government support and the participation of local citizens (Grant 2004). A critical evaluation of the traditional concept of the alleyway has shed light on the potential of mixed-use urban areas, which might be one of the best qualities of cities in Asia. Although the alleyways are further vanishing and the concept of mixed use cannot resolve all existing problems, urban design that supports and encourages mixed use can result in the creation of diverse, versatile urban places and lively city areas (Grant 2004).

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Realities and possibilities of public places: A more sensitive urban design approach? Following this argument, it might be an important task for current urban planning to ask what factors give a local community the legitimacy to exist in dialogue, with large-scale development often criticized for not offering a human-scale and communal living environment. Global economic forces and political power will keep on turning historical, distinctive areas into symbolic and material landscapes characterized by the new vernaculars of cafes, art galleries, and bars, but which are also highly specialized, homogeneous places facilitating a global consumer culture and new lifestyles (e.g., smaller household sizes, single living, and people with higher incomes resulting in higher taxes), resulting in the gentrification and increasing social segregation of cities around the world. Drawing on an approach that recognizes place as social construct and shaped from inside and outside, it has been argued that good urban design should create places that support a sense of attachment to place in which we can identify with our surroundings and yet keep pace with the speed of contemporary urban life. Neighbourhoods that exist at a human scale, facilitating diverse forms of living and multiple forms of social interaction, should have the capacity to fulfil the demands of contemporary urban society. But how to create such places – places that are not empty replicas of the past, not monofunctional, anonymous living quarters, and not consumer bubbles, reflecting every new trend? By engaging in a dialogue with developers, urban planners, local city governments, and users, it should be the aim to develop plans that respond to the needs of the community on a case-by-case basis, reflecting how the existing urban pattern can coexist with new development, when the people who are affected demand, require, and can plan it. Nevertheless, to develop such an urban planning approach, individuals have to overcome the predominant mode of passive consumption and make active use of their voice first. Furthermore, urban planners have to take an in-between position, freed from the strong influence of the global and national entrepreneur culture, to be responsible and able to create diverse urban places of interaction. Political and economic power will be always of great influence whether projects succeed or fail, but if we take this as a given fact even before analysing failures in the system, we cannot overcome the existing bias. The different case studies have illustrated that this form of everyday place might not be revitalized and used as a path of urban revitalization, arguing

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that both urban planning and new social movements have ‘institutionalized’ it and left only a limited chance of spontaneous development and recovery. Yet, reflecting on the zeitgeist of a globalizing society, with a critical perspective on current urban planning approaches to vernacular places, we have argued that the multiplicity of places should be recognized, and we have considered how to support a distinctive subculture of urbanism.

Recognizing the role of marginal places Marginal places fulfil new roles and traditional functions to the same extent that new forms of public spaces fulfil traditional and new roles – for example, vernacular public spaces play in one context a passive role and are mainly consumed, but in another context they are desired and needed to express local voices, thoughts, and personal opinions about political, economic, or social changes. In contrast, the ‘public space’ of the internet might form a new social realm to express personal thoughts and develop alternative concepts of public spaces, which could form a new source of inspiration for urban designers for the creation of common, shared spaces supporting real and everyday social interaction. This new public space might be influenced by new forms of use and consumption, which are authentic and distinctive as they follow the demands of the users who have ‘prosumed’ that space, even in an amateurish way. These forms of reproduction can be seen as a key to developing more sensitive urban planning approaches, as long as developers and architects do not hijack artistic and cultural projects for mere commercial use. While Henri Lefebvre (2003) argued that urban revolutions start in the street, this book has further argued that the urban revolution in global contexts is best understood when we study new forms of ‘public spaces’ and ‘online, public spaces’ next to different forms of traditional public spaces, as place is best understood as a ‘multilocal’ and ‘multivocal’ concept. This book has shown, in different ways, the importance of considering the ‘multivocality’ and ‘multilocality’ of place because the social construction of place occurs in not only the physical realm but also other spheres of society, and it should be made visible and reunited with urban life and grounded in space and time (Rodman 2003). Furthermore, although concluding that the alleyway, as it is approached and recognized in current urban design practice and society, has only marginal chances of being revitalized as common space, we argue that a study recognizing vernacular forms and their transformation as integral

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parts of globalization processes can offer us deeper insights into how to develop a more sensitive urban design approach (Caruso 2001). Regardless of whether they are traditional, modern, or virtual, public spaces, built up of different levels, stakeholders, and actors, are crucial for expressing our personal needs and connecting us to a wider ‘community’. The dialogue between such diverse places can only take place if we create and maintain a physical realm for the performance of our everyday urban life. Otherwise, we are ‘placeless’ and cannot become attached to place. Becoming attached to and making sense of a place can allow the user to put down roots and move grounded in one location in a reflexive mode between different public and private spaces, and different levels and degrees of social interaction, thus building up shared values and supporting the creation of meaningful places that ideally make the city more liveable and attractive for diverse forms of living.

Outlook Urban studies are increasingly multidisciplinary, with variation in contexts, views, and focus. Yet the study of the contemporary alleyway, combining spatial, social, and cultural studies with a qualitative approach, is a neglected area of research, even though it is central to understanding the complex relationships between the environment and human behaviour. Some studies on alleys and street space may help us to understand social relationships within physical properties, yet few have answered questions on how the alleyway adapts over time to different uses and effects of global change. The different chapters have drawn on urban theory, anthropology, and architecture to develop an understanding of the alleyway that facilitates different realities and other narratives of the contemporary city. The analysis of the role and character of the urban alleyways in different Asian settings has offered an understanding of how urban streets and alleys are shaped by different uses. Furthermore, this cross-cultural research has aimed to offer a comparative perspective on urban diversity, stressing the interplay between complex urban structures and the dimensions of urban life. Yet, this book is not arguing for a focus on only the social processes within urban space, but on the city as a whole, including spatial, economical, and social aspects. This is an understanding that asks to approach the configuration of the city as a product of innovative and cultural practices.

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Thus, the research is not offering new assumptions on the diversity and complexity of the city but tries to understand urban space through daily processes and small-scale events, which shape the sociospatial configuration of the alleyway and its cultural context. As such, this book can allow us to critically evaluate the field’s own complexity, and how innovative research of distinctive urban structures can offer alternative approaches to urban theory and practice. Thus, the analysis of the alleyway should encourage research focusing on urban studies to ‘get back into place’ to understand how place is socially constructed in applying a critical approach of place to analyse a diversity of urban places. Similarly, anthropological research can make use of a critical concept of place in drawing on the analysis of a geographical and anthropological notion of place. All in all, we propose that an interdisciplinary approach could help bridge existing gaps between spatial and social urban studies and contribute to the development of holistic research approaches to the study of place and placemaking. Although having argued that the urban form of the alleyway is further vanishing and being reappropriated, we suggest that the potential of the alleyway could be to function as a kind of in-between place, which, if left alone, is an alternative landscape of remembrance, or places of a heterotopian nature. If we recognize their multiplicity, history, and cultural significance, these kinds of democratic places could offer users possibilities of resistance and reaction to urban change. By focusing on a variety of ordinary places in diverse cultural contexts in future research projects, the attempts made by the contributors of this book could be strengthened. Analysing a diversity of forgotten places next to the status quo processes and structures of political power would offer further insights into the mutual process of forgetting and remembering places. Thus, urban planners could gain deeper understanding of how to support spontaneous developments and create meaningful places by means of projects that combine spatial and social research, analysing different forms of traditional and new public spaces, and how they succeed or fail in creating diverse forms of social interaction. The analysis of cultural and psychological aspects of placemaking can complement the field of urban theory and practice, as the development and future of diverse places cannot be determined beforehand, just closely monitored and/or accompanied. These and similar issues can form parts of future research, taking the case studies provided in this book as a source of inspiration or starting point for a counterdiscourse.

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References Brenner, Neill. 1997. ‘Global, Fragmented, Hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre’s Geographies of Globalization.’ Public Culture 10 (1): 135-167. Caruso, Adam. 2001. ‘The Emotional City.’ Quaderns 228: 8-13. Accessed 8 September 2019 https://www.carusostjohn.com/media/files/Adam_Caruso_-_The_Emotional_City.pdf. Gibert, Marie. 2018. ‘Rethinking Metropolitan Production from Its Underside: A View from the Alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City.’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 (3): 589-607. Grant, Jill. 2004. ‘Encouraging Mixed Use in Practice.’ Paper presented at the International Planning Symposium on Incentives, Regulations, and Plans: The Role of States and Nation-States in Smart-Growth Planning, University of Maryland, 30 September-1 October 2004. Accessed 17 September 2018. http://www.smartgrowth.umd.edu/ InternationalConference/ConferencePapers/Grant_MixedUsePractice_DateNA.pdf. Huang, Tsung-Yi Michelle. 2004. Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lee, Yong-Sook, and Brenda Yeoh. 2004. ‘Introduction: Globalisation and Politics of Forgetting.’ Urban Studies 41 (12): 2295-2301. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mallas, Lauren. 2006. ‘Emergence of Mega-Civic in Tokyo.’ In International Conference on East Asian Architectural Culture, Kyoto 2006, Proceedings II, 255-263. Kyoto: Society of Architectural Historians of Japan. Rodman, Margaret. 2003. ‘Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality.’ In The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, edited by Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, 204-223. Malden: Blackwell. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. ‘On “Engaging Power”: An Interview with Saskia Sassen.’ New Politics 1 (29). Accessed 8 September 2019. http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/ issue29/sassen29.htm. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Zukin, Sharon 2002. ‘From Landscape of Power: From Detroit to Disney World.’ In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 197-207. Oxford: Blackwell.



List of contributors

Judith Audin, Researcher at CEFC Hong Kong and the chief editor of the journal China Perspectives [email protected] Melissa Cate Christ, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala; and Built Environment, University of New South Wales [email protected] Jiayu Ding, PhD candidate, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University [email protected] Marie Gibert-Flutre, Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of East Asia Studies (LCAO) at the University of Paris [email protected] Jeffrey Hou, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, Seattle [email protected] Heide Imai, Associate Professor at Senshu University, Faculty of Intercultural Communication, Tokyo, Japan [email protected] Wimonrart Issarathumnoon, Lecturer in Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand [email protected] Hendrik Tieben, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong [email protected] Xiaohua Zhong, Associate Professor, School of Political Science & International Relations, Tongji University [email protected]

Index activism 59 activities commercial 21, 41-43, 47, 70-73, 82, 118-124, 128-129, 133, 152, 159, 162, 175, 188, 190, 195, 204 economic and social 21, 26, 38, 43-44, 48, 118-122, 162, 175, 185, 198 informal 16, 44, 47, 73, 120, 160, 162, 175-176, 188, 202 local 21, 26, 28, 36, 38, 41-44, 47-48, 63, 65, 70-73, 88-89, 101, 117-118, 122-136, 160, 168-171, 185, 188, 197-198, 200, 202 agency, agency-drive 19, 63, 78, 185-186 alleyway neighbourhood 16-19, 22-26, 29, 38-44, 47-50, 52-53, 61, 67-68, 71, 74, 78, 88-89, 91-101, 103, 106, 109-110, 115-118, 120-121, 128, 131-136, 146, 160-169, 171-176, 213 widening scheme 36, 45, 48, 49, 92, 162 alternative landscape 18-19, 26-27, 88, 110, 213, 219 anonymity 34, 50, 52, 82 apparatus, socio-spatial 34, 36, 38, 52 arrangements, local 47, 119 arts of making 57, 62, 65, 78, 83 asset-based 185-186 Baan Phanthom 115, 118, 120-122, 124, 129-130, 133-134 Bangkok 21, 23-24, 27, 29-30, 115, 118-123, 126, 129, 132-134, 136-138 Bangkok’s heritage core 115, 118-119, 133, 137 old town 115, 120-122, 132-134, 138 Banglamphu 115, 118, 120-125, 128-130, 134 Beijing 19, 21, 24, 28, 32, 57-63, 65, 68-75, 77-85, 148, 151, 162-163, 212 biopolitics 57 Bopiliao 164 borderability 36 boundaries, urban 16, 27, 37, 69, 108, 117, 175 businesses local 45, 73, 75, 88, 98, 101, 109, 117, 122-123, 125, 127-129, 135, 143, 174 small 26, 35, 50, 68, 73, 77, 91, 97, 100-101, 103, 105, 109, 129, 131, 143-144, 148, 154, 190 centrality 39, 79 China 25, 58, 65, 75, 79, 81, 83-85, 93, 121, 142, 144, 146, 148, 151, 190 Chō 23, 91-92 Chợ Lớn 33, 39 Chumchon 119, 125, 136 Chunyangli 152-153

citizen driven 185-186, 204 -inclusive 186, 204 city, global 28, 75, 93, 142 city-making 19 civilizing policy 46, 74-78 co-creation 28, 181-182, 185, 196, 200 commodity 212-213 commoning 159-160, 166, 174-175 commons 27, 159-162, 171, 175 communities close-knitted 59, 119, 136 ordinary 115-116 community 25, 28, 40, 43, 50, 59, 61, 65-68, 72, 74, 91-93, 97, 102-103, 123-126, 128-131, 133-137, 139, 142, 145, 149, 151, 156, 158-160, 162-163, 168-172, 174-177, 182, 184-188, 190, 193, 195-199, 202-209, 216, 218 engagement 168, 182, 184-185, 197-198, 203 competition 36, 45, 101, 174, 196 conflicts 45, 58-59, 62, 65-66, 71-73, 79, 81-82, 96-98, 127, 136, 149-153, 155, 159-161, 166-167, 172, 175-176 connectivity 19, 175 consumption 27, 47, 58, 117, 126-127, 169, 213, 216-217 contested 19, 28, 87-88, 92, 94, 159, 174, 215 courtyard houses 21, 24, 58-60, 63, 65, 68, 69-70, 82, 142 craft shops 91, 95, 120, 125-126, 128-129 creative citizens 129 class 130, 133, 135 clustering 117, 127 districts 27, 94, 116-118, 122 place 115-117, 133 quarter 118, 124 reuse 127, 131 cross-cultural 19, 25, 214-215, 218 cultural district, also cultural quarter 88, 119, 124 ecosystem 118 exchange 127, 132 innovation 87 revolution 22, 58, 144 cultures, hybrid 26, 163, 212 Danwei 60 demolition 60, 62, 74-75, 77-78, 81, 84, 97, 120, 123, 145, 149, 151-152, 155, 164 density 34, 40, 47, 52, 58, 122-123, 135, 143, 160, 175, 183-184

224  destruction 27, 49, 77, 83, 92, 110, 141, 213 development historical 19, 21, 38-39 planned 19, 21-22, 24, 33, 39-40, 44, 58, 71, 164, 190 spontaneous/unplanned 22, 24, 34, 39-40, 44-45, 134-135, 138, 213, 217 disappearance 81, 97, 110, 144, 154, 213 disruption 213 district open space 183, 186 economic value 94, 145, 154-155 edible way 163 Edo 24-25, 89, 91, 161 encounters, social 19, 27, 68, 175 encroachments, informal 22 everyday activities 117-118, 160, 167 life 15, 21, 24, 26, 57, 61, 66, 78, 82, 88-89, 97-98, 100-101, 103, 105, 108-109, 119, 126, 132, 139, 142, 144, 161, 165, 214 resistance 29 exclusion 47, 75, 119, 195 experiences, collective 18, 26 fabric, urban 19, 22, 28, 36, 39, 44, 49, 57-58, 60, 93, 98, 117, 120, 163, 176 fashion 70, 100, 124, 146, 212 festival 76, 100, 123-125, 165, 193, 197, 200-201 Fishball Revolution 163 fragmentation 62, 92, 108, 160, 175 French concession 146, 148 Fukurokōji 23 functions circulatory/network 26, 33-38, 43-45, 36, 52 economic 21, 23, 36, 38, 40, 43, 44-45, 109, 118, 162 metropolitan/urban 28, 121 territorial 33-34, 36-38, 44, 48-49, 52 gateways 23, 164 gatherings, social 38, 160 gentrification 61-62, 70-71, 78, 82-83, 87-89, 95-97, 103, 108-119, 124-125, 127, 130, 133, 135, 141, 153-156, 184, 198, 216 geomancy, geomantic 21 globalization 18, 25, 29, 33-34, 36, 38, 46, 53, 87, 109-110, 139, 145, 214-215, 218 Golmok 21, 24-25, 87-88, 93, 97, 110, 161-162 governmentality 29 grassroots 29, 59, 71, 122-123, 129, 198, 214 conservation 122-123, 129 grid pattern/street/alleyways 23, 25, 39-40, 43, 45, 49, 164, 190, 193 Gufeng 166-168, 173-176, 179 Hanok 24, 94-95, 97-98, 103, 105 Hẻm 22, 24, 33, 39, 41, 48, 51

Asian Alley ways

heritage 17, 21, 27, 51, 58, 60, 68-70, 81, 83, 97, 112, 115, 117-119, 123-124, 127, 133, 137-138, 141, 145, 154-156, 185, 195-196, 198, 200, 202 heterotopian 219 hijack 217 Hipsterville 125 Ho Chi Minh City 19, 21-24, 26, 33-53 homeowner 59, 69, 75, 80-81 Hong Kong 27-29, 141, 163, 169, 181-208 hutong 19, 21, 24, 57-85, 162-163, 212 hybrid 19, 26-27, 36, 38, 49, 51, 53, 88, 108-109, 163, 211-212 identity, shared 67, 82, 129, 140, 185 Ikseondong 88, 95-98, 103-109 initiatives 19, 23-24, 71, 77, 83, 117, 148, 154, 164-166, 168, 175-176, 186, 188, 205, 207 innovation, social 27, 159-160, 174-176 Insadong 88, 95-98, 104-113 integrative, city/model 27, 33, 52-53 interactions 23, 35-36, 57-58, 62, 65, 68, 71, 78, 127, 135, 149, 163, 168, 175, 202 interface 18, 26, 28, 33-34, 38, 42, 50 intergenerational 198-200 interstices 16, 33, 38 intimacy 68, 126 Japan 23-24, 62, 88, 161 Jianguo Road 148 Khaosan Road 123-124 Koenji 163 Korea 24-25, 88, 93-98, 104-105, 161-162 Krung Rattanakosin 119 Kyoto 23-25, 163 landscape, ordinary 18-19, 26, 38, 115, 119, 155 lane stairs 196 lanes 17, 25, 28, 57, 58-60, 63, 67-70, 74, 81-82, 96-97, 109, 144, 149, 162, 164, 181-205 Làng 34 Lao Beijing 62, 68-69, 72-74, 77, 82-83 life, social 22, 29, 34-35, 52, 61, 89, 118, 136, 161-162 lilong 19, 21-22, 24, 29, 62, 139-156, 162-163, 212 livelihood 17, 46, 62, 80, 98 Lizhang 168 Long-tang 162, 179 Lujiazu 142 magic carpet 196-197, 200, 202 lanes 181-182, 196-198, 200, 202-205 marginalization 21, 31, 57, 80, 83, 211 market 38-39, 41, 44, 46, 58, 60, 69-70, 79, 83, 95-96, 112, 120-121, 124-125, 131, 145, 148, 150, 154-155, 159-162, 167, 174, 176, 185, 193, 197

Index

media 75, 97, 166, 169, 212 mega-projects 17, 28, 46, 94, 215 metropolization 18, 26, 38, 44, 46, 49, 51-52 micro-sites 214 micro-structures 214 migrant workers 66, 68, 73, 75-77 mobility/mobilities 42, 45, 52, 78-79, 82, 144, 151 model, urban 21, 33-34, 46, 49-53 modernity 46, 61, 108-109, 213 modernization 24, 40, 88-89, 93, 99, 120, 127, 139, 142, 145, 212, 215 morphology, urban 37, 190 multilocal 217 multivocal 26, 217 Nagaya 24, 102 Nanji Rice 174 narratives 18, 26-27, 87-88, 98, 103, 118-119, 127, 218 negotiations 47, 51, 152 neighbourhoodism 165 neighbourhoods ordinary 18, 38, 96, 117-119, 133, 149 precarious 40 network transportation 44, 120 urban 17, 35 nhà ống 34 Office of Urban Regeneration (Taipei) 166 Open Green Matching Fund Program (Taipei) 166, 171 order, social 46 organic, urban growth/urbanization 17, 24, 34, 115, 134 Osaka 90, 163 palimpsests 27, 32 pastiche, urban 27 people, ordinary 15, 69, 145 Phra Athit-Phra Sumen 115, 118, 120-121, 123-130, 133-136 placemaker 198, 200, 202 placemaking 19, 27-28, 62-63, 78, 115, 123, 127, 166, 176, 181-186, 196-198, 200, 202, 204-205, 219 places forgotten 87, 219 in-between 16, 214 liminal 16, 26, 214 marginal 214, 217 ordinary 26, 87, 215, 219 policies, land 23, 183 politics street-level 28, 61, 71 subaltern 57, 62 POPS, Private Owned Public Space 184-185, 187, 203 Prachakom Banglamphu 123

225 practices daily/everyday 18, 26, 36, 49, 68, 78, 82, 88, 108, 127, 211 social 27-29, 38, 45-46, 58, 62, 65, 74, 78, 82, 140, 145, 176, 182 urban 28, 48-49 production, urban 18, 39 project(s) bottom-up 28, 134, 183 civilizing 46 pilot 181, 193, 196-197, 200 urban 38, 46 widening 46, 162 propaganda 46-47, 59 protest 30, 61, 75, 97, 163, 166-167, 185-186 real estate 17, 37, 45-47, 49-50, 61, 69-70, 74, 82, 91, 102, 141, 143, 145, 148, 150-151, 155, 189 reappropriation 211-212 recovery 97, 148, 150, 217 redevelopment, urban 17, 49, 57, 92, 145, 162, 184-185, 198 regulations 19, 25, 36, 46-49, 51-52, 122, 134, 144, 153, 160, 171, 174, 187-188, 193, 202 reinvention 58, 65, 211-212 remembrance 219 reminiscence 27, 88, 110, 132, 175, 213 renewal, urban 40, 46, 48, 52, 62, 69, 74, 78, 80-81, 87, 94, 140, 144, 182, 185, 197-198, 204 resistance 29-30, 57, 62, 74-75, 78, 80-83, 95, 109, 150, 153, 155, 213, 219 revitalization 27, 29, 88-89, 93, 116, 122-124, 134, 198, 216 revival 27, 29, 51, 88, 163-165, 212, 215 Riveraineté 38, 40, 42, 50-53 Riyueguang Shopping Center 148 Roji 23-24, 87-93, 100, 102, 108, 110, 161, 163 Ruijin Road 148 Ryōgawachō 23 Sai Ying Pun 182-183, 193-194, 197-199, 202 self-government 25, 161 Seoul 24, 27, 29, 87-110 settlements, informal 21 Shanghai 19, 21, 24, 29, 61, 139-156 Shang-nong 23-24, 159 shangzhijiao 146 Sheung Fung Lane 194-195, 197-199, 201, 203 Sheung Wan 183 Shichahai (Beijing) 61, 64, 66 Shida night market 159-161,166-167, 176 shophouses 21, 24, 36, 39, 42, 50, 118, 121, 124, 126, 129, 133, 143 sidewalks 183, 193-194 Siheyuan 21, 57, 63, 68-69, 72, 76 Sinan Road 148 social change 57, 67, 70, 73, 78, 82, 110, 217 control 61-62, 67

226  distance 62, 68-69 integration 87-110 movements 163, 212, 215, 217 presence 110, 213 Soi 23-24, 120 Songzhuang Artist Village 151 spaces appropriated 27-28, 38, 211-213 circulated 40 commercialized 21, 94 commodified 21, 94 common 27, 67, 88, 100, 217 conceived 29, 139-145, 149-150, 154-155 contested 28, 88, 94, 159, 174 ephemeral 28, 52 hidden 18-19, 163 in-between 26, 181 interstitial 28, 42-44, 52-53, 109, 174-175, 182-184, 186 lane 196, 203-205 liminal 50, 52, 88, 174, 211 lived 29, 40 loosening 19 multifunctional 27, 38 open 43, 63, 183, 186, 189 political 28 private 22, 27, 57, 68, 174, 185, 189-190, 212 public 33, 57, 73, 98, 118, 122, 142, 151-152, 155, 161-163, 175, 181, 184-185, 188-189, 197-199, 203, 207, 209, 212, 217 semi-private 16, 159, 161, 174 semi-public 28, 139, 142, 159, 174, 215 spontaneous regeneration 135 stairways 183 street life 57, 63, 71, 83 local shopping 101, 115, 118 stair 194-95, 197 structure, urban 22, 34, 91, 218, 219 struggles, social 19, 28, 88 subculture 133, 163, 212 Taikang Road 148, 151 Taipei 23-24, 159-176 Taiping tianguo 142 Taiwan 160, 197 tension 28, 35, 49, 66, 160, 174 territory, territoriality 26, 33-38, 40, 43-44, 48-49, 52, 77, 80, 82, 98 Thailand 23 Thanon 23 the right to the city 184 Thôn 34 Tokyo 24, 25, 27, 29, 87-110

Asian Alley ways

tourism 60-62, 70, 73, 81-83, 117, 122-126, 134, 153, 165 tourist destination 123, 163 trade 38, 41, 52 traditional houses 98 trajectories, historical 25, 27, 37 trangressions 19, 160, 175 transit 45, 49 Trok 21, 23-24, 115, 118 Tsukudajima 88, 90-103 tube-houses 24 typology, building 19, 24, 161 urban environment, inclusive 17, 33, 34, 162, 184, 188 form, contested 19 growth, organic 17 landscape 29, 40, 69, 75, 89, 92, 110, 142, 212 ordinaries 115 renewal 40, 46, 62, 69, 74, 80-81, 87, 140, 182, 185, 204 villages 22, 77, 118-119 urbanism, hybrid 36, 49 urbanism of projects 17 urbanity 17, 28, 34, 36, 52, 188 urbanization 18, 22, 24, 120, 142, 215 process 18, 34, 39, 46, 139 uses commercial 46, 141, 149, 155, 213 cultural 19 residential 29 social 45, 69 vanishing 29, 61, 87, 89, 97, 167, 212 vendors 42, 63, 73, 75, 96, 106, 159-163, 174 vernacular 17, 25, 29, 57, 88, 109, 135, 211-214 versatility 28, 29 Very Fun Park 165 Vietnam 33, 36, 38, 44, 49, 53 village-like communities 119 walkability 98 Wanhua 164 Xiaobaiwu (White Hut) 161-169, 172, 174 Xiaochaiwu (Timber Hut) 174 Xiazhijiao 146 yarn 120,136 Yokochō 23 Yuanmingyuan Painter Village 151

Publications / Asian Cities

Norman Vasu, Yeap Su Yin and Chan Wen Ling (eds): Immigration in Singapore 2014, ISBN 978 90 8964 665 1

Gregory Bracken (ed.): Asian Cities. Colonial to Global 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 931 7

Lena Scheen: Shanghai Literary Imaginings. A City in Transformation 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 587 6

Anila Naeem: Urban Traditions and Historic Environments in Sindh. A Fading Legacy of Shikarpoor, Historic City 2017, ISBN 978 94 6298 159 1

Siddhartha Sen: Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata. From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City 2017, ISBN 978 94 6298 111 9

Adele Esposito: Urban Development in the Margins of a World Heritage Site. In the Shadows of Angkor 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 368 7

Yves Cabannes, Mike Douglass and Rita Padawangi (eds): Cities in Asia by and for the People 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 522 3

Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang (eds): Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China. Urbanized Interface 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 223 9

Gregory Bracken (ed.): Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West. Care of the Self 2019, ISBN 978 94 6298 694 7

Henco Bekkering, Adèle Esposito and Charles Goldblum (eds): Ideas of the City in Asian Settings 2019, ISBN 978 94 6298 561 2

Gregory Bracken, Paul Rabé, R. Parthasarathy, Neha Sami and Bing Zhang (eds): Future Challenges of Cities in Asia 2019, ISBN 978 94 6372 881 2

K.C. Ho: Neighbourhoods for the City in Pacific Asia 2020, ISBN 978 94 6298 388 5

Simone Shu-Yeng Chung and Mike Douglass (eds): The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore 2020, ISBN 978 94 6372 950 5

Gregory Bracken (ed.): Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West. Care of the Self 2020, ISBN 978 94 6298 472 1