In the opening scene from Wong Kar Wai’sChungking Express(1994), the camera follows one of the film’s protagonists, a wig-wearing female drug smuggler, through dimly lit corridors, crowds, and restaurant stalls in what seems like an urban labyrinth. Some passageways look as if they belong to private residences and are yet crowded with foreign faces and strangers, standing elbow to elbow. The narrow spaces lead to slightly wider corridors lined with shops, some open and some closed. Nothing suggests whether one is indoors or outdoors, in a private space or a public space, daytime or evening. No apparent spatial...

Is Singapore the contemporary Asian urban model? In my consulting experience with Vietnamese planners during the 1990s and 2000s, I have heard it mentioned as such. I often hear sentiments about cleaning up cities and creating an orderly physical environment. Accordingly, one of Vietnam’s earliest new towns, Saigon South, has repeatedly been held up as a model with its wide streets, modern infrastructure, manicured landscaping, and gated communities of suburban homes (Douglass and Huang 2010). Designed by an American firm hired by a Taiwanese investor, Saigon South (also known as Phú Mỹ Hưng) is populated by mostly expatriate and higher-income...

The notion of “messiness” is not something that is new to the modern history of cities undergoing rapid population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There have been many depictions of non-European quarters as a source of disorder in colonial-era literature, from nineteenth-century travel writings to twentieth-century town planning reports (See Nas 1986; Colombijn and Kusno 2015). In the post–World War II decades, cities in the “developing countries” (known otherwise as “third world cities”) have continued to be seen as messy and in need of “modernization.” The assumption then is that messiness is typical of cities in the...

With a daytime population breaching the 12 million mark and a density of 18,650 persons per square kilometer (NSCB 2008), Metropolitan Manila, capital region of the Philippines, often presents itself as a sketch of urban anarchy to the casual observer who wanders beyond the insulated neatness of tourist spots and business districts toward the port and riverbank neighborhoods where old universities and slums spill unruly masses. At its present stage of history, it is often portrayed as a teeming stew of urbanity where migrants in search of greener pastures may be driven to desperation, as poignantly illustrated by British director...

The concept of urban palimpsest proposes that contemporary cities can be seen as a layered construction exhibiting physical diversity in their historical development (Azimzadeh and Bjur 2007, 2). In this regard, Bangkok (the capital of Siam which later became Thailand) possesses rich—if not polysemic—layers of morphologies, memories, and meanings, as vividly shown by the Royal Field (known in Thai as Sanam Luang). Created in 1782 at the same time Bangkok was founded, the Royal Field is a large open space located at the heart of the city in front of the Grand Palace. Since the eighteenth century, it...

The vernacular urbanism of Shinjuku, as described above in 1973, appears to fundamentally contradict the image of the planned high-rise district of West Shinjuku with the forty-eight-story Tokyo City Hall complex (1990) rising at its core. Such contrasts were the focus of the exhibitionShinjuku the Phenomenal Cityat the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976, but they continue to spark imaginations of alternate urban conditions from scenes inBlade Runner(1982) inspired by Shinjuku’s Kabukichō District orLost in Translation(2003), which was actually filmed at the Park Hyatt high-rise tower adjacent to the Tokyo City...

The skyline of Central District is the face of Hong Kong.¹ Trophies of famous architects neatly line the harbor against a sea of neon lighting up the sky. It is a scene of wealth and prosperity, a glamorous picture of the vivacious city and those who live in it. Against the orderliness of this cityscape, a striking transformation takes place every Sunday. Picnic blankets and vibrant dresses bring color to the usual sea of dark suits of the week, while music and lively banter replace the dull march of heels on marbled surfaces. Underneath the imposing government and office towers,...

In the early 1970s, Russell Ackoff (1974) called modern cities a kind of mess: every issue is interrelated to and interacts with other issues, there is no clear “solution,” there are no universal objective parameters, and sometimes those working on the problems are actually the ones who are creating them. Similarly, Rem Koolhaas (1977) has argued that life in any metropolis represents a culture of congestion and is full of disorder and uncertainty. Yoshinobu Ashihara (1992), a Japanese architect, offered us yet another view of urban messiness using Tokyo’s example to illustrate the various hidden orders resulting from pragmatic needs...

One of the biggest challenges for urban planning in the coming decades will be planning for unprecedented rates of urbanization in the cities of the Global South. There is an urgent need to ensure that this planning does not exacerbate the existing urban problems around health, congestion, and housing that these cities currently face. Meeting these needs will require a paradigm shift from the established notions of spatial ordering using land uses and zoning embedded in “high modernism” (Scott 1998) tenets to a more integrated approach that addresses the informal and the planned city as one. Most Indian cities have...

1. Transnational practices—colonial, postcolonial, global—are an integral part of the production process of the Asian city, its necessary mess.¹ This may be true of all urbanism, but it is certainly true of the contemporary Asian city.

2. This essay is written as a weave of notes, an indexed list of individualized “voices” that are not always in sync. The weave is designed to describe the tangled flows and networks, the inevitable mess, of transnational work, in the making of Chandigarh, international modernism’s iconic postcolonial city of India. In any complex, negotiated process, particularly a transnational one, there is always a...

Against the backdrop of economic stagnation and defunct city planning, temporary urbanism has emerged in recent years as both a new modality of urban chic and a strategy for regeneration in the postindustrial cities of Western Europe and North America. In Helsinki, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, and Naples, “fashionable leisure activities, theater projects or concerts, … weekday bars, … and even housing projects” grew in the midst of abandoned factories and warehouse since the early 2000s (Urban Catalyst 2007, 274–75). Against rising rental costs, artists and residents in Dublin set up so-called independent spaces through organized sharing (Bresnihan and Byrne...

One of the great enablers of China’s phenomenal urban growth is the capacity of planning and design professionals and officials to standardize the environment—to conform buildings and landscapes to models that vary only in their most superficial details. Standardization in Chinese urbanism certainly has a functional dimension: it enables large-scale participation in design, construction, and production by people who have minimal training or experience in new technology; it facilitates the management of a large bureaucracy and increasingly mobile labor force; and it allows the integration of China’s new urban economy with global markets. However, standardization in Chinese urban development...

We started this book with the objective of better understanding the urban “messiness” in Asian cities, recognizing that the conditions of messiness are often either dismissed or romanticized in both academia and practice. We were particularly interested in understanding the politics of urban messiness; their place in the city and value to the community; and the questions they raise concerning the ongoing production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship. Several misconceptions, myths, and negative stereotypes color our view of urban messiness, throughout the region and beyond; the state and planning apparatus remain unprepared to address it in any meaningful ways.

While...