The Urban Core in Japanese Planning (1930s-1950s): Evolving Perceptions on the Spatial and Social Form of the Metropolitan Center on the Mainland and in the Colonies

The urban core was a key topic in postwar modernist architectural discussions and in urban planning debates internationally. The proposal by Tange Kenzo for a new urban center for atom-bombed Hiroshima was an iconic reference in the CIAM 8 debates at Hoddesdon, England, on the aesthetic and functional design of a community center. But these...

Iran’s Global Petroleumscape: The Role of Oil in Shaping Khuzestan and Tehran

Various constellations of oil actors—including corporations and nations—have shaped seemingly disconnected and geographically distant landscapes, cities, and buildings around the world over the last 150 years. Corporate, public, and popular media have publicized these cycles of spatializing oil. Together, construction and representation have...

Transformation of Urban Communities from Within: Residents’ Role in Lilong’s Attributive Switch Between Market-led Commodity and State-controlled Property

The state has owned most historical buildings since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Residents within are entitled to the right to use the house in the form of a lease. After entering a free trade housing market in 1988, residents in historic neighbourhoods of Shanghai have been suffering uncertainty of their identities...

Oil Spaces: The Global Petroleumscape in the Rotterdam/The Hague Area

Corporate and public actors have built the physical and financial flows of petroleum into the very landscape. This article identifies different layers of those flows— physical, represented, and everyday practices—that combine into a palimpsestic global petroleumscape. It posits that these layers historically became essential parts of modern...

Teaching history for design at TU Delft: exploring types of student learning and perceived relevance of history for the architecture profession

Historical investigation anchors architectural and urban practice. Analyzing two sets of questionnaires distributed in different class settings, this paper explores two questions: how do design students currently learn about architectural history, and how do they translate this knowledge into their design practice? First, tentative conclusions...

Digital Excavation of Mediatized Urban Heritage: Automated Recognition of Buildings in Image Sources

Digital technologies provide novel ways of visualizing cities and buildings. They also facilitate new methods of analyzing the built environment, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to crowdsourced citizen participation. Digital representations of cities have become so refined that they challenge our perception of the real. However,...

Revisiting the transnational building of a modern planning regime in Iran: the first Tehran master plan and the interplay between local and foreign planners

In the late 1960s, the first Tehran Master Plan (TMP) was envisioned by a constellation of local and foreign experts. The TMP, which has been extensively studied, is usually credited to big-name planner and architect Victor Gruen. Scholars have neglected the contributions of local professionals in shaping the plan. Many depict the TMP as the...

The role of Dutch civil engineering in modern port planning in Japan (1870s–1890s)

In the mid-nineteenth century, civil engineering and technological innovation began to play a major role in the modernization and westernization of Japan. From the 1870s to the 1890s, Dutch civil engineers worked with Japanese practitioners on the design of Japanese ports, a key starting point for urban development. This article explores the...

Between Tradition and Modernity: Western urban planning and street improvement projects in Hankou (1889-1937)

This article examines street improvement projects in Hankou's case for unearthing the contribution of Chinese political elites and planers in exchanging planning concepts and technologies from the West to China. Aiming to realize the Modern Metropolis, which Sun Yat-sen proposed in the fundamentals of national reconstruction, Chinese political...

Fire in the port city: the impact of different population groups on the destruction and revival of Canton city in the nineteenth century

Canton (present-day Guangzhou) has long flourished as a port city. As the city expanded in the nineteenth century, the risks of conflagrations increased; streets became more crowded, buildings were more often made of wood, and there was more use of open fires. The reconstruction of Canton after conflagrations provides an excellent way to...

Shipping Canals in Transition

Shipping canals have supported maritime traffic and port development for many centuries. Radical transformations of these shipping landscapes through land reclamation, diking, and canalization were celebrated as Herculean works of progress and modernity. Today, shipping canals are the sites of increasing tension between economic growth and...

Changing Minds: Towards Water-Based Architecture and Public Space for the Future Urban Archipelago

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened...

Oil Spaces: Extended Urbanization from Sea to Land

Flows of petroleum have shaped buildings, cities and landscape around the world on sea and land. This paper shows how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment over the last century and a half, in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Understanding the multiple...