Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Week 8
COLONIAL MODERN
Casablanca, Singapore, Hong Kong
What are the characteristics of a modernist City?
What are the processes that give shape to it?
What are the values & beliefs associated with being ‘modern”? i
HOW DO WE DEFINE A MODERNIST CITY?
FORMS PROCESSES VALUES , BELIEFS,
WAY OF THINKING
Built Forms Phenomena
• Highrises / Skyscrapers • Urbanization Rationality
• Forms Follow Functions • Suburbanization • Efficiency
• New materials (steel & glass) • Industrialization • Practicality
• Modern Apartments • Increased Productivity • Forms follow Functions
• Escalators • Consumption – more • Speed
• Department stores choices • Scientific
• Gentrification
New Spaces & Systems • Mass Production / Values / Aspirations
• Broad Avenues, Public Parks Standardization • “Ornament is Crime”
• Better Transportation Networks • Urban Problems / crime, • Prosperity
• New Infrastructures health
• Law and Order
• Public Services (street light, water, • Equality / Equity
etc. ) Macro Processes • Sense of Community
• Agglomeration of Industries • Industrialization • Civic Pride
• Better Social Services (e.g. health) • Capitalism / Expansion • Continuous Progress
of the Economy • Break with the Past
Methods of Planning & Design • Socialism / Control Over
• Mixed Land Use Capital
• Introduction of Planning Regulation
• Planning for Density
• Urban Renewal
• Beautification
Source: SPIRO online catalogue, College of Environmental Design Visual Centre, University of California, Berkeley
Key Terms:
colonialism, colonial development, segregation, managed difference,
dual-city, assimilation, association
Taipingshan, looking towards the Mid-level District, 1860s
http://www.mascontext.com/issues/17-boundary-spring-13/the-segregation-paradoxes/
The interface between Old Delhi and British New Delhi, 1942
Imperialism is “the practice, theory and
attitude of a dominating metropolitan
centre ruling a distant territory."
Source: SPIRO online catalogue, College of Environmental Design Visual Centre, University of California, Berkeley
Source: British National Archives Source: SPIRO online catalogue, College of Environmental Design
Visual Centre, University of California, Berkeley
Improvement Schemes in
Shumshuipo, Hong Kong, 1910s
http://nec-pluribus-impar.over-blog.fr/article-14410381.html
Source: Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, 2007. Source: Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial
Confrontations, 1997.
Casablanca, Morocco
Colonial Governing Strategies: From Assimilation to
Association
http://halfaoui.blogzoom.fr/r30033/Lyautey-Mangin-Gouraud-Le-Protectorat/
Left: Drawings by Albert Labrade, House design for the New Medina
Singapore
Malay
Chinese
Commercial Europeans
District
Arabs
Bugis
Source: http://southeast-asia.jbdirectory.com/File:Jackson_Plan_ekk.jpg
The Jackson Plan (1822) showing the segregation of the races in Singapore
Source: Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore.
Mid-level
European District
A plan showing the typical layouts of the lots in the Lower Bazaar in 1889.
Adults
Children