Let's Talk

Q: As an icon you have been often mentioned as an inventive landscapearchitect whose designs have redefined the notion of landscape design. What or who have been the inspirations for your practice?
A.French Baroque was a revelation...and Noguchi and his landscape too; Peter Wileman, who spoke about art and landscape, Robert Smithson, an American artist, famous for his land art. The "Earthworks Artists", like Nancy Holt and Richard Long, whose unique approach to urban development have been a great inspiration to my approach to landscape architecture, especially because they were site specific, real time projects and conceptually wonderful!

Q: You have discussed how the imagination of the city as a physical fabric is limiting; you have seen this as 'a real clash in the vision of what a city is.' Can you expand on this?
A: The criticism you mention relates mainly to the traditional way the city is viewed by many architects and urban designers. When physical form and creative design become the exclusive focus of theory and practice, it has too often over the centuries instilled a certain arrogance, making the master designers think that they are the primary creators and form-makers of cities. This is a limiting vision in many different ways. For example, a narrow focusing on the physical fabric reduces our understanding of how cities and urban life are actually produced. The city does indeed consist in part of built forms but it is also a socially constructed, multi-layered and variable geography. Many spatial configurations exist: of income and class, of education levels and land values, of cultural practices and ethnic identities, of political power and ideological attachment. These may be expressed in the physical fabric but should not be reduced to physical forms or even to maps alone.

A second limitation has to do with scale. Focusing on physical form can trap thinking and action in a highly localised frame. The city all too easily becomes little more than a collection of clusters of buildings along with an infrastructural fabric. Beyond this is the 'environment' or the 'rest of the world'. The urban dweller, however, exists in many scales of urbanity, from the household and home place to the neighbourhood, the local government territory, the city or municipality, the metropolitan region, the state or province, the national state, and increasingly these days in a global economy. The very act of designing a building must be cognisant of these multiple geographical scales, as well as, of the power of design to shape behavior in positive, as well as, negative ways.

Q: How should then spatial disciplines like architecture and planning approach the understanding of urbanity, and interventions in the city therein?
A. The first step is to broaden the scope and salience of their spatial imaginations. This begins with the recognition that city-space and 'urbanity' are socially produced and can therefore be socially changed. This is important because it de-naturalises the city, moving it from a fixed and dead background as container or physical environment to the forefront of social action and specifically urban politics. Also involved here is the recognition that the city-spaces we produce and the multilevel geographies in which we exist can have powerful negative and positive effects on our lives. City-space becomes a highly contested terrain, where differential power and competing politics, as well as, the need for co-operation and collective action are always in play.

Architecture, planning and geography must be more tightly intertwined as the core spatial disciplines and the primary city-building professions. They must learn from each other and share an expansive and critical spatial imagination, one that sees all professional practice as a form of spatial planning, as trying to shape urban geographies to help the most disadvantaged and improve the overall quality of life. The major problems facing cities have been socially produced and can be socially changed through concerted and collective action, through active public participation and facilitative teamwork among city-building professionals.

My own practical, as well as, theoretical interests in teaching and research, focus on the importance of regions, regional governance and planning. I am more of a regionalist than an urbanist and believe that the problems associated with contemporary urbanism need to be addressed from a regional perspective. This is not only true for traditionally regional planning practices such as for transportation needs and environmental sustainability, but also for dealing with questions of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Understanding urbanity today as well as intervening to create a better city-space requires architects and planners to think regionally.

Q: When you discuss the nature of change that cities are undergoing you use the term ‘Postmetropolitan Transition’. What does this phrase imply, and how will it help us with addressing the problems in designing or 'repairing' the city or its parts?
A. I use the terms ‘Postmetropolis’ and ‘Postmetropolitan Transition’ to stress the need to approach contemporary urbanism in new and different ways; or, in your words, to 'discover new lenses to understand and deal with our cities today.' Over the past thirty years, such forces as the globalisation of capital, labour and culture; the rise of a new economy of flexible, information-intensive capitalism; and the effects of the ICT revolution have transformed the modern metropolis in significant ways. It is not that cities are facing completely new problems, but that continuing to approach contemporary urbanism with the same methods, theories, and practices that were used thirty years ago is becoming increasingly inappropriate and ineffective. Simply put, urbanism today is not what it used to be. The same is true for our understanding of the modern metropolis. I use the term ‘Postmetropolis’ to capture the new trends and conditions, and transition because the changes are still in progress, affecting every city in the world but to different degrees of intensity and effect.

Spatial thinkers have been among the leaders in making theoretical and practical sense of what I call the ‘Postmetropolitan Transition’ and its key formative processes of globalisation, economic restructuring, and technological change. This knowledge and understanding of what is new and different today rather than what is the same as it has been in the past is vital to the success of contemporary city-building and gives a certain advantage to the spatial disciplines. This does not mean that all past approaches, radical, liberal or conservative, must be abandoned entirely, but they must be selectively and sympathetically rethought to salvage what continues to be useful.

A key step in addressing the problems of contemporary urbanism is to break down and reformulate the many binary oppositions that have too often shackled modernist thought. These include urban vs. rural, core vs. periphery, north vs. south, socialism vs. capitalism, global vs. local. Rather than being forced into either/or choices, the new approaches to dealing with the world's urban problems must deal flexibly and sensibly with both/and also, seeking alternative strategies that are re-combinative and infused with a critical spatial imagination.

Q: What would be your comments/observations on South Asian cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, etc.?
A.I have little to say that is specific to South Asian cities, other than be careful not to see South Asian cities as having the same problems and as being entirely distinctive from, say, European or North American cities. To begin with, contemporary trends are making all cities more alike, at least in the sense of sharing the effects of globalisation and the other forces shaping the ‘Postmetropolitan Transition’. First world and third world urbanisation, for example, are now more alike than they ever have been. Significant differences still exist, but the similarities may be more relevant today than the differences. What this means is that we can learn as much if not more from understanding what is happening in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, and Shanghai than we can from Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris. Euro-centric perspectives on the city are among the most outdated and anachronistic.

Q: What differences will the reality or imagination of 'Globalisation' bring into the experience of urbanity in South Asia?
A.The triangle connecting Pakistan-Japan-Indonesia now contain nearly half the world's population and probably more than half the world's urban population. This alone warrants major attention to Asian urbanism. But while I have been writing mainly about the more general trends in the urbanization of the globe and the globalisation of the urban, I am also very interested in the particular or distinctive characteristics of each individual city I visit or study. Every city is globalised to some degree, and this will continue to shape urban life well into the future. But every city is globalised in a different way, intermingling the general and the particular, as well as, the real and the imagined.

South Asian cities need to be seen as part of a global network of increasingly polycentric and networked city-regions, within which significant intra-metropolitan changes are occurring. Within most city-regions, a regional urbanisation process, spawning major edge cities or outer cities where jobs, offices, entertainment, industry and other traditionally urban functions and characteristics are concentrating, is replacing simple suburbanisation. Mumbai and Delhi provide excellent examples of such a process of regional urbanisation, but from what I understand there are many interesting differences between the two, especially in their pattern of outer city development. There is a need therefore, not only for good comparative studies of regional urbanisation but also a growing urgency to rethink and reorganise regional structures of governance to deal with the new city-region conditions.