Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Kostof, S. (1992).

Title: Urban Division (Week 1 Reading 1)
Cue
Berlin Wall (1961-1989)

Notes
Division between urban areas in the control of the Allied forces and those
of Russia during the final days of the liberation of Berlin

Urban divisions

Arbitrated, legalistic and invisible

Lines drawn by public authority
Intangible
Political and generally administrative
Designed to keep urban order (how the population is taxed, serviced)
Objective is to design the population within the urban form
The divisions are often coincident with deep social schisms
Can be intentionally created or develop out of unforeseen social changes
Four types of partition: the administrative district, the religious district
(now diffused), the district of business and commerce, the residential
district

Divisions proposed by author

(especially in Western Europe)

Topographical: hilltop (where a town usually begins, has princely citadels

and cathedrals nucleus of feudal authority) vs valley (civil core of
craftspeople and traders)
Temporal: old town (more organic in layout) vs new town (laid out on a
broader, more regular street matrix)/ medieval vs modern [pre-industrial
vs modern industrial city]

The sovereign district

Presence of a ruler/ruling elite is necessary in the pre-industrial city

Ruler may live away from bureaucrats in a second sovereign zone for
privacy (e.g. old Russian towns Pskov, Novgorod)
Administrative and princely components can be separated (e.g. in
Beijings Forbidden City where the palace city is for the emperor and the
imperial city is for the government
Meeting ground of ruler and people usually a large public space
Primary impulses motivating the sovereign district: the dignity of the
ruler and his safety

Democracy and socialism

American concept of the civic centre

Creating an impression of dignity and appropriate beauty
Forming a rallying point for the citys life
Socialist cities: different ceremonial centre

Summary
Urban division is heavily influenced by topographical, cultural, historical and temporal context of a city.
Different cities exhibit different qualities but most of them have some similarities, such as having the city
centre as the administrative district of the city.

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Mumford, L. (1961).

Title: Town Hall and Market place (Week 1 Reading 2)
Cue
Agora

Notes
Communal meeting place/place of assembly
The market: a by-product of the coming together of consumers who had
many other reasons for assembling than just doing business
The automatism and impersonality of the supermarket (mid 20th C in
U.S.) made the market lose its functions as a centre of personal
transactions and social entertainment
Agora mainly used by men informal club where one meets friends and
cronies
Latin countries continued the idea of a social open space plaza, campo,
piazza

Citizenship in Athens

Even when the Greek city became democratic, its citizens were a class
apart
The gap between citizens and non-citizens widened
The population is made up of citizens (male), free people (metics, women
and children), and slaves
Less than one in seven of inhabitants were citizens

Town Hall (prytaneion)

Home of the King and the sacred fire

Place where foreign emissaries would be entertained and where a state
banquet would be held

Failure of democracy in Greek

cities

Inability to pass from direct democracy to representative government

Problem of numbers? Need decentralisation and regional federation

Summary
The functions and evolution of the agora which still exists today as an important part of a city.

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Stilgoe, J. R. (1998).

Title: Outside Lies Magic (Week 1 Reading 3)
Cue
Ways to explore a place

Notes
Get out now.
Abandon technology
Flex the mind
The built environment is layered over with many layers
Take it all in
Put things in spatial context or arrange them in time
Even the most ordinary of things help make sense of others
Notice dates
Built environment is a sort of palimpsest
History is on the wall, but only those willing to look up from newspaper
or laptop computer glimpse it and ponder
Exploring ordinary landscape sharpens the appreciation and
understanding of subjects from art to physics
Dont explore by car
Exploring requires the cloak of invisibility
Landscape is not meant to be interpreted/read/understood unlike a
museum gallery
Seeing intently means scrutinising, staring, narrowing the eyes, even
putting ones hand across the forehead to shade the eyes

Summary
How to explore the most ordinary of landscapes? How to be an explorer? Get out and explore now.

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Davidson, Graeme. (2006).

Title: The view from the Palisade Hotel (Week 2 Reading 1)
Cue
The city as a palimpsest, a richly
textured relic of ideas

Notes
Traces of history can be found/ glimpsed beyond the physical layers of a
place

Ideas that shaped the Australian

city

Ideas about health and disease, sociability and public order, economic
efficiency and aesthetic beauty the order of things

Shaping a city with an authentic

culture

Is it possible since Australia is born of European expansion and had

earlier exhibited qualities of English cities?
Colonialism regarded hybrid, derivative forms of urbanism as secondhand and inferior but globalisation turned it around now these
blended forms of urbanism are seen as the cities virtues

Australian city neither

authentically Australian nor fully
European

Australia as second-hand Europeans

European culture is favoured over indigenous/native culture
Englishness was produced testament of British nations power over its
colonies?
Englishness was emphasised as these colonial towns were outposts of
British civilisation in a primitive or even barbaric land
Sydney was once considered more exclusively English than Liverpool or
London

1870s onwards the differences

between Australian and English
cities became more common to
notice

Insistence on the Englishness of Australian urban life

Francis Adams the Bushman was the one powerful and unique national
type yet produced in Australia
Sydney as an inferior copy of London as it were, made in five minutes,
a substitute for the real thing
Nationalists the bush, rather than the city, was the most authentic
source of national ideals
Tendency of most Australians to look at their cities through English
spectacles

Identifying the character and

identity of the Australian city

Globalisation created new urban paradigms multiculturalism,

hedonism, hybridity, pastiche (imitation) are now esteemed
Rather than its uniqueness, its anonymity and homogeneity are what
makes Sydney attractive John Connell

Summary
What makes Australias towns and cities Australian? The earliest visitors and locals imagined Sydney and
Melbourne as little Londons or Manchesters. Then they embraced exceptionalism Australian cities would
excel by avoiding the disease, dirt, crime and density of its English parents. Nationalists hoped that the
Australian city might acquire its character by osmosis, as the ethos of the bush was transmitted to coastal
cities, but instead the bush has been succumbing to the influence of the cities. Progressive intellectuals hoped
that Australian might invent ways of urban living that were distinctively their own. The cities ended up being a
fusion of imported and local, contemporary and historical influences the Australian city was layered,
multifarious, improvised - an original composition of unoriginal elements. It is not exactly indigenous, neither is
it anonymous or homogeneous.

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Calvino, I. (1974).

Title: Invisible Cities (Week 2 Reading 2)
Cue
Cities and Memory

Notes
The city consists of relationships between the measurements of its space
and the events of its past
The city soaks up the memories like a sponge and expands
A description of a city as it is today should contain all its past
The city does not tell its past, but contains it links back to the idea of a
palimpsest

Cities and Signs

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things:
tankard = tavern, scales = the grocers
Not all signs are straightforward like road signage or billboards
Some are indicative of other hidden meanings that one may need
exclusive knowledge to understand
Even if a building is without a signboard or figure, its very form and
position it occupies in the citys order suffice to indicate its function
links back to urban division

Thin Cities

City on stilts
Two types of cities: those that through the years and the changes
continue to give form to desires, and those in which desires either erase
the city or are erased by it
Is this about unplanned growth? Unpredictability of future of cities?

Cities and Eyes

Hidden cities

Trading Cities

Canals and streets forming a network of routes

Network of routes is not arranged on one level but follows and up-anddown course of steps, landings, bridges
The city can be seen from different vantage points

Summary
An interesting read! Invisible Cities conveys the subjectivity of which cities are viewed; we are always
influenced by our own feelings, thoughts and opinions about the city which makes our viewpoints about it
varied and unique. Our descriptions of cities would consist of our own memories of the city, the signs and
hidden meanings that are revealed to us as we explore it ourselves.

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Hall, P.G. (2002).

Title: The City on the Highway (Week 2 Reading 3)
Cue
1920s

1930s

Notes
Mass motorisation
Traffic congestions in cities
Suburbs began to grow
Ordinary city streets widened and upgraded to cope with the flood of
traffic
Robert Moses (NYs master builder) gave New Yorkers access to ocean
beaches
However, his parkway bridges are too low for trucks and buses thus the
beaches were strictly reserved for middle-class car owners
The remaining 2/3 of the population had to ride the subway to Coney
Island
He did the same with the Henry Hudson Parkway, the worlds first true
urban motorway (not very nice of him)
Population of Westchester and Nassau counties increased by 350, 000
due to the new roads

Suburbanisation

Benton MacKaye: Idea of townless highway or motorway

the townless highway would encourage the building of real communities
at definite and favourable points off the main road

1950

Revolution due to Ford America boasted mass car ownership

Urban growth

Higher land values where freeways went

Rail system decayed under the pressure of rising car ownership from the
mid-1920s, its abandoned rights of way provided ideal routes for new
freeways

Summary
Did the development of freeways/motorways/highways led to suburbanisation? Or did suburbs exist already
before freeways?

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Shelton, B., Karakiewicz, J., & Kvan, T. (2011).

Title: Vertical and Volumetric (Week 3 Reading 1)
Cue
Economic restructuring after 1980

Tall buildings made possible

Notes
Manufacturing financial services (banking) due to introduction of
more open Chinese trading and foreign investment policies
1. Invention of elevator in NY by Elisha Grave Otis (1852)
2. Use of iron steel structural frame
3. Air-conditioning
Chicago first tall building 10 storeys Home Insurance Building (1885)
Hong Kong used the skyscraper as an instrument for dispersal (unlike
NY) both concentration and scattered dispersal clusters of very tall
towers are seen at the centre and periphery of the continuous built-up
area and almost everywhere between in scattered new towns beyond
- Tunnels and train lines penetrated hill barriers

Growth of New Territories

New towns continue to be in public transport-orientated small footprint

high-rise forms, linked by rail

Volumetric quality (multi-level

activity, deck/bridge connection
between buildings or from building
to sloping ground)

Each new town is a city within a city of dense dwellings, urban services,
employment
Form: Massive volumes/series of connected volumes of shops,
commercial and professional services, car parks, recreational facilities (on
podia) topped by residential towers/office towers/ hotels
Bus stations (double decker, small buses) located at an upper level
Stations at underground levels
Common lifts and stair shafts and the scissor stair are utilised
Train station podium is a form of reclamation creating ground for tower
living

World no.1 per capita

escalator state

Kowloon peninsula bestconnected place in the SAR urban

system

All but 7 of the main rail lines are found here

70% of HK residents live within 7 minutes of a railway station

Island mentality?

Erosion of established functional pattern of street network???

Relationship with nature

40% of the 3 quarters of landmass are country parks

Potential for development?

Summary
Are future cities going to expand skywards like Hong Kong when we run out of space/areas for expansion on
the ground? Should other cities use the spaces of tall buildings more efficiently, to give them volumetric
qualities?

Name: Yu Chia Lim

Urban Environments Module 1 Notes

Student number: 816571

Author/Lecturer: Silver, C. (2008).

Title: The Megacity in Southeast Asia (Week 3 Reading 2)
Cue

Megacities

Primate cities

Jakarta (Batavia in the past)

Advantages and disadvantages of

growth of megacities

Extended metropolis/megacity
concept

Peri-urbanisation (desakota)

Notes
Urban areas which support a population of 8 million people or more
Largest city within a region or nation which dominates not only in size
but also with its influence (politically and economically)
Most populous city in SEA
Rural village remains the dominant form of habitation
An overgrown cluster of villages which makes up an urban area of nearly
10 mil residents which grows to nearly 11 mil during the working day
Uncounted population those who are in the agriculture sector but have
formed attachments to urban market urban-related agricultural areas
desakota city village
Megacity undesirable outcome of urban development
Disadvantages: Environmental and ecological degradation, loss of
precious agricultural lands, increasing poverty, inefficiencies in provision
of basic services
Advantages?: upgraded housing for workers, increased home ownership
rates, improved environmental conditions through better sanitation,
clean water, increased open space that accompanies new peripheral
development, improved job opportunities and wages, improved
amenities (for a broad segment of the population)
Greater dispersal of population may help overcome diseconomies of very
large centres, diffuse economic activity more widely across regions and
nations, permit the environment to absorb the wastes better
Polycentric urban spatial pattern relieves congestion at centre without
sacrificing the benefits of metropolitan-wide agglomeration of economies
Rapid growth of the periphery has not undermined the vitality of the
urban core or eroded critical urban core functions (unlike urban spatial
abandonment in many North American cities)
Invasion of urban activities into rural areas, creating mixed land-use,
conversion of agricultural land to urban uses
SEA cities blended rural features into the city so that the boundary
between the city and countryside seemed almost non-existent

Summary
The colonisation of major cities in Southeast Asia led to different types of cities being built, the indigenous
colonial city (Bangkok) with a pre-industrial walled palace city juxtaposed against the commercial city, the
planned colonial city (Singapore), the grafted city around Sule Pagoda (now Burma). Eventually after
decolonisation and national development, urbanisation occurred in these cities, contributed majorly by ruralurban migration due to political and economic instability in the countryside (rebel movements in Malaya,
Vietnam and Burma) and false economic expectations as migrants were poorly informed about job
opportunities in urban areas. Even with government intervention the bazaar economy (face-to-face
transactions, traditional marketplaces) continued to strive, for example the Senen Triangle market area.
Challenges of growth: overcrowding, poverty, providing housing and basic amenities should growth be
controlled?