Tokyo Playground： The Interplay Between Infrastructure and Collective Space

Tokyo Playground aims to investigate the leftover space produced when the infrastructure overlaps with the urban tissue and to highlight how these are metabolized, then transformed into meaningful public spaces. The ＂hybridization＂ of Tokyo is examined using three references as a starting point. First is the spatial typology of sakariba that transformed what were transitional zones into pleasure districts during the Edo period, creating what was arguably the most definitive type of collective space for citizens of Edo. The second reference is Roland Barthes＇ description of the infrastructuraI experience. Thirdly, the book Made in Tokyo illustrated the strong mutual dependence among infrastructure, architecture, and the city as a unique characteristic of Tokyo. Transit space can be reused on the human scale with different programs related to time for pleasurable activities. Tokyo Playground aims to capture the idea of emotional space within infrastructure. It aims to highlight some possible design strategies and tools that help to domesticate the infrastructure through the injection of pleasure and playful programs with an understanding of how humans experience, occupy, and interpret such spaces. Leftovers within the infrastructure are opportunities for social and ecological reuse and these precious voids contribute to creating the contemporary soul of the city as it becomes the source of vibrant energy for transcultural urban regeneration.

Collective Forms and Collective Spaces: A Discussion of Urban Design Thinking and Practice Based on Research in Chinese Cities

The paper examines how social projects,social spaces,and social realities define three contexts and shifts critical to understanding urban design in China,which are the transformations from collective forms to community building,from government to governance,and from urban versus rural development to urban-rural integration.The argument presented is that a unique unification of administration,production,and reproduction spaces into one institution,produced collective forms in China,whose collective spaces and collective subjectivities contrast with Western-centric explanations of urban design and urban sociology that depend on abstract notions of the public,public space,community,and place making.Instead,collective forms and collective spaces are defined by concrete activities,interests,and benefits that provide social networks of support and care to clearly identifiable constituencies.The collective and the community in China are thus always legibly spatialized and develop in parallel to a socialized model of governance that derives from a“differential mode of association.”This creates a spatialized governmentality,an instrumentalization of spatial design by government that brings spatial and social problems of governance closely together.A brief discussion of the historical formations of these changing contexts is the basis to outlining an interdisciplinary urban design approach that deals with spatial and social environments,practices,and policies.The paper brings together research conducted in Chinese cities including Wuhan,Beijing,and Shanghai.