Part & Whole – Reconciling Scale, Density and Sustainability in Asian Megapolises

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AB O UT TH E AUTHO R S

Nirmal Kishnani

Nirmal Kishnani is an Associate Professor at the School of Design and Environment of the National University of Singapore. At the time of this publication, he held the appointment of Programme Director of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD), through which he has, over the past decade, pioneered a pedagogy based on systems thinking and a regenerative design approach. For more than twenty years, Kishnani has been an advocate of sustainable design, advising on projects and policies in Asia, formulating new platforms and scrutinising the space between front-line theories and drawingboard pragmatism. As editor-­ in-chief of FuturArc magazine, he championed thought leaders in the field of design, and made a case for a design an approach that is tailored to conditions within the Asian context. His books Greening Asia: Emerging Principles for Sustainable ­Archi­tecture (2012) and Ecopuncture: Transforming Architecture and Urbanism in Asia (2019) both argue for upstream imagination over acts of downstream mitigation, advocating new methods and frameworks. His essays in this publication convey the same sentiment, asking what might be the aspirations of planners and urban designers as they prepare for an ecological age.

Five 1×1 km sites in three Asian cities have been unpacked and reconstituted by teams of architects, engineers, landscape designers and planners. The aspiration wasn’t to formulate generalisable prescriptions but to investigate the robustness of a new process. A method was created to tackle the complexity of the city, unpack systemic layers and recombine them in ways that mend fractures and enhance urban quality. This approach sought to calibrate density and liveability, remain rooted in the narrative of place and examine what it means to be sustainable.

BANG KOK

HONG KONG

S HANG HAI

Our journey into the heart of twenty-first century Asian cities has revealed a deep anthropocentric bias, inherited from the legacy of the Modern movement and from recent globalisation and urbanisation trends. Challenging this legacy has revealed just how much of what happens today is unsustainable and in plain sight. The two experts who have led the study, Asma Khawatmi and Nirmal Kishnani, combine design research in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Shanghai with insights into Asian megalo­ polises. They report on the dissonance of political, economic and social imperatives, pulling cities apart at the seams, so to speak. Layered on to this are the exigencies of climate change and ecological losses, which raise questions about the substance of the discourse and reveal its underpinning worldview. Anyone seeking easy answers will be disappointed. What this book offers are glimpses of an uncertain future; what it inspires, however, are insights into how to navigate that uncertainty.

ISBN: 978-981-14-5675-6

Asma Khawatmi Nirmal Kishnani

Asma Khawatmi is a French registered architect and a visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Since 2001 she has been combining her own practice with research, publications and exhibitions dedicated to south-east Asian cities. She has notably published several essays on the shophouse typology, including SG3. Decoding Sustainable Urbanism: Case Study Singapore, co-authored with Nirmal Kishnani in 2016. Through collaborations with Asian universities, international experts and research centres, she has developed a multi-scalar and sustainable urban design methodology. In the context of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD) and the Master of Arts in Urban Design (MAUD) graduate degrees, she has applied this process to act on sustainability issues of south-east Asian megalopolises. In this book, her methodology and essay articulate the characteristics and paradigms of Asian megacities through the study of Bangkok, Hong Kong and Shanghai. While these three cities do not sum up the complexity of contemporary Asian megalopolises, the exacerbated challenges they represent do make them universal case studies.

Asma Khawatmi

Part⁄Whole

Asma Khawatmi

AB O UT TH E B OO K

AB OU T THE B OOK

Nirmal Kishnani

Reconciling scale, density and sustainability in Asian megalopolises

Part⁄Whole

Reconciling scale, density and sustainability in Asian megalopolises Asma Khawatmi Nirmal Kishnani

Bangkok Hong Kong Shanghai

Part⁄ Whole

The research presented in this book was carried out over three years by students and professors of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD) programme at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore. This university is ranked consistently as one of the world's top tertiary institutions and is located in Singapore, a city-state in Asia that is a global leader in green architecture and urbanism. In the design studios that anchor this one-year, post-professional course, sustainability is examined both as outcome and process. The curriculum is Asian-centric, and anchored in systems thinking as a pathway. This starts by asking which systems matter, how built and natural systems interact, which flows and exchanges can be intentionally altered (i.e., designed) for a resilient future. It leads to frameworks for reciprocity between systems and spatial structures that bring together social, economic and ecological imperatives. The students who join our programme come from different disciplines and backgrounds. The programme is taught by global experts in the fields of architecture, urbanism and landscape ecology.


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Part & Whole – Reconciling Scale, Density and Sustainability in Asian Megapolises by NUS Department of Architecture - Issuu