REFLECTION Victoria Jane Marshall

Victoria Jane Marshall

While density is a powerful concept that is regularly used by the state to shape urban form differentially over time, it can be thought of more broadly. If density is presumed to be an open concept, it can hold more than one definition. Thus, it affords the projection of multiple rationales of meaning. For instance, geographer Colin McFarlane (2016) notes that density is both a topographical problem of number and measurement, and a problem of topological politics and space. In response, the Density Studio asked what density-based reasonings might best be used to promote or hinder desirable settlement, and on behalf of whom or what?

Each student self-selected a one-kilometre square study area as their prompt for inquiry. One parameter for study area selection was guided by the term “ordinary” (Robinson, 2005). The term ordinary here means a settled area where there is no singular big conflict, where power, understood topologically and with nonhumans and their diverse agencies in mind, is diffuse. To demonstrate this concept, the study area selection rationale created by studio critic Victoria Marshall in the book Periurban Cartographies (2024) was used as a guide.

A second parameter for site selection was provided in a map created by the Agropolitan Territories of Monson Asia module (FCL, 2023) at the ETH Singapore, Future Cities Lab. The students selected their ordinary, study areas within the bounded areas shown on the map. The map (page 6-7) highlights areas where selected data intersect and where an “agropolitan outlook” to urbanisation is being researched at the time of writing. An agropolitan outlook foregrounds the inter-dependence of future cities and future agriculture. Over the mid-semester break, the students visited their selected study area in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, and Japan.

To focus on a re-territorialised Monsoon Asia is creatively productive for both students and periurban residents. This is because the task of imagining a transformation of an urban-rural settlement is to value the settled rural in a projective way. Rather than thinking of periurban teleologically - as the “edge of the city” and as not much more than “becoming urban,” the studio focus was toward “being periurban” anew. This was accomplished through a mix of linear (from rural to urban and urban to rural) and non-linear (from one type of urban edge to another type of urban edge) rationales, as well as an interest non-human agency.

Any task of study area selection is propositional, for it comes with assumptions about what might be possible or impossible in a certain place. Starting with a quick future scenario assignment in the first two weeks of semester, project outcomes slowly emerged from further ideation throughout the semester. Using the tools of drawing and model making the students grasped their found, density puzzle by exploring how density is lived, experienced, and contested, and how alternative forms of compactness might emerge. This iterative design research practice was supported by fieldwork, individual weekly critiques with the studio critic, periodic sharing sessions within the studio, and formal reviews with invited guests. As architect Stefani Ledewitz (1985) points out, the purpose of starting with a proposition, or “beginning backwards” is for students to immediately share the knowledge they have and thus, to see what additional knowledge might be needed.

The final projects illustrated in this report are locality-led proposals for future urban-rural forms implemented incrementally. Meaning, existing and imagined landscape practices are anticipated, and collectively, they are designed to transform land use, land cover, space, and power. All of the projects are multiscalar and most of the projects include the following: a relation to (and interpretation of) everyday life and lived ecologies at a defined scale; an appreciation of non-human agency, however defined or encountered; innovative spatial strategies at the locality level linked with tactics for the equitable rearrangement of power; tangible ideas about the elements and qualities of physical public space; and lastly, the bracketing of a certain time frame for attention and investment in the proposed transformation. The studio outcomes reveal that an emplaced, landscape architecture approach to density can act to untether outdated or irrelevant density narratives while addressing issues of inequality and environment.

Map showing agropolitan territories of Monsoon Asia (white bounded areas) and the location of Density Studio projects (yellow icons). From West to East:

India: Guo Zhiyi

Thailand: Long Siyu

Thailand: Tang Yanqi

Malaysia: Yang Yikai

Cambodia: Zou Xiaoqian

Indonesia: Virginia

Indonesia: Zhang Yu

China: Liu Runhan

China: Zou Lipeng

Japan: Ouyang Luoman