The Netherlands is one of the best places to live if you’re a member of the LGBTQIA+ community: same-sex activity has been legal since in 1811; it was the first country in the world to allow same-sex marriage in 2001; and couples can adopt children. There is, in effect, no difference between being ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ except in how people choose to constitute their families and living arrangements.

This article traces the journeys taken by two gay foreigners living in the Netherlands: Gregory Bracken, an Assistant Professor in Urbanism originally from Ireland, and TJ Rivera, a graduation-year masters’ student in Architecture originally from the Philippines. These are our personal stories, both different yet with oddly similar trajectories. This is perhaps because we’re both from devoutly Catholic countries where we were seen as ‘bad queers’ – using Carl Stychin’s memorable terminology (1998). In the Netherlands, however, we’re ‘good gays’ and these are our personal reflections on how this came to be. Our stories will hopefully help you understand the journeys we’ve taken to becoming accepted as citizens here, despite our difference from the majority in a heteronormative society. And while our stories are positive and our own personal and professional outlooks optimistic, we end this piece with a warning about the internal struggles in the LGBTQIA+ community because of new homonormativity’s dividing practice which are in danger of fragmenting it along dangerous new lines of race, class, and gender.@en

Jakarta, capital of Indonesia (for now) was founded by the Dutch and is a venue for social and spatial experimentation, not to mention the corruption and mismanagement of post-independence ‘elite informality’ (p. 113), and the city is literally sinking under its own weight. Abidin Kusno’s wide-ranging yet in-depth study of the city and its multidimensional challenges contains a felicitous mix of theoretical investigations grounded in real-life examples to unfold the story of the ‘city of a thousand dimensions’ (a term borrowed from Seno Gumira Ajidarma). In it he argues that a lack of planning has actually allowed a degree of flexibility in accommodating formal and informal, which he sees as an ‘art of governing’ (p. xi). Using multiple sites and issues, Kusno shows a ‘socio-political dimension that is neither formal nor disorderly’ (p. xii). The routines of everyday life should not be neglected, he says, because ‘they are often governed by a spatial configuration that is inescapably political’ (p. xii).@en

Although there have been numerous studies on the heritage attributes, characteristics, and values of the historic garden as a special category of cultural heritage, the question is why a comprehensive review combining mainstream historic garden conservation with ways of understanding the garden in a landscape context has not been conducted. Landscape is an integrative concept that combines physical features and the diversity of functions with social and ecological processes throughout the scales of time and space. Therefore, this landscape context means applying the landscape approach to explore the organic connection between the scale of evolution and the architectonic elements in relation to each other. To elaborate, instead of viewing the garden as an object in one specific temporal-spatial frame, such an approach focuses on the evolution of the site in order to identify persistent structures and other values. The method used in this study involved paper coding as qualitative analysis combined with bibliometric visualization software. We reviewed 162 studies to explore the interconnections between the historic garden and landscape approach. The result is that there are three correspondences between landscape approaches and different stages of the historic garden’s conservation and development: studies identifying the historic garden’s characteristics using landscape mapping, studies demonstrating historic gardens’ conservation based on landscape planning, and studies exploring the potential of development and reuse through landscape design. Finally, we discuss the research gaps and outline an action framework for the conservation and development of heritage gardens in a landscape context.@en

Books on Shanghai’s history tend to fall broadly into two categories: nostalgia for the “colonial” era and descriptions (often grim) of the Communist period that followed. Shanghai was not, in fact, a colony; it was a Treaty Port, one of five opened by the British after the end of the First Opium War in 1842 (the others being Canton [Guangzhou], Amoy [Xiamen], Foochow [Fuzhou], and Ningpo [Ningbo]). These ports increased in size, wealth, and number until 1943 when the system was ended with the Treaty for the Relinquishment of ExtraTerritorial Rights in China. [...]@en

French philosopher Michel Foucault first mentioned heterotopia in a lecture to architects in 1967. Up to this time it had been a medical term (one also used in biology and zoology). It denoted the presence of unusual tissue that can co-exist with normal tissue in a body; the heterotopic tissue shouldn’t be there but it does no harm. Foucault applied this term to ‘those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others’ (Foucault, 1991). Places that contain layers of meaning or relationships that aren’t immediately obvious.@en

'Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary', edited by H. Hazel Hahn, examines a phenomenon she says is as old as the history of human settlement. One of the book’s main strengths is its focus on exchange for the modern period which, as Hahn admits, is unusual but useful because it’s not so well understood (particularly when compared to the early-modern era).@en

China was forced to open its first treaty ports in 1842. This was one of the conditions of the Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing), which ended the First Opium War (1839–42). The country was forced to make further concessions with the Treaty of Tientsin, which ended the Second Opium War (1856–60). China saw an ever-increasing number of treaty ports appear before the system finally ended in 1943. The second treaty also opened the Yangtze River to foreign trade and missionary activity, allowing Westerners to penetrate the Chinese interior. In the first year of the river's opening, Shanghai's customs revenues tripled, but the duties paid on goods, incoming and outgoing, were handed to Western customs officers, who then forwarded receipts to Peking (now Beijing). This was because during the early stages of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the British had begun collecting import duties, and because the revenues were so much larger [...]@en

Based on the understanding of the built environment as result of competing claims on space that must be resolved via recognition, fair distribution of burdens and benefits of our human association, respect and care for the planet and just procedures to decide on those claims, Spatial Planning and Strategy is a chair in the Department of Urbanism within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, committed to helping create sustainability, resilience and spatial justice through the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement and the European New Deal, among other frameworks. This commitment is reflected in activities, events, and courses. We are concerned with knowledge about the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic and urban planning tools – visions, strategies, plans and programmes.@en

How knowledge is transmitted within and across cultures is the broad theme linking the three books under discussion here: 'Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary', edited by H. Hazel Hahn, 'Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City' by Cecilia L. Chu, and Peter G. Rowe and Yun Fu’s 'Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns'. In them, we see how networks facilitate knowledge exchange and the effects this can have on society and, in particular, the built environment of East and Southeast Asia. The first two books deal with the colonial era. H. Hazel Hahn and her contributors cover the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, British Malaya and Ceylon, and the Philippines to undertake nuanced examinations of places and practices; in them, we see the fragmented nature of cultural exchange, as well as its continuous and dynamic evolution. Cecilia L. Chu focuses on Hong Kong to offer fascinating insights into the territory’s history through dual lenses of property and race. Finally, Peter G. Rowe and Yun Fu treat their readers to a magisterial discussion of contemporary architecture (and its roots) in Southeast Asia and beyond (including parts of Austronesia). Their analysis is grounded by examining different influences: Austronesian vernacular; India, China, and Islam; Western colonization; and the postcolonial era of independence. This is an original and rewarding approach because it allows the tracing of currents of knowledge exchange and transfer across the region’s built environment through its long history.@en

Macau was founded by the Portuguese in 1557 and was the West’s gateway to China before becoming a colonial backwater in the nineteenth century. It became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1999, something that, according to Tim Simpson, augured ‘the embryonic stirring of a world-historical geopolitical realignment [with] the gradual geographical translocation of the axis of global capitalism from the once-dominant West to East Asia’ (pp. 4–5).@en

The Open Society appeared as a concept in planning discourse at the Congrès
International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM XI). It attempted to create urban
conditions which would allow society to prosper. Despite its good theoretical
intentions, the project did not always translate well into practice. We observe that
historic approaches and tools have tended to be neglected in urban regeneration
projects and discussions, yet we think that they can bring valuable urban
transformations. This paper therefore considers the extent to which historic
planning tools and theories can be useful for assessing built projects to provide
fresh approaches for urban renovation. This paper will reappraise the concept of
the Open Society empirically by analysing, critiquing, and imagining its relevance
in twenty-first-century planning projects and discourse. This research uses a
mostly qualitative approach through critical cartographies as a main medium and
to draw conclusions that highlight the power relations in the Dutch neighbourhood
of ‘t Hool (Eindhoven) as well as the local conditions and materials that can enable
them to plan for a more resilient future. We aim to bridge the gap between theory
and practice through a methodology that allows for a broader and deeper
understanding of place, history, potentials, and urgencies.@en

In the heart of the Pearl River Delta, the city of Guangzhou is fast-growing and prone to flooding. In history, people constructed canals based on natural waterways to deal with water problems. The canal system not only served as an important infrastructure but was also as the backbone of urban life. But with the development of the road network in recent decades, the urban canals in the historical inner city have been neglected and are disappearing, losing their identity, and becoming the forgotten side of the city. What can be learned from the historical situation to reactivate the urban canals as carriers of socially and ecologically inclusive urban space? This chapter aims to identify design principles for (historical) urban canal design and examine their potential through design exploration, with Donghao Chong as a typical example. The results showcase how, through the meaningful application of historical knowledge, urban canals can become a water landscape infrastructure that effectively integrates public space by combining design, heritage, water management, and ecology.@en

Practices of spatial (and social) justice depend on our rights as citizens, and those rights are under threat in an increasingly polarised and authoritarian world. Authoritarianism may be easy to spot in a non-Western, non-democratic context but it exists, too, in the West in the form of Surveillance Capitalism, where wealthy, powerful corporations operating with little regulatory oversight are making decisions that affect our lives, work, and well-being.

This paper will discuss contemporary conceptualisations of spatial justice, beginning with an exploration of the damage being done to procedural justice when our rights are eroded by ‘black-box’ algorithms which replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust. The paper will specifically address points 4 and 6: ‘evaluation of policy interventions and their impact on spatial justice’ and ‘challenges and opportunities in implementing spatial justice benchmarks’ in order to relate them to distributive justice to show how fair and equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of human association are being tilted in favour of social media companies through the unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and power that accrues through their knowledge of us. As Shoshana Zuboff says in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), ‘surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us’ (italics in original). By examing social media’s business model we can see how it sacrifices truth to profit, leading to the ‘post-truth’ world we now inhabit, where ‘alternative facts’ or ‘lived experience’ make truth in public discourse seem, not just relative, but up for grabs; where strength of conviction seems to count more than any objective assessment of reality.

Using Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations to explain the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism, I show how we, as consumers, eagerly insert ourselves into the apparatuses of social media and, as a result, render up our information for others’ use and profit. This latest incarnation of Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ revives Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century image of capitalism as a vampire feeding on labour, only in the twenty-first century, ‘instead of labour, it is feeding on every aspect of every human’s experience’ (Zuboff 2019).

The paper ends, however, with a note of hope because it argues that we will always be able to have agency as citizens, provided we use that agency and not allow ourselves fritter it away simply because we want to be entertained. We need to practice our citizenship; it is an active thing. The theoretical explorations in this paper will help inform us about the spatial and social practices of justice. By helping us understand what is going on, and the dangers we currently face (as well as highlighting the effects these dangers are already having on our lives) we will be better able to prepare ourselves to deal with them in the future.@en

Water justice can be a delicate balancing act. Conservation regulations ensure urban areas’ water demands are met, but these may conflict with the water rights of local people living in catchment areas. No metropolis wants to face water shortages, yet prioritising municipalities’ rights over those of local people can result in water injustice. This paper explores water rights and water justice, defining both to show how the latter is achieved by balancing the former. It examines Chengdu’s water catchment area using field observation, interviews, and document analysis and investigates the causes of water conflict through the lens of local culture. The study then outlines a water justice framework involving domestic habits and lifestyle, production of water, and management principles with the aim of providing parity of rights that highlight local cultural factors. The justice criteria outlined here could also be used in other places where power structures disregard local people’s water rights.@en

The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a wonderful place to work. I had the good fortune to be a Research Fellow there from 2010 to 2016 where I used my time to finalise and write up the research for a monograph (based on my PhD thesis, which I defended in TU Delft in 2009). The book, The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular, was published by Routledge in 2013, and it was through contacts made at IIAS that it was translated into Chinese two years later. While at IIAS I also organised a series of annual conferences around themes I was interested in. This proved to be not only a very effective way of getting in touch with people interested in similar topics (often from other disciplines – a good way of broadening horizons), it also proved a fecund generator of publications, with just over fifty percent of these events leading to books or special issues of journals.@en

In the heart of the Pearl River Delta, the city of Guangzhou is fast-growing and prone to flooding. In history, people constructed canals based on natural waterways to deal with water problems. The canal system not only served as an important infrastructure but was also as the backbone of urban life. The city was built around its canals; they were the lifeline of Guangzhou. But with the development of the road network in recent decades, the urban canals in the historical inner city have been neglected and are disappearing, losing their identity, and becoming the forgotten side of the city. Also, canal restoration projects often only address the historical canals as water infrastructure, without effectively addressing them as public spaces. They are no longer designed as socially inclusive urban spaces and so play no significant role in public life anymore. Restoration projects are not really concerned with the canals or their surrounding urban tissue as a system, neither do they connect the lives of local people to the water. Therefore, the newly designed public spaces in these projects often function poorly, if at all. What can be learned from the historical situation to re-activate the urban canals as carriers of socially and ecologically inclusive urban space?@en

The complexity and interconnectedness of the urban challenges of today demand integrated and innovative approaches to the planning and design of sustainable, fair, and inclusive cities and regions. This, in turn, requires us to challenge and rethink current planning practice and education. Future generations of planners and designers need knowledge and skills to deal with that complexity by integrating insights from across different disciplines, from urban and regional design, environmental technology, geomatics, and urban studies to history and other branches of the social sciences. Furthermore, they also need to have a strong understanding of the values, ethical challenges, and dilemmas intrinsic to planning practice. These insights, methods, and frameworks provide a foundation for envisioning a future in which justice and sustainability play central roles. Contemporary planners need effective tools for developing shared spatial visions in communicative democratic exercises, to design strategies to achieve those visions, and create action plans for their implementation. Communication plays a central role in multi-stakeholder environments, especially when power and knowledge are unevenly distributed, as is the case in cities. It is generally understood that the fields of planning and design require a value-oriented stance that seeks to promote pluralism(both epistemological and political) and shape public debate and practice. Planning is seen as a process in which visioning and strategy creation for (and with) diverse stakeholders is carried out. Therefore, blueprint planning is skewed in favour of participatory and deliberative planning. Conveying ideas and shaping the future are two of the capabilities of planning and design. With the help of design, we can better ground planning in existing spatial conditions and maximise the potentials of a given space. Design adds imagination and creativity to planning practice and opens up opportunities for experimenting with stakeholder participation and (visually) communicating solutions to complex urban challenges. This book provides an authoritative collection of perspectives on theories, urban challenges, and methods of research and education in planning, from a diversity of perspectives and disciplines. It builds upon the integrative ‘Delft approach’ to Urbanism, which draws on knowledge and research from design, the social and physical sciences, and engineering. At the Department of Urbanism of TU Delft, students and staff engage in cross-disciplinary and comparative studies to better understand the inherent connections between spatial planning, spatial design, landscape design, environmental technology, urban data science and urban studies. It is our hope that the various chapters in this book will resonate with the call for a more pluralist and adaptive approach to planning and design, one that is in constant evolution in response to changing needs, circumstances, and perspectives.@en

Cities attract migrants. The relationship between the two can be symbiotic, with the city acting as a magnet for opportunity and also benefitting from the hard (and often quite badly paid) work migrants do. When properly managed, this can be a win-win situation; when misunderstood or mismanaged, it can cause social and economic problems that become entrenched and hard to fix. The papers in this Focus section examine several migrations in Asia (in China, India, and Indonesia) and also Asian migration to the West (in the form of Amsterdam’s Chinatown) to see what the current unprecedented wave of migration means for the people themselves and for the cities they move to.@en

Asian cities are undergoing massive transformation in the face of globalization. Urbanization is not only part and parcel of these transformations; it is often the most visible expression of them. Three recent books explore some of these urban transformations: Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heidi Imai examine Asian alleyways as an urban vernacular threatened by globalization; K.C. Ho looks at the neighborhood scale in Asia’s cities; while Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang showcase how visual arts act as the “urbanized interface” of China. As I read these books it occurred to me that their topics: the alleyway, the neighborhood, and visual arts, each seemed to represent one of the three city elements outlined by David Grahame Shane in Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory (2005): namely: the armature, the enclave, and the heterotopia.@en

The Department of Urbanism of the TU Delft is organised in six sections: Spatial Planning & Strategy (SPS), Urban Design, Environmental Technology & Design, Urban Studies, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Data Science. SPS has three distinct and complementary pillars: (i) Spatial Planning & Strategy, (ii) Regional Design and Planning, and (iii) International Urbanisation & Development Planning. Spatial Planning at TU Delft has an evident, but unique relationship with spatial design, focusing on the development and transformation of spatial form, composition, patterns, structures, and networks. [...]@en