Asia at Play: Ideas of Leisure and the Emergence of Modernist Recreational Landscapes, 1900-1970

Abstract

Play spaces have historically functioned as temporary ideal worlds, not complete utopias but imagined perfect worlds in which people find momentary escape from everyday reality. Research on the histories of recreation in Europe and America has shown that the emergence of modernist “playscapes” in the early 20th century, such as amusement parks, expositions, theme parks and fun fairs, etc., was part and parcel of the advent of industrialization and concomitant social reform movements that sought to introduce new “free time” and collective leisure activities to the working class. While these processes helped generate new relations between work and leisure and gave new meanings to collective social life, some of these spaces also worked to reinforce existing social and cultural hierarchies and perpetuate social stratification. Meanwhile, the provision of recreational landscapes was incorporated into practices of planning, landscape architecture and real estate, where a multitude of experts, institutions and other agents participated in their development, with varied implications for the ongoing reshaping of urban forms as well as the connection between city centers and suburban territories. Although developed under very different conditions, a variety of modernist recreational spaces emerged in major metropolises in East and Southeast Asia in the early and mid 20th century. Earlier examples include the pleasure gardens that flourished in the early 20th century and provided mass entertainment to Chinese audiences in Shanghai, the zoos and amusement parks constructed by private railway companies in Japan to facilitate suburban expansion, and the new spectator sports venues such as baseball fields in Taiwan and racecourses in other cities that were adapted from earlier colonial models. While these and other play spaces have been studied by historians, research to date has tended to approach them as discrete entities with little connection either with accelerating capitalist development in the region or with the larger networks of experts, entrepreneurs and other institutional players that participated in their conception and development. Papers in this session will explore the diverse agendas, strategies and transnational exchange of knowledge in the production of recreational landscapes in East and Southeast Asia from the 1900s up to the 1970s. Of particular interest are the changing roles of recreation and their impacts on spatial relations, the adaptation of foreign planning and design models and their implications for local urban forms, the commercialization of leisure and their links with new consumption practices, and the relations between formal and informal recreational spaces.