Diversifying your city, learning from East Asia

Abstract

The speed and quantity of transformation in contemporary East Asian cities has simultaneously fascinated artists and urbanists. On the occasion of RE/Art in Zurich, the table Diversifying your city: learning from East Asia will probe how diversity, openness and adaptability as urban qualities in city centers of Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Bangkok have activated their creative potentials and catalyzed their urban developments, and how these East Asian experience could help rethink contemporary cities in the European context.

Questions framing the discussion:

1. How do diversity, openness and adaptability facilitate creative urban production? 2. What are the spatial qualities that have produced these qualities of diversity, openness and adaptability? 3. Who are the actors that participate? What are the definitions for global and local given the transnational networks of creative producers? 4. How do the institutional frameworks and urban governance structures shape the constellation of informal/formal and bottom-up/top down in creative urban production? What are the differences in the urban rules that promote small business startups and microeconomies? 5. In context of East Asian cities’ rapid urban transformations (and the obdurateness of morphology), how is urban form be a driver for the creative production? 6. What could be learned from these experiences in East Asia?