1999 Urban Design
Burning Rivers (Where Cities Melt): A Study of Urban Waterfronts throughout Southeast Asia

“Where Cities Melt: A Study of Urban Waterfronts in Southeast Asia” elaborates on aspects of “Connecting the East River Waterfront.” This project examines a variety of issues relating to New York’s East River while focusing on the need of further implementation of connections between the waterfront and the community. “Where Cities Melt” carries this research forward by proposing a study of multiplicitous urban relationships affecting urban waterfronts in Southeast Asia. It specifically examines the physical and social connections between waterfronts and their public. The waterfront as a “place” consists of a variety of physical urban spaces. Streets, parks, paths, piers, and other architectural spaces work as interrelated elements that provide public access to experience the water’s edge. While traveling to different cities I would document the typology of these different urban spaces. As diverse communities interact at these places, social activities vary depending on local rituals, planning policies, and contemporary trends. The public use of the waterfront occurs in the forms of recreation, commerce, transportation, and cultural events. By visiting cities with variegated sociopolitical landscapes, I would document the richness of activities that animate urban waterfronts.

Each of the cities on my travel itinerary offers a very different urban relationship with the waterfront. The sites in India have a sacred regard for the water. Dhaka, with its yearly floods, has a more temporal relationship. Rangoon, at the mouth of Burma’s Mandalay River, has resisted densification and maintains many open-space connections to its waterfront. In contrast, Bangkok’s rapid development around the Chao Phyra River leaves this waterway as one of the few open spaces in this dense city. Vietnam’s large agricultural base is still evident in the rice fields surrounding Saigon while Singapore’s waterfront embraces highly commercial development. Modern skyscrapers contrast with vernacular structures along Jakarta’s Java Sea, unlike Hong Kong’s harbor which is more developed than most Western cities. My tentative itinerary is as follows: Bombay, Calcutta, Dhaka, Rangoon, Bangkok, Pnomh Penh, Saigon, Singapore, Jakarta, and Hong Kong.

These densely populated cities face increases in development and population in the near future. The metabolic growth in housing, transportation, infrastructure, and commerce will disrupt current patterns of local and regional activity on the waterfront. Urban designers and architects will be called upon to implement plans for these urban edges. This study will inform the dialogue surrounding our urban waterfronts by illustrating the need to increase contextual connection to the waterfront. I hope to develop this study by means of the SOM Foundation Urban Design fellowship.

Fellow Experience

Rabindranath Tagore, Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize winning poet also known for his theoretical writing and travelogues, wrote in 1922: “It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travelers nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we generalize and crush our human facts into the packages within the steel trunks that hold our travelers’ reports.”

Thanks to the travel enabled by the SOM Foundation fellowship I now see the world in a brand-new light. It is difficult to try and describe how my original intentions were fulfilled during my travel since they were exceedingly fulfilled in more ways than I could have imagined before departure. While I tried to better understand man’s relationship to water in its different forms, I ended up fascinated by mountains. I had originally intended on focusing on the waterfronts of large cities but ended up finding great reward among rural villages. I had originally intended on traveling for four months and ended up doubling that time. Ultimately this trip was a priceless one (and one which I could scarcely afford to take again).

Perhaps the greatest fulfillment arose from the day-to-day getting about in places vastly different from what I know. There is a somewhat dark aspect to the kind of realization this exposure brings: attitudes inclining toward alienation or cynicism. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote in The Poisenwood Bible: “Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.” After traveling through places which have so much less than our nation of plenty, I have returned with a greater appreciation for our liberties, prosperity, and grocery stores. I have also learned that we have much to learn from other and seemingly less prosperous nations.

I was most impressed by how gracefully people lived without the bubbles of safety and comfort we take for granted. It is safe to say that people in less developed countries such as Southeast Asia (SEA) live more in tune with their surroundings; more in connection with the life giving and life taking forces of nature. Even Bangladesh, the densest populated country in the world, is primarily composed of water, farm, and village.

There is something remarkably different in the way in which people appreciate water in different lands. In most of SEA water is regarded as a variable element of change. In the West we think of our lakes, rivers, and oceans as a sort of constant and pleasing backdrop. Floods and hurricanes periodically interrupt this notion and the real estate plots assumed to be terra firma. In lands that experience yearly monsoons and their attendant floods, people follow quite a different model. While we often think of water as that which is opposite of land, in SEA the two intermingle and mix. Roads become canals for part of the year and then once again roads. Rice fields start as ponds and then end up as dry fields of golden grass. In Vietnam the same word for water is for country, nuoc.

I suppose I have one regret about my trip. Since I traveled most countries during their dry season, I didn’t have a chance to live through a monsoon. I wish I could have seen how different places changed when it rains every day. I wish I could have stayed longer and seen Varanasi flooded. It must be an entirely different city.

What I learned most during my trip was how little I know.

Some of the happiest days of my traveling were spent hiking around and painting among the mountains of Tibet. These efforts were more than exercises in landscape art. They were meditations on the impermanence and changeability of everything in this world. Of all things, mountains seem the most stable. Yet even the highest mountains in and around the Himalayas are evidence of the ever-changing earth. As proud and austere as they seem in their relative geological youth, the yearly thawing of snow erodes granite to gravel to dust. What are now mountains will once again be ocean.

Ultimately these meditations made me realize that we shouldn’t take ourselves all too seriously. Nor should we take the things and people around us for granted. If there is one solid thing I brought back with me, one jewel carved out of the experience of this trip, it would be this. Mountains, like anything else of seeming permanence, rise and fall like the ocean’s waves.