Urban Planning

Modern vs Traditional: Analysing sanitation efforts within China’s messy urban areas

‘China’s cities seem especially—in many respects increasingly—inhospitable to community self-determination and participation in environmental design’1

Urban Planning has proven to be difficult when accommodating a large population and according to Daniel Abramson within his article Messy Urbanism and Space for Community Engagement in China, there is a common theme of these urban areas becoming messy because of the lack of community engagement within urban development. However, to understand how messy urbanism is approached and improved, sanitation efforts enable a better insight as to how developers have been able to boost community spirt, while also cleaning up living spaces and streets. By the 1950’s China seems determined to clean up its urban spaces, and connect the public through the concept of being involved in improving sanitation together.

There are sanitation posters targeted at both children and adults to help them learn how to improve their hygiene and avoid the spread of diseases. These posters also provide insight towards Daniel Abramson’s argument which states that China would not follow the West in spreading out its population to smaller scale areas to avoid messy urbanism, instead he states that modernity was the point of interest rather than urbanity, and they were determined to push the cities into a modern state of living. Therefore, these posters from 1930 to 1950 show the progression of educating urban populations to enable the possibility of ridding the cities of messy urbanisation, while also allowing China to push towards its modern goal. To do this they needed social control of the population to enable these plans for larger streets and skyscraper buildings to become reality. Sanitation would change the state of minds and allow the community identity to accept the modernisation of their city. Below are two examples of how sanitisation was promoted towards children to catch germs and improve the living conditions of their homes.

Translation: I cover my mouth when I cough, and I spit into spittoon2

Translation: Let air circulate – open windows and doors in the morning3

‘Architectural chaos therefore also reflects a continuity and strength of community composition and identity. The coexistence of built-environmental disorder with community social order is extremely contradictory to the minds of professional planners and officials in China.’4

Furthermore, these plans to modernise China and allow space for wide streets and less enclosed living spaces could only go so far without demolishing Chinas traditional architecture. Instead, the traditional and modern began to coexist, which almost contradicted the idea of reducing messy urbanism. However, what can be argued is that through sanitation development and education, China improved its community values and enabled living spaces to change without changing. Those who lived within messy urban areas began to understand how to look after themselves and others to avoid spreading diseases, which would have been and still is a large concern within overpopulated areas. By regulating hygiene behaviours and introducing new sanitation protocols, messy areas could still modernise, while also being able to accommodate such a large population.

  1. Daniel Benjamin Abramson, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2016) p.218. [↩]
  2. Hygiene Education for Children (U.S National Library of Medicine, 1950) [↩]
  3. Hygiene Education for Children (U.S National Library of Medicine, 1935). [↩]
  4. Daniel Benjamin Abramson, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2016) p.225 [↩]

Blank Pages: The Great Kanto Earthquake and Japanese Occupied Manchuria

The Great Kanto Earthquake which leveled much of Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923 created an opportunity for reconstruction on an enormous scale and caused a shift in the population distribution as well as the aesthetic standards of the city.  The utopian approach to rebuilding Tokyo after the earthquake mirrors Japanese attitudes towards Manchuria while also serving as a stark contrast of utopian ideals.  

The event was described in the September 1923 issue of the American publication Japan Society as “The Greatest Disaster in History.”1 The earthquake and subsequent fire left “298,000 houses burned and 336,000 more shaken down,” in the journal’s initial report.2 A final estimate of its destruction was that around 45 percent of the structures in Tokyo were leveled, transforming it “from a bustling metropolis and imperial capital to a seemingly extinct city.”3 

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The scale of the destruction was interpreted at the time as “a moral wake-up call if not an outright act of divine punishment” but also, contrastingly, as a “golden opportunity.”5 At a time when utopianism and grand visions of urban planning were circulating in books like Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow, the earthquake essentially rendered Tokyo a blank slate upon which to rebuild.  It literally flattened the city, creating “not only a unique, perhaps unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct Tokyo but the chance to arrest the perceived moral and ideological regress of Japan.”6 Efforts to not only reconstruct, but to renovate, beautify, and modernize Tokyo began.  By 1930 the products of these initiatives could be visibly traced on a series of maps produced by the Tokyo City Government which illustrated the results of projects dedicated to restoration and new construction of parks, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and electrical facilities.7 

8 

In addition to government efforts to rebuilt the city itself, the earthquake triggered a flight from the city center to the areas surrounding Tokyo, increasing the suburban population and decreasing the density of the city.  The suburb of Denenchōfu, planned and constructed in the years just before the earthquake, was modeled after the utopian vision of Howard’s garden city.  The timing of its construction (completed in 1923) and its location outside Tokyo caused its population to increase dramatically after the earthquake.9 This suburban population boom was widespread according to Japan Society’s December 1925 issue, which predicted that “Under the Greater Tokyo system, in which all of these suburban towns will be included in the City of Tokyo—and it is expected that this can be realized within the next decade or so—the City of Tokyo will have a population equalling that of London.”10

Denenchōfu serves as an example of the change in Tokyo’s population distribution as well as a new emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of the city’s spaces.  The architects of Denenchōfu placed a high value on the natural beauty of the development in accordance with Howard’s garden city ideal.11 The Tokyo government likewise invested in natural surroundings in its efforts to rebuild as evidenced by the excerpt in Japan Society’s May 1925 issue stating that “The Park Section of the Tokyo Municipality will plant 3,000 trees along streets in various sections of the city in May as part of the program to beautify the city.”12

This utopian conception of Tokyo post-earthquake as a blank slate on which to modernize infrastructure, disperse the population, and beautify the city parallels how some Japanese planners and intellectuals envisioned Manchuria.  The Japanese conquest of Manchuria after 1931, “provided a blank slate, or as city planners in Manchukuo put it, a white page, hakushi, on which ideal designs might be realized.”13 Ideal designs such as the Agricultural Immigrant Plan which envisioned utopian agricultural villages populated by Japanese farmers in northern Manchuria.14  In fact, “More than a few planners disillusioned by the resistance their plans faced in postearthquake Tokyo found planning on what they considered to be ‘blank pages’ in colonial Manchukuo more rewarding.”15 While the Agricultural Immigrant Plan was never realized, many architectural projects and modernization efforts were carried out in Manchuria.16 Like Tokyo after 1923, it served as a place in which to test utopian ideals.

Despite certain similarities in the conception of utopian plans, one of the stark contrasts between the “blank slate/page” of utopian planning in 1923 Tokyo and 1931 Manchuria was the ideology which accompanied it.  Unlike the aftermath of the Kanto earthquake in which the perceived “moral regress” included socialism, for those censored for their contrary politics in Japan, Manchuria offered a blank slate of a different kind.

  1. Japan Society, About Japan 1920-1928 (Internet Archive, 2021), https://archive.org/details/about-japan-1920-1928/page/n5/mode/2up. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Charles Schencking, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan”, in The Journal of Japanese Studies 34, no. 2: (Summer 2008), 296. [↩]
  4. Zenjirō Horikiri, 1. Areas afflicted by the earthquake and fire disaster, places where fire broke out and circumstances driving the spread of the fire [map], Tokyo City Government, 1930, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~334402~90102430?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%2210808.000%22%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&mi=11&trs=38. [↩]
  5. Schencking, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan”, 297. [↩]
  6. Ibid., 297. [↩]
  7. Zenjirō Horikiri, Teito Fukkō Jigyō Zuhyō, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Tokyo City Government, 1930. [↩]
  8. Zenjirō Horikiri, 5. Program for the reconstruction of the imperial capital [map], Tokyo City Government, 1930, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~334398~90102426?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%2210808.000%22%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&mi=7&trs=38. [↩]
  9. Ken Tadashi Oshima, “Denenchōfu: Building the Garden City in Japan”, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 2: (June, 1996), 146. [↩]
  10. Japan Society, About Japan 1920-1928. [↩]
  11. Oshima, “Denenchōfu: Building the Garden City in Japan”, 144. [↩]
  12. Japan Society, About Japan 1920-1928. [↩]
  13. David Tucker, “City Planning without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo”, in Crossed Histories (Honolulu, 2005), 55. [↩]
  14. Ibid., 53. [↩]
  15. Schencking, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan”, 323. [↩]
  16. Louise Young, “Brave New Empire: Utopian Vision and the Intelligentsia”, in Japan’s Total Empire (Berkeley, 1998), 242. [↩]

Forward planning: A comparison of population control in Manchuko and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

A common thread with ideas of Utopian cities is the importance of planning, especially town planning. In the context of Manchuko, these Utopian ideals were made possible through its conception as an entirely new city, a literal blank slate from which to build a perfect regime. However, as with all concepts of Utopia dreamt up so far, what seems perfect on paper is always difficult if not impossible to make reality.

Take two examples of a Utopian ideal: Manchuko, an area of China under Japanese control, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Korea. Both are examples of a Utopian ideal that aimed to create a perfect world order according to the leader’s ideas. Both enjoyed a large degree of success in their formative years, and yet both ended up struggling to maintain that order as the cities grew.

The greatest similarity I found between these two examples is that of housing and the settlement structure. Both were designed around a rigid system of strictly controlled numbers for houses, whereby the entire population was compartmentalised into numerical blocks of houses, streets, villages, and districts. The aim in both was to instil a sense of duty and order in the inhabitants as well as create stronger bonds. I argue that while this may have been the case for some, this tightly controlled system of planning set itself up for failure from the beginning as both cases failed to take proper account of population demographics and long-term planning.

Let’s compare the statistics. David Tucker sets out the numbers for Manchuko in his chapter City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchuko. Accompanied at every stage with clearly labelled diagrams, he shows the proposed outline of Manchuko. It was ordered into a system of hamlets, with each one surrounded by fields and woodland and bordered by a gated wall and moat1. Each hamlet consists of a community building with a central plaza, and rows of houses arranged around it. Each one would have 150 houses, with each household comprising 5 people and allotted 15 acres of fields. The scale then ascended with 3 hamlets forming a village of 450 households of 2250 people2.

Tucker states that these numbers were very carefully chosen as it was based on an assumption that 150 households of 5 people each would mean an average of about 200 working-age men to provide labour, who would be equally split between guarding and agricultural duties. The designation of 3 hamlets into a village would be enough to provide “a sufficient economic base for shared educational, cultural and administrative facilities”3

These numbers were roughly the same in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Instead of villages, families were grouped together into 25 households, although the size of each household was not regimented4. What sets it apart from Manchuko is the religious aspect. As the name suggests, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a religious organisation, and so the fundamental doctrine is very different from the economic foundation of Manchuko. Perhaps the most striking difference is Taiping’s absolute segregation of the sexes and total prohibition on sex even between married couples, punishable by death5. This appears to have been far more of a religious order than any attempt at population control, and in any case was dropped after the inevitable loss of morale.

What does need to be considered is the sheer scale of population that both Manchuko and Taiping had to plan for. At it’s height, Manchuko had a population of 300,0006. A sizeable number, but comparatively easier to plan for. Taiping, on the other hand, had at its greatest height up to 2 million people7. This is of course impossible to verify and includes people on the periphery who may have proclaimed themselves a follower but not actually lived in a Taiping-controlled city. Nevertheless, the numbers speak for themselves.

In both cases, then, it was not so much a case of a lack of planning, but of fundamental population oversights. Both Manchuko and Taiping were founded on a basis of control of growth; economic for Manchuko and religious for Taiping. For Manchuko, the tightly regimented, perfect-on-paper outline could never have worked in reality as it failed to account for pretty much all aspects of population demographics. Such strictly controlled numbers of households and villages may have seemed like it could have been added to as required, but it takes an all-or-nothing approach and so does not account for the ‘in-between’ stages. Especially for a campaign that aimed to entice Japanese citizens to move in huge numbers, it would have required huge levels of pre-emptive statistics to be able to successfully house the numbers they required and neatly sort people into such a system.

Taiping, in the same vein, placed huge importance on proselytising and enticing new converts. In this sense, it is a contrast to Manchuko as there was far more planning for the governmental and political control than on a daily level, with far vaguer outlines for the distribution of land and labour. The emphasis was on communal life, but without the same kind of structural, regimented divisions seen in Manchuko.

 

Both Manchuko and Taiping are therefore brilliant case studies of the difficulty an urban planner faces in trying to marry a Utopian ideal with the lived reality of the human population. Manchuko arguably enjoyed a greater degree of success due to the smaller population overall, while Taiping could not cope with the sheer overwhelming scale of its devotees. It would thus be interesting to take this discussion further, perhaps in a longer essay than the scope of a blog post allows.

  1. Tucker, David “City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo” in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed)., Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, p. 60 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p. 61 [↩]
  3. Ibid [↩]
  4. Wm. Theodore de Bary (ed), Sources of Chinese Tradition, pg. 225 [↩]
  5. Reilly, Thomas H. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire, University of Washington Press, 2011, p. 142 [↩]
  6. Tucker, pg. 53 [↩]
  7. Philip A. Kuhn. “The Taiping Rebellion” in Cambridge History of China, p. 275 [↩]