Local Cultures – Global Spaces
Abstract
Urban theory is undivorceable from place. For hub-cities like Hongkong, Singapore or Vancouver, place is contiguous with the global. Taking a cue from the conference theme that “the concept of place is local, yet globalised,” this paper suggests a theorist who conceptualises this concept of globalised place is similarly spatialised. A theorist’s body develops and reconstitutes across cities, readers, texts, dialogues, encounters, and philosophical personas. Its thoughts never belong to a fixed “I.” Its theoretical position is written in real time by the forces that simultaneously make place and globe. Without a fixed “I,” there is no theorist (in a conventional sense) who stands above the flows of forces making the globalised place to represent that as a slice in time. Theorist and texts are produced in-between these flows; to engage with these texts is to be in-between these flows. Here, the theorist-masterplanner, who determines what socio-spatial form a (global) city must ethically take, disappears. However, this does not mean an absence of ethics. Rather, and specifically for hub-cities, this may mean the ethical is more than a reliance on fixed ethnic-cultural mores and identities. Perhaps the ethical might be a matter of producing urban artefacts (including texts) that proliferates the capacities for a city and its people to create and act, rather than represent an ideal end. This paper proposes, to write urban theory (or to produce the theorist) in between localities and globalities is to broaden the relation between theory and writing. Writing moves beyond being a representational tool to a poetic (poeisis) one. The text and theorist are bodies in the global-place flows that modifies certain flows in order to create spaces for yet-determined places that nonetheless retain their perpetual in-betweenness. Afterall, the “in-between” is not a point between things, but an opening.
Since completing a PhD at RMIT’s School of Architecture in the 2000’s, Chan has researched, taught, written, and designed in Australia, Hongkong, Singapore and Canada, with a focus on counter-colonial/nationalist experiments within design and urban theory practices. This includes exploring how theoretical writing can be a spatial-activist tool. Chan is an urban designer currently at Vancouver’s Planning Department, and hopes to recover soon from a recent spine injury/surgery, which started him to explore what is “pain” in spatial practices.