ABSTRACT

This book's core thesis questions the legitimacy of conventional masterplanning techniques to address the complexities of urban growth and transformation, and in particular to rapid urbanization occurring at the pace it is in China. As a landscape architect based in Hong Kong for so many years, and given your experience of working within multidisciplinary masterplanning teams alongside your teaching and research, I am interested to hear your views on the preeminent models and methodologies from which urbanization takes shape and the extent to which masterplanning can deal with the speed and complexity and quantity of urbanization taking place, especially within the context of the unrelenting and unprecedented urbanization occurring in Asia. What do you believe to be the merits and pitfalls of top-down centralized planning processes, and by what means can bottom-up emergent processes be developed and engage local constituencies, issues, and desires, to generate local specificities within global models?