Urban Design and Adaptive Reuse in North Korea, Japan, and Singapore (opens in new tab)

> Singapore's "strata malls" let individuals own shops outright, not rent them. Any building change needs 80% owner approval. Result: retirees treating shops as social clubs, refusing million-dollar buyouts. These malls become uncurated havens for niche businesses and retirement communities disguised as retail.

Note that "strata" means "condominium": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_title , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium .

There are some interesting observations about commercial retail condominiums in Toronto. Several "dead malls" with quirky shops and low foot traffic are retail condos (i.e. with individually owned units, not rented from the building owner): Aura (Yonge & Gerrard), Chinatown Centre (Spadina & Sullivan). Because the units are owned, they can't be kicked out on a whim in order to change the variety of shops in the mall.

OG Title : Adaptive Reuse Across Asia: Singapore's Fragmented Ownership, Japan's Rural Revival, & Korea's Material Limits

It was a bit long and whatnot, so I edited down. Turns out to be a pretty good interview about a guy (Calvin Chua) who teach Urban Design in North Korea for a bit

The interviewee sounds like a insufferable navel-gazing professor. A lot of platitudes and very evasive about anything concrete. (the interview section doesn't add anything new to the top intro/description)

"the agenda of rethinking the peripheries" - how can this not elicit an eye-roll..?

At least props to the interviewer for calling him out on "heroic architecture". A very "humanities" move, make up some bullshit term, don't explain it, make your interlocuter guess and feel like an idiot.

the TLDR of the main thesis is when you redesign a space, try to see if you can preserve the existing social structures and perceive how people interact with architecture before you roll in with the bulldozers. But it doesn't really present any concrete examples, so whatever..

It seems there are maybe kernels of some good ideas, but then everyone started to enjoy the smell of their own farts too much

Interesting stuff. I did not realize it was even possible to build a 40-story building without using steel. (I mean, I presume they use some, just a lot less if the walls are load-bearing.)

The issue with trying to study US YIMBY through the lens of Asian urban planning is that most of these Asian countries have very different approaches to civil rights and private property than America. Japan has the added complication of routine natural disasters forcing rebuilds of housing. Singapore is a tiny city-state with a strong single party unicameral government (no separate parliaments, no municipal/state/federal divide) and a willingness to use eminent domain powers (and you don't "own" property there, most land is not freehold, you are merely temporarily leasing it from the state). South Korea is more similar to the US with a high percentage of rental owners but they also have a negative population growth (same as Japan). The less said about North Korea the better. People in these countries are also used to public transport, which is completely unacceptable to most Americans used to car ownership.

In short, some of these models are nice to be admired from afar and I definitely recommend going in person to to experience them, but I doubt there's truly any interesting takeaways that truly useful for the US.