Skip to content
News

Person: Ken Tadashi Oshima

Alternative gentrification: coexistence of traditional and new industries in historic districts through transfer of development rights in Dihua Street, Taiwan

Sho, K., Chen, Y.-L., & Oshima, K. T. (2023). Alternative gentrification: coexistence of traditional and new industries in historic districts through transfer of development rights in Dihua Street, Taiwan. International Journal of Heritage Studies : IJHS, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2250776

View Publication

Abstract

The transfer of development rights (TDR) has been widely used in the preservation of historic districts. The Dihua Street TDR (DS-TDR) in Taipei, Taiwan, successfully preserves the exteriors of historic buildings and traditional landscape in Dihua Street, without significant displacement of previous residents or increases in rents. This study describes this process as 'alternative gentrification', which facilitates the coexistence of traditional and new industries in historic districts, unlike typical gentrification in other cities. Although new shops gradually replace existing shops, the rent level remains relatively affordable compared with other shopping streets in the Taipei city centre. These aspects enable the coexistence of a clustering of new creative-industrial stores and existing stores within the buildings restored and landscaped by the DS-TDR.

Keywords

Historic district; transfer of development rights; historic buildings; restoration; landscaping; Commercial Gentrification; Heritage; Displacement; TDR; Urbanization; Conservation; Neighborhood; Culture; State

Rediscovering Japanese Urban Space in a World Context

Oshima, Ken Tadashi. (2016). Rediscovering Japanese Urban Space in a World Context. Journal Of Urban History, 42(3), 623 – 633.

View Publication

Abstract

Counter to the rise of the modern metropolis in Japan in the era of high-speed growth following World War II, a movement to embrace elements of traditional townscapes that had been lost as rational urban planning took hold from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. During this period, the realities of large-scale urban development and increasing urban problems would eventually expose the limitations of functional planning and the need to preserve traditional structures and townscapes. While architects like Bruno Taut had praised the virtues of the farmhouse villages at Shirakawago in the 1930s and Yoshida Tetsur presented traditional Japanese architecture to an international audience as contemporary design before World War II, among others, the discourse subsequently shifted from Japanese objects and structures to urban space in the postwar period. This discourse on Japanese urban space would lead to the publication of Nihon no toshi kukan (Japanese Urban Space) in 1963 (1968 as a book) that presented the work of the Toshi dezain kenkyutai (Urban Design Research Group) including Isozaki Arata (1931-) and architectural historian It Teiji (1922-2010). This article analyzes the origins and implications of this work through a plethora of subsequent design surveys throughout Japan and other trajectories of research and design of Japanese urban space from the 1960s to the present.

Keywords

Japanese Urban Space; Urban Landscape; Serial Vision; Imageability; Design Survey

Ken Tadashi Oshima named a Society of Architectural Historians Fellow

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches trans-national architectural history, theory and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and UCLA, and has taught at Columbia University and the University of British Columbia. He earned an AB degree, magna cum laude, in East Asian studies and visual and environmental studies from Harvard College, an MArch degree from University of California,…

Humanities, Histories, Futures (HHF)

HHF invests in CBE’s current humanities strengths, including connections to social science, relevant to climate solutions, prosperity, equity, and social justice. This includes connecting CBE’s humanities capabilities with the greatest needs of other UW colleges, local institutions, and community and industry partners; developing teaching and research initiatives to contextualize, articulate, and challenge concepts of what constitutes just, responsible, and resilient built environments; and developing national and international symposia, workshops, and other events to elevate CBE scholarship and research in humanities, histories, and futures, with a particular focus on climate solutions.

PhD in the Built Environment

The College of Built Environments consists of five departments that together provide one of the country’s few comprehensive built environment programs within one academic unit: Architecture, Construction Management, Landscape Architecture, Real Estate, and Urban Design and Planning. Together, this combination of departments enable faculty and students to engage almost the entire development process, from economic and environmental planning, real estate, regulatory processes, siting and design, through actual financing and construction, to facility management and adaptive reuse in subsequent stages. Thus, the college is inherently multi-disciplinary, not only in terms of the dimensions of reality that it treats, but also in regard to the specialized disciplines, methods, and practices that it employs: history, theory, cultural criticism, engineering, design, planning, urban design, energy sciences, acoustics, lighting, environmental psychology, ecology, real estate analysis, statistics, management, horticulture, soil science, law, public policy, and ethics. In addition, because of the College’s focus on comprehensive analysis and practice concerning the built environment and its interrelation with society, it is substantially engaged in interdisciplinary work with other units on campus and outside of the campus, including mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering; with public policy and the health sciences; with art and art history; with textual interpretation in the humanities; with many of the computing and digitization activities that range from digital arts to the information school and technical communications; with education and social studies and services; with sustainability and ecological programs, including urban ecology, geography, the College of Forest Resources (especially urban horticulture and urban forestry), and Ocean Science and Fisheries; with environmental and land use law.

The College’s interdisciplinary character is a good fit with the emerging trends in today’s complex world, where only a pluralistic and collaborative approach will generate the necessary learning and teaching, research, and service. If we are to provide, in the end, both disciplinary and professional means to promote environmental well-being, the diverse environmental specializations must be fully integrated. Thus, working outside traditional disciplinary and departmental categories, the College’s faculty will advance solutions to problems that demand interdisciplinary perspectives and expertise. Other UW units bring much to bear on the built environment and students are wholeheartedly encouraged to explore possible cross-campus connections both in obvious and seemingly unlikely places. The Technology and Project Design/Delivery specialization especially connects with Psychology, the Information School, Technical Communication, Computer Science and Engineering, and Industrial Engineering; the Sustainable Systems and Prototypes field with Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, the Information School, Technical Communication, the College of Forest Resources (especially Eco-System Science and Conservation, Urban Horticulture and Urban Forestry), the Evans School of Public Affairs, Geography, Public Health, Ocean Science and Fisheries, and Social Work, Urban Ecology, and perhaps Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Processes and Nanotechnology; the area of History, Theory, and Representation with Textual Studies, Art History, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at Tacoma, and Comparative History of Ideas.

Center for Asian Urbanism

The Center for Asian Urbanism was established to promote and undertake interdisciplinary and collaborative research of urban conditions and processes in Asia and the “Global Pacific”, for example, the relevance of cities and city-regions in Asia to each other, to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., and to the world at large. 

The Center integrates research and action-oriented activities in the field to develop new knowledge and inform policy, decision-making and professional development. It provides a platform locally and internationally for critical discussion of urban issues in Asia and beyond.

The Center serves as a platform to explore the intersection of architecture, construction, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. It is also the goal of the collaborative to establish the University of Washington as a national and international leader in the field of urban research in Asia. The College, together with other units at the University of Washington, including especially the Jackson School of International Studies, the Asian Law Center and the Foster School of Business’s Global Business Center, currently has one of the strongest concentrations of scholars on Asian cities and urbanization in the United States.

Ken Tadashi Oshima

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where he teaches in the areas of trans-national architectural history, theory, representation, and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and taught at Columbia University and the University of British Columbia. He earned an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, in East Asian Studies and Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College, M. Arch. degree from U. C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Columbia University. From 2003-5, he was a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in London.

Dr. Oshima’s publications include Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and Sea (Lars Müller/Harvard GSD, 2015), Architecturalized Asia (University of Hawaii Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2013), GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Toto, 2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) and Arata Isozaki (Phaidon, 2009). He curated “Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake” (Harvard GSD, 2012), “SANAA: Beyond Borders”” (Henry Art Gallery 2007-8), and co-curator of “Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond” (University of Pennsylvania, UC Santa Barbara, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, 2006-7). He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2016-18 and was an editor and contributor to Architecture + Urbanism for more than ten years, co-authoring the two-volume special issue, Visions of the Real: Modern Houses in the 20th Century (2000). His articles on the international context of architecture and urbanism in Japan have been published in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Review, Architectural Theory Review, Kenchiku Bunka, Japan Architect, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and the AA Files.