Asia ’s Diversity & Asia’s Dwellings: A Geographer’s Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores some of the essential geographic elements relating to Asia that make it difficult generalizing about the continent as well as a challenge to map Asia’s vernacular architectural patterns. While generalizing about ‘time’ and ‘space’ are both important, one must guard against comparing housing patterns in relatively small countries with those of larger ones and suggesting a timelessness and homogeneity of building forms within Asia. Insufficient data sources further frustrate any effort to employ maps as analytical tools of analysis. Old dwellings in Asia are not the product of a motionless traditional culture in which values were stagnant and techniques static, yet the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ are unfortunately loaded with ambiguities of agelessness, monotony, and permanence rather than revealing that ‘traditions’ are recreated and remodified as time passes and as building structures are brought from one place to another. Spurred by accelerated economic development that has come on the heals of decades of neglect, warfare, and political upheaval, much of Asia’s inherited past has been vanishing rapidly. Yet, the nature of this crisis of a loss of heritage alarms some but certainly not all, and varies from country to country in the attention given to it. Market reforms, political squabbling, conflicting visions of planners, fluid property markets, poorly enforced or absent policies, indifferent public attitudes, as well as inertia and neglect continue to corrode the accumulated built heritage and frustrate efforts of those who wish to further enhance heritage preservation efforts. While this paper calls for increasing the use of maps when writing about Asia’s vernacular architecture in order to raise questions, kindle insights, and stimulate thinking about the analytical power of graphic representation of information, it recognizes inherent difficulties in the mapping enterprise.