ACADEMIC JOURNAL of ARCHITECTURE

History Identification of Landscape Architecture Design: A Case Study of Yinhe Square (Yinhe Guangchang), Tianjin, China

2026-05-12T10:16:04+07:00

Chinese municipal squares are typically analyzed through governance, publicness, or post‑reform urban development, with little attention to world landscape architecture history. This study adopts a qualitative interpretative methodology and typological analysis to examine Yinhe Square (Yinhe Guangchang) in Tianjin, China. Rather than comparing the site to specific historical landmarks, the research evaluates its spatial configuration against broader landscape principles from prehistoric to twentieth‑century traditions. Findings reveal that Yinhe Square integrates design ideas from Neolithic menhirs (territoriality, collective memory), Classical agoras and Roman forums (civic openness and scale), ancient theaters (terraced gathering), East Asian principles of balance and appropriation (shakkei), Renaissance axial symmetry, Japanese hide‑and‑reveal sequencing, English garden naturalistic composition, nineteenth‑century public park accessibility, and twentieth‑century correspondence between form and context. The square operates as a contemporary palimpsest of global landscape architecture principles rather than solely a product of governance‑led public space formation. This conclusion challenges prevailing tendencies in Chinese urban space research and demonstrates the relevance of landscape architectural history for analyzing contemporary civic landscapes. The authors acknowledge this as one interpretative perspective among many possible readings. The findings offer conceptual resources for landscape architecture academics, urban historians, and practitioners seeking historically informed design and analysis of Chinese municipal squares.

From Cultural Roots to Sustainable Urbanism: A Critique of Machizukuri Development and Mechanisms in Japan

2026-05-28T13:30:55+07:00

This research aims to study and synthesize the development of the "Machizukuri" concept from the past to the present, and to suggest guidelines for developing a sustainable conceptual framework to address social and environmental crises in the 21st century, using documentary research methodology. The study reveals that the foundations of Machizukuri are embedded in the city's historical urban fabric, which emphasized spatial relationships of "Cho" and social units of "Chonaikai," shaped through cultural mechanisms and self-management for coping with disasters, as well as architectural preservation work. However, Machizukuri is currently facing new challenges, including global warming, an aging society, and the problem of empty housing (Akiya). This article therefore argues a transition from focusing solely on physical and aesthetic dimensions to deep participation and collaborative policy development, the focus is on integrating digital technology and the concept of resilient cities to create practical approaches from lessons learned, applicable to both Japanese and Southeast Asian urban contexts.

Housing Challenges and Coping Approaches among International Students in Ratchathewi, Bangkok

2026-06-08T14:26:11+07:00

This paper examines the experiences and strategies of international postgraduate students in off-campus housing in Ratchathewi District, Bangkok. Off-campus housing is limited and expensive, and many students live in private rental accommodation in areas adjoining the university. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with twelve international postgraduates and uses thematic analysis to explore housing difficulties, decision-making processes and everyday coping approaches. Results indicate that students face interlinked issues of rental affordability, language barriers, a lack of housing information, spatial trade-offs, and variable housing quality. In response, students draw on peer networks, shared accommodation, budget adjustment, informal translation support, collective cooking, minor room modification and acceptance of compromised living conditions. The paper argues that the response to these challenges is not a fixed strategy but a ` coping approach mediated by Bangkok’s private rental market, students’ financial resources, language ability, peer networks and limited institutional housing support. This study contributes to the literature on student housing and urban studies by illustrating how international students acquire situated housing knowledge as they navigate the off-campus rental markets in a Southeast Asian city. It also underscores the need for universities and housing providers to improve multilingual housing information, rental guidance, and accommodation support for international students.

Provincializing Housing Resilience: Urban Political Ecology, Informality, and the Right to Dwell

2026-06-18T08:29:15+07:00

Housing resilience has become a central concern of urban climate governance, yet its dominant framing remains technocratic, focusing on upgrading structures, optimizing infrastructure, and engineering adaptive capacity. This paper argues that such framings systematically depoliticize resilience by obscuring the property relations, exclusionary planning, and uneven infrastructures that determine who can secure safe dwelling. Through a critical narrative review spanning urban political ecology (UPE), housing studies, infrastructure studies, and climate justice scholarship, the paper develops a provincialized UPE framework that re-centers analysis on the Global South, where informality is constitutive of urbanization rather than a deviation from it. The framework advances three interconnected analytics, “CEE”. Capture traces how resilience is financialized and commodified, transforming safety into an investable frontier that deepens housing inequality. Enclosure diagnoses how resilience planning produces fortified enclaves for elites alongside sacrifice zones of normalized risk. Endurance foregrounds the everyday repair, improvisation, and insurgent dwelling through which marginalized communities assemble habitability where formal systems fail. These analytics converge on a political horizon of radical housing resilience, demanding redistribution, recognition, and the right to dwell. Abuja, Nigeria, a master-planned capital where formal order and informal life collide, serves as one illustrative thread among several Southern cities. The paper’s contribution lies less in the now-established claim that informality is constitutive of urbanization than in integrating these dispersed critical strands into a single diagnostic framework calibrated to housing resilience, reframing it as a political struggle over dwelling rather than a technical property of buildings.