Desire and Circumstance of Urban Density: Tightness as Positive Density in Asian Cities

Is urban density to be desired or is it merely the outcome of external forces? What makes a hyper-dense environment desirable or unacceptable? Such questions were examined in the exhibition ‘Super Tight’ held in Melbourne this year. This work developed the term ‘tightness’ with the aim of placing a qualitative dimension on density and to view it as a desirable. This aim is premised on the fact that procuring density is a critical task of reducing the environmental footprints of cities, and that modern western cities, in particular, struggle to overcome their legacy of dispersed planning - both in policy and practice. The Supertight project establishes ‘tightness’ as a counterpoint to density as volume, and the density of the Asian city as a counterfactual to models of urban dispersal found in Australian cities. Such cities have bottom-up social, economic, political and other trajectories which drove the tightening of their urban fabric; yet in many cases the outcome has been a vibrant and diverse urban form. The emergence of extremely tight, or closely integrated living and working environments in cities has coincided with the development of technologies that have brought people, and institutions, into a state of closeness previously unimaginable. Tightness, closeness and connectivity are conditions, that the despite the corresponding trade-off of personal space that are inherently desirable conditions. To what extent can dense, tight, and constrained urban conditions be considered the outcome of this desire for closeness and connectivity – rather than simply the by-product of uncontrolled human settlement.