The Ugly Cities of Asia - Any hope of beauty for cities built after 1950?

Clearly, there will be those who find skyscrapers, concrete, and glass to be attractive. I don't. I think Tokyo is ugly and Hong Kong is only helped by its natural setting. The cities of China are ugly as sin outside of the part of Shanghai built by foreigners and the hutong area of Beijing. Visiting Europe again and even Istanbul - not even a fully Western city - and seeing the beauty of the nineteenth architecture, even when it is crumbling, is always a painful reminder of just how unpardonably ugly the cities of Asia are. I suppose they were doomed by the materials used in their traditional architecture. Coming to Europe always depressed because of this.

I wasn't talking so much about why East Asian cities are ugly. There are plenty of reasons ranging from bombing to wood structures, to population pressures. I was more bemoaning the fact and commenting that this reality makes me awfully depressed. This was an emotional comment more than a rational one. Also, if East Asian cities looked more East Asian, they wouldn't be ugly. Hence, I noted that Beijing's inner city is nice (though clearly impractical due to the . The problem is that they are an nearly endlessly repeating city scape of concrete, glass and steel. Even the construction minister of China bemoaned the fact that China was "a land of 1,000 identical cities" in 2007. These are the places that matter in the future.The comment about East Asian cities having more energy is absolutely true though. It's too bad. I wish the beautiful places also had the vitality. I fear the places with the vitality have no hope of becoming beautiful.

I actually think the urban poor - or at least the barbarous ones - are better concealed in Chinese cities than in European ones. My feelings connected to East Asian cities combine elitism masking self-doubt, schadenfreude, and self-pity. While China is quickly coming to dominate the world economically and will soon do so politically, its cities will never be attractive like those of the West. The West may be enervated, but at least it is beautiful. At the same, there is no escape from me from concrete, gray, Asia. Strange to call it gray when demographically Europe is gray and getting grayer.