Kyoto – Tourism, liveability, landscape, heritage
Releasing the virtuality captured in the Real
A Performative Architecture Studio by Martine de Maeseneer
Master Dissertation studio
Campus Brussels (recruting/open for students from the Brussels & Ghent campus)
English
Studio, with individual Thesis Projects
10-15 students max.
Exempt from the pandemic, Kyoto, the century-old city and former seat of Japan’s imperial court – by many still considered the cultural capital of Japan – had been under severe pressure from its rapidly growing tourism industry. Huge tourist numbers, at times outnumbering its population ten times over, created tensions and conflicts, with the city of Kyoto on one hand benefitting economically from tourism, whilst on the other hand suffocating under its pressure. The term kango kogai – tourism pollution – had been making headlines. Locals argued that whilst tourist numbers kept expanding, local infrastructures did not see matched investment, putting pressures on local residents to navigate their daily lives, from overcrowded public transport networks, to shops that catered for tourists rather than locals.
During the Kyoto studio, students will engage with this topic in a research-based and explorative manner. As students you will make use of the Kyoto site visit discoveries in the first week of November 2025, and engage to ‘hunt’ down fissures but also opportunities, assembling and charting their discoveries in a collective catalogue, from sites within the city centre to sites on the periphery. Through a critical reappraisal of your findings, you will set impulses to develop alternative scenarios and strategies that serve as starting points for a critical contemporary debate on Kyoto’s tourism and its future. From adaptive re-use, to a reappraisal of current domestic scenarios, to off-set strategies that consider the role and potentials of adjacent regions and rural communities, you will develop test scenarios that question and propose at the same time.
The Kyoto studio will tackle these issues from inside out, by unfolding particularities, unseen potentials but also challenges as they present themselves in the everyday realm. As the global and local scale are inextricably linked, global issues manifest themselves in the urban and spatial patterns of everyday life and vice versa. Students who join for the Kyoto studio will be urged to consider the pressures of tourism in relation to these other overriding pressures.
The Kyoto studio is part of the Performative Architecture Studio, which been focussing for several master dissertation studios on hyper-transforming cities – these city studies can be consulted via https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/?s=maeseneer
View the new description of the studio here (pdf).
For more information, contact: martine.demaeseneer@kuleuven.be – www.mdma.be