Asian Urbanism

Abstract

This entry on Asian urbanism begins by examining how Asian urbanism can be seen as bothactually existingandimagined, taking into consideration the ways in which Asian urbanism has entailed the use of successful Asian cities as reference points for other cities in the Global South on the one hand, and how such referencing practices often entail the rendering of Asian urbanism as imagined models and ideologies that are detached from the realities of the receiving end of the model transfer on the other. The ensuing section examines how Asian urbanism can be situated in the context of state–society relations, with a particular emphasis on the role of the Asian states that exhibited developmental and/or authoritarian orientations in the late twentieth century. The penultimate section explores the sociospatiality of Asian urbanism, summarizing some salient characteristics of Asian urbanism. The entry concludes with an emphasis on the need to avoid Asian exceptionalism, and also to have a pluralistic perspective on Asian urbanism while retaining Asia as a unit of analysis.

Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

“…In other words, at least three factors determine the shape of (trans)configurations: they are structured by iterative conveyances that transcend modes and forms of consolidation; they are composed through transmissions that constantly overstep the substance of a particular goal; and they are carried out by means of extensions that spill over from processes of settlement. In this piece, which embraces a lens of ‘process geographies’ (Appadurai, 2000) to focus on the multiple narratives of flows, policies, people, ideas, and capital (Massey, 1999; Shin, 2019) that constitute ‘Asia’, we weave together empirical insights from Dhaka, Luanda, and Mumbai in order to unpack each of these three components of the (trans)configurations of urban re‐arrangements. Our intention is not to provide a comprehensive and all‐encompassing lexicon for the theorisation of Asian urban geographies, but to read slices of each of these cities into each other.…”

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

“…The rise of Asian economies has aroused great interest in Asian development models and experiences. In particular, the phenomenon of Asian cities as new epicenters of rapid economic growth has attracted considerable scholarly and media attention thanks to their alternative urbanization models in contrast to the longstanding paradigmatic cities of the West (Yeung, 2011; Collingridge, 2014; Shin, 2019). This phenomenon—described as ‘fast urbanism’ (Shin et al ., 2020)—accentuates the capacity of developmental states to effectively conjoin capital and labor in spatio‐temporal terms that facilitate fast industrial and urban growth (Lee et al ., 2010: 361).…”

“…This phenomenon—described as ‘fast urbanism’ (Shin et al ., 2020)—accentuates the capacity of developmental states to effectively conjoin capital and labor in spatio‐temporal terms that facilitate fast industrial and urban growth (Lee et al ., 2010: 361). This condensed and compressed development of Asian cities is deemed to go beyond ‘the remit of twentieth‐century and typically Western normative approaches’ (Lancione and McFarlane, 2021: 3), offers ‘the potential to function as a less conventional reference point for urban and economic development’ (Shin, 2019: 1), and is even imagined as presenting new ‘global urban frontiers’ (Bunnell et al ., 2012). Using the concept of ‘worlding’, Ong (2011: 2) explains these efforts to set Asian cities as new urban norms, templates or models which can travel across the globe 3…”

Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis

“…4. Scholars have refined the concept of speculative urbanism to explain rapid shifts in financialized urban processes globally (Goldman, 2011;Goldman and Narayan, 2021;Sood, 2018), in China (Li et al, 2014;Shin, 2019), Cambodia (Nam, 2017), South Korea (Shin and Kim, 2016), across Southeast Asia (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018;Zhang, 2017), and in the USA (Knuth, 2014). More generally, this role of global finance in city-making has spawned a fruitful body of scholarship on the "financialization of the city" (Aalbers, 2017(Aalbers, , 2019(Aalbers, , 2020Weber, 2015).…”