When people look at success stories among postcolonial nations, the focus almost always turns to Asia, where many cities in former colonies have become key locations of international commerce and culture. This book brings together a stellar group of scholars from a number of disciplines to explore the rise of Asian cities, including Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and more. Dealing with history, geography, culture, architecture, urbanism, and other topics, the book attempts to formulate a new understanding of what makes Asian cities such global leaders.
This book explores the multiple and changing ideas, concepts, and representations that shape contemporary cities in Asia in a historical perspective. It does so by using multiple sources, objects (architecture, planning, spaces and practices), and methods of inquiry. At a time when intense dynamics of urban development of Asian cities puzzle and disorient, Ideas of the City in Asian Settings offers knowledge about the ideas that lay beneath the historical and contemporary production of cities in Asia, in order to deepen our understanding of the processes and meanings of urban development in the continent. The book sheds more light on the vast array of rules and perspectives that make cities into complex objects that are continuously 'in the making'. Because Asian cities have experienced unprecedented dynamics of urban development during the last fifty years, they are considered as crucial places to question the aspirations that multiple actors project onto changing urban environments, as well as the evolution of the role of cities in globalisation.
Asian cities create concomitant imagery - polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurry lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. With Asia's re-emergence on the global stage, there is an acute focus on its multifarious urban issues and identities: What are Asian cities going to become? Will they surpass the economic and environmental debacles of the West? This collection of twenty-four essays surveys the most dominant issues shaping the Asian urban landscape today. It offers scholarly reflections and positions on the forces shaping Asian cities, and the forces that they in turn are shaping.
Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy that often challenges understanding and appreciation. With contributions by a cross-disciplinary group of authors, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia examines a range of cases in Asia to explore the social and institutional politics of urban informality and the contexts in which this “messiness” emerges or is constructed. The book brings a distinct perspective to the broader patterns of informal urban orders and processes as well as their interplay with formalized systems and mechanisms. It also raises questions about the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship. Messy Urbanism will appeal to professionals, students, and scholars in the fields of urban studies, architecture, landscape architecture, planning and policy, as well as Asian studies. “The rubric of ‘messy urbanism’ is a productive antidote to the binaries that have limited a productive discussion about urbanism in Asia. This book is a significant contribution in understanding the inherent nature of the built environments in aspiring democracies—an emergent urbanism that seamlessly embraces the incremental, temporal, and ephemeral as given conditions in the formation of Asian cities.” —Rahul Mehrotra, Architect / Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University “This book is of a high quality, with multiple examples from Hong Kong and China. The authors have covered the topic admirably and I expect the book to attract a wide readership.” —Vinit Mukhija, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Urban Planning, UCLA
China's opkomst als wereldmacht is een van de ingrijpendste gebeurtenissen van deze tijd. Honderden miljoenen mensen zijn de armoede ontvlucht dankzij de snelle industrialisatie van het land. De wonderbaarlijke economische groei van China heeft zijn nadelen, iets wat vaak het meest pijnlijk duidelijk wordt in de steden. Deze studie is geschreven door wetenschappers uit verschillende disciplines, waaronder architectuur, stedenbouw, sociale wetenschappen, aardrijkskunde en antrolpologie. Een dee van de auteurs behandelt de mondiale ambities van de steden, terwijl andere hun culturele en architecturale uitingen onderzoeken.
Hong Kong is a small city with a big reputation. As mainland China has become an 'economic powerhouse' Hong Kong has taken a route of development of its own, flourishing as an entrepot and a centre of commerce and finance for Chinese business, then as an industrial city and subsequently a regional and international financial centre. This volume examines the developmental history of Hong Kong, focusing on its rise to the status of a Chinese global city in the world economy. Chiu and Lui's analysis is distinct in its perspective of the development as an integrated process involving economic, political and social dimensions, and as such this insightful and original book will be a core text on Hong Kong society for students.
Colonial powers in China and northern Vietnam employed the built environment for many purposes: as an expression of imperial aspirations, a manifestation of supremacy, a mission to civilize, a re-creation of a home away from home, or simply as a place to live and work. In this volume, scholars of city planning, architecture, and Asian and imperial history provide a detailed analysis of how colonization worked on different levels, and how it was expressed in stone, iron, and concrete. The process of creating the colonial built environment was multilayered and unpredictable. This book uncovers the regional diversity of the colonial built form found from Harbin to Hanoi, varied experiences of the foreign powers in Asia, flexible interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, and the risks entailed in building and living in these colonies and treaty ports.
Globalisation has long historical roots in South Asia, but economic liberalisation has led to uniquely rapid urban growth in South Asia during the past decade. This book brings together a multidisciplinary collection of chapters on contemporary and historical themes explaining this recent explosive growth and transformations on-going in the cities of this region. The essays in this volume attempt to shed light on the historical roots of these cities and the traditions that are increasingly placed under strain by modernity, as well as exploring the lived experience of a new generation of city dwellers and their indelible impact on those who live at the city’s margins. The book discusses that previously, cities such as Mumbai grew by accumulating a vast hinterland of slum-dwellers who depressed wages and supplied cheap labour to the city’s industrial economy. However, it goes on to show that the new growth of cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Madras in south India, or Delhi and Calcutta in the north of India, is more capital-intensive, export-driven, and oriented towards the information technology and service sectors. The book explains that these cities have attracted a new elite of young, educated workers, with money to spend and an outlook on life that is often a complex mix of modern ideas and conservative tradition. It goes on to cover topics such as the politics of town planning, consumer culture, and the struggles among multiple identities in the city. By tracing the genealogies of cities, it gives a useful insight into the historical conditioning that determines how cities negotiate new changes and influences. There will soon be more mega cities in South Asia than anywhere else in the world, and this book provides an in-depth analysis of this growth. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian History, Politics and Anthropology, as well as those working in the fields of urbanisation and globalisation.
