Worlding Cities E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Studies in Urban and Social Change
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 739

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Worlding Cities is the first serious examination of Asian urbanism to highlight the connections between different Asian models and practices of urbanization. It includes important contributions from a respected group of scholars across a range of generations, disciplines, and sites of study.

• Describes the new theoretical framework of ‘worlding’
• Substantially expands and updates the themes of capital and culture
• Includes a unique collection of authors across generations, disciplines, and sites of study
• Demonstrates how references to Asian power, success, and hegemony make possible urban development and limit urban politics

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Figures

Table

Notes on Contributors

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global

Singular Logics in Urban Change

Milieus of Intervention

Worlding Practices

Modeling, Inter-Referencing, New Solidarities

Part I Modeling

1 Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts

Introduction

Global City

Success as Identity

Singapore as Model

Fragmenting Singapore into Discrete Lessons

Industrialization and Migration

From Garden City to City in a Garden

The National Public Housing Program

Housing Estate Planning and Allocation

Exporting Urban Planning Expertise

Conclusion

2 Urban Modeling and Contemporary Technologies of City-Building in China: The Production of Regimes of Green Urbanisms

Modeling as a Mode of Governing the Urban

Emergent Regimes of Green Urbanism and Garden Cities

Conclusion

3 Planning Privatopolis: Representation and Contestation in the Development of Urban Integrated Mega-Projects

The Historical Context of UIM Development

When and Why Do UIMs Succeed or Fail?

Kolkata: The Quagmire of Political Society

Metro Manila: “Booty Capitalism” and the Privatization of Planning

Conclusion

4 Ecological Urbanization: Calculating Value in an Age of Global Climate Change

Touring the Exhibit, Living at Home: Huangbaiyu Model Village

The Present Problem of a Future Uncertainty: Consumption

Rural Problems, Urban Solutions: Subsistence to Service

Making Wasteland Productive: The Reorganization and Redistribution of Value

Conclusion

Part II Inter-Referencing

5 Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong

Introduction

Historical Global and Cultural Bricolage

Grounding a Mobile Population

That “Sinking” Feeling in Post-1997 Hong Kong

Renegotiating Identities

The New Silk Road: Worlding Activities at the High End

The Strategic March to the North

The Historical Global and the Asian Postmodern

6 Cracks in the Façade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai

Introduction

Dubai-as-Brand: Imagining Desirable Landscapes

Dubai-as-Lived: Landscapes of Urban Desires

Conclusion

7 Asia in the Mix: Urban Form and Global Mobilities – Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai

Introduction

“Welcome to the Land of Light”

Along the Seawall – Mohamed Ali Alabbar Takes a Walk

Cultural Production in, and in Critique of, Pan-Asian Urban Form

Walking toward a Conclusion

8 Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty

Urban Spectacles

Hyperbuilding: Exception, Spectacle, and Speculation

II. The Hyperbuilding: The Hyperspace Moves East

Conclusion

Part III New Solidarities

9 Speculating on the Next World City

Introduction: Believing in the India Story

Provincializing “Old” Bangalore

Speculative Government

Speculative World-City Projects

IT as the Urban Growth Machine

Conclusion: No Exit (Strategy)?

10 The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism

“India Poised”

The Blockade

Standing Still

11 Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

Planning without Plans

Calculative Deficiencies and the Turn to Aesthetic Norms

World-Class Aesthetics and the Nuisance of Slums

Slum Surveys and Aesthetic Training

Shiv Camp: Picturing Private Property

Conclusion

Conclusion Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams

Itineraries of Recognition

Worlding Practices

ASIA

Index

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Published

The Creative Capital of Cities: Interactive Knowledge of Creation and the Urbanization Economics of InnovationStefan Krätke

Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being GlobalAnanya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds.)

Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage MarketsManuel B. Aalbers

Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace IdentitiesLinda McDowell

Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global CityS. Harris Ali and Roger Keil (eds.)

Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating EuropeAdrian Favell

Urban China in TransitionJohn R. Logan (ed.)

Getting Into Local Power: The Politics of Ethnic Minorities in British and French CitiesRomain Garbaye

Cities of EuropeYuri Kazepov (ed.)

Cities, War, and TerrorismStephen Graham (ed.)

Cities and Visitors: Regulating Tourists, Markets, and City SpaceLily M. Hoffman, Susan S. Fainstein, and Dennis R. Judd (eds.)

Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future PerspectivesJohn Eade and Christopher Mele (eds.)

The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market ReformJohn R. Logan (ed.)

Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global ContextMark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.)

The Social Control of Cities? A Comparative PerspectiveSophie Body-Gendrot

Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds.)

Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of ConsumptionJohn Clammer

Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the CityLinda McDowell

Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist SocietiesGregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (eds.)

The People’s Home? Social Rented Housing in Europe and AmericaMichael Harloe

Post-FordismAsh Amin (ed.)

The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City*Mercedes Gonzalez de la Rocha

Free Markets and Food RiotsJohn Walton and David Seddon

Fragmented Societies*Enzo Mingione

Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader*Enzo Mingione

Forthcoming

Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental StatesBae-Gyoon Park, Richard Child Hill and Asato Saito (eds.)

Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage MarketsManuel B. Aalbers (ed.)

Globalising European Urban Bourgeoisies?: Rooted Middle Classes and Partial Exit in Paris, Lyon, Madrid and MilanAlberta Andreotti, Patrick Le Galès and Francisco Javier Moreno-Fuentes

Paradoxes Of Segregation: Urban Migration In EuropeSonia Arbaci

From Shack to House to FortressMariana Cavalcanti

Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist CitySonia Hirt

Urban Social Movements and the StateMargit Mayer

Fighting GentrificationTom Slater

Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern EuropeKiril Stanilov and Ludek Sykora (eds.)

Social Capital Formation in Immigrant NeighborhoodsMin Zhou

*Out of print

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Worlding cities : Asian experiments and the art of being global / edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. p. cm. – (Studies in urban and social change) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9277-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-9276-7 (paperback) 1. Urbanization–Asia. 2. Globalization–Asia. I. Roy, Ananya. II. Ong, Aihwa. HT384.A78W67 2011 307.76095–dc22

2011006751

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444346770; Wiley Online Library 9781444346800; ePub 9781444346787; eMobi 9781444346794

List of Illustrations

Figures

4.1 The entrance to the “sustainable development model village”

4.2 Maize stalks stacked as winter feed

5.1 Hong Kong white-collar workers during lunchtime

5.2 Hong Kong’s middle class marched for democratic reforms

5.3 The Bank of China building in Hong Kong

7.1 Concord Pacific Place, 2009

7.2 Emaar’s Marina Promenade development, 2009

7.3 Henry Tsang, Welcome to the Land of Light (detail)

8.1 The CCTV tower, Beijing

8.2 The cantilever joining the CCTV towers

8.3 A view of the CCTV figure poised next to an adjacent tower

9.1 Water worlds

9.2 The new Bangalore has grown by threefold since 2007

9.3 The writing on the wall

10.1 Standing still, 2000–2003

11.1 An artistic rendering of the DLF Emporio

11.2 “Our future isn’t here,” February 2007

11.3 “It is a proper house,” February 2007

11.4 “It’s like a dream for them,” November 2007

11.5 “We hope to live like that one day,” November 2007

12.1 Photographing the city, Lianhua Mountain, Shenzhen, 2010

12.2 Cingapura, a slum redevelopment project in São Paulo, Brazil, 2009

Table

4.1 The organizational structure of the China–US Center for Sustainable Development, and its implementation networks for the development of Huangbaiyu

Notes on Contributors

Chua Beng Huat is currently Provost Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, and Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster Leader at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is founding co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His most recent publications are Life is Not Complete without Shopping and edited Elections as Popular Culture in Asia. His previous books include Public Housing and Political Legitimacy: stakeholding in Singapore and Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore.

D. Asher Ghertner is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He recently completed his PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was trained in urban geography, political ecology, and development studies. His research explores urban informality and governance, aesthetic politics, and the epistemology of rule. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book, tentatively titled Rule by Aesthetics. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and legal research in Delhi, the book will examine how slum demolitions are discursively justified and given meaning, legally enacted, and experienced by slum residents. His recent articles have appeared in Economy and Society and Economic and Political Weekly.

Michael Goldman is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, USA. His latest book, based on a decade-long ethnography of the World Bank, is entitled Imperial Nature: the World Bank and struggles for social justice in the age of globalization (Yale University Press, 2005; Orient Longman India, 2006; Kyoto University Press, 2008 [in Japanese]). He is currently working on a project funded by the American Institute for Indian Studies, “Bangalore: The Making of a World City,” focusing on the transformations of government and citizenship taking place under liberalization.

Chad Haines is currently on the Religious Studies faculty and is a researcher with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. Previously, he was a faculty member in Anthropology at American University in Cairo and taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Nation, Territory, and Globalization in Pakistan: a view from the margins (Routledge, 2011), as well as numerous articles on northern Pakistan. He is currently working on a new manuscript, Being Muslim, Being Global: Dubai, Islamabad, and Cairo.

Lisa Hoffman was trained as a cultural anthropologist and is an Associate Professor in Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma. Her work has examined new techniques of governing, subject formation, and questions of neoliberalism in contemporary China. She has been particularly interested in the rise of professionalism and the links between “human capital” development and urban transformation, focusing on Dalian, a major port city in the northeast. Her recent book, titled Patriotic Professionalism: talent in the global Chinese city, examines the rise of a professional middle class in urban China as the country has moved from the planned system and adopted socialist market practices. The book argues that young college graduates who find jobs on their own rather than receive assignments from the state express and embody “patriotic professionalism.” This social form combines individualized career planning and calculative choice with an ethic of state-strengthening and love for the nation, challenging more standard analyses of neoliberalism, urban change, and subjectivity. Her more recent work has examined governmental rationalities of environmental city-building in China and sustainability as a governmental problem. Other publications include “Autonomous choices and patriotic professionalism: on governmentality in late-socialist China,” Economy and Society 2006, 34(4); and “Enterprising cities and citizens: the re-figuring of urban spaces and the making of post-Mao professionals,” Provincial China, 2003, 8(1).

Glen Lowry is Associate Professor of Cultural & Critical Studies, Faculty of Community & Culture, at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He is a specialist in contemporary culture and poetics, and has published articles on contemporary Canadian literature, photography, film, and television. His recent work looks at practice-based (creative-critical) collaborations between artists and academics in the context of global urbanization. A senior research in Emily Carr’s Social and Interactive Media (SIM) Research Centre (funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and Chair of Online Learning, Lowry’s work is also engaged with building new media platforms capable of connecting scholars, artists, and audiences across cultural and geographic distances. Current projects include Maraya, a large-scale, international public art initiative focused on urban waterfront sites in Vancouver and Dubai, and linking artist, writers, and academics in Canada and the UAE. With Ashok Mathur, he has recently completed a qualitative study of the Outcomes and Impacts of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research/Creations in Fine Arts grants pilot program. Since 2002, Lowry has edited West Coast Line. In 2009, he published Pacific Avenue, a book of poems.

Shannon May is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork throughout China and in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work engages anthropological problems of governance, development, citizenship, community, and political ecology as constituted in everyday practice. She is currently writing her dissertation on the convergence of ecological and market rationalities in a project to “modernize” rural China, titled Practices of Ecological Citizenship: global dreams for a Chinese village.

Eugene McCann is Associate Professor, Department of Geography, at Simon Fraser University. He is an urban geographer with interests in urban politics, policy-making, and the relationships between urbanization and globalization. His current research explores how cities act globally through inter-urban policy mobilities – the processes of teaching, learning, and transferring policy knowledge among cities. He is co-editor, with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism: cities & policy-making in the global age, published by the University of Minnesota Press in Spring 2011, and is working on a co-edited volume, Cities & Social Change, with Ronan Paddison, for SAGE Publications, and a co-authored text, Urban Geography: a critical introduction, with Andy Jonas and Mary Thomas, for Wiley-Blackwell. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Urban Geography and Geography Compass, and has co-edited special editions of the Journal of Urban Affairs and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. His work has appeared in these and other top international journals, including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Geoforum, Professional Geographer, Social & Cultural Geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Urban Studies.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests focus on global technologies, modes of governing, techno-scientific assemblages, and citizenship in particular Asian contexts of emergence. She is the author of the now classic Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: factory women in Malaysia (1987); Flexible Citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality (1999); Buddha is Hiding: refugees, citizenship, the new America (2003); and Neoliberalism as Exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty (2006). She also co-edited Global Assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (2005); and Privatizing China: socialism from afar (2008). Her latest collection is Asian Biotech: ethics and communities of fate. Ong’s writings have been translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, French, and Chinese. Currently, Ong is the president-elect of the Society for East Asian Anthropology.

Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center. Roy is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: gender and the politics of poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004). Her most recent book is titled Poverty Capital: microfinance and the making of development (Routledge, 2010). Roy’s essays have focused on urban modernity, liberal, and post-liberal paradigms of planning, questions of praxis in the time of empire, and new geographies of urban theory.

Gavin Shatkin is Associate Professor of Urban Planning in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Ann Arbor. His research focuses on urban inequality, community organizing, and collective action around issues of shelter and infrastructure delivery in developing countries, and the impacts of globalization on cities in developing countries. His recent articles have appeared in Environment and Planning A, Cities, Urban Studies, and other leading urban studies and planning journals. His book Collective Action and Urban Poverty Alleviation: community organizations and the struggle for shelter in Manila was published by Ashgate Publishers in 2007.

Helen F. Siu is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Since the 1970s, she has conducted historical and ethnographic fieldwork in South China, examining socialist transformations and the reach of the state, the revival of market towns, rituals, marriage practices, community festivals, and the reworking of the rural–urban divide in the post-reform era. Since 1997, she has worked on the “sinking and shrinking” generation of Hong Kongers who use urban space and global charisma to engage with China. Her publications and co-edited volumes include Mao’s Harvest: voices of China’s new generation (Oxford University Press, 1983); Furrows: peasants, intellectuals, and the state (Stanford University Press, 1990); Down to Earth: the territorial bond in South China (Stanford University Press, 1995); Agents and Victims in South China: accomplices in rural revolution (Yale University Press, 1989); Empire at the Margins: culture, ethnicity and frontier in early modern China (University of California Press, 2006); SARS: reception and interpretation in three Chinese Cities (Routledge, 2007); and Hong Kong Mobile: making a global population (Hong Kong University Press, 2008). In 2001, she founded the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Institute, hosted by the University of Hong Kong, promotes creative, interdisciplinary research that allows scholars in North America, Europe, China, and Hong Kong to connect. In the next five years, the Institute will focus on research training stressing inter-Asian connectivity in historical and contemporary terms.

Series Editors’ Preface

The Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Urban and Social Change series is published in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It aims to advance theoretical debates and empirical analyses stimulated by changes in the fortunes of cities and regions across the world. Among topics taken up in past volumes and welcomed for future submissions are:

Connections between economic restructuring and urban changeUrban divisions, difference, and diversityConvergence and divergence among regions of east and west, north, and southUrban and environmental movementsInternational migration and capital flowsTrends in urban political economyPatterns of urban-based consumption

The series is explicitly interdisciplinary; the editors judge books by their contribution to intellectual solutions rather than according to disciplinary origin. Proposals may be submitted to members of the series Editorial Committee, and further information about the series can be found at www.suscbookseries.com

Jenny RobinsonNeil BrennerMatthew GandyPatrick Le GalèsChris PickvanceAnanya Roy

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book grew out of our particular interests in the field of global metropolitan studies. It has also emerged from our shared sense that dominant conceptual frameworks and methodologies in this field do not capture the diversity of urban dreams, projects, and practices that are constitutive of cities in emerging world regions. We therefore seek to articulate a new ethnographic turn in global metropolitan studies. For us, such an orientation hinges on the idea of “worlding.” We see the worlding city as a milieu of intervention, a source of ambitious visions, and of speculative experiments that have different possibilities of success and failure. We hold that such experiments cannot be conceptually reduced to instantiations of universal logics of capitalism or postcolonialism. They must be understood as worlding practices, those that pursue world recognition in the midst of inter-city rivalry and globalized contingency. We therefore focus on the urban as a milieu that is in constant formation, one shaped by the multitudinous ongoing activities that by wedding dream and technique, form the art of being global. Inherently unstable, inevitably subject to intense contestation, and always incomplete, worlding is the art of being global.

But also at stake in this book is how cities are worlded in geographies of knowledge. By insisting upon a shift away from the concepts of world cities and world systems to that of worlding practices, we seek to intervene in the ways in which global metropolitan studies “worlds” Asia. Impossibly heterogeneous, the idea of Asia functions in this book as much more than a geo-political location. While massive urban problems prevail in the region, “Asia” is increasingly invoked as the testing ground for successful models of economic growth, rational planning, and ecological sustainability. Inter-Asian comparisons and contrasts have become common practices in many urban initiatives to attain “world-class” status. Thus, in this book, Asia is a geographic location, a space of urban innovations, as well as an emergent symbol for urban renovations that have global applicability. But also in this book we pay attention to the constant experimentation with social formations, to the politics of solidarity that seeks to reformulate the urban question and domesticate the dream of Asian futures.

The book is organized around the themes of modeling, inter-referencing practices, and new solidarities. In somewhat unusual fashion, we have chosen to divide our editorial essays into an introduction and conclusion. Aihwa Ong’s opening essay introduces the book and its key concept of “worlding” as situated practice and experimentation. She makes the case for viewing the city as a problem-space for which a range of solutions are created out of disparate local and circulating elements. Ananya Roy’s concluding essay returns to the theme of “worlding,” but examines how cities of the global South have been “worlded” in the discourses and imaginaries of metropolitan studies. Building on Ong’s critique of urban political economy and postcolonial analysis, Roy seeks to shift the terrain of the political away from the standard icons of global capital and subaltern agency to the “worlding city” as both a site of emergence and as a mass dream. Together, the two editorial essays highlight different theoretical approaches to the common question of the “worlding city.” We hope that such theoretical multiplicity makes visible the productive nature of the concept of “worlding” and the significance of locating the study of “worlding cities” in the context of inter-Asian urbanism.

We owe considerable thanks to the scholars who have contributed essays to this edited volume. It is their work that has led us to the conceptual frameworks that anchor this book. Hailing from different fields and generations, they present new research on the social, political, material, and symbolic interconnections that are proliferating between different Asian metropolises. Their work has challenged us as editors to address methodological approaches to global metropolitan studies in an era of Asian emergence. It has led us to be attentive to diverse conceptual and research questions and to thereby provide an open-ended account of experiments and possibilities, rather than promote a single unifying framework.

This volume emerged from an interdisciplinary workshop we organized for the “Inter-Asian Connections” conference that was convened by the Social Science Research Council in February 2008. We had the opportunity to hold a two-day workshop, quite appropriately located at a site that features prominently in this book: Dubai. We thank the SSRC for both the initial inspiration for this endeavor and for its generous funding of our workshop. At the forum, Michael M. Fischer and Abdoumaliq Simone made astute comments that added to our lively exchange on contemporary metropolitan experiences in the Asian region.

We are pleased to be a part of Wiley-Blackwell’s Studies in Urban and Social Change series. We are grateful to two editors-in-chief of the series, Neil Brenner and Jennifer Robinson, for their interest in our project. The various chapters of the book have benefited from extensive comments provided by Jennifer Robinson and Timothy Bunnell. At Wiley-Blackwell, Jacqueline Scott helped us navigate publication and Geoffrey Palmer copy-edited the manuscript with great skill and grace. At UC Berkeley, editing assistance was provided by Jerry Zee.

The book is dedicated to our doctoral students in common who are invested in the interdisciplinary work of building a truly global metropolitan studies here at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, Aihwa wishes to express her appreciation of scholars based in Asia who are first-hand witnesses to the tumultuous changes under way in cities of the emerging world. Ananya wishes to thank Nezar AlSayyad for immeasurable support and for his own work on cities that continues to be an inspiration for her.

Aihwa Ong and Ananya RoyBerkeley

Introduction

Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global

Aihwa Ong

… the skyline rises in the East.

Rem Koolhaas

Cities rise and fall, but the vagaries of urban fate cannot be reduced to the workings of universal laws established by capitalism or colonial history. Caught in the vectors of particular histories, national aspirations, and flows of cultures, cities have always been the principal sites for launching world-conjuring projects. Today, urban dreams and schemes play with accelerating opportunities and accidents that circulate in ever-widening spirals across the planet. Emerging nations exercise their new power by assembling glass and steel towers to project particular visions of the world. Once again, as Rem Koolhaas (2004) notes, “the skyline rises in the East,” as cities vie with one another, and regional aspirations are superseded by new horizons of the global.

In the 1970s, New York City was celebrated for its architectural constellation, which fostered a “delirious” culture of congestion. Koolhaas (1997) called New York “The City of the Captive Global,” one that unites the modern with perpetual motion. But by the early twenty-first century, the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 (called the Great Recession) dealt a reversal of fortune for New York, London, and Tokyo. As these mighty cities struggle to retain their lead as financial powerhouses, Singapore and Dubai are emerging as centers of global finance. Meanwhile, China’s role as the banker of the world has made Shanghai and Hong Kong the shares-selling capitals of the world. While capitals of big economies remain crucial players, Asian economies have skyrocketed, and the Asian world has witnessed the stunning emergence of cities of international consequence. The 2010 Shanghai Expo has been the most explicit demonstration yet of a can-do determination to experiment with cutting-edge innovations in urban architecture, industry, and design. Indeed, if nothing else, the 2008 economic recession vividly invalidates magisterial views of how cities, their functions, and publics will change according to some master law of European experience. Today, Asian cities are fertile sites, not for following an established pathway or master blueprint, but for a plethora of situated experiments that reinvent what urban norms can count as “global.”

Aspiring cities in the so-called global South challenge disciplinary controls that map cities according to a global division of global capitalist and postcolonial regions. Hegemonic theories of globalization and postcoloniality have long inspired a conceptual terra firma of generalizable global spaces, including cities and their destinies. As is the case with early modern nations, cities in the emerging world today have come to embody nationalist ambitions of wealth, power, and recognition. Major cities in the developing world have become centers of enormous political investment, economic growth, and cultural vitality, and thus have become sites for instantiating their countries’ claims to global significance.

A recognition of the changing skylines of the world not only directs our gaze to emerging metropolitan centers, but also points to the fallacies of some key assumptions in metropolitan studies. In the social sciences, two major approaches have been dominant in defining the parameters and perspectives for investigating contemporary cities and urban conditions: (a) the political economy of globalization; and (b) the postcolonial focus on subaltern agency. Both models bear a Marxist pedigree and are thus overdetermined in their privileging of capitalism as the only mechanism and class struggle as the only resolution to urban problems. The political economy approach constructs the great metropolis as a site of capital accumulation and as the battleground for remaking citizenship and civil society. The postcolonial perspective views cities outside the Euro-American region as settings animated solely by subaltern resistances to different modes of domination. While there are many excellent studies that illuminate aspects of urban change through the prism of global confrontations between capitalism and democracy, the larger lesson seems to be that two universal principles of globalization – capitalism and postcolonialism – are each associated with a unified set of economic effects or political outcomes for shaping global spaces. By positing a singular causality (global capitalism) or a special category of actors (postcolonial agents), such universal principles tend to view significantly different sites as instantiations of either a singular economic system or the same political form of globalization. By studying situated phenomena through a lens that understands them as singular moments in a unified and integrated global process, analysts lose sight of complex urban situations as particular engagements with the global. We should account for the complexity of these particular engagements rather than subject them to economistic or political reductionism.

Indeed, such conceptual blind spots also overlook the unexpected effects of historical shifts, events, and crises. As the 2008 economic crisis quickly revealed, the political economic focus on city functions cannot account for the sudden economic collapse of heretofore global cities, or for the rapid rise of major Asian cities of global significance. Meanwhile Beijing, and by proxy, China, have emerged as the pollution capital of the world. In other words, besides the volatility of global markets, emerging nations and planetary threats variously exert influences on the roles, rankings, and achievements of particular metropolises.

Conceptual architectures that leave little room for empirical heterogeneity and changeability are thus invested in a given global status quo. Claims about city ranking and power, whether by urban analysts and city champions, are political statements that are inseparable from the processes of urban development. It seems reasonable to expect metropolitan scholars to treat identifiable urban achievements, and the global metrics that apply to them, as contingent measures subject to potential challenges, whether in the realms of academic theorizing or the contexts of inter-city rivalries. Normative codes cannot account for the situated ways in which urban aspirations play out in emerging sites, or how the entry of these local forms into the global one actually transforms the whole question of what counts as a global city in some significant way.

The contributors in this volume tend to bypass overarching principles of globalization, and are all sensitive to the geopolitical shifts and spectacular rise of cities throughout Asia. The city is viewed not as an exclusive site of capitalism or postcolonial activism, but as a milieu that is in constant formation, drawing on disparate connections, and subject to the play of national and global forces. Authors pursue, in more or less intensity, an analytics of urban practices, tracking a variety of projects engaged in remaking a city’s fortunes despite, or perhaps because of, an awareness of the uncertainty of urban claims on the future. We thus focus not on established criteria of city achievements, but on the ongoing art of being global. We pay attention to an array of often overlooked urban initiatives that compete for world recognition in the midst of inter-city rivalry and globalized contingency. While contributors in the book take different analytical angles, there are some shared elements that favor situated investigations of urban phenomena in highly dynamic circumstances, and without the predetermining of social outcomes.

First, there is emphasis on the city as a field of intervention for solving an array of problems associated with modern life and national interests. For instance, specific urban issues – city infrastructure, investments, sustainable standards, political life, or aesthetic value, among others – are variously problematized as a sphere of action is called into question, and a set of difficulties are transformed into problems to which diverse solutions are possible (Foucault 1984). Second, the metropolis tends to be viewed not as a fixed locality but as a particular nexus of situated and transnational ideas, institutions, actors, and practices that may be variously drawn together for solving particular problems. In the shift from an analytics of structure to an analytics of assemblage, analysts stay close to the practices that rearticulate and reassemble material, technical, and discursive elements in the process of remaking particular contexts (Collier and Ong 2005). It follows that modes of interventions, at different scales, promiscuously draw upon ideas and objects, and find allies in multiple sources that are recontextualized for resolving urban problems. Third, city ambitions are reimagined in relation to shifting “forms and norms” (Rabinow 1991) of being global. Different chapters note that a striking aspect of Asian urban transformations involves seemingly unavoidable practices of inter-city comparison, referencing, or modeling.

Such discursive and non-discursive activities are spatializing practices that drive the flow of distinctive urban codes that gives the region a buoyant sense of being on the cusp of an urban revolution. These urban interventions are viewed as worlding practices; that is, projects that attempt to establish or break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city. World-aspiring projects are experiments in that they put forth questions, initiatives, and procedures in the midst of uncertainty, without guarantees about successful outcomes (Jacob 1998). Contemporary experiments to remedy an urban situation that has been assessed as problematic – aging infrastructure, underinvestment, neglect of the urban poor, lack of international profile, and so on – draw on global forms that are recontextualized in the city matrix, and then dispersed to other places seeking solutions. In such globalizing circumstances, the neoliberal as a global form comes to articulate situated experimentations with an art of being global.

Many have viewed “the neoliberal” as a set of market conditions that scale back the state, but in a more careful formulation, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002) have argued that that there is great variability in geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism.” But the neoliberal as a logic of optimization (Rose 1999) refers not to a space or a form of state, but a set of maximizing rationalities that articulates particular assemblages of governing. The neoliberal as a mobile technology can be taken up by a government or any other institution to recast problems as non-ideological and non-political issues that need technical solutions to maximize intended outcomes (Ong 2006). As a logic of entrepreneurialism, neoliberal reason has even infiltrated domains that have been and are ideologically cast, by observers and by practitioners, as resolutely anti-market, such as NGOs, workers’ organizations, and aesthetic/cultural production. If we recognize urban movements as ongoing experiments to expand social power, we should not be surprised at the apparently paradoxical interdependence of calculative practices of political entrepreneurialism and the progressive language of “anti-neoliberalism.” The proliferation of neoliberal techniques thus contributes to the blossoming of an urban terrain of unanticipated borrowings, appropriations, and alliances that cut across class, ideological, and national lines even as it depends on the continual meta-practical discursive resedimentation of these boundaries. Even what appear to be opposed ideological positions are constituted in relation to each other; they are mutually imbricated and also linked through a set of semi-shared norms. This would make the judgment of “right” or “wrong” quite detrimental to an analytical practice aimed at probing the singularity and complexity of the phenomena in question. By circumventing normative ideological judgments on the “right” or “wrong” side of power, we can analyze a range of urban initiatives, large and small, as they struggle to move forward and also experience setbacks in the techniques of urban transformation.

Situating our inquiries in a region previously known as the “third world,” we pay attention to urban efforts that experiment with visions of the global alternative to those where cities in the West are taken as an unproblematized benchmark of an apparently unsituated urban ideal. The critical mass and vitality of urban projects in Asian centers, especially, are destabilizing established criteria of global urban modernity. The following chapters will highlight distinctive practices of urban modeling, inter-referencing, and the forming of new solidarities that collectively seem to raise an inter-Asian horizon of metropolitan and global aspirations. This would mean the constitution of a set of distinctive visions of the global that exist without essential reference to the West, which is made sometimes conspicuously absent in practices of inter-Asian self-reference that spell the effective and often emphatic formation of an ex-Western urban referential space. Current methodological thinking, however, has both overdetermined and limited a serious engagement with actually existing metropolitan complexities and ambitions.

Singular Logics in Urban Change

Urban geography has been dominated by theories of globalization that have centered on finding a universal law – social, political, economic, and so on – that characterizes the current epoch, either in a singular form of global capitalism or in the pronouncement of an epoch defined by a universal condition of postcoloniality. This reliance on frameworks that depend on global generalization has shaped metropolitan studies to such an extent that empirical heterogeneity, flux, and uncertainty tend to be subsumed under a minimal set of explanatory conditions.

One hegemonic approach views a diffuse and abstract capitalism as the master driver of globalization; as capitalist operations roam the world, they busily determine the ranking of big cities, subdivide urban space, and thus paradoxically both dismantle political authority and undermine the public sphere. Under the “globalization” rubric, cities are largely viewed as functioning nodes in an integrated planetary capitalism, giving rise to the impression that great cities are more functionally integral to the workings of global capitalism than to that of their homelands. Building on the world-systems model, Saskia Sassen’s concept of “global cities” (2001 [1991]) – paradigmatically embodied in New York, London, and Tokyo – identifies the material processes, activities, and infrastructures that these provide for the implementation of economic globalization. At the city scale, capitalist mechanisms subdivide the great city into a hierarchy of zones and labor categories according to their economic value. Sassen’s paradigm is refined by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001), who use the term “splintering urbanism” to characterize the shattering effects of transnational infrastructural networks on urban environments and political conditions. This account depends on the fractal replication of the segmenting effect of Sassen’s economic globalization at ever-finer spatial scales; just as the model of capitalist world-system splits the planet into core and periphery regions, global cities and second-tier cities, so capitalist operations fragment urban landscapes into precincts of value and limited value, high-tech and low-tech, rich and poor – into differentiated urban spaces that as a disarticulated aggregate splinters the public good in the service of the “corporate good” (Graham and Marvin 2001: 33). Such analyses aim to provide a generalizable rendering of corporate machinations, the avatars of capitalism cum globalization, as they come to shape urban functions, landscapes, and fortunes in the interests of a global capitalist machinery.

The overall effect, however, is to put the variation in and particularity of urban development, as well as metropolitan life, everywhere at the mercy of a universal force called globalization. The assumption is that there is a single system of capitalist domination, and a set of unified effects of regular causal factors that can foment nearly identical problems and responses in different global sites. An extension of the generalizable laws of capitalism culminates in Mike Davis’s characterization of mega-cities in the global South in his apocalyptic “planets of slums” (Davis 2006). By piling on extreme statistics of density, migrant flows, and garbage production, Davis argues that the lack of industrialization in the “third world” has spawned giant shantytowns, creating global conditions that may lead to a great upheaval of urban proletarians. In this conceptual cul-de-sac, big cities in Africa owe their rapid growth to high concentrations of working poor, and inevitable urban revolution seems a foregone conclusion. In short, these all-determining theories of globalization are fundamentally interested in the homogenizing effects of capitalism. This singular capitalist process-force is presumed to account for engineering urban status and fate throughout the world.

Such schematic perspectives fail to enrich our understanding of particular challenges and solutions on the ground. The planet-of-slums approach, for instance, does not mention that Ibadan (Nigeria) and Nairobi (Kenya) have urban facilities and well-educated residents. Furthermore, the rapid demographic growth of cities in the former “third world” is resulting in more than the explosion of shantytowns. We learn that over the last decade, the world’s ten fastest-growing cities of more than a million people are found in greater Asian region. Four are located in China – Guangzhou, Chongqing, Nanjing, and Wuhan – and, together with Dubai, have become centers of turbocharged middle-class growth (Wall Street Journal, 2009). Thus, accelerated urban population growth may be attributed to the influx of dispossessed peasants and/or the rise of the middle classes – as, for example, in Mumbai (see Ananya Roy, Conclusion, this volume). Variations in class composition mean that one cannot attribute urban expansion to a single collectivity or homogenized demographic, such as slum-dwellers, nor can one characterize the great city as the paradigmatic site of a global revolutionary multitude (Hardt and Negri 2000). By the mid-century, over half of the population in Asia will be urbanized. Perhaps the one sure claim that can be made about the staggering weight of this phenomenon is the equally huge size of their carbon footprints, and the urgent need for all cities to reverse this planet of pollution (Shannon May, this volume).

Anthropologists and humanists working in cities have a more subtle analysis of class interrelationships and practices, but the binary oppositions of globalization frameworks are reproduced in ethnographic accounts of life in the city. The city as the universal or promised space of citizenship and universal human rights remains a resonant political economic theme. The study of cities outside the Euro-American setting tends to focus on the class-driven fragmentation and the uneven distribution of urban privileges and rights to citizens and migrants alike. Teresa Caldeira (2000) examines São Paulo as a “city of walls,” providing a rich ethnographic account of how the rich increasingly barricade themselves against the poor. In another study, Caldeira and Holston (2005) note that migrants in Brazil stream into the cities to claim citizenship rights by staking out land and putting pressure on municipal governments to deliver urban facilities. In a similar vein, Arjun Appadurai (2002) identifies a form of “deep democracy” in demands by Mumbai slum-dwellers for basic infrastructural services. These are rich and valuable accounts of political struggles, but so much of what progressive theory has to say about non-Western cities gives the impression that class and politics of outright resistance are the only significant urban events and activities in the developing world.

Postcolonial theory is another hegemonic approach for studying cities and urban conditions outside the West. There is the implicit suggestion that outside the West, the Rest is inescapably postcolonial, sharing the same set of global effects of former colonialism. Postcolonial theory is also invested in the idea that regularity in causal factors can instantiate nearly identical responses in different emerging sites, such as cooptation of the elites, or resistance by the exploited and marginalized. Thus, as non-Western cities are brought into metropolitan studies, the tendency has been to approach a spectrum of contemporary phenomena in studies whose form and concerns are overdetermined by the legacies of colonial rule.

Many insist, with some justification, that urbanization across the developing world should be viewed through the lens of distinctive histories and “postcolonial” experiences. Postcolonial cities must be understood through different paths of modernization that have roots in colonial experiences and postcolonial national liberation and transformations. For instance, anti-colonial struggles were shadowed by what Benedict Anderson calls “the specter of comparison” (1998: 2), a kind of psychological vertigo induced in Asian leaders by the distance to be traveled in order to catch up with the development benchmarks and metropolitan ideals established by and in the West. For a short while, newly independent countries came to view modernist architecture as a universal utopian form, and sought to build new capitals as literalizations of models of rational government and democratic aspirations (Holston 1999).

When it comes to urban studies, the logic of postcolonial globalization can be divided into two orientations. One kind of postcolonial formulation emphasizes urban features and norms that register colonial experiences but have since transcended the colonial. Under the rubric of “postcolonial urbanism,” the continuation of the colonial past into the present urban culture and order is emphasized. Some note the historically and regionally specific urban features that make Southeast Asian cities a “supplementary” category to Western global centers (Bishop, Philips, and Yeo 2003). There is also attention to the historical continuities of regional flows and particular cosmopolitanisms that collectively endow a special character to those “other global cities” outside advanced capitalist countries (Marayam 2009). The approaches of scholars based in Asian cities tend therefore to emphasize the distance traveled since their brief engagements with colonialism, and the ongoing process of ‘catching up’ to modern or even civilizational measures of metropolitan greatness.

A second approach, inspired by postcolonial scholars, focuses on giving primacy to the agency of subaltern groups – for instance, racial, ethnic, class, and gender populations – that have been subjugated by a variety of colonial, neocolonial, and capitalist forces. When it comes to studying urban transformations in India since colonialism, the emphasis has not been on studying how cities attempt to “catch up,” as is the case in Southeast and East Asian Studies, but rather has focused on the political agency of a special category of postcolonial subjects. Postcolonial theory is thus as much about how contemporary urban situations have been shaped by colonial legacies of injustice as by contemporary problems of urban underdevelopment.

The generalizable claims of postcolonial theory have been applied to other former sites of European colonialism. AbdouMaliq Simone (2008) famously celebrates the aspirational politics of African migrants whose everyday agency shapes emergent conditions of everyday life in the face of daunting urban inequalities. Such studies have much to recommend themselves in challenging the urban diacritics of the global North by recuperating the distinctiveness of postcolonial urban history, character, and the authenticity of subaltern subjects who inhabit and produce the ever-shifting landscapes of urban experience. However, the conceptual binarism of postcolonial studies seems to privilege postcolonial subjectivity and agency as the primary driving force in vastly different global sites that have been greatly transformed, through heterogeneous processes, colonial encounters, and postcolonial histories, in infrastructure, politics, and culture. In her modification of the postcolonial approach, Gayatri Spivak (1999) employs a concept of “worlding” that rejects the recuperation of subaltern subjects, thus moving postcolonial analysis away from the emphasis on subaltern subjects, political society, and street politics. Nevertheless, universal capitalist and postcolonial variants of neo-Marxism rely on singular logics of global change, focusing on homogenizing effects of capitalism and colonialism that are presumed to account for uniform conditions in a huge swath of cities throughout the world.

As it has become clear, we take the vantage point of an Asian region that cannot be reduced to the uniform expectations, logics, and prescriptions of structural Marxism or postcolonial theory. Collectively, our chapters tend to be open-ended rather than delimited by rich–poor, metropolitan–postcolonial frameworks. Urban environments are animated by a variety of transnational and local institutions, actors and practices that cannot be neatly mapped out in advance as being on the side of power or on the side of resistance, as if positions could be so unproblematically delineated. Only by liberating the city as a conceptual container of capitalism and subaltern agency can different analytical approaches explore methods for explaining how an urban situation can be at once heterogeneously particular and yet irreducibly global (Ong and Collier 2005). Any hope we have to grasp the particularity and variability of the great urban transformation demands situated accounts of how urban environments are formed through specific combinations of the past and the future, the postcolonial and the metropolitan, the global and the situated, but is not dominated by any single mechanism or principle.

Milieus of Intervention

Ideally, urban studies should be open to the multiplicity of events, interrelationships, and factors that, in ways both chaotic and strategic, expected and unforeseen, are in play in the formation of particular urban environments. A view of the city as a site of experimentation allows us to integrate qualities of fluidity, interactivity, and interactivity that crystallize the possibilities within which we reimagine, remake, and reexperience urban conditions and the notion of the urban itself.

Foucault counsels us to consider the city as a milieu, or “a field of intervention” in which individuals, populations, and groups put into conjunction of elements and events that circulate beyond the site itself (Foucault 2007: 21). Spatializing practices, in the dual senses of the gathering and the dispersing of circulating ideas, forms, and techniques, are constitutive of emerging globalized spaces. Spatializing practices thus form the urban as a problem-space in which a cast of disparate actors – the state, capitalists, NGOs, foreign experts, and ordinary people – define what is problematic, uncertain, or in need of mediation, and then go about solving these now-identified problems such as urban planning, class politics, and human capital. The starting point of analysis is thus not how singular principles define a city environment, but rather the array of problem-solving and spatializing practices that are in play in shaping an urban field.

In developing countries, a major player in configuring the urban environment is the state. It seeks to rethink and remake the contemporary world rather than being simply passively “globalized” by it. “Sovereignty capitalizes a territory,” Foucault declares (2007: 20), and states in emerging nations have been especially active in drawing resources, methods, and capabilities to their cities, as well as circulating urban and nationalist interests overseas. Entrepreneurial governments from East and Southeast Asia to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are often initiators of mega-urban projects, drawing sovereign wealth funds for the makeovers of old cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, or building totally new citadels in a desert landscape, as in Dubai. Through the renovation of cities, new political maps are drawn.

Urban planning takes place in conditions of uncertainty, and impressive built forms do not necessarily withstand the risks of market variability. Dubai is an overnight hypercity that emerged out of the confluence of post-9/11 repatriation of capital and Arab elites to the Middle East, and the petrodollar boom that followed. But the Dubai bubble burst in the 2008–9 financial catastrophe, and the city required a general bailout from oil-rich Abu Dhabi to get on its feet again. While Dubai will survive as the capital of Islamic banking and as a Middle East transportation hub and pleasure dome, its metropolitan flair as a global business hub has been undermined by the shifting sands of volatile capital flows. The building frenzy in brash new cities has been informed by a neoliberal logic of unlimited possibilities and risk-taking embodied in Dubai’s vertigo-inducing towers. The entrepreneurial quest to remake the city’s fortunes drives the circulation of global knowledge, actors, and talents. These are variously assembled by city officials, planners, activists, and citizens as they seek to shape a new space of governmentality attuned to global competition (Ong 2007). Political leaders view their city as a globalized field of intervention, a national space of problem solving that relies on methods both irrepressibly global and resolutely situated.

Worlding Practices

“Worlding” is employed here not to signal adherence to a world-historical logic of “world making,” as in a crude reading of Marx’s conception stagist historical development (cf., Marx and Engels 1848), but rather to identify the projects and practices that instantiate some vision of the world in formation. A Marxist view of worlding from above and counter-worlding from below reflects cosmopolitan ideals of emerging world citizenship. Worlding and reworlding were articulated by Spivak (1999) in her postcolonial attempt to recuperate subaltern subjects through a rendering of the Heideggerian concept of “being in the world.” Hardt and Negri (2000) provide another structural Marxist view of world transformation through generalized class conflicts. They claim that the “multitude,” a globally disenfranchised working-class collectivity produced through the contemporary workings of capitalism, are milling in the world’s cities to confront Empire. In a follow-up to Hardt and Negri, Rob Wilson (2004) proposes that a variety of counter-worlding tactics, including art, can challenge the universalizing ideology and materiality of planetary capitalism. He calls the aggregate of these tactics “worldings against Empire.” Such Marxist conceptualizations of worlding thus define a unified logic (class wars), set of agents (subalterns, working-class subjects, multitudes), and target (global capitalism) of world transformation. The everyday struggles of these special categories of historical actors are construed as coalescing, sooner or later, into a single counter-worlding movement against capital’s Empire.

We do not make our case by invoking such singular laws of inevitable worlding planetary scale. An anthropological focus on mid-range theorizing (Collier and Ong 2005) dives below high abstraction to hover over actual human projects and goals unfolding in myriad circumstances of possibility and contingency. We stay close to heterogeneous practices of worlding that do not fall tidily into opposite sides of class, political, or cultural divides. Rather, a non-ideological formulation of worlding as situated everyday practices identifies ambitious practices that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations – that is, “worlds” – than what already exists in a given context. Wording in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the claims that global situations are always in formation. Worlding projects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities, but they seem to form a critical mass in urban centers, making cities both critical sites in which to inquire into worlding projects, as well as the ongoing result and target of specific worldings.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) have suggested that in a world of flows, social formations emerge from the “rhizomatic” connections that cross-cut vertical integrated hierarchies (328–9). In this sense, worlding exercises are those lateralizing microprocesses that remap power by opening up new channels or reconfigure new social universes. In an echo of Foucault’s notion of milieu or social field (2007: 22–3), this notion of the production of emergent spaces from the flows of ideas, actions, and objects is a radical departure from a conventional view of the world as stabilized into binary orders. In a related argument, Bruno Latour (2005) notes that a social system is formed through “a provisional movement of new associations” that effects a continual change in its topography. Extrapolating from these theorists, worlding refers not to a single unified political process, but to diverse spatializing practices that mix and match different components that go into building an emergent system. If the city is a living, shifting network, then worlding practices are those activities that gather in some outside elements and dispatch others back into the world.

Indeed, the very act of reimagining or redesigning an urban milieu – whether in changing material infrastructure, political possibilities, or aesthetic styles – is by definition aspirational, experimental, and even speculative. Donna Haraway (2008) notes that scientific experiments open “up to speculative and so possible material, affective, practical reworlding” in concrete and detailed situations (92–3). There is a mix of speculative fiction and speculative fact in worlding exercises as practitioners aim to build something they believe is for the better. It seems important to register that such creative and contingent activities are at the core of urban innovation, and that tinkering with a spectrum of urban ideas and forms is an art of being global.

It is therefore not surprising to observe that there is no singular or fixed standard of urban globality; there are many forms of “the global” in play. The very contested nature of what counts as global in a shifting inter-urban field of power requires urban analysis to capture the reflexive dimension in many urban initiatives that go beyond local improvements to participate, however implicitly, in a bigger game of winning some kind of world recognition. Today, residents of Asian cities large and small like to think of their hometown as having some degree of global significance, or having attained some level of “world-class” standing. Indeed, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, major urban projects are invariably caught up in an inter-city competition over the “global” stature of hometowns.

Furthermore, in this emerging region, the tendency is no longer simply to turn to Western prototypes, but rather to develop from homegrown solutions to Asian metropolitan challenges, distinctive urban profiles, political styles, and aesthetic forms. Urban initiatives of all kinds are thus experiments with metropolitan futures, and they draw on disparate styles, actors, and forms that circulate in and through Asian metropolitan centers. In sum, worlding practices are constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures that variously conjure up worlds beyond current conditions of urban living. They articulate disparate elements from near and far; and symbolically re-situate the city in the world. By eschewing singular concepts of worlding, single standards of urban ranking that take for granted the terms in and through which cities can be ranked, and unified ways of achieving an already given future, we open up academic inquiries into a diversity of urban activities engaged in the transformation of contemporary urban living. In urban Asia, we encounter an art of being global that is invariably caught up in a political game that is allusive, contrastive, comparative, and contested, with cities in the region, but also beyond.

Modeling, Inter-Referencing, New Solidarities

Drawing on new research presented in the chapters, we identify three styles of being global that, while not exclusive to Asia, seem to be distinctive practices associated with urban development in the region. Worldwide, aspirant cities vie with one another in to leave some mark on the world stage. Different attempts to burnish city images, shape skylines, or push through innovative urban agendas can be found in many domains and scales of renovation. Besides mega-projects supported by politicians, planners, and boosters, there are also a variety of political, cultural, and economic projects pursued by activists, migrants, and artists to improve the condition and standing of their hometowns vis-à-vis others that are experienced as being in de facto competition in the game of urban ranking. All too schematically, for the sake of argument and organization, shared urban forms and norms in Asian metropolitan transformation seem to fall into three distinctive styles – modeling, inter-referencing, and association – that will be subtitles for different sections of this book.

Modeling

In recent decades, the renovation of cities in the non-Western world has given rise to the circulation of urban models that have become established values understood as desirable and achievable throughout the developing world. A number of Asian cities have come to stand as replicable models of an urban futurity that does not find its ultimate reference in the West. Here, Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, instead of New York, London, or Paris have become centers to be invoked, envied, and emulated as exemplary sites of a new urban normativity. Through the years of the tiger economies, city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong led the way in solving urban problems – public housing, downtown development, clean industries, upscale districts, cultural and tourist attractions – that transformed them into world-class cities. Furthermore, the cultivation of transnational links with corporations, banks, and cultural institutions made them the centers of global networks. While Hong Kong sees itself as “Asia’s World City,” Singapore presents itself as the knowledge hub of a far-flung “effervescent” business ecosystem (Ong 2005).