TY - JOUR
T1 - Asian urbanisms and the privatization of cities
AU - Hogan, Trevor
AU - Bunnell, Tim
AU - Pow, Choon Piew
AU - Permanasari, Eka
AU - Morshidi, Sirat
N1 - Funding Information:
The workshop from which this paper emerges was jointly funded by the Asia Research Institute and the Cities research cluster in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. We are grateful to the former for funding the participation of Trevor Hogan and Morshidi Sirat; and to the latter for funding Eka Permanasari. Our intervention benefitted from the insights of Zhu Jieming who presented a paper and other participants who contributed to the discussion, notably Chris Houston and Joel Kahn. We are also grateful for helpful comments from three referees who read two earlier drafts of this piece, and for the editorial guidance of Ali Modarres.
PY - 2012/2
Y1 - 2012/2
N2 - The majority of Asia's cities are being constructed from private funding and by private labor. This has always been the case for so-called informal settlements. Recently, however, the newly acquired socioeconomic status, aspirations, and cultural horizons of the emergent professional and business middle classes in Asia have captured both popular imagination and critical academic attention. These classes are building their own urban spaces, with or without state intervention or support. To what extent can these trends be understood by drawing upon the existing Anglophone literature, which conventionally considers the global cities of Western Europe and North America as the leading edge of urban change and theorization? What can diverse empirical cases in Asia tell us about the global privatization of urban space? Arising from a workshop on the privatization of urban space in Asia, this Viewpoint article addresses four issues that arise from comparison of several Asian cases. More specifically, this work challenges Western-centered assumptions about the spatiotemporal origins of urban change; positions Asia at the leading edge of certain urban trends that may also be discerned elsewhere; questions the prior 'public-ness' implied by the term 'privatization;' and unravels the dystopianism of Anglophone academic treatment of privately owned, constructed, or regulated spaces.
AB - The majority of Asia's cities are being constructed from private funding and by private labor. This has always been the case for so-called informal settlements. Recently, however, the newly acquired socioeconomic status, aspirations, and cultural horizons of the emergent professional and business middle classes in Asia have captured both popular imagination and critical academic attention. These classes are building their own urban spaces, with or without state intervention or support. To what extent can these trends be understood by drawing upon the existing Anglophone literature, which conventionally considers the global cities of Western Europe and North America as the leading edge of urban change and theorization? What can diverse empirical cases in Asia tell us about the global privatization of urban space? Arising from a workshop on the privatization of urban space in Asia, this Viewpoint article addresses four issues that arise from comparison of several Asian cases. More specifically, this work challenges Western-centered assumptions about the spatiotemporal origins of urban change; positions Asia at the leading edge of certain urban trends that may also be discerned elsewhere; questions the prior 'public-ness' implied by the term 'privatization;' and unravels the dystopianism of Anglophone academic treatment of privately owned, constructed, or regulated spaces.
KW - Comparative urban studies
KW - Gated communities
KW - Jakarta
KW - Los Angeles
KW - Manila
KW - Privatization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=83355172749&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cities.2011.01.001
DO - 10.1016/j.cities.2011.01.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:83355172749
SN - 0264-2751
VL - 29
SP - 59
EP - 63
JO - Cities
JF - Cities
IS - 1
ER -