Post Industrial East Asian Cities

Drawing on a wide range of literature and on interviews with firms, this book explores issues of economic growth with a focus on six East Asian cities: Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. It suggests how policies and institutions can induce and furnish an urban environment that supports innovative activities. A valuable resource for researchers, urban planners, urban geographers, and policy makers interested in East Asia.

Drawing on a wide range of literature and on interviews with firms, this book explores issues of economic growth with a focus on six East Asian cities: Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. It suggests how policies and institutions can induce and furnish an urban environment that supports innovative activities. A valuable resource for researchers, urban planners, urban geographers, and policy makers interested in East Asia.

The East and Southeast Asia region constitutes the world’s most compelling theatre of accelerated globalization and industrial restructuring. Following a spectacular realization of the ‘industrialization paradigm’ and a period of services-led growth, the early twenty-first century economic landscape among leading Asian states now comprises a burgeoning ‘New Economy’ spectrum of the most advanced industrial trajectories, including finance, the knowledge economy and the ‘new cultural economy’. In an agenda-setting volume, New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities draws on stimulating research conducted by a new generation of urban scholars to generate critical analysis and theoretical insights on the New Economy phenomenon within Asia. New industry formation and the transformation of older economic practices constitute instruments of development, as well as signifiers of larger processes of change, expressed in the reproduction of space in the city. Asia’s major cities become the key staging areas for the New Economy, driven by the growing wealth of an urban middle and professional class, higher education institutions, city-based inter-regional movements and urban mega-projects. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cites animates this New Economy discourse by means of vibrant storylines of instructive cities and sites, including cases studies situated in cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Singapore. Theoretical and normative issues associated with the emergence of the new cultural economy are the subject of the book’s context-setting chapters, and each case study presents an evocative narrative of development interdependencies and exemplary outcomes on the ground. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities offers a vivid contribution to our understanding of the ongoing transformation of Asia’s urban system, including the critical intersections of global and local-regional dynamics in processes of new industry formation and the relayering of space in the Asian metropolis. The synthesis of empirical profiles, normative insights, and theoretical reference points enhances the book’s interest for scholars and students in fields of Asian studies, urban and cultural studies, and urban and economic geography, as well as for policy specialists and urban/community planners.

Rapid technological, economic, social and cultural changes are transforming the idea of "Asian space." With the shift to a global economy and an urban population explosion, Asian cities have become a mainstay of progress, national pride, identity, and positioning on the global stage. The extraordinary pace and intensity of the changes have created a situation unique in the history of urban development. Despite the immense diversity of Asian countries, "Asia-ness" is often treated as a distinctive quality that has emerged from unique recent circumstances affecting Asian urbanizations as a whole. In Future Asian Space, 15 authors explore broad concepts relating to the creation and re-creation of "Asian space" and contemporary Asian identity, and their examination of different sites and research approaches highlights the difficulty of pinpointing what Asia-ness is, or might become. Appropriate design and planning of cities is a critical element in building a sustainable future and coping with environmental, social and cultural problems. Future Asian Space is designed to stimulate interests and engagement in discussions of the Asian city, and its trajectories in architecture and urbanism, but the authors' conclusions will intrigue anyone interested in the future of cities and urban life in Asia.

During the second half of the twentieth century, development in the Asia-Pacific region has been dominated by industrialization. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, services, in particular, finance, information and creative services, have become deeply embedded in the processes of urban growth. In Asia-Pacific the rise of service industries has lead to national modernization programmes and globalization strategies. Services are also driving change in the internal form of city regions and are being actively deployed as instruments of metropolitan reconfiguration and land use changes. These changes have created problems such as social polarization and the displacement of traditional industries and residential districts. Also, there are tensions between local and global processes in the development of service industries, and between the imperatives of competitive advantage and sustainable development. Service Industries and Asia Pacific Cities brings together a multi-disciplinary team of experts to explore and illustrate the theoretical, conceptual and practical issues arising from the transformation of Asia-Pacific cities by service industries.

This volume explores how migration is playing a central role in the renewing and reworking of urban spaces in the fast growing and rapidly changing cities of Asia. Migration trends in Asia entered a new phase in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War which marked the advent of a renewed phase of globalization. Cities have become centrally implicated in globalization processes and, therefore, have become objects and sites of intense study. The contributors to this book reflect on the impact and significance of migration with a particular focus on the contested spaces that are emerging in urban contexts and the economic, social, religious and cultural domains with which they intersect. They also examines the roles and effects of different forms of migration in the cauldron of urban change, from low-skilled domestic migrants who maintain a close engagement with their rural homes, to highly skilled/professional transnational migrants, to legal and illegal international migrants who arrive with the hope of transforming their livelihoods. Providing a mosaic of insights into the links between migration, marginalization and contestation in Asia’s urban contexts, Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, migration studies, urban studies and human geography.

Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Post-Politics and Civil Society in Asian Cities examines how the concept of ‘post-politics’ has manifested across a range of Asian cities, and the impact this has had on state-society relationships in processes of urban governance. This volume examines how the post-political framework—derived from the study of Western liberal democracies—applies to Asian cities. Appreciating that the region has undergone a distinctive trajectory of political development, and is currently governed under democratic or authoritarian regimes, the book articulates how post-political conditions have created obstacles or opportunities for civil society to assert its voice in urban governance. Chapters address the different ways in which Asian civil society groups strive to gain a stake in the development and management of cities, specifically by looking at their involvement in heritage and environmental governance, two inter-related components in discourses about establishing liveable cities for the future. By providing in-depth case studies examining the varying degrees to which post-political ideologies have been enacted in urban governance across Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia, this book offers a useful and timely resource for students and scholars interested in urban studies, political science, Asian studies, geography, and sociology.

In The Asian City the Asian urbanisation processes, nature and characteristics of the 1990s have been analyzed by countries, by comparing different countries and in an international context. The authors are urban specialists from four continents. This volume has been divided into six parts: Part I Urbanisation in an international context; Part II Comparative urban setting; Part III Urbanisation characteristics by country; Part IV Urban planning; Part V The urban poor, and Part VI Perspectives on urbanization. This work allows the reader to understand Asian urban forms, their evolution, the nature of urbanisation, its impact on economic growth in cities, the living and working conditions of the poor, and urban planning and problems.