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The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space (i.e. the space of everyday life), focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the "global village" and "this is a small world." In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a "social" account of the city's urban space as it has been reshaped by the process of globalization with a "private" account of the urban landscape as experienced by its walkers (as represented in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Shinya Tsukamoto and the novels of Wang Anyi). Rather than rest here, the author wishes to show that for many of the inhabitants of the new global city, the "shrinking world" phenomenon is deeply literal: the "lived" space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning, construction of new infrastructures, space modification — all in the name of urban development.
Globalization, Modernity and The City weaves together broad social themes with detailed urban analysis to explore the connections between the rise of big cities, the creation of a global network and the making of the modern world. It explains the growth of big cities, the urban bias of global flows and the creation of metropolitan modernities. The text develops broad theories of the subtle and complex interactions between urbanization, globalization and modernization in a sweep of the urban experience across the modern world. Thematic chapters explore the making of the modern city in profiles of the growth of urban spectaculars, the role of new flanerie, the traffic issues of the modernist city, recurring issues of urban utopias and the rise of the primate city.
Heteroglossic Asia presents an analysis of geographic, historical, cultural, economic, spatial and political factors underlying Taiwan’s maritime urbanity by means of case studies based on Taipei and Kaohsiung; two cities which represent the multi-accentual character of Taiwan’s urban environment and its recent changes and development through architecture. Focussing on the concept of a heteroglossic Asia Pacific, exemplified by the analysis of Taiwan’s urban transformation, the study argues that Taiwan’s urban environment shows a form of intended "fuzziness" which cannot be described as resting on either a simplified nationalist base or chaotic societal anxiety. Rather, this form lies between binary poles: autocracy and democracy, nation state and day-to-day life, top-down and bottom-up orientations, orthodoxy and hybridisation.
This textbook of essays by leading critical urbanists is a compelling introduction to an important field of study; it interrogates contemporary conflicts and contradictions inherent in the social experience of living in cities that are undergoing neoliberal restructuring, and grapples with profound questions and challenging policy considerations about diversity, equity, and justice. A stimulant to debate in any undergraduate urban studies classroom, this book will inspire a new generation of urban social scholars. - Alison Bain, York University "Stages a lively encounter with different understandings of urban production and experience, and does so by bringing together an exciting group of scholars working across a diversity of theoretical and geographical contexts. The book focuses on some of the central conceptual and political challenges of contemporary cities, including inequality and poverty, justice and democracy, and everyday life and urban imaginaries, providing a critical platform through which to ask how we might work towards alternative forms of urban living." - Colin McFarlane Durham University What is the city? What is the nature of living in the city? This new textbook provides students with an in-depth understanding of the central issues associated with the city and how living in a city impacts its inhabitants. Theoretically informed and thematically rich, the book is edited by leading scholars in the field and contains an eminent, international cast of contributors and contributions. It provides a critical analysis of the key thinkers, themes and paradigms dealing with the relationship between the built environment and urban life. It includes illustrative case studies, questions for discussion, further reading and web links. Examining the contradictions, conflicts and complexities of city living, the book is an essential resource for students looking to get to grip with the different theoretical and substantive approaches that make up the diverse and rich study of the city and urban life.
This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities. Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances. This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.
Cosmopolitanism and Place considers the way contemporary Anglophone fiction connects global identities with the experience in local places. Looking at fiction set in metropolises, regional cities, and rural communities, this book argues that the everyday experience of these places produces forms of wide connections that emphasize social justice.
As a nineteenth-century commercial development, the alleyway house was a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house and the Western terraced one. Unique to Shanghai, the alleyway house was a space where the blurring of the boundaries of public and private life created a vibrant social community. In recent years however, the city’s rapid redevelopment has meant that the alleyway house is being destroyed, and this book seeks to understand it in terms of the lifestyle it engendered for those who called it home, whilst also looking to the future of the alleyway house. Based on groundwork research, this book examines the Shanghai alleyway house in light of the complex history of the city, especially during the colonial era. It also explores the history of urban form (and governance) in China in order to question how the Eastern and Western traditions combined in Shanghai to produce a unique and dynamic housing typology. Construction techniques and different alleyway house sub-genres are also examined, as is the way of life they engendered, including some of the side-effects of alleyway house life, such as the literature it inspired, both foreign and local, as well as the portrayal of life in the laneways as seen in films set in the city. The book ends by posing the question: what next for the alleyway house? Does it even have a future, and if so, what lies ahead for this rapidly vanishing typology? This interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese studies, architecture and urban development, as well as history and literature.
Transecting Securityscapes is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors’ study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in “securityscapes.” In Transecting Securityscapes, Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway put into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, they develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security—mainstream as well as academic—that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict “from above.”
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.
Hybrid Hong Kong attempts to attract and excite the intellectual, cultural, economic and political elites as well as the intelligent laymen of Hong Kong - hopefully enough for them to take a closer look at their society - while engendering a public discourse on the city's identity, its past, present and future. Hong Kong is at its crossroads. With a colonial past and having been handed over, and back, to China in 1997, the city has since been going through a process of re-sinification and re-integration (not entirely wanted) into the Pearl River Delta region of mainland China, all of which have far-reaching consequences for identity politics, culture, loyalty and attachment, and everyday livelihood. The hybridity concept offers an in-between space, and time, to narrate, describe and make sense of the many layers of entanglement of cultural, anthropological, economic and political forces that impinge, impact, sometimes confuse, even disturb, the everyday lives of the Hongkongers who have decided to call the city home. The book probes a range of sites and locales of a Hongkonger's natural habitat, including film and television, ethnicity, popular music videos, gay identities, fashion, art, theatre, Cantopop electronic dance music, museum, visual arts, the Muslim youth, food and cuisine, and Chinese and western medicines. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation, Hybrid Hong Kong intends to display and explain hybridity as it is performed in the public as well as private spheres of city life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.