Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Introduction 13Asian Cities: Colonial to Global

Gregory Bracken

Part One Post-colonialism

1 Gambling, City, Nation 31Popular Illegality and Nation Building in Singapore, 1960s-1980s

Kah-Wee Lee

2 The Death of the Pasar Malam 53The Counterpoint to Development in the Singapore Story

Elmo Gonzaga

3 Artif ice and Authenticity 69Postcolonial Urbanism in Macau

Thomas Daniell

4 Urban Art Images and the Concerns of Mainlandization in Hong Kong 95

Minna Valjakka

Part Two Networks

5 Honkon Nippō and Hong Kong-Japan Relations 125Re-examining the Geopolitical Position of Colonial Hong Kong in East Asia before the End of World War II

Wilson Wai Shing Lee

6 Chain Reactions 143Japanese Colonialism and Global Cosmopolitanism in East Asia

Faye Yuan Kleeman

7 Old Networks with New Users 159Mapping Global Mobility between Dongguan and Hong Kong

Max Hirsh

8 Asian Cities in the Global Maritime Network since the Late Nineteenth Century 173

César Ducruet

9 Back to the Future 187Feasible Cost-Sharing Co-operation in the Straits of Malacca

Senia Febrica

Part Three Cities and Buildings

10 Rallying Towards the Nation 217Theatre of Nation Building in Post-colonial Dhaka

Kishwar Habib and Bruno De Meulder

11 Selectively Connected 241New Songdo and the Production of Global Space

Bridget Martin

12 The Vernacular and the Spectacular 261Urban Identity and Architectural Heritage in Southeast Asian Cities

Rita Padawangi

13 Heritage in Times of Rapid Transformation 279A Tale of Two Cities – Yangon and Hanoi

William Logan

14 Small-scale, Bottom-up 301Cosmopolitan Linkages Reglobalizing Shanghai’s City Centre

Ying Zhou

Conclusion 327Global Cities in Asia

Gregory Bracken

Contributors 331

Bibliography 337

Index 367

Figures

Figure 1.1 Factors influencing gambling frequency amongst industrial workers 37

Figure 1.2 ‘The individual as target’ 42Figure 1.3 Exposing gambling fortif ications 44Figure 1.4 ‘A gambling spot by any other name’ 48

Figure 3.1 Plan de la Ville et du Port de Macao 81Figure 3.2 Peninsula de Macau e Ilha da Taipa 82Figure 3.3 Aerial photo of Z.A.P.E. Reclamation, 1941 83Figure 3.4 Aomen shi quan tu (City Plan of Macau) 84Figure 3.5 Z.A.P.E. in the 1980s 85Figure 3.6 Álvaro Siza and P & T Group proposal for N.A.P.E.

and Novos Aterros da Areia Preta 85Figure 3.7 N.A.P.E. planning regulations 86Figure 3.8 Eduardo Lima Soares, Nova Cidade de Cotai, plan 86Figure 3.9 Eduardo Lima Soares, Nova Cidade de Cotai, model 87Figure 3.10 Las Vegas Sands Corporation original proposal for

the Cotai Strip, 2002 87Figure 3.11 Novos Zonas Urbanas diagram 88Figure 3.12 Novos Zonas Urbanas rendering 89Figure 3.13 Novos Zonas Urbanas reclamation in progress 89Figure 3.14 Rocco Yim, StarWorld Macau, 2006 90Figure 3.15 Dennis Lau, Grand Lisboa Hotel and Casino, 2007 91Figure 3.16 View of the Cotai Strip 92Figure 3.17 Gary Goddard, Galaxy Macau, 2011 92Figure 3.18 AEDES, Sands Cotai Central, 2012 93

Figure 4.1 Tsang Tsou-choi (King of Kowloon), untitled (pair of iron gates), ink on iron gates, 200 cm x 270 cm 102

Figure 4.2 MAIS, ORSEK and JAMS, a spray-painted commemorative piece for Tsang in Fotan, 2007 103

Figure 4.3 Anonymous local artists, a sticker in MTR station, 2014 111Figure 4.4 Anonymous local artists, a sticker in MTR train, 2014 112

Figure 4.5 Street artist Death, Mao with a Yellow Bowtie, stencil, 2012 113Figure 4.6 Street photographer Cpak Ming, ‘Modern VIIV spirit’,

photograph, 2011 114Figure 4.7 Chin Tangerine, Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei?, stencil, 2011 116Figure 4.8 Artist Kacey Wong, ‘Attack of the Red Giant’, 2014 117Figure 4.9 Street artists Start From Zero (SFZ), poster of Henry

Tang, 2013 119Figure 4.10 Graff iti artist RST2, spray-painted banners of local

parties, 2013 120Figure 4.11 Graff iti artist RST2, poster of Leung Kwok-hung, 2014 121Figure 4.12 Graff iti artist Pibg Gantz, a spray-painted piece,

Macau, 2012 122

Figure 5.1 Japanese submarine cables in East Asia, 1915 137Figure 5.2 Planned cable routes in the East Asia Stability Sphere, 1940 141Figure 5.3 The cable and wireless network, 1934 142

Figure 6.1 Bank of Korea (present day) 150Figure 6.2 National Taiwan Museum 1949-present 151Figure 6.3 Remains of torii gate (present day) 152Figure 6.4 Taiwan’s Presidential Palace (present day) 154

Figure 7.1 Hong Kong-Macau Passenger Ferry Terminal, Humen Town, Dongguan, China 160

Figure 7.2 Apartment blocks near the upstream check-in terminal, Dongguan 162

Figure 7.3 Rendering of SkyPier, Hong Kong International Airport; Terminal 1 in the background 166

Figure 7.4 APM tunnel between SkyPier and Terminal 1, Hong Kong International Airport 167

Figure 7.5 Mainland ferry staff at SkyPier, Hong Kong International Airport 168

Figure 7.6 Luggage cranes at SkyPier, Hong Kong International Airport 169

Figure 8.1 The Lloyd’s Shipping Index in 1890 176Figure 8.2 Global and local data source comparison based on

the Chinese case, 1890-2008 177Figure 8.3 Regional distribution of world vessel movements,

1890-2008 177

Figure 8.4 Regional distribution of vessel movements in Asia, 1890-2008 178

Figure 8.5 Traff ic hierarchy of Asian port cities, 1890-2008 180-181Figure 8.6 Port trajectories of selected Asian cities, 1890-2008 184

Figure 10.1 The timeline of Dhaka. The timeline shows the position of Ramna – a green oasis in-between indigenous and postcolonial extensions of the city 218

Figure 10.2 Inside-out Ramna. These aerial photographs show Ramna as a forest or park at the centre in sharp contrast to the dense urban morphology 219

Figure 10.3 Open spaces in the capital. Ramna (number 10) is a vast open public space located at the heart of the capital 219

Figure 10.4 Dhaka City Map, 1859 222Figure 10.5 Map of the new Civil Station of Dhaka (1905) 224Figure 10.6 Neoclassical Dhaka College (left) and Indo-Saracenic

Curzon Hall (right) 225Figure 10.7 The wave of new construction around Ramna 227Figure 10.8 Constantine Doxiadis’s 1963 plan for the Teachers’

Students’ Centre (TSC), Ramna 229Figure 10.9 Ramna in 1952 (left) and 1960 (right) 231Figure 10.10 Pseudo-Islamic versus modern architecture in Ramna 233Figure 10.11 The gradual transformation of Ramna racecourse

from a maidan (open space) to a children’s park and the city’s recreational Park Suhrawardy Uddyan (left); f igure-ground plan of Ramna (right) 234

Figure 10.12 The Design interventions of Liberation War Museum at the historical Ramna racecourse (present Suhrawardy Uddyan) 236

Figure 10.13 Ramna holds a delicate balance between institutions, representative buildings, and monuments at the centre of the city 239

Figure 11.1 New Songdo’s high-rise towers, including the First World Complex, with real estate advertisements lining the streets 246

Figure 11.2 IFEZ advertisements (‘Developing the City at the Heart of South Korea’s Leading Service Industries’, right-hand poster translation) 248

Figure 11.3 Compact Smart City Exhibit Building 252

Figure 11.4 Model of New Songdo 253Figure 11.5 Show-model apartment in New Songdo’s POSCO (The

Sharp at Greenworks) 254Figure 11.6 New Songdo’s border area 255Figure 11.7 Ja-ap Village near New Songdo being demolished 257

Figure 12.1 Clarke Quay shophouses and the tourist boats 269Figure 12.2 Museum Fatahillah in Kota Tua (Old Town), Jakarta 275

Figure 13.1 The South Gate of the World Heritage-listed Thang Long-Hanoi citadel 284

Figure 13.2 The Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, a future World Heritage nomination? 285

Figure 13.3 The beaux-arts palace of the French Indochina Governor-General built in Hanoi in 1907 287

Figure 13.4 The neoclassical New Law Courts built in Yangon in 1927 287Figure 13.5 Demolition site in Hanoi’s French Quarter, 1990 297Figure 13.6 Derelict warehouse, Yangon 2012 297

Figure 14.1 Café Volcan 305Figure 14.2 Yongkang Road 305Figure 14.3 Plan of Jing’an Villas, with ground-floor commercial

insertions indicated 315Figure 14.4 Jing’an Villas ground floor commercial viewed from

the front courtyard 316Figure 14.5 People reading the plaques of the heritage buildings

on Wukang Road 323Figure 14.6 Photos of the interior of huiguan club houses on

Wukang Road 324Figure 14.7 Map with the creative commercial activities

highlighted and the three research areas around Yongkang Road, Jing’an Villas and Wukang Road 325

Tables

Table 1.1 Gambling-related offences, 1951-1973 32Table 1.2 Number of prosecutions, 1967-1968 33

Table 9.1 Contribution of each state to the IIP 205

IntroductionAsian Cities: Colonial to Global

Gregory Bracken

Some cities are more dynamic than others, some are more important, larger, or simply more urbane. And while there are any number of factors that determine a city’s importance, be it economic or infrastructural, it can also be something less tangible, such as culture or history, or even freedom of expression, or quality of life. It is a well-known fact that the world is now 50 percent urban, but the idea that we can simply divide the world’s population into urban and rural is too simple, too naïve. People who dwell in towns, even very large towns in rural India or China, lead a far less urbane existence than do farmers in Western Europe, say; and even the urban environment itself embraces a wide range of varying types: from the rural village to the glittering global metropolis. Urban fabric also contains a bewildering array of types, everything from the sleepy suburb to the twenty-four-hour dynamo that spins at a city’s centre.

Cities are graded according to a wide variety of factors; one of the better-known is the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Group’s ranking system.1 In this system the world’s major metropolises are divided into alpha, beta, or gamma, with London and New York as alpha cities, Hong Kong and Singapore as beta, and Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta as gamma. This global grading system takes into account a number of important factors and yet all it is doing is reflecting the sophisticated and highly ordered system of self-organization that operates between these cities. In many ways this is much the same as the way in which cities organize themselves internally, by a sort of autopoesis.

One thing nearly every city has in common in the twenty-f irst century is that they will be interacting ever more closely in an increasingly globalized economy. What makes this interaction particularly vital is the fact that this global economic system has become more and more homogenized simply because it has no real alternatives: China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1970s followed by the collapse of Soviet-style economics in the 1990s means that the world can be said to operate one economic system, i.e. that of global capitalism. And yet globalization is not quite as new as some

1 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/gy/research/gawc.html.

14 GreGory BrACken

may think. Saskia Sassen has estimated that the international f inancial markets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were at least as massive as today’s – this is certainly true when volumes are measured against the national economies of the time. The world at the end of the nineteenth century was a surprisingly globalized one, the difference with today is that this globalization took place within different imperial systems: the British, French, Russian, Japanese, etc. The cities of these empires were also organized according to strict hierarchies, each with its metropolitan centre, such as London or Paris, serviced by colonial enclaves, like Hong Kong or Hanoi. Of course, then as now, some parts of the world fell outside the influence of the international markets, either because they were too inaccessible, or too poor, or because they chose to isolate themselves for political or religious reasons.

The global city

Saskia Sassen sees global cities operating as a unified system rather than simply competing with one another, and what competition there is tempered by strategic collaboration, with a division of labour that enables these cities to f it into the global hierarchy. Mobility of capital has led to new forms in the mobility of labour with the result that there is a degree of centralization in some cities. This is hardly surprising, people go to where the jobs are; what is surprising, however, is that no one saw it coming. The new technologies that have enabled long-distance management and services seem to have actually increased the importance of certain cities. Why is this? If we are able to interact with colleagues anywhere in the world at the touch of a button then why have certain cities became even more important as nodes in the global network? Why not simply stay home and communicate at long distance? The answer is simple: people require face-to-face contact in order to do business; people need to meet one another in order to establish relations of trust.

The rise of information and communications technology (ICT) is what Manuel Castells refers to in his trilogy The Information Age as ‘informa-tionalism’. He sees the new economy as producing information, as opposed to the old economy, or ‘industrialism’, which preceded it (where the main sources of productivity were labour, capital, and natural resources) (Castells 2006: 8). Castells sees informationalism as inseparable from the new social structures that have given rise to what he calls the Network Society. Infor-mation technology has turned producer services into tradable goods, and cities that provide these new and increasingly mobile services have become

IntroduC tIon 15

not simply nodal points in the co-ordination of these global processes, they have become sites of production in their own right.

In order to produce and disseminate information, complex physical infra-structure is required. Certain cities have a strategic advantage because this infrastructure is by its very nature immobile. The management of the complex interaction between massive concentrations of material resources that infor-mation technologies allow have reconfigured the interaction between capital f ixity and hypermobility, with the result that cities that were already major global players f ind themselves with a new competitive advantage. These are the cities where the global players congregate, so this is where you will have to go if you want to do business with them. Or, as David Harvey puts it in The New Imperialism, fluid movement over space can only be achieved by fixing certain physical infrastructures in space (physical infrastructure can mean roads, railways, airports, and port facilities, cable networks and fibre-optic systems, as well as electricity grids and sewerage systems, etc.). These require a lot of capital to set up and maintain, and the recovery of these investments depends upon their use in situ (Harvey 2005: 99-100).

David Harvey also sees an identif iable territorial logic of power aris-ing from this infrastructural centralization, which he terms ‘regionality’ (Harvey 2005: 103). He see this as the necessary and unavoidable result of the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time, with the result that inter-regional competition and the specialization in and among regional economies becomes one of the fundamental features of capitalism. One of the side-effects of this is that the global city becomes increasingly iso-lated from its hinterland. K. Anthony Appiah puts this even more forcefully in his foreword to Saskia Sassen’s Globalization and Its Discontents: these global cities can become not only increasingly isolated from, but actually actively antagonistic to their regional cultures and economies (Appiah 1998: xii). David Harvey gives us some examples of this: the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China as well as the Lower Yangtze region, which he sees as areas that encapsulate dynamic power centres that are economically (though not necessarily politically) dominating the rest of the country (Harvey 2005: 105).

Colonial to global

Modern telecommunications have not created networks out of nothing. The nodal points in the global city network have formed themselves in places where networks already existed, cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. Shanghai is an interesting case in point, whereas Hong Kong

16 GreGory BrACken

and Singapore made the almost flawless segue from colonial entrepôt to global city, Shanghai was cut off from the rest of the world after 1949. The city found itself forced to operate as the engine for Chinese development under the Communists. Ironically, it was only after the Open Door economic reforms of 1978 that Shanghai began to have its position undermined, when it began to fall behind new national rivals like Shenzhen. The staggered series of economic reforms introduced to the city since 1984, culminating in the development of the Pudong Special Economic Zone in 1990, eventually allowed Shanghai to pick up the international threads – the city is once again being taken seriously as a global player, very much so.

So what has enabled some of these key cities to become so important? Manuel Castells sees geopolitics as providing the grounds by which the politics of post-colonial survival became successful developmental policies, paving the way for some of the Tiger Economies that so startled the world at the end of the twentieth century. This can be taken as a sign that there is an important link between colonial networks and global cities. Ackbar Abbas has also investigated this phenomenon, taking the specif ic cultural spaces of Hong Kong as his point of departure. His work has highlighted the important link between Hong Kong, the colonial enclave, and Hong Kong, the Global City. In fact, he is convinced that colonial networks make useful foundations for global ones.

One other important point, and one which ties back to Saskia Sassen’s analysis of global cities, is the fact that the construction or improvement of ICT networks cannot substitute for social networks. What facilitates these social networks in the case of a city like Hong Kong – the stability of the business environment, the investment in infrastructure, and the adherence to international standards of business law – is the fact that they were all founded by the British to service their colonial city and went on to act as the foundation for the territory’s global pre-eminence today.

One important element in this continuity of development is identif ied by Manuel Castells as being Hong Kong’s civil service, the administrative class of elite scholars recruited by the colonial service in Britain, usually from the better colleges, such as in Oxford and Cambridge. These people had strong social and ideological cohesion, as well as shared professional interests and cultural values. They ran Hong Kong for most of its history, and their power was exercised primarily in the service of Hong Kong’s business community, a group which enjoyed far greater freedom in its operations than most others in the international capitalist system during the second half of the twentieth century, something which has helped Hong Kong become the global leader it is today.

IntroduC tIon 17

Ackbar Abbas has also pointed out that colonialism has pioneered the methods required to incorporate what were precapitalist, pre-industrial, non-European societies into the world economy; establishing ways of deal-ing with ethnically, racially, and culturally different societies. In Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance he states that colonial cities can be viewed as the forerunners of the contemporary global city, suggesting that it was colonialism that allowed imperialism make the leap into globalism (Abbas 1997: 3). This is true – think how much more cosmopolitan a place like Hong Kong or Shanghai was in the nineteenth century, compared to the likes of London or Paris at the same time. As global capitalism rose from the ashes of empire, some cities of these erstwhile empires found themselves perfectly placed to become global players.

Asian cities: colonial to global

This book is the result of a seminar held under the auspecis of the Interna-tional Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden and the Technical University of Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, which took place in Leiden in April 2013. This was a multidisciplinary investigation into how networks laid down during the era of Western colonial domination of Asia have given certain cities in the region a global edge.

The chapters in this book focus on a number of specif ic places in South, Southeast, and East Asia, some of them also deal with inter- and transre-gional themes, such as shipping. Most of them deal with the region’s urban environment, paying particular attention to certain specif ic cities, with Singapore the focus of three of the chapters, one of which makes a useful comparison with Jakarta. Shanghai is also examined, particularly its indig-enous lilong or alleyway houses. Hanoi is seen as a comparison and possible model for Yangon (a place we do not hear very much about but are likely to in the future – making this chapter a particularly timely investigation). Dhaka also features, where the use of colonial (and precolonial spaces) are looked at to see their influence on the city’s post-colonial history. The history of Macau is also examined, this is a more recently post-colonial enclave, as is its near neighbour Hong Kong, where two chapters look at Japan’s influence on the city in the colonial and post-colonial eras, one of which also includes an analysis of Taiwan. Dongguan, a nearby but less-well-known neighbour in the Pearl River Delta, is a city where anomalous spatial articulations are the result of increasing regional and global integration. Keeping up to date with the new global hegemony, we also turn our attention to New Songdo City

18 GreGory BrACken

in Korea, a not entirely successful Free Economic Zone (FEZ). And, as has just been mentioned, some of the chapters examine more general themes, such as shipping (globally, historically, and more specif ically, regionally, in Asia). Finally, there is a fascinating look at urban art images, and the role it plays as an urban expression of post-colonialism in Hong Kong.

Note that ‘post-colonialism’ will often be hyphenated in the chapters that follow. This is done to differentiate it from the notion of ‘postcolonialism’, with its more theoretical implications (which is also used in a number of the chapters). The hyphenation is not intended to be an avoidance of the theoretical implications of postcolonialism, indeed, many of the chapters take a profoundly theoretical stance, rather, it is an attempt to sidestep issues which, while interesting and important, may distract the reader, and indeed the researcher, from the more practical considerations of the built environment of Asia as a thing in itself. These are real places that are being examined here, with real conditions, and real people, something I will return to in the Conclusion.

Post-colonialism

The fourteen chapters in this book have been divided into three parts: Post-colonialism, Networks, and Cities and Buildings. The Post-colonialism section begins with Kah-Wee Lee’s ‘Gambling, City, Nation: Popular Il-legality and Nation Building in Singapore, 1960s-1980s’, which sees the intensif ication of the criminalization of gambling as part of a much more complex phenomenon, one where the very notions of morality and legality were bound up with the processes of nation building, particularly through urbanization and the building of modernist tower blocks and new towns. New housing estates made it diff icult to exercise the sort of informal social control that had been practiced in the kampongs. Delinquency lurked in corridors, playgrounds, and other unsupervised areas of these new high-density environments where idling could lead to mischief. This is fascinating because the Brave New World of post-World War II social housing is gener-ally regarded to have failed in its social goals, particularly in the West where architects saw themselves as social activists rather than the middle-class professionals they actually were, and they tried to achieve social change by manipulating one aspect of social life: housing. By doing this without paying suff icient attention to other underlying causes of social problems (which were legion) they failed in their laudable aims. However, lamenting that if only the people who inhabited their vast new tower blocks would live up to their vision and everything would be alright showed a profession

IntroduC tIon 19

dangerously out of touch with reality. Sadly, the resultant perception of architects as being to blame for many (if not all) of society’s ills, simply because of these disastrous tower blocks (even as they did bring material improvement to many people’s lives), has done nothing to address these underlying problems (quite apart from being an argument from causality so naïve and simplistic that it need not detain us further here). Yet Kah-Wee Lee’s chapter shows us that the location of dangerous practices in this new social vision made the modernist project more touch-and-go than has perhaps been realized.

In the 1960s, Singapore’s public housing estates were both the crucible of Modernity as well as its vulnerable locus where failure was lurking. As a key site in the struggle to build a new nation, Lee shows how this new high-rise, high-density living environment came to be conceptualized in the idioms of order and disorder, where ‘cleanliness’ was not just the absence of danger or disorder – it was the very expression of the New Order. And while a clean urban environment may have been the measurable and visible result, it was not the real target. Lee’s analysis might be understood as one genealogy of nationalist modernity which draws out the relationships between modern techniques of control, the symbolic order of the nation and the ‘criminal genius of everyday life’. In a move that would have Michel Foucault shaking his head in dismay, the new rulers of Singapore, the People’s Action Party (PAP), made their real target the individual and aimed at transforming their habits. Gambling, even in its most trivial forms, became anathema to national survival. The result of this struggle was, as Lee tells us, an unstable truce, one that saw a slow but thorough transformation of the implicit, and explicit, rules in Singapore’s social contract between the state and its citizens.

Staying in Singapore we come to Elmo Gonzaga’s ‘The Death of the Pasar Malam: The Counterpoint to Development in the Singapore Story’ which is closely related to the themes explored in Kah-Wee Lee’s chapter, where another traditional aspect of Singaporean life came to be considered dangerous to the newly independent government’s project of Modernity: in this case the pasar malam. What is interesting in these two chapters is how Lee’s old pattern of gambling made use of older, more established spaces in the city, whereas Gonzaga’s pasar malam was an old pattern reinvented and reused in the new spaces of the social housing blocks, helping them, initially, but then rapidly being seen as a hindrance to Modernity.

Gonzaga argues that the pasar malam, far from being something that existed in a primitive ‘state of nature’ prior to the modernization of British Malaya, was an integral part of the process of modernization; a by-product of the extensive reconfiguration of the spatial and social landscape which

20 GreGory BrACken

marked Singapore’s development into a First World nation. They formed because of a lack of commercial facilities in the newly created residential areas, and served as the main source of basic provisions, which saved residents from having to make the long trek into town. Appropriating grass f ields around the housing estates, they became improvised public spaces for commerce and consumption and were centres of social life in the early stages of Singapore’s national development.

Gonzaga argues that from its inception, the pasar malam was seen as possessing an indeterminate quality (perhaps from the energy of its atmos-phere or the allure of its merchandise) which impelled ordinary citizens to perform illicit activities (such as buying smuggled goods). Once the clean-up campaigns of the 1960s got underway (beginning with the Hawker’s Inquiry Commission concluding that food hawkers were a primary source of f ilth and disease, as well as dangers to order and lawfulness), the pasar malam found itself under attack. Characterized as primitive, brazen, and irrational, it was deemed an obstacle to the good workings of government, and a hindrance to the elements of civilization. The eradication that followed exhibits what Gonzaga calls the logic of ‘sanitary modernity’ which was fundamentally antagonistic because it relied on hierarchy and exclusion for its epistemological foundation. For this modernity to establish itself the government must identify, degrade, and exile all undesirable and recalci-trant elements it deems threats to identity and stability. The mere presence of the pasar malam in the city exposed the limits of an effective government and state authority. Gonzaga also interestingly draws our attention to a uniquely Singaporean phenomenon: the city-centre shopping mall, because parallel to this social cleansing was the development of something that is in remarkable contrast to what happened in the cities of North America and Western Europe. Singapore’s monumental shopping malls are situated right in the centre of the city and represent the beating heart of its social life. Clean and organized (according to the logic of sanitary modernity) any hint of the sort of boisterousness of the pasar malam would only serve to disorient and repulse potential customers – something that must be avoided at all costs.

Now we move north to ‘Artif ice and Authenticity: Postcolonial Urban-ism in Macau’ by Thomas Daniell, which argues that the authenticity of this Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China seems to lie in its very artif iciality. He gives us a succinct overview of the various waves of land reclamation which have been freighted with political exigencies, economic crises, demographic pressures, and cultural ambitions that resulted in an erratic series of well-intentioned projects that were all too often cancelled, compromised, or abandoned. The territory’s urban identity seems to possess

IntroduC tIon 21

a kind of cognitive dissonance that compels each new development to attempt to restore a degree of balance to the accumulating incongruities of its past. The result is an exhilarating and sometimes disturbing sense of disorientation, which has only increased since Portuguese control ended in 1999 and the gambling industry has become increasingly dominant. Rather than the new overwhelming the old, or enhancing it by contrast, Daniell sees surviving traditional districts as being on the verge of becoming just another part of the patchwork, no more or less authentic than any other: a case study of the implications and potentials for piecemeal tabula rasa planning where we f ind, not a palimpsest of historical layers within a contained territory, but a proliferation of adjacent alternatives, almost like an array of experimental results left permanently on display.

The f inal chapter in this section is ‘Urban Art Images and the Concerns of Mainlandization in Hong Kong’ by Minna Valjakka, which asks how urban art images (such as street art and graff iti) survive the pressures of a dense urban environment, as well as the discourses of post-colonialism (with specif ic reference to a recolonization or ‘mainlandization’ by China), and the debates surrounding cultural heritage and indigenous identities. Even more importantly, the chapter asks what impact this context has on urban art images and how they can engage with such complex situations. In examining the creation of urban art images Valjakka argues that we need to consider the nationality of their creators as well as issues such as site-responsiveness, content, language, format, and style to provide differ-ent perspectives on the usage and understanding of urban public space, especially at a grassroots level.

In making these investigations, Valjakka seeks to take an interdiscipli-nary approach, both methodologically and theoretically, therefore her piece is very appropriate for this book (which would be dominated by architects and urbanists otherwise) because it deals with the urban environment. The different perspective that this chapter brings is both refreshing and fascinating because one of its more interesting aspects is something that is of particular relevance for the urban environment: how the creators of urban art images have managed to create spaces for themselves in Hong Kong. The examples examined here reveal a concern, indeed even an anxi-ety, over Hong Kong’s growing recolonization by China.

Networks

The f irst chapter in section two looks at the geopolitical position of Hong Kong in the colonial era from the point of view of media in a wider East Asian

22 GreGory BrACken

context. ‘Honkon Nippō and Hong Kong-Japan Relations: Re-examining the Geopolitical Position of Colonial Hong Kong in East Asia before the End of World War II’, by Wilson Wai Shing Lee, argues that Hong Kong, at least until the end of the World War II, was considered less significant than other cities or territories in the region, such as Shanghai or Taiwan. Through a study of Honkon Nippō, a Japanese newspaper in Hong Kong which reflected the grow-ing presence of Japan in the colony in the run up to the war, Lee contends that Hong Kong was an important consideration as the Japanese Empire was preparing to expand its influence southwards, and one that ultimately strengthened Hong Kong’s geopolitically significant position in the region.

Staying with Japanese influence, Faye Yuan Kleeman’s ‘Chain Reactions: Japanese Colonialism and Global Cosmopolitanism in East Asia’ examines how modern ideas and goods circulated among cities like Dalian, Harbin, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Saigon in the f irst half of the twentieth century and formed a network of urban centres fostering a uniquely East Asian cosmopolitanism. She argues that all of these cities were shaped by one or more colonial experiences, and that all were, at one time or another, ruled by the only Asian colonizer: Japan (even if in some cases this was a very brief wartime occupation).

Her chapter examines the larger context of this chain of formerly colonial cities as well as what she calls their ‘graduated emergence’ as global cities, which occurred at different junctures in the post-colonial era. Particular attention is paid to Taipei (Taiwan was Japan’s oldest colonial outpost and, consequently, its main urban centre was most inf luenced by this encounter). Kleeman argues that the trajectory of cultural f lows was not always unilateral; on various occasions, encounters with the local, native cultures came to cross-fertilize and, ultimately, transform both colonizer and colonized. This could help to explain how Taipei has begun to exploit its colonial past, revitalizing ties to Japan through nostalgic language use and strategic preservation, as well as the actual repurposing of colonial-era buildings where, interestingly, their continued utilization is less offensive to the locals than in other parts of Asia. Indeed, this repurposing seems to point to a pragmatism and a more nuanced interpretation of Taiwan’s colonial past. The commodif ication of this past, Kleeman argues, shows a relaxation of the taboos about Japanese coloniality. Taipei, reaching into its hidden past, is drawing on both a precolonial native and indigenous culture, as well as its now-exoticized colonial past, to construct a layered, multicultural urban space.

Max Hirsh’s ‘Old Networks with New Users: Mapping Global Mobility between Dongguan and Hong Kong’ investigates the development of a

IntroduC tIon 23

network of ferry terminals that allows passengers from Mainland China flying via Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) to bypass Hong Kong’s customs and immigration procedures. Located deep inside Guangdong Province, these check-in terminals cater to passengers whose cross-border movement is limited by income or citizenship. This chapter argues that the Pearl River Delta’s upstream system originated in the late 1980s through a partnership between local off icials and the Overseas Chinese. While these installations were initially to abet the transfer of capital and expertise from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Mainland China, they have now been ap-propriated by China’s incipiently mobile middle class (and others) to travel further af ield, including to South Asia, the Middle East, and even Africa. SkyPier, as this ferry terminal is known, is accessible only by ferry and underground train, it cannot be entered at ground level. Its organizational logic reveals much about the aesthetics of transborder infrastructure in the twenty-f irst century, as well as highlighting the ‘frustrated mobility’ of a group of people who have the ‘right’ f inancial resources but the ‘wrong’ travel documents. This chapter uses the physical design as well as the passenger prof ile of the upstream check-in system as useful lenses for interrogating broader shifts in global mobility patterns that are taking place in the Pearl River Delta.

Now we come to two chapters that deal with shipping, an important element in any analysis of global city networks. This book, in aiming at a multidisciplinary approach, welcomes these contributions as being particu-larly valuable. We begin with César Ducruet’s ‘Asian Cities in the Global Maritime Network since the Late Nineteenth Century’ which makes use of a hitherto untapped data resource, Lloyd’s List, and provides fascinating information about the global movements of merchant vessels among Asian port cities since 1890, where a snapshot, as it were, of maritime activity every forty years or so was chosen to reflect major evolutions in the port hierarchy and the functions of Asian cities (Asia in this case being def ined as everything from Greece to Siberia but excluding Oceania). The main goal of this research was to provide a solid comparative overview which can also serve as a reference for more detailed future studies. This chapter contains such large-scale analysis that it cannot describe every port city in detail, but it serves as a useful benchmark for identifying changes, resilience, and path-dependency within one of the world’s busiest trade areas from the colonial era right up to the present. These trends are beautifully illustrated in Ducruet’s many maps which give hard evidence for what we already know about the region: e.g. West Asia’s prominence in the late nineteenth century due to the concentration of steamer vessels; East Asia’s increasing

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productivity from 1925 onwards (backed by the rapid growth of Japan); and the remarkable growth of the Asian Tigers since the 1960s.

Senia Febrica’s ‘Back to the Future: Feasible Cost-Sharing Co-operation in the Straits of Malacca’ explains the importance of Britain’s decision to abolish dues in the Straits of Malacca in the early nineteenth century. It argues that the opening of the Straits during British colonial rule was a vital factor in transforming the legal climate and ushering in a free-passage regime in all straits used for international navigation. In looking at cost-sharing problems rooted in the colonial era, this chapter surveys possible examples of cost-sharing co-operation from the past to the present.

Cities and Buildings

The third and f inal section of this book deals with specif ic cities and buildings and begins with ‘Rallying Towards the Nation: Theatre of Na-tion Building in Post-colonial Dhaka’ by Kishwar Habib and Bruno De Meulder. This chapter examines the Ramna area of Dhaka. Originally created by the Mughals as an area of pleasure gardens outside the city, the British restructured it into a campus-like environment with new types of recreational facilities (e.g. horse racing, polo, etc.) and various colonial institutions, all lying within a unifying and picturesque park. The end of British colonial rule in 1947 saw the Indian subcontinent partitioned into India and Pakistan, with East Bengal becoming part of the latter. Priority was given to religion over indigenous Bengali culture and caused tensions as Bengali cultural consciousness found itself in conflict with an exclusively Islamic ideology. Ramna became the nation’s pre-eminent representative landscape, where competing centres of power were juxtaposed. The area’s porous tissue and spatial setting catered to massive f lows of people as well as acting as a strategic central gathering place where celebrations, manifestations, protests, and demonstrations frequently (and sometimes simultaneously) occurred. From a Mughal pleasure garden via a colonial recreation to the present contested postcolonial territory, Ramna’s processes of (re)production have been the result of spontaneous and organic gestures rather than the result of any superimposed plan for the city.

Bridget Martin’s ‘Selectively Connected: New Songdo and the Production of Global Space’ serves as a warning to any would-be global-city-builder that a deeper understanding of what constitutes a city, let alone a global one, is needed if they are to have any chance of success. New Songdo, in Incheon, South Korea, is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone and represents a new trajectory that seeks to be a liveable, globally connected urban space. By

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looking at New Songdo’s constitutive elements, Martin provides a useful un-derstanding of how a city-scale zonal space can function both as an enclave and a hub, with reference to earlier, colonial-era cantonment structures. However, selective spatial liberalization and connectivity work together here to amplify particular (and often imagined) constitutive elements, which are to the detriment of some others. The city planners envisaged New Songdo as having the boulevards of Paris, a New York-style Central Park, canals inspired by Venice, and a convention centre reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House; one enthusiastic architect even called New Songdo an ‘architect’s dream’. Sadly, when architects’ dreams are realized they all too often become a dystopian nightmare for those forced to inhabit them. This pick ‘n’ mix approach to urbanism, as exhibited by New Songdo’s planners, shows a profound misunderstanding of what constitutes the urban, with distressing consequences for the city’s inhabitants, as Martin so chillingly shows.

The next chapter goes to the heart of this book’s investigations: ‘The Vernacular and the Spectacular: Urban Identity and Architectural Heritage in Southeast Asian Cities’, by Rita Padawangi, which questions the existence of the vernacular city in architectural heritage discourse in Southeast Asia’s cities. Padawangi sees architecture, and the urban environment, as being involved in the production, transformation, and construction of identity for the city, and its residents, where efforts to achieve global greatness tend to see the built environment being adjusted and retrof itted. What she wants to know is how does the shift from the colonial to the global, particularly in Southeast Asia, reflect the vernacular city? She argues that urban heritage has become less about the vernacular and more about the spectacular, with images intended to boost the urban economy. Rather than pointing solely to commodif ication, this chapter argues that the dominance of the spectacular over the vernacular in urban-heritage discourse is a process whereby power structures in the architectural profession f ind themselves related within a context of globalizing market forces. Padawangi highlights this by looking at a number of case studies in Singapore and Jakarta where she sees urban identity as leading to a possible vernacularization of the colonial; she also analyses how the heritage discourse can relate to a city’s engagement with the global economy. Urban heritage and urban identity are inseparable from the vernacular city, according to Padawangi, and far from seeing heritage projects as impeding a city’s economic growth, she thinks they could and should propel it.

Myanmar is opening up to the world again after f ifty years of military rule. William Logan’s chapter, ‘Heritage in Times of Rapid Transformation:

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A Tale of Two Cities – Yangon and Hanoi’, sees indications that the changes currently taking place in the country are parallel to those which Vietnam faced 25 years ago, when it, too, emerged from a period of isolation and opened up to global investment, tourism, and intellectual inf luences. According to Logan, one of the similarities is also likely to be a growing awareness, and use of, cultural heritage as a political, economic, and social asset. He asks what Yangon might learn from the Vietnamese experience. His chapter focuses on tangible heritage, as represented in the built environment of Hanoi and Yangon (while also acknowledging that much of the signif icance attributed to urban buildings and sites relate to intangible characteristics, such as sacred and religious values or associations with historic events and people). The protection of heritage is not seen as just a technical matter, and this chapter, which follows on from Logan’s earlier work, sees heritage protection as primarily a cultural practice; a form of cultural politics dominated by particular regimes and social groups where decisions are made about the future of, and access to, scarce resources.

There are differences, of course, between these two cities: Yangon was British and Hanoi French. Another major difference was how the colonial era ended: with the British withdrawing under a negotiated settlement in 1948, whereas Vietnam engaged in brutal wars, both international and civil. Ironically, it was Myanmar that then fell into isolation as the second half of the twentieth century progressed, while Hanoi, by the mid-1990s, had become a boom town. Yangon’s colonial-era urban heritage is still essentially intact, but it is in desperate need of repair (much as Hanoi’s was in the early 1990s) and Logan sees Yangon as starting on the same path as Hanoi in coming to see the usefulness of this heritage as it moves from isolation to becoming a global city.

The f inal chapter in this book is ‘Small-scale, Bottom-up: Cosmopolitan Linkages Reglobalizing Shanghai’s City Centre’ by Ying Zhou which looks at Shanghai and asks a number of important questions: 1) What is the constel-lation of actors and agents who have activated the re-use of existing building typologies for the production and consumption of the new economy in China? 2) How do they relate Shanghai’s cosmopolitan history to its recent renaissance as a global city? and 3) What can be learned from these specif ic and localized transformation processes for future developments?

Ying Zhou sees urban development as having come to represent China’s rapid economic growth and global integration following the country’s ac-celerated transition to a state-controlled market economy in recent decades. And it is in the central historic neighbourhoods located at the western end

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of the former French Concession and International Settlement that she sees socio-demographic, cultural, and economic changes producing new international trend quarters which echo places like Berlin’s Prenzlauerberg or New York’s Williamsburg. Her chapter seeks to examine how Shanghai’s transnational networks, cosmopolitan agents, and diasporic linkages have all helped in expediting the city’s reglobalization since the early 1990s, especially in the reconf iguration of the former concession areas, both physically and socio-economically. She makes particular reference to the Jing’an Villa lilong (alleyway house)2 enclave to examine the transforma-tions of Shanghai’s existing and vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods, which is something she sees as a specific example of how these hitherto little-studied yet crucial ‘centralities’ can spatially manifest the recalibration of drivers, agents, networks, and urban forms as they respond to globalization’s effects on local frameworks in presenting what she calls a more nuanced or ‘thick-ened’ version of the cosmopolitan legacy of the reglobalization narrative.

Towards a conclusion

As you can see, what we have here in this collection of essays is not so much a straightforward historical reading of what enabled certain cities in Asia to make the segue from nodes in imperial networks to being global cities in their own right (although we do have some impressive historical research), we have more a genealogy of these developments.3 Michel Foucault tells us that genealogy is ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (Fou-cault 1991: 76), that it ‘requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’ (Foucault 1991: 76-77), something that we see here is this book in abundance (it is also something that I shall be returning to in my Conclusion). In the meantime, I invite you, the reader, to visit the cities of Asia with these scholars as your guides and allow yourselves to be led along the series of genealogical tracings that they lay out for you, so you can see for yourselves what has made some of Asia’s cities move so spectacularly from the colonial to the global.

2 There are a number of different terms for the Shanghai alleyway house (see Bracken 2013: 11): lilong is the most commonly used Chinese term, while longtang is the term invariably used in Shanghai itself.3 I am grateful to the peer reviewers of this book who suggested this term, which I am sure the reader will agree is apt.