Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global

From Dubai to Delhi and from Singapore to Shanghai, cities across Asia are sites of intense experiments with different ways of being global. This book intervenes in urban theory focused on established global cities, and instead argues that the urban globality is something that is continually being imagined, assembled, and contested. Greater Asia is a region of vibrant innovations in urban design, built forms, governance, aesthetics, and politics. Worlding Cities draws attention to diverse projects of ′worlding′ and "reworlding" that draw upon local and transnational relationships. Alternative ways of being global are instantiated through practices of mobility, modeling, and speculation that inter–reference other Asian sites. As many of the essays in this book illustrate, different Asian futures are being shaped in cities, from green governmentality to eco–city, from corporate speculations to political contestations over urban development, from "world–class" city branding to demands for "world–class" services, and from sky–high hopes to dashed dreams on the ground for city–dwellers and migrants. This inter–generation and interdisciplinary group of authors offers the first serious examination of diverse actors, energies, and conditions at play in defining new worlds of inter–Asian urbanism.

List of Illustrations vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Series Editors’ Preface xiii

Preface and Acknowledgments xv

Introduction Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global 1
Aihwa Ong

Part I Modeling 27

1 Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts 29
Chua Beng Huat

2 Urban Modeling and Contemporary Technologies of City–Building in China: The Production of Regimes of Green Urbanisms 55
Lisa Hoffman

3 Planning Privatopolis: Representation and Contestation in the Development of Urban Integrated Mega–Projects 77
Gavin Shatkin

4 Ecological Urbanization: Calculating Value in an Age of Global Climate Change 98
Shannon May

Part II Inter–Referencing 127

5 Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia′s Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong 129
Helen F. Siu

6 Cracks in the Façade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai 160
Chad Haines

7 Asia in the Mix: Urban Form and Global Mobilities – Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai 182
Glen Lowry and Eugene McCann

8 Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty 205
Aihwa Ong

Part III New Solidarities 227

9 Speculating on the Next World City 229
Michael Goldman

10 The Blockade of the World–Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism 259
Ananya Roy

11 Rule by Aesthetics: World–Class City Making in Delhi 279
D. Asher Ghertner

Conclusion Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams 307
Ananya Roy

Index 336

Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Co–Director of Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (2010).

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Socio–cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent publications are Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (2008) and Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate (2010).

“I am hopeful that this collection, along with others of its kind, will inspire new lines of research and theorisation that will help arrest the actual realities of cities in an era of planetary urbanisation.”  (Urban Studies, 1 February  2015)