THE TRANSFORMING ASIAN CITY: THE CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL FOR PLANNERS In National Organization of Students of Planning Forum 2003, eds., Divya Chandrashekhar and Poulomi Chakraborty (February) 11-15.
Nihal Perera, PhD Director CapAsia Associate Professor of Urban Planning Ball State University
South and east Asia has been subject to radical economic transformations during the last three decades, and the cities in this region continue to change. The question is how have these transformations affected the role of the planner? The rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization of Asia’s cities was initiated by the introduction of export-oriented development policies, the liberalization of economies, and the privatization of state-run institutions and banks. These transformations have both effected and been supported by the increased affluence among middle classes and a greater and quicker flow of information. This process was retarded in certain cities such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kathmandu due to the Asian economic crisis, political instability, the recent Western concern for the use of child labor in industries, and domestic political problems. Yet subways are being built, highways are being constructed, and highrises are being erected, indicating that the transformation of Asia’s cities still continues. Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), for example, is developing a massive informational node in Bandra-Kurla. It is not simply the economic and physical landscape that is changing, but also how urban and regional planners in Asia engage the city. They have moved away from a century-long tradition of growth control and making master plans towards strategically promoting economic
growth in selected locales. This approach is influenced by pro-growth politics and showcase projects in the USA which have been very well critiqued.1 Most crucially, the city is a perception and this differs from person to person and from group to group. Despite living in the same physical city, the people live in different cities. When it is described and explained the city begins to take shape within that particular imagination. For scholars of urbanism, an urban unit is a system –mainly demographic, political, or economic-- that is defined as a town or a city.2 In other words, it is not a pre-existing “thing” that is discovered; the city is imagined while analyzing these systems. Within this “subjectivity” –and well informed scholarship– the researcher for the most part is bound to find what s/he is looking for, whether it is a global city or globalization within a city. The city that a planner plans is also a perception. New aspects of planning in Asian cities which adopt inhabitant perpectives provide a platform for the development of more inhabitantfriendly planning practices. The identification of such aspects by researchers could help the planners to go beyond the present-day Euro-centric planning approaches and bring their imagination closer to those who inhabit the city.
The Rapidly Changing Asian City What you know is what you see, asserts an African adage. It is structurally impossible to identify local-friendly planning practices outside of the West employing Euro-centric paradigms as they clash with Euro-centric analytical frameworks. The frameworks silences, erases, and marginalizes such conflicting local practices. In regard to the inadequacy of analytical frameworks, Sulakshana Mahajan observes: Arguments, projections and models based on the urbanization trends observed in the early industrialization period will prove grossly inadequate, redundant and futile like the
forecasts based on future population growth in India made 5, 10, or 15 years ago. How these projections made by the United Nations Population Division for Calcutta and Mumbai have proved totally wrong. It is essential to analyse the failures of these projections and reasons behind them.3 I have argued, in “Exploring Colombo: The Validity of a Knowledge of New York,” that the theories of global city and world city are grossly inadequate to understand the contemporary developments in Asian cities.4 Sang-Cheul Choe argues that East Asian cities in transition are struggling to find their own identity. He claims this is the beginning of a long and thorny journey which explores the Asian way of urban transformation without risking the blind imitation of alien urban paradigms.5 Vikramaditya Prakash reflects on his own thoughts: “I came back from [the second conference on Tradition and Modernity, held in Indonesia in 1996] feeling ... that to understand the full impact of the development that is going on today, one needed something of a paradigm shift of a kind that is still unclear to me.”6 The principal issue is what vantage point of inquiry and analytical frameworks are employed for the understanding of the transforming Asian city.7 In order to see the postcolonial urban and spatial practices in Asian cities, one needs to first conceptualize them, then look for them, and update and develop the concepts as one continues to examine the practices. Although some Asian societies were not directly subjugated by Western imperial powers, many scholars have argued that they have not been significantly different in regard to their cultural and economic dependence on the West. It is in this broad sense that I refer to “colonial” and “postcolonial.” A shifting of the vantage point of inquiry from Europe and the USA to particular Asian locales and provide agency to Asian “participants” is bound to highlight some planning related practices in these societies that are not directly imported from the West. Then, we can observe the types of developments in Asia that are considerably different. Most significantly, planning is becoming popular and being practiced in most cities. During the
latter part of the last decade, when the demand for architecture was sliding, the demand for admission to the planning program at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) in New Delhi has increased,8 and the leading private school of architecture in Mumbai focus on a largescale community development projects: Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi, for example, focus on the redevelopment of the thirteen-mile long Eastern-Waterfront where the old harbor was located. Along with the surge of planning, new planning agencies and institutions to support these efforts have also begun to emerge. Most of these cities not only have new plans, but also new agencies, for example, MMRDA, Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Urban Development Authority (UDA), and the Center for National Physical Planning (CNPP) in Sri Lanka established in 2001. With different missions at hand, the agencies themselves view their cities differently and many new concerns have been raised. Colombo is increasingly redefined within its metropolitan region. MMRDA considers Mumbai to be a multi-centric city, a different type of a city from the traditional one found in literature which has a core and suburbs around it. The Primary Education Enhancement Project (of NIUA, India) has developed a substantial database on the state of education and the needs among the children living in the informal settlements of Delhi. This project has not only provided official existence to people degraded as “slum dwellers� by the authorities but also produced a new issue: education of the children living in these settlements. Gita Dewan Verma has drawn our attention to the implementation of plans.9 Sri Lanka has developed a totally new national physical plan. As evident in the Colombo Metropolitan Regional Structure Plan,10 the planners are rethinking some basic issues as how to define Colombo, are factoring its larger international and national contexts into analysis, and are analyzing its physical form from a variety of standpoints. These are new in Asian planning. Yet there is a lack of conscious innovation.
The Absence of Innovation Despite the new ideas, concerns, and considerations that have entered planning practice lately, urban planning responses to current transformations have been rather weak. Planning has principally been reactive, and has responded to immediate problems. Planning, in most cases, has been a piecemeal effort which has not taken into account larger and long-term processes. For the most part planning has taken the form of strategic interventions, but the omissions are substantial. According to Singaporean planner Liu Thai Ker, the economic upgrading of Asian countries has not been matched by environmental improvement. Hence the current urbanization process is bound to require a second round of planning, later, especially once the problems that are currently overlooked become acute. As more land is developed, and further developed, any changes to the city’s infrastructure and the built environment are bound to be more costly, and would result in the relocation of citizens, activities, and functions, and the demolition of buildings and infrastructure.11 The crucial issues at this time concerns the perceptions of the city on which planning exercises are based and the new directions being taken in planning. Most crucially, the aspect of uniqueness in Asian urbanization has not been fully appreciated; we don’t even know what is unique about Asian urbanization. The focus thus far has been on the commonalities between Asian and Western urbanization and globalization, which largely refers to the Americanization and corporatization of the world. Many Asian countries have large semi-urban areas. Terence McGee and Norton Ginsburg, who have argued about what they call “desakota” (city-country) and “extended metropolitan regions,” have begun to put their fingers on this uniqueness.12 They
begin to address the shortcoming of the conventional, US-centric view of urbanism by highlighting a crucial difference: “The uneven incorporation of these Asian countries into a world economic system from the fifteenth century onward created divergent patterns of urbanization.”13 Yet they use Jean Gottman’s work on megalopolis 14 as a point of departure and focus on economics, bringing the analysis back a full circle, reconnect to the Euro-US paradigm. Anthony King argues that colonialism was the vehicle by which contemporary urban planning was exported to many non-Western societies.15 Despite the ending of formal European colonialism in the mid twentieth century, the export of values, ideologies, and models of Western planning still continues. Planning is currently very active in Asia, but is largely viewed as a politically and culturally neutral practice for the larger “public good.” Despite the radical changes in the social and cultural environments in Asia, the lack of innovation and identity in cities is strikingly apparent. It is precisely their focus on the economy that makes Asian politicians and planners rely on Western methods of planning. Despite the renewal of the discourse, the peoples day-to-day language has not entered plans. In other words, planning in Asia still remains foreign with very little local perceptions of space making their way into the planning discourse. In Sri Lanka, people define space in terms of handi (junctions) and malu, in India they use chowks, in Kathmandu the space is organized around durbars and hitis, and hutongs are very important in China. These and other significant spaces have hardly entered the planning vocabulary. When such concepts enter the planning discourse, they tend to be assimilated within the dominant discourse, in which process they largely lose their meanings. A good example is the kampong of Indonesia and Malaysia used completely out of the context. From a physical viewpoint, there is not much concern for the older (and local) fabric of
the built environment. In regard to the historic areas in Beijing, Wu Liangyong asserts that Throughout much of the post-Second World War era ... urban renewal and the wholesale replacement of old dilapidated city precincts with entirely new and different types of structures was quite acceptable. Today, by contrast, in most parts of the world, it is clear that traditional urban patterns of settlement are to be valued not only for their strict historical significance, but also for their aura.16 The lack of innovativeness and the weak connection between planning and the culture, nature, and history of the place is very much an issue of perception. The new concern for the environment is also an imported notion which does not provide much room for indigenous conceptions. The UDA’s concern for the environment is not based upon the idea of a “sustainable environment” with which Sri Lankans have been familiar; the one that was widely practiced for millennia before the British introduction of a monoculture-based vegetation system and economically shaped environment in the mid-nineteenth century. It is about protecting the wild life, the rain forests, and marshes which are very relevant to the well being of the USA. Hence, there is a big gap between the planners and the “citizens.” As John Friedmann argues in regard to three plans for Singapore and Hong Kong, “As top-down efforts with very limited involvement of others than government and certain business sectors, [these plans] fall short of the criterion of active citizen participation.”17
The Future of Asian Planning Despite the profoundness and intensity of the impact that it has, European colonialism is simply a layer in the multi-layered complex history of Asia, and the planners will eventually transcend this phase of history. Reconnecting with the cultural landscape of the place and spatial practices is essential for postcolonial planning. Cultural landscapes consist of both the landscapes developed within social and cultural perceptions and various meanings attached to
the existing physical landscapes. Researchers could help the planners make this transition more efficient, effective, and expeditious by identifying and highlighting small but innovative ideas developed by planners and planning scholars –and the planners should rely on such research. A major cause for the continuation of exporting planning is the training of planners within Western discourses. It is important to acknowledge that successful planners and designers of social space in Asia are largely trained in the field (on the job). As I have argued elsewhere,18 a certain group of architects have developed place and culture specific practices which I call critical vernacularism. Although it is not so pronounced, this is not uncommon in planning. Institutions like the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, the Mahaweli Architectural and Planning Unit of Sri Lanka, and the Design Cell of KRVIA have developed their own models of research and development. Learning by doing appears to be how Asian planners are developing culture and place-friendly planning paradigms.
Notes:
1. See Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1987. 2. Seymour Mandelbaum, “Thinking about Cities as Systems: Reflections on the History of an Idea,” Journal of Urban History 2 (1985) 139-150; Nihal Perera, Exploring Colombo: The Relevance of a Knowledge of New York, in Anthony D. King (ed.) Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital, and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis. London: Macmillan, 1996. 3. Sulakshana Mahajan, “Ramayan to Globalayan: Transformation of Nasik,” in City Space and Globalization: An International Perspective. Proceedings of an International Symposium, ed. Hemalata C. Dandekar: 282-95 (Ann Arbor, MI: College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan, 1998), 292. 4. Nihal Perera, “Exploring Colombo: The Relevance of a Knowledge of New York,” chapter in Re-Presenting the City King
5. Sang-Cheul Choe, “A Search for Cultural Paradigm of Urbanization in East Asia,” in City Space and Globalization: An International Perspective. Proceedings of an International Symposium, ed. Hemalata C. Dandekar: 72-75 (Ann Arbor, MI: College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan, 1998), 75. 6. Vikramaditya Prakash, “Listening to the Subaltern: The Ethics of Professional Work Or, Notes Towards the Pedagogy of the India Studio,” in City Space and Globalization: An International Perspective. Proceedings of an International Symposium, ed. Hemalata C. Dandekar: 245-8 (Ann Arbor, MI: College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan, 1998), 246. 7. See Perera, “Exploring Colombo;” Society and Space, “Introduction.” 8. Personal correspondence with Professor Jamal Ansari. 9. Gita Dewan Verma Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and their Saviours, N ew Delhi: Penguin, 2003. 10. Urban Development Authority, Ministry of Housing & Urban Development, Colombo Metropolitan Regional Structure Plan, Vol I (Colombo: Urban Development Authority, 1998), 16. 11. Liu Thai Ker, 12. T.G. McGee, “The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis,” in The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, eds. Norton Ginsburg, Bruce Koppel, and T.G. McGee:3-26 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1991); Norton Ginsburg, “Extended Metropolitan Regions in Asia: A New Spatial Paradigm,” in The Urban Transition: Reflections on the American and Asian Experience (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1990). 13. McGee, 5. 14. Jean Gottman, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Nortwestern Seaboard of the United States (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, Kraus International Publications, 1961), 257. 15. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System. London: Routledge, 1990. 16. Wu Liangyong, Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing: A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighborhood (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), ix. 17. John Friedmann, “ Strategic Planning for World Cities: A critical Comparison of Singapore and Hong Kong,” in International Conference: Re-Inventing Global Cities. CUPEM 20th Anniversary International Conference: 152-167 (Hong Kong: The Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, 2000), 166. The plans are Singapore: The Next Lap (1991), Singapore 21: Together We Make the Difference (2000), and Bringing the Vision to Life: Hong
Kong’s Long Term Development Needs and Goals (2000). 18. Perera, Society and Space, Chapter 5.