Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia

Rita Padawangi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134799770
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of urbanization in Southeast Asia has been a growing field of research over the past decades. The Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia offers a collection of the major streams and themes in the studies of the cities in the region. A focus on the urbanization process rather than the city as an object opens the topic more broadly to bring together different perspectives. This timely handbook presents these diverse views to build a clearer understanding of theoretical contributions of urban studies in Southeast Asia and to provide a complete collection of scholarly works that are thematically structured and a useful tool for teaching urbanization in Southeast Asia.

Following the introduction by the editor, the handbook is structured along central, emerging themes. It contains six parts, which are each introduced by the editor:

• Theorizing Urbanization in Southeast Asia
• Migration, Networks and Identities
• Development and Discontents
• Environmental Governance
• The Social Production of the Urban Fabric
• Social Change and Alternative Development

This handbook will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in Urban Studies, cities and urbanization in Asia, and Southeast Asian Studies.

PART I

Theorizing urbanization in Southeast Asia

OVERVIEW

Theorizing urbanization in Southeast Asia

Rita Padawangi

Revisiting the notion of the “Southeast Asian City”, this part consists of two sections. First is the various perspectives in looking at the “Southeast Asian city” or the “city in Southeast Asia” and the urbanization processes related to the continuously evolving cities. The second section is the methodological challenges in defining and examining urbanization in the region that would affect possibilities in the theorization of urbanization from the ground.

The first section starts with “Gateways, corridors and peripheries” by Peter Rimmer and Howard Dick, which looks at cities in Southeast Asia as connected urban centers since their earliest formation. Examining the contrast between mainland and island Southeast Asia, Rimmer and Dick call for more attention to contextualize Southeast Asia within the Asia Pacific and for sensitivity to the different geographies within Southeast Asia. Questioning of boundaries is also applicable to cities, as rural areas are continuously encroached by urbanization. Peri-urbanization in Yap Kioe Sheng’s chapter is reminiscent of Terry McGee’s (1991) formation of desakota, albeit on a larger scale due to increasingly globalized urban economies.

Besides identifying patterns, future-oriented perspectives also emerge studying the urbanization of Southeast Asia. The influence of the creative economy, according to Forbes, needs to be taken into account to address the broader complexity of urban development in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Tim Bunnell, Daniel Goh and Huiying Ng suggest aspiration and urban mobility as future-oriented concepts, which include four key strands: (i) rural to urban migration and mobilities; (ii) migrants’ remaking of themselves and city space; (iii) the middle class city; and (iv) increasingly global constitutive geographies of city transformation.

Rather than focusing on themes and patterns, AbdouMaliq Simone and Abidin Kusno offer perspectives to study the “messiness” of urbanization in Southeast Asia. Simone’s chapter on the politics of increments in the making of the urban echoes Kusno’s “semi-urbanism” by focusing on the relational economy. Kusno criticizes the insufficient attention paid to irregularity and fragmentation in the urbanization process, as well as to the binary frameworks in analyzing the city.

The second section of this part is on the methodological challenges in studying urbanization in Southeast Asia. Gavin Jones points to problems in definitions, boundaries and data comparability across cities and countries in Southeast Asia. Jones proposes addressing the problems by using satellite imagery to analyze urban growth. Nevertheless, conventional data sources from respective government offices are also still useful in providing comparative analysis, as demonstrated by Sin Yee Koh’s chapter on refining comparative research on urbanization in Brunei-Miri and Singapore-Iskandar Malaysia. Stephen Cairns’ chapter, while questioning city-centric understanding of urbanization that is continuously perpetuated by various official documents, demonstrates the possibilities of using remote sensing to address boundary issues in urbanization research.

In conclusion, this part demonstrates the potential avenues in constructing urban theories from Southeast Asia. First, it is important to be cognizant of urban transformations in the region to be able to grasp the perspectives offered in this part. Second, the various perspectives in theorizing urbanization in Southeast Asia are results from various disciplines and strands in urban studies. Each of these perspectives requires suitable methodological approaches in future research. Although the choices here are not exhaustive, they represent a range of existing methodologies and their challenges, such as ethnography that has been utilized by Bunnell et al. and Simone in shaping their perspectives, demographics and statistics with their limitations as examined by Jones, comparative urbanism as Koh demonstrated, and satellite imaging as explored by Cairns.

1

GATEWAYS, CORRIDORS AND PERIPHERIES

Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dick

Southeast Asia as a region was only ‘discovered’ after the mid-twentieth century. Thus the discourse frame itself was contingent, while the internal structure was for several decades contested by nationalisms and neocolonialism. During the Cold War period, cities were very much subsidiary to nation-states. Since then, along with a tidal wave of globalization, city-regions have emerged into new prominence that challenges political structures and familiar imaginings, not least by academics themselves. The result is an intellectual mess.

Southeast Asia’s cities have always been gateways to and from the wider world. The broad concept of ‘gateway’ is more flexible than ‘port city’ in allowing modes of transport and communication to be studied together at their urban intersections. The spatial tools of gateways and corridors have been applied at a global level to inform the planning of sustainable infrastructure for the transcontinental ‘space of flows’ and used extensively in policy studies within both Canada and Europe (Pain 2007a, 2007b, 2012). However, the physical infrastructure of gateways and corridors is insufficient. Efficient logistics also require good management within and across borders as an enabling environment for economic development (Chin 2012).

Gateways and corridors provide a useful framework for understanding the emerging structure of urban and regional development in Southeast Asia. We begin by reviewing the academic discourse on cities in Southeast Asia since the 1950s. This has been an awkward conversation between area studies perspectives that have tended to ‘exoticize’ and urban studies that have tended to ‘globalize’ (McGee 2007; Jones 2014; Sutherland 2014). As a step towards blending area and urban studies, we contextualize cities in Southeast Asia by identifying gateways and corridors at both global and Asia-Pacific levels. Southeast Asia is seen to enjoy the good fortune of straddling busy international trade routes, but the benefits have diffused very unevenly with a manifest core-periphery pattern that especially disadvantages Island Southeast Asia. Trade, investment and technological change are still mediated by geography and path dependency (Mahoney 2000). We suggest that the political entity of Southeast Asia-as-ASEAN is not a good regional frame for analyzing urban and regional development. More differentiation would better inform policy-making.

Urban Southeast Asia ‘discovered’

Not until the mid-1940s did the term Southeast Asia find acceptance to designate the diverse tropical zone located south of China, west of the Pacific Islands, north of Australia and east of India (Dobby 1950; Fisher 1964; Kratoska, Raben and Nordholt 2005). There was general agreement that colonial rule and interference in this crossroads region linking China and Japan with India and Europe had disrupted the pre-colonial pattern of port cities associated with centuries-long international trade (Reid 1980, 1993; Blussé 2013). Colonial rule and a sharp reduction in ocean shipping costs gave rise to specialization in a narrow range of commodity exports such as sugar, rice, coffee, tobacco, rubber and tin that were exchanged for imported consumer goods from metropolitan countries. All this gave rise to an urban hierarchy comprising nine prime port cities: Bangkok (Thailand), Jakarta and Surabaya (Dutch East Indies), Manila (American Philippines), Rangoon (British Burma), Saigon-Cholon and Hanoi-Haiphong (French Indochina), and Singapore and Penang (British Malaya) (Huff 2012). Yet as late as 1930, none of these cities or city pairs exceeded 600,000 in population and most second cities were much smaller. Urban primacy was amplified during the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s and its unstable aftermath. The breakdown of colonial controls and worsening rural insecurity led to migration from the countryside that soon created cities exceeding one million (Huff and Huff 2014). By the 1950s scholars were writing about the ‘million city’, primacy and the ‘pseudo’ or ‘parasitic’ nature of the rapid urban development of these war-torn colonies (Fryer 1953; Hoselitz 1954; Ginsburg 1955). Since then the focus on urban and regional development discourse and practice has shifted almost by decade in response to economic, political and social changes within countries and variations in academic theorizing and cross-country generalization.

The notion of Southeast Asia as a defined geographic space gained substance in the mid-1960s following the overthrow of Sukarno and the end of low-level warfare (Confrontation) between Indonesia and Malaysia. In 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was established as an intergovernmental arrangement between Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, at first with a focus on security cooperation but in due course also becoming a forum for economic cooperation.

In the academic sphere, Terry McGee (1967, 1970, 1971) was seminal in proposing the Southeast Asian city to be a distinctive ‘type’ of ‘Third World City’ with common urban elements of colonial enclaves, kampongs and squatter settlements. McGee was also influential among human geographers at the Australian National University who undertook pioneering studies of the ‘informal sector’ in food, shelter and transport (Rimmer, Drakakis-Smith and McGee 1978; Forbes 1981). Dick and Rimmer (1980) argued for attention to linkages between corporate and unincorporated sectors with room for dynamic intermediate enterprises (Figure 1.1A).

In the 1970s, Southeast Asia’s cities were one by one being swept into an accelerating process of globalization (Rimmer 1977). Singapore had been at the forefront of this trend as it grew beyond its traditional entrepôt role to become not only the regional hub for container movements, airline traffic and telecommunications, but also a center for multinational finance and manufacturing (Huff 1994). Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia soon followed this path but Bangkok under military rule in Thailand, Metro Manila in the Philippines under Mayor Imelda Marcos and Jakarta in Indonesia under Governor Ali Sadikin were unable to achieve such efficiency in their own sprawling and congested capital cities.

During the 1980s scholarly attention turned to ‘world cities’ (Figure 1.1B) associated with growing trade, investment, technological transfers and the new international division of labor (Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Sassen 1991). Southeast Asia’s accelerating industrialization was the counterpart of the ‘hollowing out’ of the Japanese economy through offshore investment (Hatch and Yamamura 1986). The manufacture of less sophisticated components of high technology products began to relocate from Japan in a ‘flying geese’ pattern, first to gateway hubs in the newly industrializing economies of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, before spreading to the emerging ‘tiger’ economies of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, then eventually to China and Vietnam. Around the outskirts of their capital cities and ports, rural villages were cleared to make way for new factories and industrial estates. At the same time, a growing middle class gave rise to new housing estates and a rapid increase in private motor vehicle ownership (Dick 1985, 1990; Rimmer 1986a). Such rapid transformation of land-use in turn imposed great strain upon already inadequate urban infrastructure, resulting in an intractable crisis of logistics. The Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) became vehicles for Japanese urban planners offering to remedy logistics deficiencies (Rimmer 1986b).

Figure 1.1 Decadal shifts in the focus on urban and regional development discourse and practice in response to economic, political and social changes

Source: Based on (A) Rimmer 1977: 137, figure 2; (B) Friedmann 1997: 33, Figure 2.3; (C) Rigg 2003: 308, Figure 7.3; and (D) McGee 2002: 18, figure 2.

In the 1990s the focus of scholarly attention turned to extended metropolitan regions (EMR) supported by retail consumption and finance capital (McGee and Robinson 1995). Some claimed, as shown in Figure 1.1C, that Southeast Asian EMRs had distinctively village-city (desakota) characteristics associated with their extension into wet rice-growing areas (McGee 1989, 1991, 1997, 1998; Forbes, 1996). Others saw ‘First World’ confluences such as the new town gated communities bundled with industrial estates, toll roads, ports and airports that could be addressed as part of a single urban discourse allowing well-informed comparative analysis (Garreau 1991; Rimmer 1993; Webster 1995; Dick and Rimmer 1998). These lenses suggested very different but not necessarily incompatible approaches.

Notwithstanding the expansion of ASEAN to encompass ten nations by the successive inclusion of Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98 showed the vulnerability of Southeast Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies to unstable international currencies and volatile capital flows (Figure 1.1D). The crisis originated in Thailand and quickly spread to Indonesia and beyond Southeast Asia to Hong Kong and South Korea, highlighting more complex regional and global interdependencies (McLeod and Garnaut 1998). An historical geography of urban and regional development in Southeast Asia sought to transcend the crude nationalization of space by foregrounding cities in three dimensions—as nodes of the world economy, as gateways to their hinterlands and as systems in their own right—to provide complementary perspectives for studying global and economic integration in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Praise
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Theorizing Urbanization in Southeast Asia
• Part II Migration, Networks and Identities
• Part III Development and Discontents
• Part IV Environmental Governance
• Part V the Social Production of the Urban Fabric
• Part VI Social Change and Alternative Development
• Index