New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities

From Industrial Restructuring to the Cultural Turn

Peter W. Daniels, K.C. Ho, Thomas A. Hutton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138118416
• eBook ISBN: 9781135272593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The East and Southeast Asia region constitutes the world's most compelling theatre of accelerated globalization and industrial restructuring. Following a spectacular realization of the 'industrialization paradigm' and a period of services-led growth, the early twenty-first century economic landscape among leading Asian states now comprises a burgeoning 'New Economy' spectrum of the most advanced industrial trajectories, including finance, the knowledge economy and the 'new cultural economy'. In an agenda-setting volume, New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities draws on stimulating research conducted by a new generation of urban scholars to generate critical analysis and theoretical insights on the New Economy phenomenon within Asia.

New industry formation and the transformation of older economic practices constitute instruments of development, as well as signifiers of larger processes of change, expressed in the reproduction of space in the city. Asia's major cities become the key staging areas for the New Economy, driven by the growing wealth of an urban middle and professional class, higher education institutions, city-based inter-regional movements and urban mega-projects. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cites animates this New Economy discourse by means of vibrant storylines of instructive cities and sites, including cases studies situated in cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Singapore. Theoretical and normative issues associated with the emergence of the new cultural economy are the subject of the book's context-setting chapters, and each case study presents an evocative narrative of development interdependencies and exemplary outcomes on the ground.

New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities offers a vivid contribution to our understanding of the ongoing transformation of Asia's urban system, including the critical intersections of global and local-regional dynamics in processes of new industry formation and the relayering of space in the Asian metropolis. The synthesis of empirical profiles, normative insights, and theoretical reference points enhances the book's interest for scholars and students in fields of Asian studies, urban and cultural studies, and urban and economic geography, as well as for policy specialists and urban/community planners.

1 Contextualizing the transition from industrial restructuring to the cultural turn in Asian cities

Peter W. Daniels, K. C. Ho and Thomas A. Hutton

Introduction: Industrialization, sectoral restructuring, and development in Asia

A half-century of industrialization, supported (and in some cases directed) by the state and its agencies, has underpinned the growth and development of Asian economies in the postwar era. This trajectory of induced, or in some cases accelerated, industrialization has encompassed a progressive development of product sectors, starting with low-value goods and relatively primitive production technologies, advancing to automobile manufacture and electronics, then to semi-conductors, and eventually embracing almost the full range of end-products characteristic of the most sophisticated economies. Over time larger shares of industrial production became available to domestic consumers, but the dominant orientation of industrial outputs was directed toward export markets, and especially the wealthy consumer markets of the developed ‘West’. This generated the sales and the incomes required to invest in the infrastructures for national and social development.

For the Asian economies this overarching industrialization was a vocation that, in turn, produced a suite of physical, spatial, and socioeconomic outcomes. These included: the development of urban-regional industrial complexes; industrial labour formation (including substantial representations of the New International Division of Labour [Fröbel et al 1980], which favoured industrializing Asian regions, as well as labour formation shaped by endogenous agencies); trade and transportation infrastructures and systems; social class reformation; and the reshaping of space, place and landscapes. Thus, all the defining markers of the ‘factory world’ were imposed in a relatively short time upon the agrarian and local services spaces of cities and regions in East and Southeast Asia. The resulting policy exemplars, mimics and experimentation are explored in a vast literature.

Yet industrialization, in the Asian setting, cannot be readily aligned with the parameters of the Western experience of the process; the political, social and cultural conditions of development are responsible for important contrasts, whether at the localized, regional or broader national scales. As Brook and Luong (1997) have observed, cultural factors have been instrumental in shaping distinctive forms of capitalism in Eastern Asia, typified, on a national scale, by the deployment of Confucian and Islamic legacies for promoting particular visions of the economy. At the regional and community scale there are numerous examples of the way in which culture has been influential: the prominence of family structured firms and reliance upon trust-based personal networks in Southeast Asia or the cultures of labour and management relations in Chinese village enterprises, in Vietnamese ceramics firms and South Korean export-processing zones (Brook and Luong 1997). Further, while in the West the industrial economy (and city) have been characterized as an ‘accidental’ vocation, with the state playing mostly regulatory roles, industrialization occupied a position at the core of national development aspirations and ideology for each of the high growth economies in Asia over the last half century.

Consequently, from a social perspective the industrial worker occupied a pivotal position within the class structures of nation states. Examples include the paternalistic corporate manufacturing cultures of Japan, together with welfare commitments on the part of the state; the exaltation of the urban industrial worker as a mainstay of development in the Chinese communist lexicon; and the expansion of (semi-skilled and skilled) Fordist production labour among the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) such as Taiwan or Hong Kong and near-NICs such as Thailand by the 1970s and 1980s.

However, such structures have not been immutable. Since 1978 a ‘new class’ of entrepreneurs, traders and advanced service workers has become ascendant within the leading regions and cities of China, while the hollowing out of manufacturing in much of Japan has inevitably weakened the blue-collar class. The growth of an advanced service economy in Singapore has underpinned the rise of an ascendant ‘new middle class’ which reproduces to an extent the affiliations, behaviours and preferences of post-industrial society in the West (Ho 2005), while the expansion of cultural industries has also signalled the formation of a putative creative class in numerous Asian cities.

This process of industrial development and social restructuring was uneven. Following Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong in East Asia and Singapore in Southeast Asia functioned as low cost manufacturing platforms from the 1960s to the late 1970s (Clark and Kim 1995). By the 1980s, Malaysia, Vietnam and, most significantly, China have entered the industrial era and wrested an increasing share of manufacturing activity from the NICs. It is this process of industrial restructuring accompanied by a geographical redistribution of industries which was accompanied by the major cities in East and Southeast Asia taking on an increasing role in production and distribution of services, as loci of innovation activities, and the development of consumption and leisure activities as the share of manufacturing in their economies declined.

Industrialization and innovation in the modernizing Asian state

The industrialization saga in Asia continues. It involves ever-more sophisticated production processes among the leading states, refinements of industrial policy, and a relentless pursuit of competitive advantage. But over two decades spanning the end of the last century and the start of the 21st century other developmental vectors have been added to this long-term storyline of industrialization, the most notable being the rapid growth of service industries, including specialized, intermediate services such as banking, finance, business and trade services (Daniels, Ho and Hutton 2005). In contrast to the Western economies, where the sequences of comprehensive restructuring over the 1970s and 1980s produced post-industrialism that marked a break with the industrial city and society, some Asian economies have achieved a phase of ‘coincidental sectoral development’ whereby growth both in manufacturing and services has been simultaneously sustained.

That said, service industries and occupations are clearly ascendant in the lead economies such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore where manufacturing is in relative (or even absolute) decline. An incipient stage of tertiarization is evident in other regions. The ‘hollowing out’ of Japanese industrial capacity and labour is the defining exemplar of this shift, but industrial restructuring and labour shedding is increasingly a feature of other economies in the region. The technological deepening of East Asian economies is also helping to reshape economic space, as the proliferation of science parks and the technological ‘retooling’ of older industrial parks, such as Jurong in Singapore, continues apace. The broader developmental landscape of Asian economies is therefore undergoing concurrent reshaping through innovation and restructuring. In some ways this follows the contours of globalization, but it also strongly embodies national and even local characteristics.

The intensity of globalization and competition generates constant pressure on East Asia to upgrade industrial production systems and labour, imparting a high degree of dynamism and destabilization to urban-regional economies, and effectively compressing development/redevelopment cycles. Thus, while Singapore in the eyes of some is still numbered among the NICs or newly industrializing economies (NIEs), advanced services are in many ways the growth leaders of its economy. But regional rivals such as Thailand and Malaysia have established programmes designed to compete (initially on price, but in time also on quality) for specialized services. Singapore is therefore locked into a constant policy refinement and experimentation process that entails striving not only to maintain regional competitive advantage in key production and trading sectors, but also to keep pace with the most advanced Western economies, in areas such as finance, knowledge, IT and cultural development which are the defining platforms of global city status in the early 21st century. And while Singapore is often seen as the leader in economic policy innovation in the region, other advanced Asian states (Korea, Taiwan) are pursuing their own programmes, while large metropolitan cities and city-regions (including Osaka, Seoul and Beijing) are similarly experimenting with policies for maximizing their industrial development potential in a competitive world. At least implicitly, these aspirations carry with them parallel social programmes (and outcomes) that embrace housing, consumption, class and identity.

Asia is therefore a fascinating and dynamic site for a variety of urban-based new economic spaces that reflect:

• the growing sophistication of manufacturing operations that has resulted in new regional headquarters activities, transport and logistical services as well as research and development activities

• a period of industrial development that has been followed by service growth, not only of service transnationals that support regionalized and globalized production networks, but also of local services as local firms have developed to fill niches

• two decades of rapid growth in East Asia that have created an educated, urban and well-travelled middle class very much involved in maintaining a conspicuous lifestyle; this provides an important consumer base that drives many of the products of the cultural economy, and the development of consumption-driven services, as well as growth in advertising, financial services and media services

• a better and more broadly educated youth that has created a new dynamic base of practitioners and entrepreneurs experimenting with cinema, new media technologies, and art.

The ‘new cultural economy’ as urban-regional development trajectory

We are suggesting then that the emergence of urban-based new economic spaces in Asia can be aligned with ideas about newly emergent cultural economies. These have their roots in Western societies where advocates such as Florida (2002) have posited that the cultural economy of the city and its constitutive industries, institutions and labour is the ascendant development vector. The cultural economy discourse has evolved to include more critical theoretical perspectives (Scott 1997, 2000; Hall 2000) and even more acerbic critical studies that position the ‘creatives’ as another of a long line of neo-liberal panaceas (see Peck 2005). But, as in the case of the earlier development of advanced and ‘producer’ services (Daniels 1985), programmes for the cultural economy have been inserted within mainstream urban and regional policy clusters, and the creative industries have also assumed a prominent status within the media and in the public imagination. Certainly an increasing number of cities are vigorously deploying the cultural sector as a key agency for place-making, marketing and ‘re-branding’.

It is important to appreciate that the rise of the ‘new cultural economy’ does not represent a complete break with the traditional cultural bases of the city (nor with the dominant service workforce of the post-industrial city). Rather it embraces several key contrasts that include: (1) an insistent absorption of the new technologies of production and communications in creative industries, reflecting the premium placed on innovation within competitive markets; (2) a tendency to mix diverse cultural influences in creative production, reflecting the transnational cultural bases of heterogenetic cities, as opposed to expressions of the ‘pure’ cultural bases of orthogenetic cities; (3) the enlistment of local artists within formal industrial production systems, for example in graphic design and video game production; (4) new divisions of production labour within the cultural economy, including artists and designers, ‘neo-artisanal’ workers, free-lance creative workers, web-designers, techno-entrepreneurs, and battalions of technical support staff – positioned within generally ‘flatter’ organizational models than the more segmented office workforce of the intermediate services industries; (5) expressions of global-local interaction in the creative sector, carrying with them inherent tensions, as exemplified in the co-located clustering of cultural and manufacturing production within industrial districts and sites, and the coincident emergence of more extended cultural production networks for outsourcing, marketing and recruitment which may disrupt the localized input-output relations within cluster formations; (6) an intimate interface between cultural production, consumption and housing markets in the city; and (7) the incorporation of contemporary culture and creative industries across a spectrum of state policies and programmes, including economic development, local regeneration, education and training, urban place-making and place-marketing.

Culture, development, spatiality and place

The complex synergies between culture and the economy form one of the central axes of development studies in the modern era. An historical perspective links development with belief systems, ideology and social practices, which may transcend a particular place – state, region or locality. But for at least a century, perhaps the richest traditions of development studies emanated from an appreciation of the cultural bases of particular spaces and places, encapsulated in a discourse spanning Marshall to Markusen. Alfred Marshall’s seminal writing on the developmental role of industrial districts inspired countless monographs on particular places; his ‘place’ encompassed a hierarchy of nations, regions, cities and industrial zones within which ‘the local level seems to function here as the basic unit’ (Bellandi 2004: 245). In the classic Marshallian interpretation localization of industrial production profers three categories of supply-side benefits, including: (1) knowledge spillovers among individual actors; (2) access to pools of common factors of production, notably land, labour, capital, energy and transportation; and (3) productivity gains accruing from specialization.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Human Geography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contextualizing the transition from industrial restructuring to the cultural turn in Asian cities
• Part I Situating the cultural turn in the Asian city
• Part II The new cultural economy and the reconstruction of space in Asian cities
• Bibliography
• Index