The Politics of Civic Space in Asia

Building Urban Communities

Amrita Daniere, Mike Douglass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415542425
• eBook ISBN: 9781134040216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how and why civic spaces are used by different communities in Asia and what role urban governance and public participation play in the support or demise of communities. Using case studies of contemporary city life throughout, the contributors provide insights into the importance and value of civic space, arguing that civic spaces provide not only the physical sites for civil society to function autonomously; but also provide a sense of place in the form of identity, meaning, memory, history and linkages with the wider world.

Each chapter focuses on the production of and access to civic spaces in a particular Asian city, as well as examples of successes and failures that can inform urban policy regarding inclusive, tolerant and socially vibrant city life through focused attention on the provision and continuity of civic space.

This book is designed to provide information to policymakers, researchers and students of the developing world regarding the importance and value of civic space in terms of creating and supporting urban communities. As such, The Politics of Civic Space in Asia will be an invaluable resource for those interested in urban planning, urban design, public policy and political science, as well as Asian studies more generally.

1 Urbanization and civic space in Asia

Mike Douglass and Amrita Daniere

Introduction

The chapters of this book examine the many ways in which the local production of inclusive civic spaces contributes to the social and political life of cities through public participation in place-making and governance. Drawing from a general concept of civic spaces as real-world venues for social encounters and associational life, the chapters reveal how they are also spaces where social capital is formed, strengthened, and utilized. Such “free” spaces with a high degree of autonomy from state and private economic interests are vital for social and cultural life to flourish (Evans and Boyte, 1992; King and Hustedde, 1993; Lefebvre, 1991). Society—space relations permeate history, social processes, experiences and understandings because social relations are both space-forming and space-contingent (Friedmann, 1989; Massey, 1994; Lefebvre, 1991). In the context of this book, civic spaces provide not only the physical sites for civil society to function autonomously; they provide civil society with a sense of place in the form of identity, meaning, memory, history, and linkages with the wider world. In both instances, they are vital to the well-being of society.

Through case studies of contemporary city life, this book is designed to provide critical insights into the importance and value of civic space in terms of creating and supporting the rise of civil society in Asia’s burgeoning cities. The research brought together in the following chapters shows that civic spaces are insufficiently available and are under great stress in Asia for a variety of reasons. In the earlier post-colonial era, governance structures extensively controlled urban spaces in ways that inhibited open access and use by citizenry. More recently, globalization has pushed an agenda of privatization of public space, mega-projects, and rapid urban expansion into gated suburban communities, all of which have increasingly become the more salient sources of stress on urban community life and the idea of open cities and unscripted social spaces. At the same time, the following studies show that the social desire for civic spaces is also manifest, and where it is not readily provided through public policy, people mobilize to create them through their own efforts as well as with and against the state.

Each chapter in the book focuses on the production of and access to civic spaces in a particular contemporary community setting in an Asian city. The authors examine the ways in which ordinary people, in seeking associational life either for its own sake or for political ends, collectively create these spaces. Sometimes referred to as “life-spaces” (Friedmann, 1989), their common characteristic is the room they allow for people to associate free from the state and private commercial dominance. The chapters provide examples of successes and failures that can inform urban policy regarding inclusive, tolerant, and socially vibrant city life through focused attention on the provision and continuity of civic space.

Objectives

The scholars who contributed their work to this volume have three shared research objectives: (1) to reveal the space-forming, space-contingent dimensions of civil society in fostering associational life and building social networks; (2) to examine the linkages between civic space and the rise of civil society in Asia; and (3) to understand how urban governance can enhance associational life and urban governance through the production of civic spaces. In other words, a primary question raised by this research is: If associational life and social networks enhance the possibilities for community action and improvements to urban governance, then how can policymakers, researchers, and planners support their formation and sustenance? We believe that part of the answer lies in civic spaces—“spaces that are vital for voluntary societal associations to bridge divides through shared experiences, and for people to engage in resolving social, political and economic issues in common” (Douglass, 2002: 1). As stated at the outset, this human propensity to form associations is also viewed as being a key source of social capital formation, which is viewed as the capacity of society to innovatively engage in problem solving through everyday forms of social engagement (Daniere and Takahashi, 2002; Putnam, 1993).

Asian cities share many similarities and are undergoing many of the same kinds of changes and pressures. They are also connected historically through centuries of long-distance trade; linguistic, cultural, and religious interaction; integration into pre-colonial empires; Western and Japanese colonialism; and, most recently, an international division of labor that is creating an “interdependent web” (Miao, 2001: 3) of (post-)industrial economies. Yet each context also has its own characteristics derived from long sociocultural, political, and economic histories that prevent “one-case-fits-all” treatment. For example, some societies have experienced fundamental political reform toward democratic forms of governance, while others remain under authoritarian governments or are experiencing deep political crises. Several are part of Asia’s first wave of newly industrialized economies, while others remain largely agrarian. Cultural practices and institutions vary as well. This book elucidates the commonalties and the differences among the contemporary urban settings, showing how general problematics are worked out in a variety of ways among the localities under study.

Composed of case studies explicitly conducted as part of collaborative study of civic space, community life, and public policy in urban Asia, the research brought together in this volume includes communities in various cities where associational life is active but where pressures and changes are imminent. Though these communities are often poor and marginalized neighborhoods, such as slums, squatter settlements, or public housing projects, they can also exhibit resilience in resisting place-breaking forces attending rapid urban growth and the increasing presence of global actors in the production of urban space. As such, they underscore the demand for community and civic spaces in situations in which neither government nor market provides them and might even be sources of stress on them.

Another contribution of this book project is its emphasis on policy issues and recommendations for the contemporary city. In addition to contributing to theory of society and space through case studies, this book also intends to provide planners, policymakers, developers, and communities insights into how they can directly improve the provisioning and access to civic spaces in Asia’s cities.

Themes in the case studies

The studies in the following chapters share a number of common themes that form the basis for a comparative understanding of the insights they each provide. Among the most important are (1) globalization, urbanization, and the production of urban space as interdependent processes; (2) the rise of civil society as a social and political force in Asia; (3) urban governance and civic space as a critical dimension of an inclusive civil society; and (4) the ascent of neoliberal doctrine as ideology and urban policy and land-use decisions.

Globalization and urbanization as interdependent processes

Globalization is radically transforming cities, economies, and societies and their relationships across territorial boundaries. It is eminently a spatial as well as temporal phenomenon, which is well summarized in its characterization as a process that entails the collapse of time—space relationships on a global scale, making distant places closer in time and more interdependent in terms of interlocking flows of capital, goods, service, people, and information. Urbanization—the shift from rural to urban societies—is a key element of globalization. Cities and city systems provide the nodes and networks that most efficiently and speedily articulate global economic, social, and political impulses.

Just as global investors put pressure on cities to create a built environment conducive to their interests, the global system would be severely handicapped without the worldwide urban transition and global intercity networks that have been rapidly coalescing around the world over the past few decades (Sassen, 2006). Cities provide the necessary built environment and producer services that greatly facilitate the velocity of capital flows and accumulation. Hub airports, ever-larger container ports, information hardware, and other infrastructure provide essential linkage functions for rapid deployment, circulation, and distant control of all forms of capital. Much of this infrastructure is provided by governments, which feel compelled to invest in or otherwise subsidize the construction of “world city” infrastructure as a key element of intercity competition for global functions (Douglass, 2000; Friedmann, 1986).

The processes of globalization foster a worldwide urban transition that is now either nearly complete or is accelerating in all world regions, including Asia. By 2008, more than half the world’s population will be residing in cities, dubbing this as the world’s first urban century (UNFPA, 2007). In many countries, rural populations are already in steep decline, with migration from villages to cities being a principal source of urban growth. At the highest levels of urbanization—75 percent or more of national populations living in cities—national population growth and internal migration begin to diminish, and in its place much of urban population growth comes from international or global migration. This latter process has already begun in the higher-income societies of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore and, to a lesser extent, in Malaysia and Thailand. The resulting emergence of multicultural cities presents a new set of issues of social justice and “right to the city” that, as Chapter 4 on Taipei’s Little Philippines reveals, also relate to access to civic spaces to express cultural association that differs from the mainstream population.

A major dimension of this vast worldwide urbanization process is the increasing presence of “world (or global) cities,” a phenomenon that has dominated the discourse on the geography of globalization over the past two decades (Amen, Archer, and Bosman, 2006; Brenner and Keil, 2006; Friedman, 1986; Sassen, 1991; Scott, 2001; Taylor, 2003). Global cities are strategic nodes in overlapping networks of global exchange distinguished, inter alia, by their high concentrations of global or regional corporate headquarter functions and advanced producer services, finance, and investment. Not only centered in the North, they are emerging in other world regions, more often than not through intentional efforts by governments to create them either symbolically through, for example, the construction of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, or functionally through world hub airports, global business districts, and elite housing and leisure services (Amen et al., 2006).

Nowhere is the rush to recast major metropolitan regions as world cities more apparent than in Asia. Fueled by the global investment, national ambition, and developmentalist cum neoliberal governments, Asian cities are undergoing a remarkable transformation as they try to shift from low-cost manufacturing hubs or agrarian economies into centers of global consumption, advanced services, and decision making. As city governments in every quarter of the globe vie for world city status, the simple language of first world vs. third world or core and periphery now needs a more complex vocabulary (Douglass, 2006a: 270; Douglass and Boonchuen, 2006). For example, many of the candidate world cities in Asia are now much more advanced than cities in the West in terms of infrastructure, such as high-speed trains and the world’s tallest buildings, and global services, including banking and finance. At the same time, social inequalities, poverty, homelessness, and many other urban ills are as likely to be found in “rich” countries as they are in “poor” ones. As elements of the new urban landscape, such as privately owned gated communities, appear throughout the world, so are many urban issues concerning community and civic space appearing to be more commonly experienced everywhere.

The logic of this global pursuit has consequences for daily urban life and social relations in the city. Many writers, such as Sassen (1998) and Friedmann (1986), focus on a renewed duality in global cities that is manifested in a widening of social inequality. In the following chapters of this book, this inequality is found to be embedded in the production of urban space and often, but not always, current trends in struggles over the built environment reveal that globalization proceeds to the detriment of civic space. Slums proliferate in the urban margins, and long-established neighborhoods in city centers are being dislocated by office buildings, shopping centers, business hubs, and global tourist hotels, while in the peri-urban areas, vast gated housing estates and new towns for the upper-middle class fill in agricultural land. Gentrification and the commodification of urban spaces occur at the same time that the quality of the urban environment deteriorates and access to public amenities for the many declines.¹

Adding to these issues is an urban population boom in many Asian countries that is fueled by massive internal and international migration of people to major city regions. Municipalities are barely able to keep up with the demand of urban services. Poor neighborhoods, often situated on undesirable, inaccessible, and hazardous land, are the most affected by this (Douglass, 2006a, 2007a).

However, urban residents do not simply accept worsening urban circumstances. Global forces can, in turn, be confronted by an equally determined populace who mobilize around local cultures, shared identities, and historical bonds. The capacities of people to express their concerns through collective efforts show that such negative outcomes of globalization are not inevitable. In this light, the opportunities and constraints of globalization outcomes have much to do with how local institutions and social agency interact and respond to global forces (Batley, 1997). In other terms, globalization and urbanization are also part of a third force, the rise of civil society in the public sphere in Asia’s cities.

The rise of civil society

Civil society is manifested in the formation of voluntary associations in society that exist beyond the overt control of the state and the private economy. These organized faces of society appear in a variety of forms, including neighborhood associations, religious organizations, clubs, labor unions, NGOs, and other sociocultural forms (Douglass, Ho, and Ling, 2002: 345–346). Civil society typically exists “for itself ” rather than for direct engagement in political life (Friedmann, 2005). From this perspective, civil society emerges from community life to form intermediate organizations between the state and the individual that act not just to contest politics or the state but as alternative sources of societal self-governance typically writ small and in such forms as amateur sports leagues, neighborhood churches, and charity organizations (Friedmann, 2005; de Tocqueville, 1988). As noted by Friedmann (2005: 5), “from time to time, these associations may become politicized around an issue of special interest to them, but for the most part, intermediate organizations of the Tocquevillean kind are active for themselves alone rather than active in the public sphere.”

Whether for itself or in the public sphere, civil society is essential to the functioning of democratic societies (Markussen, 1996). As described by Young (1999), civil society allows “self-organization for the purposes of identity support, the invention of new practices, and the provision of some goods and services… public spheres thriving in civil society often limit state and economic power and make their exercise more accountable to citizens.” Where it flourishes, civil society can thus provide checks and balances to the uses (and misuses) of state and private corporate power.

As a concept, civil society is not without problems. Not all of its organizations are “civil,” and some take the forms of intolerant, racist, and violent associations. Civil society is often lauded as plural, and democratic in itself, but this ideal form is hardly realized everywhere. Associational life and social networks have found their roots in ethnic, religious, or other sectarian bases, and many continue to function within these divisions that can be exceptionally exclusive and, as noted, even antagonistic to other elements of civil society (Weiss and Hassan, 2003). Similarly, Hellman observes that, “the assumption that [civil society] movements are automatically more democratic seems as ill founded as the assumption that they inevitably promote democratization simply because they make demands on the system” (cited in Weiss and Hassan, 1994: 133–134). Civil society is, for example, rife with class and other divisions that can systematically work against social justice, inclusionary democracy, and environmental improvements. Gentrification, privatization of public spaces, and the appearance of vast gated communities for elites are driven, in part, by demands from privileged elements of civil society.

These important caveats notwithstanding, the rise of civil society is one of the most profound aspects of globalization and urbanization in Asia. It has been the major source of political reform in many Asian societies, including Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, to name a few (Douglass, 1994, 2007a). It has also been the source of innumerable non-governmental organizations advocating empowerment of the poor and acting as watchdog groups over such vital aspects of the city and urban governance as squatters’ rights, low-income housing, environmental pollution, corruption, and many other issues that were largely ignored under authoritarian regimes.

Globalization is intricately implicated in the rise of civil society in Asia. To the extent that economic growth through globalization created a large, educated urban working and middle class, it helped set the foundations for the major social movements toward democracy in the region from the 1970s to the present. In bringing new forms of communications such as the Internet, to Asia, it has brought the means to access and process information from global as well as local sources that, owing to the nature of the technology, is exceptionally difficult for governments to control. As Lim (2002) has shown in the case of Indonesia, it can bring previously unknown evidence of corruption and other abuses of power by governments that were previously unavailable because of tight control of media by the Ministry of Information, and this became a major factor in social mobilization that led to the downfall of the New Order Government in 1998. Urbanization has been integral to this process as in its association with the formation of broad middle and working classes that in the city can more readily form effective large-scale political associations and mobilize citizens around political issues.

Just in terms of organizing for its own social purposes without direct regard to politics, t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Urbanization and civic space in Asia
• 2 Communities in retreat: civic spaces and state–society relations in globalizing Singapore
• 3 Machizukuri, civil society, and community space in Japan
• 4 Foreign workers and spaces for community life: Taipei’s Little Philippines
• 5 Tangible and intangible civic spaces in Bangkok’s slums
• 6 The meaning of voice in Kuala Lumpur’s changing urban communities
• 7 Kampung spaces and the future of Indonesian urbanism: reflections from Jogjakarta
• 8 Boundaries and belonging in Guangzhou: changing the nature of residential space in urban China
• 9 Neighborhood associations as civic space in Kathmandu: progressive and regressive possibilities
• 10 Uses and understandings of public space among young people in Hanoi, Vietnam
• 11 Policy implications and conclusion
• Bibliography