Whither the ‘Asian’ City?

In Asian Cities: Globalization, Urbanization and Nation-Building, Malcolm McKinnon argues that globalization is not the only default explanation for urban transformations in contemporary Asian cities. Instead, he argues that cities in “developing Asia” – which he interprets as the People’s Republic of China, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia [p. 11] – face two processes that “do not affect Western cities in the same way” [p. 3]. These processes are urbanization (i.e., massive transformations of the social, cultural and built environment) and nation-building (i.e., the process through which a population of a particular territory acquires a shared identity). He supports his argument empirically by adopting comparative analyses of a metropolitan centre where “a great deal had been written” [p. 14] with a lesser known provincial or second tier city “with which it was more practicable for the researcher to become acquainted” [p. 14]. These are the three pairings of Shanghai with Yangzhou in China, Jakarta with Semarang in Indonesia, and Bangalore and Mysore in India.

 

The book is organized into four parts. Following an introduction in Part 1, Part 2 discusses urbanization and cities: chapter 2 focuses on urbanization, defined as “the process by which cities and towns become more populous and more economically significant than rural areas” [p. 37]; while chapter 3 focuses on urbanism, defined as transformations in cities vis-à-vis traditional areas of life, including “new levels of education, new kinds of occupation, and new opportunities for private space” [p.71]. Part 3 discusses how various processes in Asian cities relate to nation-building: chapter 4 discusses businesses, i.e., the “building of domestic networks and markets by capitalist businesses” [p. 136]; chapter 5 discusses the flows of domestic labour migration; chapter 6 discusses the travel and hospitality industries in cities; and chapter 7 discuses how commercial popular culture is a national and global phenomenon in developing Asian cities. Part 4 concludes the book and postulates the future of urbanization, urbanism and nation-building in developing Asian cities.

 

McKinnon’s broader objective is to question Eurocentric dominance in urban theories that have been conveniently projected upon non-Western contexts. Globalization, taken as the default explanation for late-20th and early-21st century Asian capitalism, results in “the relative invisibility of both urbanization and nation-building in scholarly discussion” [p. 9]. Triggered by his visits to a number of Asian cities in late-1990s and early-2000s, McKinnon questions how globalization has been conveniently interpreted as “symmetrical globalisation” [p. 214], arguing instead that globalization pans out “asymmetrically” in different (developing Asian) contexts. Thus, he argues that it is useful to consider “multiple globalizations” [p. 215], as well as how the shift from one type of globalization to another implicates processes at other scales (e.g., regional, subcontinential, national).

 

However, a casual reader without the benefit of knowledge of recent debates in contemporary urban studies would find it difficult to follow McKinnon’s book. The book gives prominent space to ethnographic accounts and detailed descriptions of urban phenomena in the respective chosen cities. As a consequence, little space is given to explain the theoretical conversations that this book locates itself within. It is as if McKinnon assumed that readers would be familiar with debates about Eurocentricism and the questioning of globalization in urban studies. As a result, the reader is left to do a lot of work: firstly, to connect the dots between the stories; and secondly, to understand how these fit into the flow of arguments at the broader theoretical perspective.

 

On the other hand, as an academic researcher and writer, I find it hard to get past two shortcomings of the book. Firstly, while McKinnon has rightly identified that non-Western cities go through processes of urbanization and nation-building that were not similarly experienced in Western cities, his somewhat careless categorizing of “developing Asia” repeats the flaws of Eurocentrism he criticises. In claiming that the purpose of the book is “to draw out common elements in the urban Asian experience of globalization” [p. 13], McKinnon has over-generalized and essentialized the “developing Asia” based on a few conveniently-selected case studies.

 

Secondly, although McKinnon has attempted to address issues of bias in his ethnographic methods (e.g., selection bias, language barriers) [pp. 11-19], this appears cursory and lacks further elaboration. For example, no mention was made about the durations, frequencies, and nature of any fieldwork visit, other than a quick mention that “ethnographic investigation was carried out periodically in the case study cities over six years” [p. 16]. Another sentence mentioned that “ethnographic material is least rich for China and richest for India” [p. 16], without explaining why and what implications this would have on the analysis. These shortcomings, unfortunately, do not do justice to his use of comparative urban research, as recently advocated by urban studies scholars.[1]

 

There is no doubt that McKinnon’s message is important: cities in “developing Asia” have divergent urban experiences “on the ground” [p. 69], which urban theories developed from the Western experience cannot quite capture and explain. Furthermore, processes and phenomena within a nation-state may better inform our understanding of cities, in addition to globalization as an explanatory factor. Unfortunately, this message has not been fully articulated and/or supported with convincing comparative analysis of both “developing Asia” and “the West”. For the significance of the underlying message contained within, I wish that this book had articulated the message loud and clear, instead of leaving the casual reader lost without a clear sense of how the case studies connect with each other and to a broader debate.

 

 

 

Sin Yee Koh, PhD Candidate in Human Geography and Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (s.y.koh@lse.ac.uk)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1]Robinson, J. 2011. Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35: 1–23.