asian urbanism in bhumi 2010
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The need to understand Asian urbanisn and planning from an Asian standpoint.TRANSCRIPT
Bhúmi, the Planning Research Journal, Vol. 01, No. 02, December 2009
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of
Production NIHAL PERERA
Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Ball State University, USA [email protected]
(Revised paper received, December 2009)
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ABSTRACT - Global affairs are increasingly shaped by events in Asia and its cities are undergoing profound
social (i.e., economic, polit ical, and social) changes. Yet the spatial transformations in Asian cities do not
seem to follow this social change. According to the dominant discourses, Asian urbanization is following
Western models, and the planning of Asia‟s cities is conservative, reactive, and piecemeal. I will argue that
the above characterization of Asian urbanization is inaccurate and is caused by external urban and planning
perceptions. The discourses on Asian urbanization focus on its Westernization and approach the subject
from upper-class perspectives. As they speak, the scholars, professionals, politicians, administrators, and
developers create the image of the Asian city as one that is dominated by West -centered global forces and
processes, marg inalizing the transformat ions caused by local inhabitants and communities. In this, they
deny space for locally-produced developments that might take these urban environments in alternative
trajectories. Hence it is important for p lanners and planning educators in Asia to focus on the innovative
urban and planning practices in Asia, particu larly those developed through learning by doing, and view
them from the places of production.
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INTRODUCTION
Henri Lefebvre (1991) highlights that “A revolution that does not produce new
space has not realized its full potential.” Global affairs are increasingly shaped by
events in South-East Asia and its cities are undergoing profound social (i.e., economic, political, and social) changes.
Yet its spatial transformation, as highlighted in the dominant discourses,
especially those on globalization, modernity, global city, world city, informational city, international
development, and their critics, is mostly reactive, slow, and sporadic. In this,
Asia is undergoing a massive social change without a spatial counterpart, the latter simply following Western models.
The social and spatial transformations seem to go in opposite directions:
socially Asia leading the way and
spatially following the West. Moreover, the planning in Asia‟s cities is conservative, reactive, and piecemeal.
I am skeptical about this view. I
will argue that this characterization of Asian urbanization and planning is partial and inaccurate. The above
discourses –wrapped in global understandings-- focus on mega projects
and the Westernization of Asian cities. This is simply one transformation among many. Beyond and besides this, Asian
cities are undergoing a large-scale spatial transformation. The larger problem is
with the perception caused by the theoretical approach adopted in these discourses, especially the vantage point
and the analytical framework which are external to Asia and privilege the West.
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Yet the social power of the dominant discourses is not absolute. The changes
taking place at the “bottom” (when looked at it from authorities‟ or planners‟
vantage points) and in the interstices of the society --or the real life-level-- reveal that (colonial) modern society was not as
systematic and complete as we are made to believe by the dominant discourses.
As Partha Chatterjee (2007) argues: The reason why many of the forms of modern government actually manage to work is because they make adjustments and negotiate with many of these contrary forms. They do so at the localized level, very often by recognizing themselves as merely exceptional cases. But, of course, exceptions pile up on exceptions and very often there are localized norms which are often quite contrary to what the larger principles would dictate. Very often, at the local level, people have an understanding that the norm is actually quite different. It is only by recognizing that norm at the local level that in fact the larger structure will survive.
While the system of domination is not
complete, non-compliance, defiance, and
resistance to the West- induced transformation operate in the center,
within the cracks, and the margins of the system. “Bottom-up” processes and innovations take place and new ideas
emerge in Asia‟s cities, but at a small scale, slow rate, by small people who
negotiate space for their daily practices. The professionals who adapt to the society, culture, and environment also
“learn by doing.”1 These innovations in Asian urbanism and planning lay beyond
and besides the city of dominant Western narratives, in grounded realities. “Western” here stands for a perspective
and vantage point; “innovation” refers to transformative practices that do not
directly follow or mimic dominant or hegemonic examples. It does not refer to pure or authentic spaces, but to hybrid
perceptions, conceptions, creations, and
transformations of space that creatively combine local, regional, Western, and
global knowledge and experience in new ways, but grounded in global, local, and
daily processes. These are spaces that the subjects negotiate for their day-to-day practices within, besides, and in the
margins of the larger spatial structures of the authorities. In so doing they create
new physical spaces and redefine existing ones.
The resulting hybridity of Asian cities is well described in Jeremy
Richmond‟s journal from his south-Asia based field study CapAsia IV in spring 2005.2
Bangkok’s landscape is woven with religious and political imagery. Spirit Houses occupy various locations throughout the city; the process of how these edifices are placed is not clearly evident to the casual observer, though ... there must be some criteria. The King is portrayed in large enshrined posters that line the major intersections and the political center of the city. The major political campaigners are portrayed ... on large posters, seemingly enshrined, which indicates their otherness from the average Thai... the King is portrayed in lavish dress as well as more common “European” dress indicating that they are other than the common man but simultaneously of the people. This merely touches the surface of the intricate cultural and political landscape which weaves itself through the city. One such phenomenon is that there is a monk only standing area on the ferries.
According to this observation, Bangkok is neither Western-modern nor Thai-traditional and does not fit into this
opposition; it is a unique hybrid with a strong sense of place and identity.3
Richmond continues:
“Asian practices, as understood in these localities, use the structure of the West since the idea of ... design [and planning professions are] Western, though there
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 3 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
may be mimicry or blind use of the Western minded practice, they are still working within the system to understand their own voice. Sri Lanka has produced very indigenized architecture through the impetus of several architects. ... How are these emerging “professionals” constituted and legitimized in this Euro-centric world system, able to find their own voice and presence, either becoming more unmarked practitioners (architect…planner) or more local or possibly marked (Indian architect…Thai planner)? Or will the “third” in-between “space” come into being somehow managing both extremes – the “middle way” of design with Buddha at a drafting table on a lotus chair?”
Such complex understanding of
the Asian city is hampered by the lack of
analytical tools and theoretical approaches, due to the dependency on
the West for intellectual tools. The scholars pay very little attention to the production of space, place, and identity
by the majority of citizens. This focus on Westernization occupies the historical
space of regular people of Asia of which the literature speaks. The discourse has thus marginalized and silenced local
voices, 4 causing epistemic violence, much worse than physical colonialism of
the past. In order to bypass this impasse, I would propose that we observe the production of space from the spaces of
production, from the vantage point of the agents who produce these spaces and
from the place of production. THE LACK OF INTELLECTUAL
FRAMEWORKS
An African adage reminds us that what we know is what you see. Although the process of seeing and observing might be
more complex, the parameters of what a researcher finds (or not find) is largely
mapped out in the research design, particularly the analytical framework and the methodology. In this type of
Western-scientific research, there is
hardly any space for the observation of realities that lay beyond the research
focus in particular and Western worldviews in general. According to the
former Director of Singapore‟s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), Liu Thai Ker (2001), a Western architect
who was commissioned by the URA for a project in Singapore took two years to
understand rain. It is not so much the physical rain that he is referring to, but to its meaning, especially how it is
understood from a Singaporean standpoint, and how people –especially
architects-- react to this environmental condition forming an aspect of culture. To be fair to the Western scholar,
whether in the West or Asia, the identification of indigenous-friendly
planning practices outside of the West (or Westernized localities) are constrained by the Euro-centric
analytical frameworks and approaches. These frameworks silence, erase, and
marginalize indigenous practices. Anthropologists, among others, have attempted for decades to cross this
boundary, but, Johannes Fabian (1983) argues that they create their other by
denying the subject the same time, or coevalness, of the researcher. While there are exceptions, researchers of
Asian cities largely deny their subjects the same time and space that the
researcher occupies. The transformations of the city by regular citizens are not given the same time and
space given to official planning and high end projects. In this, the regular citizens
are Othered.
Besides, the city is a perception
and there is no one city in which to carry out empirical studies. The absolute city
is, therefore, accessed through representations; as we do so, we create the city by classifying particular sets of
processes as urban --marginalizing others-- and flattening the selected layers
of activity and space into one. Each
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observer makes sense of the city by using intellectual frameworks of
understanding which comes with their own “baggage” including premises,
assumptions, biases, beliefs, interpretations, and narratives. Most crucially, as a person perceives and
describes it, she or he also creates the city. The city thus differs from one
observer to the next, depending on the time and place from which it is observed (the vantage point), the knowledge and
the world-view (the framework) applied, and the language employed to build it.
The administrators‟, planners‟, and scholars‟ cities are perceptions constructed through the definition and
identification of particular sets of social processes and structures as well as the
territory on which these are believed to be concentrated as “urban.”5
Despite its partiality and the social power involved in it,
representation is a necessity for the analysis, planning, and management of the city and its neighborhoods.
Representations are not false, but quite the opposite; they give tangibility and
materiality to the city by providing intellectual access to the city that is “out there.” This mediation enables the
scholar and the practitioner to understand, examine, and modify it.
What is false is the “objectivity” attached to certain representations, thus privileging them over the others. Hence,
in this paper, I focus on the “discourse” on Asian cities which Michel Foucault
defines as the system of statements within which the world can be known.
The strongest impact of colonialism and European expansion is
the establishment of a European cultural hegemony, i.e., the socialization of the locals to think the way the colonizing
society did. Although some societies in Asia 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, especially after the mid-
nineteenth century. It is in this broad sense that I use “postcolonial” in this paper, and apply it to non-colonized
countries such as China and Thailand.
In their colonies, the Europeans not only built cities but also taught the “natives” their ways of understanding
the city, although never completely, establishing a hegemony for their
cultural perceptions and practices.6 The superior position was established through several means: the identification
of certain environments in Colombo as a problem in the 1920s, the scientific
definition and classification of these environments, the bringing of so developed perceptions into circulation,
and making the Ceylonese accept these.7 The level of hegemony that this planning
discourse has achieved is evident in the fact that sixty years after independence of 1948, the cultural “unpacking” of the
British town planning discourse has not yet been undertaken.
There are several ways in which
the professionals and academics use
Western knowledge. The main approach to knowledge is the direct use, i.e., to
study the Western urbanization processes and apply them to local situations. Here the assumption is that this knowledge is
scientific, that is free of cultural value, and can be transferred to other locations
and times. While most professionals simply apply this knowledge, many have highlighted their frustrations when the
Western analytical frameworks and methods do not work for them.
Sulakshana Mahajan (1998) has the following observation:
Arguments, projections and
models based on the urbanization trends observed in the early industrialization
period will prove grossly inadequate,
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Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 5 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
Despite the criticism, Mahajan also refers to these frameworks as belonging to the unmarked early
industrialization period in the West.
From within the Western world-view, these mismatches are not seen as structural, but as shortcomings that need
minor adjustments. My own studies have revealed that even the basic
processes of urbanization in the West and in Sri Lanka are very different; even the idea of evolution of cities from rural
areas, which is fundamental to the understanding of Western urbanization,
is redundant in modern Sri Lanka. I have argued that it is not Sri Lanka that made Colombo, but it is (colonial)
Colombo that made Ceylon.8 This is a radically different understanding which
challenges us to develop a different understanding of Asian (and other) urbanizations.
As Mahajan, Otto Koenigsberger
has also made similar observations and criticisms. He was one of the first postcolonial planning critics in
independent India to realize, in the 1950s, that British-style master planning
does not work in Asia as its urbanization process is much faster and different than that of the societies in which this method
was originated. He developed an alternative named action planning which
better responded to local conditions. In order to avoid, among others, the inability to make accurate long term
projections, he suggested that plans be made and implemented quickly and
planning be carried out in cycles,
updating and expanding the plans frequently within three to five years.
Despite Koenigsberger being the Chief Planner of Delhi, action planning has not
rooted in India or Southeast Asia. The hegemony of the West has been too strong.
The second way in which
Western knowledge is used is by locating the city or the country within a larger structure which provides it a place
in relation to dominant countries, within oppositional/ hierarchical structure.
Here I refer to dualities such as developed-underdeveloped, metropole-colony, core-periphery, or hierarchical
structures such as the capitalist world-economy and world cities. These
frameworks provide a structural relationship in which Sri Lanka, for example, becomes the colony, the Third
World, and periphery. All of these positions are subordinate to the West.
The frameworks are West-centered and Eurocentric, and provide limited identity and agency for the locals within the
structure of subordination.
In this, if I want to know Colombo in relation to a hierarchy of world-cities, it is important to know the
Global Cities, i.e, New York, London, and Tokyo. But I do not need to know
anything about Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. In fact neither of these cities fully exist in this framework; if they do, they do so
only as peripheral places, a quality which is shared by a large number of
cities that provide the background for world cities. This framework too classifies, categorizes, and organizes the
cities of the world from the USA –the vantage point– thus developing
knowledge of the world for the USA. As we socialize into this way of thinking, the differences between Asian cities such
as Colombo, Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, and the need to learn about them
disappears. Hong Kong and Singapore
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are simply absorbed into the world cities discourse. Most crucially, these global
structures cannot be viewed from the vantage point of those cities, but only
from the West which devalues them as Asian cities.
What is significant here is that neither of these main approaches
promote the movement of ideas across Asian countries, even in this so-called globalized era. There is no way to know
how these structures operate, say from Manila. If a scholars in Manila learns
about Colombo, he/she largely do so through the West, within a Western frame work and categories, temporally
and spatially locating it within this structure, for example, as a Third World
city affected by a separatist war.9 It is very important to question this structure of knowledge. Understanding the
identity of a community is a prerequisite for planning. Sang-Cheul Choe (1998)
argues that East Asian cities are very much in transition, and are struggling to find their own identity. He claims that
this is the beginning of a long and thorny journey exploring the Asian way of
urban transformation which ensures itself from the risk of blind imitation of the alien urban paradigms 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.” Hence the question: How can we understand Asian urbanization? I wish to highlight
that, if we are to understand the local aspects of the Asian city, it is more
pertinent to view these from the city itself, i.e., to view the production of spaces (in Asian cities) from the very
spaces of production.
ASIANIZING THE ASIAN CITY
The Asianizing of the Westernizing and Globalizing Asian city is largely carried
out –besides, beneath, and around these processes– by regular people at the day-to-day level. According to Lefebvre
(1991), the reduction of (colonial) modern representations of space which
are based on mathematics and science (that the Europeans were developing during the imperial era) does not take
into account the autonomy and creativity of the subjects. Despite the profoundness
and intensity of its impact, European colonialism (and/or hegemony) is a layer in the multi- layered present of Asia.
Nevertheless, the European hegemony has caused ruptures in regard to both
time and space, privileging this layer from other historic and vernacular spaces that have combined over time making
hybrid identities and spaces. The bridging of the gap between the
externally imposed spaces and local spatial practices is an essential component in postcolonial space-
making.
What urban studies have largely failed to consider is that, to quote Arjun Appadurai (1998) in a different context,
“at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into
new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way.” What is missing in most studies is the
idea that, in Goh Beng-Lan‟s (2002) words, the “people are never passive
recipients of external initiatives, but rather always struggle within their own immediate contexts of constraints and
opportunities to produce a meaningful life with their own particular values and
goals.” In regard to planning, Jill Grant (2005) highlights the familiarization of New Urbanism:
Although within the ultimate New Urbanist scenario, home owners live next
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Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 7 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
to renters and the merchants live above the shops, both apartments and houses in Canada are mostly occupied by owners, and the image has become a caricature and the settlement a theme park.
As the recipients of a space make
it meaningful for themselves, especially for their social and cultural activities, the original space tends to transform.
Anthony Giddens (1987) highlights “the capability even of the most dependent,
weak and the most oppressed … to carve out spheres of autonomy of their own.” The assuming of a subject position
within a space (including the dominant space) requires the creation of new
hybridized cultural practices and spaces of varying autonomies. Hence, the assuming of a subject position itself
opens up the possibility of redefining, negotiating and, if necessary, subverting
space.10 Familiarization, including indigenization, localization, and personalization are simultaneously forms
of questioning, resistance, and adaptation of extant spaces and spatial structures.
Spaces are being constantly
familiarized by people who live and
migrate to Asian cities. Chandigarh, the great modernist capital in Asia, is
complemented by many neighborhoods built by migrants beyond and besides the administrative city. According to Aditya
Prakash (2003), worked with the team that who saw the city develop,
Chandigarh was planned as an elite city and the rest of the city, beyond its planned, elitist limits, grew by creating
its own momentum. The outsiders who were excluded from the original plan
have built their own neighborhoods near the residences of the lowest grade government workers. Over 100,000
people now live in these self-built settlements. At the same time, many
inhabitants redefined their lives within this administrative city; this is evident in Bujwada and Nagla villages and the
Shastri market. The city designed and
built was thus filled in and expanded by people with little power.11 In short, those
who were excluded from the planned city engaged in creating their own
spaces; this is represented in self-built housing, non-planned settlements, satellite towns and new industrial areas.
All Asian cities are comprised of
many cities and the less powerful are highly creative in making many decisions that planners make in regard to
the location, size, and scale of the settlements and dwellings they create as
part of constructing the type and kind of their activities. Bangkok, for example, has many cities that function alongside
with the formal city quite evident in the continuous flow of people who eat on
the sidewalks from very early mornings to late nights, right outside of big restaurants and highrise offices.
In regard to Mumbai, Rahul
Mehrotra (2007) brings to light what he calls the Kinetic City. This temporary city is not simply created by the poor or
who are conventionally recognized as being in the informal sector. Following
Western perceptions, the stereotypical informal sector is economically defined and this definition privileges the
economy over other aspects of life. For Mehrotra, ephemeral structures are built
even by the government and the powerful actors to celebrate the national day and more formal organizations to
celebrate occasions such as the Chinese New Year. There is no lack of such
structures in any Asian city.
In the transforming China, the
people whose economic and spatial needs are not met create their own
villages: urban villages. The expansion of Chinese cities takes away the farming land of the nearby villages that get
incorporated into the city. This way they are left with their houses, or
reproduction land. The migrants who
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come to the city also do not have affordable housing. Matching these two
needs, and creating opportunities for both, the inhabitants of Tianhe village in
Guangzhou, for example, have build their houses up, about seven stories, and rent the spaces to migrants. This is
extremely innovative matching of the needs of two groups in the city. Even
within China, the creation of such urban villages is not uniform. The migrants from Zhejiang province in Beijing, for
example, created their own village with the help of similar villagers in the city.
Yet the migrants were more entrepreneurial and more powerful to create a village, Zhejiangcun, to suit
their own needs but modified to the conditions in Beijing.12 This way they
familiarized the urban space in more different ways than the migrants of Tianhecun in Guangzhou.
The transformation of Chinese
cities is not limited to migrant spaces. The citizens themselves are engaged in refamiliarizing spaces created during the
Cultural-Revolution era; this is evident in the recreation of religious and other
cultural spaces. 13 Moreover, such transformations from the “bottom” are carried out in all cities in Asia. In Hong
Kong, for example, people protest against most development projects
today. The issue is, how can we understand the regular (or subversive when viewed from a formal viewpoint)
space-making which challenges the administrative and planner-centered
space-making?
The development of our ability to see
innovations in ordinary spaces would help us overcome the hegemony. It
allows us to provincialize Westernization, for innovations are locally produced, not borrowed, but
within a global context and are influenced by Western and non-Western
societies. In Asia, the citizens do
produce their own globality. Although referring to the immediate post-
independence period, India‟s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1946) best
highlights his notion of local (Indian) modernity:
India is a . . . cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. Overwhelmed again and again, her spirit was never conquered, and to-day when she appears to be a plaything of a proud conqueror, she remains unsubdued and unconquered. . . . She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive. . . . From age to age she has produced great men and women, carrying on the old tradition and yet ever adapting it to changing times. .... there can be no real cultural or spiritual growth based on imitation . . . true culture derives its inspiration from every corner of the world, but it is home-grown and has to be based on the wide mass of the people. Art and literature remains lifeless if they are continually thinking of foreign models.
It is this diverse and hybrid
society and space that we miss when we look for and apply pure (Western)
categories. Identities are complex and cannot be spelled out in pure categories. So are Asian cities.
Whether an observer sees the
creations of such subversive spaces, what she sees in them depends on her focus. The “low-politics” of the subjects
largely become dismissed as unimportant compared to the “high-politics” of
authorities which is about power and economics.14 Planners have a way of focusing on growth and being silent
about important tensions that emanate from ethnic and cultural differences,
portraying these issues as “low-politics,” especially by getting back into their technology nest and serving the power.15
The official planning story, according to Leonie Sandercock (2005), portrays
planning as a heroic pursuit leaving out
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Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 9 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
gender, class, race, and cultural biases of planning practices, and by implication,
serving as an agent of social control, regulating bodies in space. Moreover,
such documentation reinterprets planning, locating it in a scientific mode of historiography.16
Despite challenging the
modernization paradigm from a mode of production standpoint, and highlighting the significance of urban and social
movements, the urban political-economy approach is still Western scientific
(modernist) and its bearers view urban processes from an external viewpoint, and tend to privilege it as “objective.”
They classify and categorize the subjects, transforming them into objects
and limiting the positions that the latter can assume within the structure employed by the researcher.17 This way,
they see global cities, world cities, network societies, and civil societies all
through (Western) scientifically constructed categories. They have provided a significant insight into
society but, in this view, culture and the worldviews are static and muted.18 They
do not see their own subjectivity and themselves in the discourse. They see classes but do not necessarily see the
subalterns, let alone the latter‟s perspective. Most crucially, they wish to
represent the subalterns within their frameworks. Within this external view, planning is seen as a provision: we
provide for them, a view which is somewhat revised by the “class
struggle.” I am not convinced that digging deeper into the same paradigm of Western rationalistic science is
capable of providing alternative insights.19 Building on the insights
provided by the urban political economy of the 1970s, scholars of planning such as Leonie Sandercock, Oren Yiftachel,
Karen Umemoto, and Vanessa Watson (1994) have been searching for new
ways of understanding planning.
In my own research, I had to develop my own strategy. I pursued a
simple question: Why do people in Sri Lanka plan, design, and build the way
they do? Yet there is no authentic Sri Lankan. In Decolonizing Ceylon, I map out the territories, urban systems, and
architecture created by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in Ceylon,
from Western perspectives, and asks how did local groups such as the elite, the nationalists, the socialists, the youth
movements, the separatists, the planners, and the architects respond to these
spaces. As many brilliant studies of colonialism and urbanism carried out from a Western vantage point exist, my
interest was to find out what I would see from the Sri Lankan (Asian) side.
Hence, I had been open to the possibility of Sri Lankans creating spaces that would go beyond and besides colonial
spaces. I have documented the processes of familiarization of colonial Colombo
by the elite, workers, migrants, the Buddhist establishment, and women. Similarly, in the context of Singapore,
Brenda Yeoh examines the production of space excellently; her Contesting Spaces
examines the conflicts between British and Singaporean-Chinese spatial perceptions and practices.
Today, there is a strong body of
work that approaches postcolonial urbanism from postcolonial standpoints. A cohort of scholars in urban studies
employs locally-friendly perspectives that could acknowledge local agency and
be empathic to inhabitants. The deconstruction and the decentering of colonial, Western, and nationalist
discourses has been effectively carried out by scholars of subaltern and
postcolonial studies.20 Despite the expansion of these studies beyond their original foci of history and English
literature, they have little to say about social space and urbanism. Approaching
from a number of theoretical
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perspectives, particularly political-economy, scholars of colonial urbanism
have, from the mid-1970s, begun to expose the political and social power
involved in the historical construction of social space and the connections between colonial policies and spatial
subjectivity. Beginning in the 1990s, critically feeding off these streams of
studies as well as new cultural geography, scholars of urbanism and planning began to not only expose the
Euro-centrism and male-centrism in mainstream work, but also attempted to
acknowledge agency and the transformative capacity of subordinate people in creating space. Shifting the
vantage-point in different ways and questioning „post-colonial‟ and
„nationalist‟ constructions of social space at different scales, the work of Holston (1989); King (1992); Hershkovitz
(1993); Yeoh and Kong (1994); Yeoh (1996); Nalbantoglu and Wong (1997);
Perera (1998); Sandercock (1998); Kusno (2000); Zhang (2001); Law (2002); Goh (2002); Nasr and Volait
(2003); Yang (2004); and Hosagrahar (2005) among others, laid a foundation
for the study of urbanism from “subaltern/postcolonial” perspectives.
These works, produced from local vantage points could help us
develop our own frameworks to understand Asian urbanization on its own terms. As these authors highlight, it
is important to develop appropriate analytical frameworks. In addition, I
would stress the significance of adopting local vantage points. Moreover, paying attention to the spatial stories of ordinary
Asian citizens and those of planning which learns from people and making
these practices visible would lead to the creation of new cascades of thought, practice, and scholarship. More
immediately, their documentation would create an alternative “tool box” for urban
managers, leaders, and planners in Asia,
not simply to borrow or mimic, but to generate inspiration for more diverse
practices. These studies can shed light on the complex urban processes in Asia,
particularly on subversive and contested spaces.
At the same time, it is important to avoid significant problems. First we
should avoid thinking of Asia as the opposite of the West, but deconstruct the hierarchy and the structures that
disprivilege Asia by provincializing the West. This way we can be open
ourselves to the idea of hybridity and to treat the West as any other region from which the planners can borrow as and
when needed. Moreover, it is important to understand that whatever the
knowledge that we produced is not complete. As long as it is about subjects, they too develop knowledge and spaces.
Hence we should locate ourselves also within the discourse, and acknowledge
the subversive elements existing within our own narrative.
THE ABSENCE OF INNOVATION
IN PLANNING
Despite the large scale transformation of Asian cities and the innovative practices
at the day-to-day level, planning is yet to catch up with these developments. I do
not refer to the absence of the tallest building or the largest fountain in the world, which are claimed to be in Asia.
Moreover, the highrises and mega-projects are being Asianized in places
like Shanghai though new roof designs and lighting at night. I focus on the weak connection between planning and
the culture, nature, and the history of the place. The planners are yet to open
themselves up to learning from the people and people‟s practices and developing a more locally oriented
discourse.
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 11 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Despite the fact that new professional ideas have seeped into
Asian cities, and the higher-end planning is operating at more or less the “cutting
edge,” the perceptions are largely imported from the West. As mentioned earlier, Anthony King (1980) argues that
colonialism was the vehicle by which contemporary urban planning, developed
in the West within a Western culture, was exported to many non-Western societies. This was initially carried out
by the conscious laying out of various settlements, camps, towns, and cities
according to various military, political and cultural principles developed in the metropolis. The beginning of the
twentieth century saw the export of formally stated town planning
ordinances and theories. The process of exporting planning has continued beyond European- imperial times, well into the
era of so-called sovereign states, and further intensified under the banner of
liberalization, globalization and, now, sustainability. Whether as part of foreign aid packages, a concern for the
poor or the environment, an interest in taking part in the process of
globalization, or training professionals in the West and within Western discourses, the export of values, ideologies, and
planning models from the West is still strong.
What planners in Colombo are
most excited about is the environment.
This is not an indigenous idea: The new concern for the environment is an
imported notion which does not provide much room for indigenous notions, from the past, or from the vernacular. The
concern of the Urban Development Authority (UDA) of Sri Lanka (2001) for
the environment is not based upon the nature-culture relationship with which the Sri Lankans are familiar; the one that
was widely practiced for millennia before the British introduction of
domination over nature, 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. This is not to belittle the fact that the planners in
Colombo have, for example, different views about reclaiming land. They no
longer think that the marshes are waiting to be filled and “developed.” Therefore, strategies have been introduced to
preserve and retain natural areas in their existing state, while permitting activities
in harmony with the natural/cultural environment. Other exported ideas –that will not be discussed in this paper–
include historic preservation, modernity, and globalization.
The planners who presumably
undertake to create a future strongly
acknowledge existing –largely colonial– boundaries, data, and information. Old
structures distorting current development and management of the city is a constraint that transcends Asia; the
limited land area that falls within the city –excluding the suburbs– itself is a
problem for managing the city in the USA. In Colombo, while the planners hesitate to confine the “practiced” city
within its municipal boundaries, for the lack of a larger metropolitan boundary,
they use another colonial demarcation, Western Province, as the larger urban region.
Most questionable is the fact that
planning is considered to be politically and culturally neutral. Although planning was considered an objective
exercise practiced for the public good at the early days of the profession, the fact
that planning, development, and foreign aid are political was exposed in the late 1960s. The issues of environment and
globalization, and the new pro-growth neoliberalist approach taken by the
planners, have caused planning, once
12 Nihal Perera
______________________________________________________________________________________
again, to appear apolitical. In this context, the American interest in selling
computers to communities that need food and housing gets camouflaged
within the desire to have modern Western technology and the idea of integrating them into the so-called
informational society.
Despite the new ideas, concerns, and considerations that have entered into planning practice during this period,
urban planning in Asia still lacks direction; planning responses to the
current transformation at large have been rather weak. Planning has principally been reactive and has responded to what
planners have recognized as immediate problems. Planning, in most cases, has
been a piecemeal effort which has not taken into account the larger and longer term processes that are underway. For
the most part planning has taken the form of strategic intervention, but the
silences are significant.
According to Liu Thai Ker
(1998), the economic upgrading of Asian countries have not been matched by
environmental improvement. Hence the current urbanization process is bound to require a second round of planning, later
on, especially once the problems that are overlooked become critical. As more
land is developed, and further developed, any changes to the city‟s infrastructure and the built environment is going to be
more costly, and will result in the relocation of citizens, activities, and
functions, and the demolition of buildings and infrastructure.
The two crucial issues at this time concern the perceptions of the city
on which these planning exercises are based and the new directions in planning. Firstly, the unique aspects of
Asian urbanization have not been adequately understood. For example,
many Asian countries do not have
clearly defined urban and rural areas as once conceptualized in Europe. They
have large tracts of semi-urban areas. Terence McGee and Norton Ginsburg
(1991), who have argued about what they call “desakota” and “extended metropolitan regions,” have begun to
identify some aspects of this uniqueness. Although they begin to problematize the
shortcoming of the conventional view, they use Jean Gottman‟s (1961) work on megalopolis which is more US-centered
as a point of departure, and focus on the economy which is most pertinent for the
analysis of Western cities. Nevertheless, within the urban political-economy paradigm, McGee argues that the
Western paradigm of the urban transition is not directly transferable. He (1991)
highlights the difference: “The uneven incorporation of these Asian countries into a world economic system from the
fifteenth century onward created divergent patterns of urbanization.”
Although this is also an outside view, from the core of the world-economy, it provides some insights into Asian
urbanization. Yet the Colombo Metropolitan Regional Plan (CMR Plan)
does not mention much uniqueness nor does it engage with the semi-urban areas, or desa-kotas. While the CMR Plan
correctly identifies that “Incompatible land use and ribbon development along
the principal trunk roads in the region has led to traffic congestion and delays in passenger travel,” 21 it is unable to
characterize this non-conventional development from a local standpoint.
Instead, the Plan identifies an urban hierarchy, and implies a clean division between the urban and the rural.22
Anything that is outside of this model is a problem that needs to be corrected. In
this, their top-down approach itself creates (planning) problems on the ground.
Despite the renewal of the
discourse, however, the people‟s day-to-
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 13 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
day language has not entered plans and planning reports. In other words,
planning in Asia still remains foreign with very little indigenous perceptions of
space-making finding their way into the planning discourse. In Sri Lanka, people define space in terms of handi
(junctions) and mulu, in India they use chowks, in Kathmandu space is
organized around durbars and hitis, and longtangs are very important in China. The language of massive resistance to
growth –categorized as development– in Hong Kong has not entered the planning
discourse either. These and other important signifiers of space have hardly entered the planning discourse, the
explicit objective of which is “public good.”
At the same time, if these
concepts enter the planning discourse,
there is also a danger of them being assimilated into the dominant discourse,
in which process their meanings will be transformed. This may not be a deliberate act, but reveals a structural
constraint of the intellectual frameworks employed by planners.
From a physical viewpoint, there
is not much concern for the older fabric
of the built environment. In regard to the historic areas in Beijing, Wu
Liangyong (2000) 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.
Roger Chen (2000) argues that Whilst it is imperative that Shanghai develops into a finance and service economy in the informational era, it is
equally important that the city maintains its traditional sector .... Cities that can preserve their own cultural characters, keep and make full use of their unique natural advantages when they develop according to an international standard, will be better places for living, visiting, and investing.
The remaining historic areas of a
city have more significance than their sheer history and aura; they are part of
continuity of the identity and culture of the people. At the same time, the conservation of hutongs occur within the
larger processes of commercialization and gentrification. In the more state
dominated Singapore, Perry and others (1997) highlight that “much of the conservation initiative is state driven and
state-planned and serves the various ideological intents of the government.”
Hence, there is a substantial gap between the planners and the “citizens.” In regard to three plans for Singapore and
Hong Kong, John Friedman (2000) argues that, “As top-down efforts with
very limited involvement of others than government and certain business sectors, [the plans] fall short of the criterion of
active citizen participation.” Yet the use of overarching external categories such
as the “civil society” to identify the whole non-political community homogenizes the community and make
individuals inactive.
Going beyond this limitation requires the shifting of the vantage point. In regard to Seoul, Joochul Kim and
Sang-Chuel Choe (1997) highlights the significance of acknowledging the on-
going urbanization processes: When strolling along the streets of Seoul, particularly in the island of Youido, one is left with the impression that it is like any other modern western city. Buildings, street designs, business activities and other city functions closely resemble cities such as New York, Tokyo, and London. A uniquely Korean
14 Nihal Perera
______________________________________________________________________________________
tradition in architectural and cultural presentation is lacking. The absence of traditional Korean influences, along with a substantial increase in urban density and crowding, reduces the overall legibility of the city environment: the city looks disjointed, chaotic, and unattractive. The development of special functional districts within the city might enhance its image and ambiance. At present, a number of special districts such as theaters, antiques, general consumer goods, and electronic products have been created in various sections of the city, but others, such as foreign embassies, historic sites, and the arts, are not available. The creation of such special districts cannot be brought about by zoning or other enforcement mechanism alone, but rather through a historical process of urban growth and development.
The addressing of Western concerns such as modernization,
Westernization, environmental degradation, and globalization could only transform non-Western cities into
more familiar Western environments, for the West and the Westernized locals, and
more profitable environments for local businessmen and growth coalitions. Although the contemporary planning
tools provide some advancement for the non-Western societies within the
dominant structures, within an international setting, these strategies do not empower the local people very
much. Although all plans mention equity, the way in which privatization is
promoted, 23 the plans disempower the people.
Planning has become an expert-driven exclusionary activity which does
not provide room for other voices. The planners have moved away from a century- long tradition of growth control
to become promoters of economic development. This approach has a
strong element of pro-growth urban politics and an interest in showcase
projects which have been common in the USA. So far, experts with alternative
views, NGOs and the general public have played highly subdued roles.
Beyond the import and export of ideas, the dependency on the West is reproduced by training planners in the
West and Western institutions, and maintaining the centers of knowledge
production and the journals that validate knowledge in the West. A major cause for the continuation of exporting
Western planning and planning ideas is the training of planners within Western
discourses, whether in the West or elsewhere.
What the Euro-centric discourses have failed to do is to reconnect planning
with the place, the people, the culture, the past, and the future. Yet this is a colossal undertaking. Chung-Tong Wu
(2000) points to the fact that “planning practice in Asia is more than ever both
difficult and challenging. Most planners who work in Asia will have to spend their time navigating the unknown.”
Ideas that might give rise to place and culture specific ways of thinking and the
development of new approaches to planning in Asia have been hampered by the marginalization and silencing of
ideas and practices that fall outside of the Euro-centric discourses. In this
context, highlighting such ideas and practices would help planners develop more place and culture specific
discourses.
ASIANIZING PLANNING
At the same time, many Asian leaders,
administrators, and planners are responding to this challenge. They are
navigating the unknown and are learning by doing. Planners and planning scholars need focus more on their
progressive practices. In order to see these practices, they need to develop
intellectual frameworks and adopt local
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 15 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
vantage points and look at the right places. Innovative practices are found in
the cracks of the society, in the exceptions, and the details. Moreover,
planners ought to learn from the people. In this section I wish to highlight how planners are engaged in the
empowerment of local communities and thereby in Asianizing planning.
A prerequisite to seeing
subversive and innovative practices is to
acknowledge the fact that successful planners and designers of social space in
Asia are largely trained in the field (on the job), through learning by doing. As I have argued elsewhere, select architects
have developed place and culture-specific practices which I call critical
vernacularism. Although it is not as pronounced as in architecture which has a strong visual element, this is not
uncommon in planning. As mentioned above, Koenigsberger developed the
notion of action planning in Asia and also practiced it. Matthew Nowicki who developed the first plan for Chandigarh
finished all his designs in an Indian idiom. Institutions like the Urban
Redevelopment Authority (URA) of Singapore, the Mahaweli Architectural Unit (MAU) of Sri Lanka, and the
Design Cell of KRVIA have developed their own models of research and
development, and the Department of Town and Country Planning at the University of Moratuwa has launched a
bachelor‟s program and its new leaders have radically redefined planning
education at graduate level.
At the same time, however, the
type of development that is taking place in Asia is also 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 downwards, the
demand for admission to the planning
program at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) in New Delhi
increased, and a leading private school of architecture in Mumbai, Kamla
Raheja Vidyanidhi, have been focusing on large-scale community development projects, such as the Eastern Waterfront
Development and the Redevelopment of Dharavi.
There are fundamental
differences in the way in which many
Asian cities take part in the discourses of environmentalism and globalization. An
extraordinary feature of the CMR Plan (2001) is the acknowledgment of the existing system of paddy fields,
wetlands, and the canal system in Colombo, and undertaking to protect and
promote that pattern: Colombo Metropolitan area has a unique natural landscape with wetlands, water bodies, and paddy fields combined with rivers and natural and man-made canals. ... The strategy of the CMR Plan is to utilize this natural layout by making further improvements for sustainable development through application of appropriate environmental and physical planning strategies.
What is identified is a complex vernacular land use system made up of natural land forms, natural and man-
made water features, urban land uses and farming which cannot be characterized
by conventional terms employed in analysis, the separation of uses. Here, planning begins by identifying the areas
that should not be developed and by promoting high density development in
other areas.
For Sri Lankan leaders,
globalization is both getting more connected to the global economy and
also reasserting Sri Lanka‟s national identity. While the UDA opened up the CBD of Colombo for private capital in
the late 1980s, inviting international banks and financial agencies to invest in
16 Nihal Perera
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it and to rebuild it in an international style, it also developed a new capital, a
political center in the outskirts of Colombo. In separating global-
economic and national-political functions, the UDA moved the national parliament house and the Secretariat to
the new seat of government in Sri Jayawardhanapura-Kotte. While the
new CBD in the Fort was built by private companies –after the government lead– in an International Style, attempting to
erase locally produced differences, the Parliament House was built by the
government in a Sri Lankan style, representing the nation and its identity. This way Sri Lanka is producing its own
globality, on its own terms, but within the larger global contexts. This is very
different to what the Global City, World City, and the dominant globalization discourses suggest.
In regard to the Mahaweli
Project, a large irrigation-based development project in the interiors of Sri Lanka, its design and planning unit
(MAU) developed its (unrelated) version of action planning. Prior to that in the
early 1980s, even after decades, the new towns in the north-central Sri Lanka had very few buildings dispersed in space
with vegetation (jungles) in between. These were partially developed rural
areas, but with harsher conditions as the trees were bulldozed. In the 1980s, MAU decided to provide the settlers
with a town from the beginning of their life in the newly irrigated areas. It
would build the towns outwards from a dense urban core created by the clustering of the institutional and
commercial buildings that would be built in the first few years. The plan was
updated annually based on the building program, funding, and other factors which were also determined annually,
thus connecting the social processes and space. While the town was anchored in
the core, it also allowed some flexibility
for the users to adapt through a “loose-fit” plan and design of buildings.24 These
towns were thus urban centers from day one, but their planning process continued
in cycles. In this, the planners were in close touch with all agencies involved in the development process and allowed for
future inhabitants‟ responses.
In the 1980s, the Sri Lankan government adopted a housing policy founded on the idea of “support
systems.” This was based on John Turner‟s idea that the state provision of
(public) housing is not a solution to self-building as the latter is the people‟s solution to the lack of affordable
housing. Instead, the people should decide what they want and the state
should support. Although this sounds idealist (and anarchist), the Sri Lankan government did implement a policy
based on such support systems. Although the policy is still known by its
political name, The Million Houses Program, its more substantive lessons have not been absorbed into the thinking
process. Valuable experiences such as that of MAU planning and support
systems are lost due to the focus which is on formal processes –although they may have failed– and not on the innovative
ones. This is very strong in both India and China where the students are most
concerned about getting a job in the formal system and the teachers and institutions largely support this notion,
thus encouraging planners to be quite far from people. Considering the role of
these two countries in the current transformation, this type of planning education might turn out to be a disaster.
Conservation also provides an
effective way to perceive the city or parts of it within indigenous histories –not necessarily as static environments
following the way Western philosophers such as Hegel have characterized Asian
societies. This would enable planners to
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 17 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
reconnect the future of the city to its past. The Ju‟er Hutong project in
Beijing provides a good example of this kind. Here the historic courtyard houses
organized around hutongs are revitalized, but within a contemporary setting.
Critics and planners are
highlighting that planning is political. In one of the profound planning analysis, Slumming India, Gita Dewan Verma
(2003) argues that the planning authorities have to accept responsibility
for their action. Particularly the slum formation in India cannot be viewed as the making of the slum dwellers or the
colonial regime, especially after five decades of independence. Moreover, the
plan is a document of entitlement, especially for the under-privileged. Hence, it is important to implement
these. These are novel definitions of the plan which are not well received in
India.
In a bold move, the National
Physical Planning Department (NPPD) in Sri Lanka has recognized that
planning is political. The planning commissions and boards at national and regional levels include leading
administrators and politicians. This way these leaders would buy into the plan
that they got involved in “making,” or authorizing, and have some interest vested in its implementation. Along with
the surge of planning, new planning agencies and institutions to support these
efforts are also emerging. Most of these cities not only have new plans, but also new agencies, for example, Mumbai
Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), Delhi
Development Authority (DDA), Urban Development Authority (UDA) of Sri Lanka, and the NPPD in Sri Lanka
established in 2001. This way the institutional structure of planning in Asia
has been changing. With a different
mission at hand, the agencies themselves view the cities on which they focus
differently. Colombo is increasingly redefined within its metropolitan region.
MMRDA considers Mumbai region to be a multi-centric city. This is a different type of a city compared to the
traditional one that is found in literature which has a core and suburbs around it.
While Asia has been highly
innovative, the innovations have been
sporadic and temporary. This is largely due to the planning community‟s focus
on the developments in the West and the lack of availability of these innovations for them to understand and/or to use.
These innovative aspects of planning can be further enhanced and others can learn
from these experiences. It is the responsibility of the academics to provide visibility to the innovative and
locally grounded practices. Yet the mere documentation of these practices is
insufficient. They need to be documented in substantive and analytically sophisticated ways that
highlight their relevance. Why should a planner in Vientiane read about a
planning experience in Kuala Lumpur? Why is this experience more important than that of Paris? Moreover, these
practices also need to receive some legitimacy from the authorities so that
they can be practiced by planners. Although it is highly relevant, action planning is not commonly practiced in
India or any other country, largely because of the lack of legitimacy.
Many changes are taking place in
Asian cities and planning, but
halfheartedly. Empowering communities is the most certain way to
empower planning. This will give new life to communities and planning in rapidly transforming Asia. Centering the
community in the planning discourse is crucial for the planning process to
achieve this goal. However, the usual
18 Nihal Perera
______________________________________________________________________________________
town meetings which operate within the dominant discourse are grossly
inadequate. At times of transformation, it is important to maintain the
relationship between the society and space. If not, it is more likely than not for them to get disconnected, leading to
the defamiliarization of the environment for the inhabitants. Although the new
aggressiveness among planners should be valued, as the suggestions made by the team headed by Wu (2000) in
Beijing, reducing the speed and scale of urban renewal, and rethinking about the
dominant discourses, both theory and practice, is a prerequisite to build communities instead of physical
environments.
Most crucially, researchers of Asian cities should not deny their subjects the same time and space that
they occupy. Planners should work with people and not for people; they should
not represent people, but let the people represent themselves. At this stage, people in Asia are far ahead of planners
as a whole. This is not unusual as, at one level, they do not have the same
constraints that the planners have in regard to transformation of space. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned
from the people about Asian urbanization. Engaging with the people,
and learning from them requires the crossing of the boundary between us and them. The planner should become a
trans-status subject who can operate within the domain of the subjects with
whom he plans and an outsider who brings value to the planning process.
IN CLOSING
In short, Asia is transforming in its own way. As I have demonstrated above, the social transformations of Asia are indeed
paralleled by spatial transformations. The social and spatial transformations
are not isomorphic or isotemporal, but
take their own forms at their own times. The local people are not passive
recipients of global and dominant forces, but create and negotiate spaces for their
social and cultural practices. The transformation of the Asian city is far more complex than the hegemonic
discourses of modernization and globalization suggest.
Using “modernizing” and
“globalizing” to characterize this
transformation can only provide a partial view of this change. This transformation
cannot be understood simply as Westernization or Asianization by using simple dualities, using Western
frameworks of analysis, or by adopting external vantage points. It is important
to remove the ideological wrapper around the discourses on Asian urbanization of global discourses which
focus on mega projects and the Westernization of Asian cities and
identify globalization as simply one transformation among many.
The understanding of the Asian city on their own terms requires new
analytical tools. The documentation of diverse and innovative urban and planning practices in Asian cities could
provide an alternative tool box of ideas that could be used along with other tool
boxes to observe, understand, and create diverse environments and to inspire innovations of their own. In order to
substantially engage the city, the scholars and practitioners should
understand the local production of space and develop an empathy towards the local inhabitants; this requires the
shifting of the focus to local practices and the vantage point of inquiry from the
West to the locale, or the city itself: i.e., to observe the production of space from the spaces of production.
In addition to the multitude of
small transformations carried out by
Asian Urbanism and Planning:
Viewing the Production of Space from the Spaces of Production 19 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
local inhabitants, planners have also infused innovative elements into their
plans. Although almost every city plan in Asia has Western roots, some planners
have been learning by doing. The development of planning methods such as action planning and support systems,
the adoption of incremental and loose-fit planning, the acknowledgment of the
vernacular land use patterns, the politics of planning, and the negotiation of Colombo‟s globality demonstrate the
transformative capacity of the Asian planner. While planning needs to catch
up with the people, planning education should catch up with the progressive
planners.
Notes
1. See Nihal Perera, “People‟s Spaces: Familiarizat ion, Subject Formation, and Emergent Spaces in
Colombo” 2009 2. See http://www.capasia.net/iv/announcement.htm (Cap Asia iv, 2005)
3. See also Joochul Kim and Sang-Chuel Choe, Seoul: The Making of a Metropolis, 1997
4. Inspired by Anthony King, “Rethinking Colonialis m: An Epilogue,” in Forms o f Dominance: On the
Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, eds., Nezar A l-Sayyad1992
5. See Nihal Perera, “The Planners‟ City: The Construction of Town -Planning Perception of Colombo”
(2006)
6. I have demonstrated elsewhere of four princip le stages of European colonialis m Ceylon: the military
conquest, the establishment of a colonial administration, economic incorporation, and the establishment
of a European cultural hegemony. (See Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and
the Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka, See Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and
Power in Colonial India, for a deeper analysis.
7. See Nihal Perera, “Importing Problems: The Impact of a Housing Ordinance on Colombo” Arab World
Geographer, (2005)
8. See Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka
(1998)
9. See Nihal Perera, “Exploring Colombo: The Relevance of a Knowledge of New York?” In
Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital, and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis , ed., Anthony D.
King: (1996)
10. See Nihal Perera “Indigenising the Colonial City : Late 19th -Century Colombo and Its Landscape”
Urban Studies: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, eds., Lily Kong and Lisa Law, (2002),
“Femin izing the City: Gender and Space in Colonial Colombo” In Trans-Status Subjects: Genders in
the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia , eds., Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De: (2002)
11. See Nihal Perera, “Contesting Visions: Hybrid ity, Liminality, and Authorship of the Chandigarh Plan,”
Planning Perspectives; “Chandigarh: India‟s Modernist Experiment,” in Planning Twentieth-Century
Capital Cities, ed., David Gordon (2004).
12. Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfiguration of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s
Floating Population (2001)
20 Nihal Perera
______________________________________________________________________________________
13. Yang, “Spatial Struggles.”
14. Inspired by Scott A. Bollens, “Urban Planning and Intergroup Conflict: Confronting a Fractured Public
Interest” in Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning I, eds. Bruce St iftel and Vanessa Watson:
(2005)
15. See Bollens, “Urban Planning and Intergroup Conflict.: Confronting a Fractured Public Interest” in
Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning I, eds. Bruce St iftel and Vanessa Watson, (2005)
16. See Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge (1980)
17. For the limits of such dualistic positions, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., (1994)
18. This is precisely why the search for planning cultures failed. See Bishwapriya Sanyal, “Hybrid
Planning Cultures: The Search for the Global Cultural Commons” in Comparative Planning Cultures,
ed. Bishwapriya Sanyal: (2005)
19. For example, this is what some scholars do when they try to find answers to issues of culture in the
writings of well-known figures in polit ical economy. The results of this type of work are not very
different from a qualitative standpoint. Jane Jacobs clearly highlighted the limits of Western science in
understanding the city. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life o f Great American Cities (1961)
20. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(1994); Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999); Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000);
“Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography” Position Papers, Nepantla: Views from South 1, 1
(2002); Gyan Prakash “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Crit icis m” The American Historical Review
99 (5) (1994): 1475-1490; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader (1995); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key
Concepts (2000); Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformations (2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics
of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2006).
21. Urban Development Authority, Colombo Metropolitan Regional Plan , 6.
22. Wu Liangyong, Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing: A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighborhood
(1999), ix.
23. “The main task of government ... is to provide an environment that promotes competition and
efficiency and remove constraints that affect private sector participation.” (Urban Development
Authority, 73-4).
24. The term “loose-fit” for this planning was suggested by Wes Janz
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