Urban Imaginaries and Power in Asia's world-level Cities

The rise of Asian cities and their challenges: New configurations of East West power relations within the urban arena?

The world is witnessing a global shift in power relations between the ‘old West' and the East which puts Asia's developed and rapidly developing economies at the global centre stage. While these trends are mostly seen in a globalization and a national perspective, it is also clear that they cannot be understood, if the dynamics at the sub-national and urban level are left out of the account.

Asia's large cities are ‘world-cities', that is, urban agglomerates with millions of inhabitants struggling to accommodate to and exploit new challenges and opportunities posed by global risks, opportunities and shifts (Beck & Grande 2010). They are important dynamos in the shifts that we witness from the ‘old West' to the East.

Many Asian cities have accumulated considerable political, financial, human, and physical resources and power. Increasingly, they have no fixed physical borders and they span territories that do not correspond to one jurisdictional unit. They are arenas for the integration and negotiation, but also the contestation of the global, the regional and the local at a level which challenges both the national as a dominant assemblage of territory, authority, and rights (Sassen 2006), and the global as a possible or complementary new type of assemblage.

These cities are ‘global' in nature or aspiration (Sassen 2006) and they position themselves in national and world-level competition as attractive to invest in, to do business in, to be educated in, to do research in, to innovate in, and to experience the "good life". They capture all manners of people, the creative classes, white and blue collar workers from home and abroad, as well as national and international investments, large-scale corporations (national or MNCs), SMEs, small business, and sweatshops. They participate in trans-regional and trans-national networks and they challenge each other to become increasingly innovative, competitive and sustainable.

As an integral part of their growth, the visions of these cities for the future, their identities, the reconfiguration, and the use of their spaces are negotiated with global competitors, between their state and the local authorities, between the city authorities and the citizens, between the locals and the newcomers, between the long term residents and their new global citizens, between the self and the other.

The cities are or aspire to become ‘trend setters', and they thrive on the constant contestations and negotiation of their realities, their placeness, their identity, and the imaginaries that drive them forward, i.e. their futures.

As Asian cities grow ever larger, their constituencies are exposed to a variety of new political, economic, social, environmental, and resource deficiency risks that they have to address through innovation and change, often "radical change" with the goal to create the "good city" (Pieterse 2008:6).

One of the key justifications for the cities to expand and develop in a globalizing world is their ability to create value-added for their citizens, communities, businesses, organizations and governments, i.e. their diverse constituencies, through constant attempts to reinvent themselves on different dimensions such as state building, governance, innovation, learning, socio-technical transitions, creative solutions, demographic composition, environmental performance, ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, etc. Notably, they produce both winners and losers in their efforts to deal with the mounting global opportunities and risks.

All of this leads to a rewriting of the territories, histories, futures, and identities of urban areas, place and spaces. The cities have to be re-planned and re-built to adapt to and accommodate the changes, and thus enact themselves as urban laboratories for change where political, economic, and social actors promote and contest each others' imaginaries and their power to make them come through.

The assumption underlying this panel is that creative and visionary ideas about urban development at micro-, meso- and macro-levels are important for urban development and change in Asia. Imaginaries are therefore seen as a key driver for shaping new urban territories and identities in agglomerates that thrive on the pluralism of their constituencies.

The focus on imaginaries complements the existing dominant focus in the literature on the influence of political, economic and social "realities". The term imaginary may refer to "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (Taylor 2004).

Imaginaries are thus different from a detached theory of social reality as they entail looking at how people in different contexts "imagine" their surroundings. Imaginaries are enacted within different configurations of formal and informal power, where political, economic and social stakeholders - individuals as well as interest groups, and authorities interact and seek to influence each other to make their imaginaries come through.

Asian cities thus exert urban power, i.e. the cities and their constituencies organize themselves and use resources to promote their imaginaries at local, regional, national and global level. Therefore, the intention is to examine how human beings act to address risk and promote urban change through their constituencies and communities, as well as through their informal and formal organizations and networks, and in relationship to the state and global actors, thus shaping the space and identity of their urban lives.

The innovative aspect of this approach lies in the ambition to examine the development and application of new urban imaginaries in Asia's world-cities in the hands of constituencies with power of influence, however conceived, configured, or constructed. This will help explain some of the global shifts that the world is experiencing in its search for a new cosmopolitan order.

Papers

Asia's cities also engage with European partners in different types of ventures and we would like to solicit papers that either deal with developments in Asian cities themselves based on the ideas above or that deal with the Asia-Europe connection or its contestations.
It is our hope that this panel will lead to new research collaboration.

Panel conveners

Jørgen Delman, Professor, China Studies
Anders Blok, Assistant Professor, Sociology

References

Beck, U. & E. Grande, 2010. Varieties of second modernity: the cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and research. The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 61, Issue 3, pages 409-443, September
Pieterse, E., 2008. City Futures. London, New York: ZED Books; Cape Town: UCT Press
Sassen, S., 2006. The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo: Princeton University Press
Taylor, C., 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press (Public Planet Books)