Contemplating the Rise of Asian Cities

On May 9th, scholars from across Yale assembled at the Greenberg Conference Center for the final session of a semester-long workshop series entitled “Contemplating the Rise of Asian Cities.” Organized by Professors Erik Harms, Helen Siu, and K. Sivaramakrishnan, and sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center, the MacMillan Center, and the Councils on South, Southeast, and East Asian Studies, the interdisciplinary workshop series assembled a broad mix of scholars studying Asian cities from multiple perspectives to question what the rapid growth of cities across Asia means in humanistic, social, and aesthetic terms. The final session of the popular semester-long workshop series was held in the packed amphitheater of the Greenberg Center and came to a close with a pair of plenary lectures by Ananya Roy and Neil Brenner. The evening then concluded in the center’s magnificent dining room with a lively banquet dinner, where assembled guests discussed initiatives for further work on the study of Asian cities at Yale.

The first speaker at the closing plenary was Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and inaugural Director of The Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. In her talk, Roy challenged the audience to rethink received paradigms regarding the urban management of “slums.” Her talk exposed the dark-side of “world-class” city making and detailed how the supposed rise of the Asian city is often founded on dispossession and displacement. Roy argued that the concept of “inclusive growth” in Indian urban planning often functions to make poverty legible for capitalistic ventures. Spurred by the logic of fighting poverty with endless economic development, these inclusive growth policies have recast residents as beneficiaries of municipal policy, which Roy argued is indicative of a hegemonic process intent on deterritorializing space and transforming undesirable slums into calculable and monetizable surplus rather than alleviating poverty.

The second speaker was Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory and Director of the Urban Theory Lab at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In his talk, Brenner encouraged the audience to push the boundaries of urban theory by calling for more critical reflection on the framing devices that urban planners have adopted to approach the question of urbanization. For instance, Brenner criticized the city-dominant models of mapping projects as “punitive” for the way they leave non-urban spaces as unmapped landscapes. Brenner posited that the entire planet is itself already urban and thus took issue with the spatial-binarism that defines urbanization as strictly the growth of cities. Instead, Brenner wants audiences to consider the transformations that take place betwixt and between population centers by visualizing and counter-visualizing via new maps that include the broad range of elements that support the operation of the urban (resource extraction, industry, population density, light emissions, biomass, etc.). With these maps as a visual guide he called for the destabilization of existing assumptions, the expansion of “zones” and boundaries, as well as the development of new vocabularies to move beyond conceptions of cities that only focus on centers of agglomeration.

The plenary was the conclusion of a semester-long series of workshops that critically engaged the trope of the rising Asian city. In the first workshop session “Build, Dwell, Live,” on February 1st, speakers illustrated how non-state actors come into conflict with the state, and how they mobilize alternative forms of political agency. In the second session “Imagine, Conceive, Represent,” on March 7th, speakers revealed the centrality of everyday practices to the meaning of a city’s rise by reimagining urban development and analyzing gaps in logic of transportation design, satire and humor in colonial newspapers, and the use of folklore in critiquing urban bureaucracy. In the third workshop “Move, Connect, Exchange,” on April 4th, speakers traced the uneven and troubled development of the rising city by presenting cases of environmental repercussions, failed attempts in developing global art centers, and port cities as historic centers of exchange.

Throughout the workshops this semester, speakers reminded audiences of three central points: (1) that the so-called rise of Asia is neither new nor universally dictated by the imperatives of circulating capital alone; (2) that scholars must look beyond surfaces and superficial forms of spectacular urbanism and pay attention to quotidian and popular engagements with cities; and (3) that scholars need to approach the concept of the Rising Asian City with healthy skepticism–for every spectacular rise, there is often an equally spectacular set of unacknowledged costs. The workshops also helped establish a network of scholars of Asian cities from across the university. The organizers hope this network will foster continued interdisciplinary and inter-Asian work on the study of cities at Yale.