Choon-Piew Pow

Seeing Red Over Green: Contesting Urban Sustainabilities in China

The urban sustainability agenda is engaged at some levels with the two concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism. While they share certain important commonalities (for example, the emphasis on what is normatively understood as ‘right’ policy-making), each has largely progressed on its own intellectual trajectory. It is suggested that the concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism are crystallised and concretised in the idea(l) form of the ‘eco-city’ through the search for an ‘urban sustainability fix’ in urban China. Although the idea of constructing an ‘eco-city’ has been mooted since the 1980s, the concept remains somewhat elusive and controversial for a number of reasons. First, while its physical form and design appeal have often been promoted by urban planners, architects and government officials, the deeper normative tenets of building an eco-city are surprisingly ignored. Secondly, the lack of an ‘actually existing’ or successfully implemented eco-city project suggests the considerable amount of resistance and difficulties (in terms of planning, politics, economic costs, etc.) that the concept encounters in practice. To that end, the paper examines various green urban initiatives in reform China before focusing on the example of Shanghai’s Dongtan eco-city project (an entrepreneurial urban prestige-project jointly developed by the British and Chinese governments) to examine the challenges and contradictions of an urban sustainability fix in the guise of eco-city building in China.

Marketing the Chinese Dream Home: Gated Communities and Representations of the Good Life in (Post-)Socialist Shanghai

This paper examines the advertising themes and rhetoric that have been assembled in the place-marketing of Shanghais newly built gated communities. We demonstrate how place-marketing strategies, in this case selling the Chinese dream home, draws upon specific landscape meanings and values that are embedded in Chinese/Shanghainese history, even as symbolic and cultural capital from the contemporary scene also exert their influences. Collectively, these representations of the good life both reflect and reinforce the exclusivist housing aspirations and privatist visions of middle-class residents of gated communities in contemporary Shanghai. While advertisements do not always achieve the outcomes that property developers wish for, there is no doubt that they play significant roles in both shaping and reflecting landscape meanings and values. As medium and outcome, they reveal the growing aspirations of a new Chinese middle class.

License to travel

In the world of ‘fast policy transfer’, stylized models of ‘successful’ paradigmatic cities have been assembled and circulated widely around the world, providing supposedly ‘best practices’ and ‘tried and tested’ policy solutions for a variety of problems. Far from being neutral and objective, these traveling models and policy assemblages are deeply embedded in power relations and animated by urban imaginaries of ‘good places’ to live and work. Both in rhetoric and form, the purported ‘Singapore model’, driven by the entrepreneurial zeal of state agencies as well as private developers, has been exported to many cities in the global south. Yet how does this self-stylized Singapore model possess the representational power and ‘license to travel’? What role does urban materiality play in the circulation and flow of the Singapore model? To this end, this paper argues that the Singapore model rests on the seductive narratives of a self-orientalized ‘Asian success story’ that is enacted and materialized through an assemblage of policy artifacts. On the whole, however, rather than converging towards a unified singular policy narrative, the Singapore model is consumed in highly differentiated and uneven ways, thus underscoring the contradictions and friction that underpin the process through which mobile policies and neoliberal urban models are assembled and circulated around the world. Beyond the empirically grounded analysis of assemblage theory and policy mobility, this paper attends to the diverse urbanisms that are being assembled and produced both within and beyond the global south.

Constructing a new private order: gated communities and the privatization of urban life in post-reform Shanghai

This paper examines changing notions of public and private spaces in post-reform urban Shanghai by focusing on the emergence of private gated communities (fengbi xiaoqu) and their impact on the privatization of urban space and social life in the city. While gated communities in Anglo-American literature are typically cast in a negative light (often depicted as the bulldozing of public spaces by private interests), this paper offers a nuanced interpretation by arguing how Shanghais gated communities are, potentially, sites where greater household autonomy and personal freedom may be realized away from the hegemonic control of the Communist Party-state. By examining the evolving notions of private life/privacy in Shanghai, this paper contributes to the nascent understanding of the concepts of public and private in a non-Western context.

“Sense and Sensibility”: Social‐spatial Experiences of the Visually‐impaired in Singapore

Vision plays an important role in our daily life, and geography is to a large extent, a visual discipline. The persistence of the visual ideology is problematic as it encourages geographical scholarship to neglect the role of non-visual senses while at the same time, marginalises the experiences of non-sighted people. By adopting an interpretative approach and drawing concepts from “sensuous geographies”, this paper explores the role of non-visual senses in the spatial experiences of the visually-impaired in Singapore. Through humanistic inquiry, the paper also examines some of the problems that the visually-impaired in Singapore encounter in public spaces and social interaction. To this end, the author aims to illumine the intricate relationship between our non-visual senses and social sensibility when thinking about sightlessness.

Urban dystopia and epistemologies of hope

This paper takes issue with the dystopian views that have come to dominate research on privatized urban forms such as gated communities. Urban scholarship on gating is often overwhelmed by recurring case studies documenting the proliferation of urban fortressing and segregation that often warn of an impending urban dystopia with cities being besieged by neoliberal forces of privatism. Moving beyond such noir urban scholarship and universal pessimism, the paper argues for a more ‘hopeful’ research agenda by countering the overcoded mono-logic of urban fortification and segregation with a more nuanced perspective that underscores the differentiating dynamics and contingent nature of urban spaces.

‘GOOD’ AND ‘REAL’ PLACES: A GEOGRAPHICAL‐MORAL CRITIQUE OF TERRITORIAL PLACE‐MAKING

Abstract. As a spatial strategy to control people by controlling access to space, gated communities are territorial place‐making devices par excellence. While gated communities often conjure up images of extreme urban inequality and social–spatial segregation, relatively few works have actually engaged in more normative analysis and debates on these contentious urban forms. Addressing this lacuna, this paper will critically examine the geographical‐moral dimensions of gated communities by adopting Sacks (2003) theoretical framework on ‘good’ and ‘real’ places. Specifically, the paper seeks to underscore the geographical‐moral significance of place by considering gated communities as a key site for the critical reflection on the moral content of urban development driven by ideologies of privatism and neoliberal market logic.

Consuming private security: Consumer citizenship and defensive urbanism in Singapore

Recent scholarship in criminology has suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of an uneven patchwork of urban policing and security provision, increasingly determined by the ability and willingness of consumers to pay for private security goods and services. In particular, it has been argued that the commodification of urban policing and private security has given rise to new forms of ‘consumer citizenship’ and identity and alongside these, the creation of new secured spaces of consumption. This article seeks to examine one specific manifestation of such a security product—the gated community. While the proliferation of gated communities and the frantic construction of such ‘architecture of fear’ (Ellin, 1997) have often been associated with an American-style ‘defensive urbanism’, the emergence of such security-enhanced urban landscapes is invariably time and place specific. Using the context of Singapore, a city-state with strong state control and relatively low crime rate, the article traces the development of such enclosed residential enclaves to show how the rise of private policing and security are bound up in the creation of fortified residential spaces in which an exclusive social-spatial order comes to be defined and enforced.

Courting the ‘rich and restless’: globalisation of real estate and the new spatial fixities of the super-rich in Singapore

How have the globalisation of real estate and the rise of a transnational class of super-rich homebuyers challenged conventional analyses of local residential property markets? What analytical tools and concepts can we deploy to understand the dialectical tensions between the local and global; fixity and motion as well as the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of real estate by the super-rich? Drawing on Singapore as a case study, this paper interrogates the new ‘spatial fixities’ of the super-rich housing market at two inter-related scales of analysis. At the national scale, this spatial fixity could be interpreted in terms of the attempts by the Singapore ‘property state’ to attract high net-worth individuals to reside and invest in the country as a ‘quick fix’ way to boost national capital. At the global scale, this new spatial fixity of highly mobile super-rich can be seen in their territorialisation strategies to constantly seek out new safe havens to physically ‘park’ and grow their wealth beyond the traditional confines of national boundaries. Insofar as these two kinds of spatial fixes both complement and feed off one another via conspicuous real estate development, they also risk colliding and generating social contradictions that may potentially threaten their symbiotic relations.

The Weight of Small Cities: Development and the Rural–Urban Nexus in Jinghong, Southwest China

Research on small cities has begun to attract the attention of scholars who argue that contemporary urban scholarship, in its preoccupation with the largest and most advanced world-class cities, have largely ignored small to medium-sized cities. In China, although much attention has been paid to economically advanced urban centers, there actually has been a steady stream of work on small cities. This article profiles how a comparatively smaller city in western China attempts to market itself by selectively placing itself within various social–spatial and political–economic realities. Through Jinghong, we illustrate how local officials and planners attempt to center the city as a gateway to Southeast Asia. By activating, often discursively, multiscalar transborder strategies, local officials in Jinghong not only mobilize ethnic imaginaries, but they also adopt forms of entrepreneurial tactics to promote growth. Developmental strategies of Jinghong not only vacillate between (and draw on) both rural and urban resources; they are furthermore expected to alleviate rural poverty. Through highlighting the agency of small cities like Jinghong in China, this article speaks to the broader developmentalist critique of third- and fourth-world cities as an unfortunate footnote in global urban restructuring, often depicted as places of uniform marginalization and structural irrelevance. Indeed, by focusing on the geography of small cities and giving due attention to their size and proximity to rural spaces, case studies like Jinghong might yet point empathetically to different ways and imperatives of “being urban” where the weight that they carry can also be duly recognized.