Paul Waley

Reservoir resettlement in China: past experience and the Three Gorges Dam

This paper reviews involuntary resettlement resulting from dam-building, which has been ignored relative to the dominant focus of migration research in China, rural to urban migration. Reservoir resettlement in China has a long history, often of misery and hardship for those displaced. Relocatees affected by the Three Gorges Project (1994–2009) on the Yangtze River face a similar situation. In China priority has been given to building the dam to provide electricity, flood control and navigation. Less attention has been paid to the problems of the people affected by the reservoir inundation. The rural population forced to relocate and rural-urban migrants in general have been discriminated against by national policies.

Capital Versus the Districts: A Tale of One Multinational Company's Attempt to Disembed Itself

Abstract The process of international economic integration in which multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a significant orchestrating role is a contradictory one of a space of flows, on the one hand, and a space of places, on the other hand. It is this contradiction that produces a variegated landscape of relations within and among MNEs and a whole range of territorially rooted organizations and institutions. As a result, interest in global production networks, as part of a broader relational turn in economic geography, has sought to highlight and uncover these webs of relations within which MNEs are embedded. In reviewing this literature, we emphasize the economic imperatives underlying such relations or, rather, their political-economic nature and the discontinuities in industrial restructuring they can produce. We then present an empirical illustration of these points and some of the key concerns within the literature on global production networks. We consider a recent round of restructuring by Black & Decker Corporation, focusing on the politico-economic ramifications of closing one of two European factories. Our reading of the literature, coupled with our empirical findings, suggests the continuing tendency for international integration as a space of flows to eclipse the coherence of places. Localized points of resistance can moderate the powers exercised by MNEs internally and across a network of organizations, although there are limits to the transferability of such tactics of resistance.

Tokyo-as-World-City: Reassessing the Role of Capital and the State in Urban Restructuring

The world cities literature has been enlivened by debate over the place of Tokyo in a conceptual model that appears to have clear North Atlantic roots. In recent years, it has been suggested that Tokyo is shaped to an unusual degree by interventions by the state. This paper reviews this discussion and argues that the role of capital in Tokyos restructuring has been underplayed. The paper places Japans capital within a wider context of urban theorising through the use of three conceptual categories: urban governance, the urban terrain and urban life-spaces. It follows the story of the restructuring of Tokyos urban terrain and the squeezing of life-spaces, drawing out the ever more substantial role of business corporations in urban development projects, with national government cheer-leading and local government increasingly sidelined.

Articulating Intra-Asian Urbanism: The Production of Satellite Cities in Phnom Penh

Privately built satellite cities are becoming an increasingly common urban development concept in peri-urban areas of South-east Asian cities. While these projects are beginning to receive academic attention, the majority of studies have a limited capacity to explain why and how they are produced. Most satellite cities built in the past five years have some degree of foreign influence from other East Asian countries in terms of invested capital, planning concepts or urban design and architecture. The majority of this influence originates from within the East Asian region. This paper argues that an investigation which incorporates both the relational and the territorial can increase an understanding of the production of satellite cities. This argument is illustrated with empirical research on two satellite city projects in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: one by a Korean developer and another by Indonesian conglomerate Ciputra.

Jiaoyufication: When gentrification goes to school in the Chinese inner city

Gentrification, or the class-based restructuring of cities, is a process that has accrued a considerable historical depth and a wide geographical compass. But despite the existence of what is otherwise an increasingly rich literature, little has been written about connections between schools and the middle class makeover of inner city districts. This paper addresses that lacuna. It does so in the specific context of the search by well-off middle class parents for places for their children in leading state schools in the inner city of Nanjing, one of China’s largest urban centres, and it examines a process that we call here jiaoyufication. Jiaoyufication involves the purchase of an apartment in the catchment zone of a leading elementary school at an inflated price. Gentrifying parents generally spend nine years (covering the period of elementary and junior middle schooling) in their apartment before selling it on to a new gentrifying family at a virtually guaranteed good price without even any need for refurbishment. Jiaoyufication is made possible as a result of the commodification of housing alongside the increasingly strict application of a catchment zone policy for school enrolment. We show in this paper how jiaoyufication has led to the displacement of an earlier generation of mainly working class residents. We argue that the result has been a shift from an education system based on hierarchy and connections to one based on territory and wealth, but at the same time a strangely atypical sclerosis in the physical structure of inner city neighbourhoods. We see this as a variant form of gentrification.

Tokyo: Patterns of Familiarity and Partitions of Difference

Tokyo stands at the center of the largest conurbation in the world, one that has continued to grow throughout the second half of the century. It remains the political, corporate, educational, and c...Tokyo stands at the center of the largest conurbation in the world, one that has continued to grow throughout the second half of the century. It remains the political, corporate, educational, and cultural heart of Japan. In this article, the author examines the conurbation in light of its evermore pronounced insertion into world systems of capital flow and corporate control, reflected in an exceptional rise in land prices in the second half of the 1980s, followed by an equally severe slump. In seeking to explain why this buffeting could occur without a greater degree of social dislocation, the author sets Tokyo apart from interpretations of changes that have affected other cities as a result of the globalization of corporate interests and capital flows. The author then discusses ways in which the increased corporatization of urban space has affected the citys inhabitants, with a particular focus on inner-city areas. Finally, the author examines social trends normally linked to the globalization of capital and its effects on urban dynamics—trends such as pauperization and gentrification—and suggests some reasons why these trends have not been as apparent in Tokyo as in other world cities.

From modernist to market urbanism: the transformation of New Belgrade

This paper introduces two starkly contrasting faces of recent European urbanism, and shows how they have shaped the same urban territory, New Belgrade. In the first place, it outlines the central dilemmas and difficulties around the construction of a large modernist city in Europe, and secondly, it explores the modifications undertaken in order to accommodate a radically different, consumption‐oriented society. The location for this enquiry is the largest municipal district within Belgrade. New Belgrade, with its immense size and expanse (over 40 sq km and a population of about 250,000), grand boulevards and massive apartment buildings lined up in numbered blocks, is a mixture of modernist vision and socialist planning, far larger than any comparable urban district in Central and Eastern European cities. Designed as a federal capital for Tito’s Yugoslavia, it rapidly became a predominantly residential suburb. New Belgrade is now being re‐positioned and partly re‐built as a business centre in a process of change driven largely by international capital, with international companies investing in the construction of large retail, leisure and business facilities. At the same time, open spaces are being filled in, often with up‐market housing. The paper provides an overview of some of the plans and controversies that surrounded the city’s construction and an outline of the modifications that have transformed New Belgrade since.

Speaking gentrification in the languages of the Global East

This commentary sets out to make a claim for gentrification to be understood from the Global East. I argue that a regional approach to gentrification can nurture a contextually informed but theoretically connected comparative urbanism, contributing to the comparative urbanist project by providing an appropriate point of contact between local context and universalising theories. In the process, I attempt to partially destabilise the concept of gentrification and then re-centre it in the Global East. Any comparative exercise is not a straightforward process; on the contrary, it is fraught with epistemological, theoretical and methodological stumbling blocks – regions are slippery and often diverse; diversity can be hard to bottle and label along theoretical lines; methods work more smoothly in discrete settings. But it is an exercise worth undertaking; the regional is the middle stratum that allows the locally specific to speak to planetary trends, and planetary trends to find local purchase. In the pages that follow I map out a number of recognisable types of gentrification in East Asia. I then use these to transcend the region and cut across the Global North / Global South binary that bedevils so much theory-making. The aim, addressed specifically in the final section, is to use these claims for gentrification in the Global East to speak back to and, hopefully, enrich urban theory-making and contribute to discussion of what is becoming known as planetary gentrification (Lees et al., forthcoming).

Ruining and Restoring Rivers: The State and Civil Society in Japan

R ivers in Japan and Currents in Civil Society The postwar history of Japan can be seen in terms of the inexorable march of development through construction (generally in concrete).1 Much of the resulting conflict has focussed on struggles over water, in its various forms and attributes. It has also played itself out against the backdrop of an immense transformation in the human and physical landscape of postwar Japan. Large-scale migration to cities has been accompanied by almost total urbanization and industrialization of coastal areas. At the same time, rivers and their banks, as well as over half the country’s coast, has been cast in concrete, with consequences that are only now being acknowledged. Dams were built across nearly all of Japan’s rivers to provide power for industry, as well as water for the cities and irrigation for farmers. The combination of steep and thickly wooded mountain slopes and packed but productive plains, consisting largely of paddy fields, combined to form a potent protection force against flooding, but with urbanization in the flood plains and widespread reforestation to conifers in the mountains, the land lost its absorptive capacity. Japan’s rivers flood easily; they are generally quite short, rushing down narrow valleys before wandering sluggishly through alluvial flood plains, where in the summer months, swollen by seasonal rains, they are liable to burst their banks. All told, the presence of water is as remarkable a feature of the Japanese landscape as is the presence of mountains. Equally remarkable, however, is the aesthetic impoverishment of the landscape resulting from the encasement of rivers. The dramatically manipulated landscape of rivers, their beds, banks and flood plains serves as a setting to the issues that are examined in this paper. These concern civil society, especially in the context of a rise in volunteer activity in recent years, a growth that both coincided with and was spurred

Japanese cities in Chinese perspective: towards a contextual, regional approach to comparative urbanism

This study uses an introduction to the comparative study of Japanese and Chinese cities to make a case for a regional approach to thinking about cities in East Asia. In so doing, it argues for contextually sensitive comparative urbanism as a platform for a broader understanding of trends toward global convergence. It outlines three different types of comparative urbanism and sets out a basic framework for the study of urban change in the larger cities of China and Japan. The central argument is that the close relationship between the state and capital in the two countries has conditioned the rapid and dynamic nature of urban change.