Case study cities are Beijing in China, Hanoi in Vietnam and Ahmedabad in India.

Considering Asian cities ranging from Taipei, Hong Kong and Bangkok to Hanoi, Nanjing and Seoul, this collection discusses the socio-political processes of how neoliberalization entwines with local political economies and legacies of ‘developmental’ or ‘socialist’ statism to produce urban contestations centered on housing. The book takes housing as a key entry point, given its prime position in the making of social and economic policies as well as the political legitimacy of Asian states. It examines urban policies related to housing in Asian economies in order to explore their continuing alterations and mutations, as they come into conflict and coalesce with neoliberal policies. In discussing the experience of each city, it takes into consideration the variegated relations between the state, the market and the society, and explores how the global pressure of neoliberalization has manifested in each country and has influenced the shaping of national housing questions.

DIVA successor to FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP, focusing on the meanings of citizenship to different classes of immigrants and transnational subjects./div

The East and Southeast Asia region constitutes the world’s most compelling theatre of accelerated globalization and industrial restructuring. Following a spectacular realization of the ‘industrialization paradigm’ and a period of services-led growth, the early twenty-first century economic landscape among leading Asian states now comprises a burgeoning ‘New Economy’ spectrum of the most advanced industrial trajectories, including finance, the knowledge economy and the ‘new cultural economy’. In an agenda-setting volume, New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities draws on stimulating research conducted by a new generation of urban scholars to generate critical analysis and theoretical insights on the New Economy phenomenon within Asia. New industry formation and the transformation of older economic practices constitute instruments of development, as well as signifiers of larger processes of change, expressed in the reproduction of space in the city. Asia’s major cities become the key staging areas for the New Economy, driven by the growing wealth of an urban middle and professional class, higher education institutions, city-based inter-regional movements and urban mega-projects. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cites animates this New Economy discourse by means of vibrant storylines of instructive cities and sites, including cases studies situated in cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Singapore. Theoretical and normative issues associated with the emergence of the new cultural economy are the subject of the book’s context-setting chapters, and each case study presents an evocative narrative of development interdependencies and exemplary outcomes on the ground. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities offers a vivid contribution to our understanding of the ongoing transformation of Asia’s urban system, including the critical intersections of global and local-regional dynamics in processes of new industry formation and the relayering of space in the Asian metropolis. The synthesis of empirical profiles, normative insights, and theoretical reference points enhances the book’s interest for scholars and students in fields of Asian studies, urban and cultural studies, and urban and economic geography, as well as for policy specialists and urban/community planners.

The concept of the neoliberal city has become a key structuring analytical framework in the field of urban studies. It explains both the ongoing transformation of urban policies and the socio-spatial effects of these policies within cities and highlights the prominent role of cities in the new geography of capitalism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this book challenges the neoliberal city thesis. It argues that the definition of neoliberalization may be more complex than it seems, resulting in over-simplified explanations of some processes, such as the rise of metropolitan governments or the importance given to urban economic development policies or gentrification. As a structuralist and macro-level theory, the "neoliberal city" does not shed light upon micro-level processes or identify and analyze actors’ logics and practices. Finally, the concept is profoundly influenced by the historical trajectories of the United Kingdom and the United States, and the generalization of this experience to other contexts often leads to a kind of academic ethnocentrism. This book argues that, on its own, the current conceptualizations of neoliberalization are insufficient. Instead, it should be analyzed alongside other transformative processes in order to provide an analytical framework to explain the variety of processes of change, motivations and justifications too easily labelled as urban neoliberalism. This unique and critical contribution will be essential reading for students and scholars alike working in Human Geography, Urban Studies, Economics, Sociology and Public Policy.

While there is no lack of studies on Asian cities, the majority focus on financial districts, poverty, the slum, tradition, tourism, and pollution, and use the modern, affluent, and transforming Western city as the reference point. This vast Asian empirical presence is not complemented by a theoretical presence; academic discourses overlook common and basic urban processes, particularly the production of space, place, and identity by ordinary citizens. Switching thevantage point to Asian cities and citizens, Transforming Asian Cities draws attention to how Asians produce their contemporary urban practices, identities, and spaces as part of resisting, responding to, andavoiding larger global and national processes. Instead of viewing Asian cities in opposition to the Western city andusing it as the norm, this book instead opts to provincialize mainstream and traditional knowledge. It argues that the vast terrain of ordinary actors and spaces which are currently left out should be reflected in academic debates and policy decisions, and the local thinking processes that constitute these spaces need to be acknowledged, enabled, and critiqued. The individual chapters illustrate that "global" spaces are more (trans)local, traditional environments are more modern, and Asian spaces are better defined than acknowledged. The aim is to develop room for understandings of Asian cities from Asian standpoints, especially acknowledging how Asians observe, interpret, understand, and create space in their cities.

Seoul, as one of Asia’s rising global cities, has been a place where enormous changes in politics, industry, and culture have taken place over the last five decades. This book explores the new urbanism in Seoul from the perspective of global political economy, focusing on the contexts in which the city has witnessed the transformation of its population structure, such as the rise of the global urban middle class and the city’s increased nodal function in commodity chains. The burgeoning signs of Seoul’s status as a global city are discussed in terms of transnational tourism and the frequency of study abroad, the immigrant community, and cross-border cultural flows. Examining the labour structures within the city, economic growth policy, the role of advanced information technology, and neoliberal urban development, the authors also examine the local response in the city to its emerging status. A study of the development of the Korean capital and its deep embeddedness in the world economy, Seoul, Korea’s Global City will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and economics with interests in political economy, urban studies and Asian studies.