The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form

3. Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal

Growth and Separation: The Dimensionality of the New Asian City In related but distinct ways, expanding Seoul, Singapore, and Taiwan of the s and s share an urban aesthetic that owes much to the logic of the export-oriented production that fueled their economies. To examine this aesthetic, I use two conceptual frames that deal with urban and literary transformation, respectively. First, I address the question of dimensionality of the postcolonial New Asian City: in contrast to the metropolitan experience of horizontally expanding industrial cities, growth in the geographically and resource-limited New Asian City is typified by height, density, and constant reconstruction. Where European metropolitan residents might have been overwhelmed by the city’s endless extension, subjects of the NewAsian City are alienated by its decisive qualities of newness, repetition, and ominous compression. Second, in terms of the literary reworking of such spatial realities,I use the model of the European bildungsroman as discussed by Franco Moretti to consider Korean, Singaporean, and Taiwanese short fictions that present youth as a distinctive problem against the new and shifting postcolonial cityscape. Again, we must make the assertion that not only have such cities been a fundamental component of global modernity, but that this modernity looks somewhat different from theirWestern counterparts.Just as we saw with colonial cities and    Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal It is exactly this “new” density—the high-rise explosion of which the HDB housing blocks were only the beginning—that will be the sign of the Asian. —rem koolhaas,“Singapore Songlines”  Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal their discrepant spaces, postcolonial cities will manifest an aesthetic and dimensionality of development corresponding neither to the prewar modernisms of Europe (of which they would be belated versions) nor to the postwar Fordist, consumerist societies (or postmodernism in the West).1 This chapter is thus framed as an interrogation of the interlinked concept of growth across human, urban, and economic terms. A paradox that immediately demands our attention is that while growth—of GNP, labor power, agricultural productivity, exports, and urbanization—unarguably remains central to discourses of third world development, the most astounding growth has occurred in the geographically smallest and most resource-poor territories of Asia,earning for these nations the epithets“economic wonders”or“man-made miracles.”2 Indeed, we can think of the question of postcolonial development in these cities in terms of how human growth is controlled, ordered, and transformed into growth of production.3 In contrast, Moretti’s well-known account of bildungsroman literature deals with growth in terms of the relationship between individual and society. The “novel of formation” appears in the West with the shift away from traditional apprenticeship models of learning ,corresponding to a new mobility that is characteristic of modernity.In the classic bildungsroman, the education, moral growth, or development of the young individual is problematized but must eventually coincide with and internalize the larger imperatives of the social world. Moretti describes how the novel stages the conflict between individual and social desires, to arrive at the paradoxical formulation: “I desire to do what I in any case should have done” (Way of the World, ). If, as Moretti suggests, “the structure of the bildungsroman will of necessity be intrinsically contradictory ”(),how might we read NewAsian City fictions as working through a homologous set of tensions between youth and stability, individual and world, but set against a wholly different notion of growth? In other words, what can we make of both modern urban and literary forms in which urban growth,the separation from traditional communities,and individual formation mean vastly different things than they did for the development of the imperial powers? I suggest that the postwar international division of labor described in the first Transition,in which peripheries embarked on industrialization under unequal terms,requires a reappraisal of the assumed symbolic dimensions of both youth and urban modernity. Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal  Building on the comparative historical accounts of chapter , we must recount the broad changes to the urban environment that occurred in the three sites, and how they relate to the fictional texts I examine. Consider post- Seoul, which saw the massive repatriation of Koreans who had been living in colonial Manchuria and Japan, followed at the end of the KoreanWar by the influx of displaced rural dwellers and refugees from the north. The s and...