- Asian and Pacific Cities: Development Patterns ed. by Ian Shirley and Carol Neill
This publication comprises sixteen chapters, each representing one city in Asia, Oceania or along the Pacific Rim. Cities as diverse as Apia (Samoa), Santiago (Chile), Pune (India), Jakarta (Indonesia), Auckland (New Zealand) and Shanghai (China) are described in their historic formation as the authors search for forces shaping today’s social, political and economic development processes. By focusing on the dynamics of development, without necessarily classifying, rating or comparing the cities under study, this volume examines development patterns of Asian and Pacific cities and their social dimensions. In doing so, the publication concludes the first phase of the Asian and Pacific Development Program (APDP), established by Ian Shirley in 2006 to generate distinctive interpretations of development from research teams working across the region.
In the introduction, the editors argue that development in the Asia-Pacific region over the last six decades and its attendant impact on the political economy of the world has been outstanding. For instance, the region generates a third of the world’s GDP. Macroeconomic indicators aside, Shirley and Neill utilize literacy and life expectancy rates to describe the region’s social transformation: average life expectancy at birth rose from fifty-six years in 1960 to seventy-one years in 1990, with rates of adult literacy jumping from 73 to 91 per cent over the same period (p. 4). The enormous diversity within this vast region, which covers a third of the world’s surface and houses 56 to 60 per cent of its total population, can be expressed in terms of its geography, population distribution, religious plurality, demographic transformation, political systems and/or economic models. This diversity, the editors argue, is often neglected in academic research.
The rapid growth of cities in the region is described as a new phenomenon that gained momentum during the second half of the last millennium. Thus the formation of Asian and Pacific metropolitan cities differs radically from what is known about cities in the West: the urban planning practised under colonial rule; the comparatively late but immense impact of industrialization; and the more recent effects of globalization exemplify the different circumstances and forces that shaped or still shape development patterns in Asian and Pacific cities. These transformation processes are documented by scholars and global development agencies in numerous books and articles. Nevertheless, according to the Shirley and Neill, this region remains one of the least understood regions in the world (p. xvii).
Reasons for this are the scale and diversity of the area as well as the dominance of Western academic theories in research. These theories, widely used [End Page 339] by researchers and global agencies, tend to place the region in a global web of interdependencies, in turn, marginalizing areas of high regional value and indigenous forms of progress and development. Using theories of globalization, researchers tend to describe development through economic constructs and economics alone. The editors therefore question traditional, linear concepts of development because of their partial and deterministic interpretations of political, social and economic change. To create distinctive interpretations of development, the book asks local scholars to write “development stories” about their respective cities.
In other words, Shirley and Neill have aimed to collect “indigenous” knowledge about the cities’ development by tracking economic and social trends and describing specific moments in their development trajectory. In this context “indigenous” is understood as research carried out by local scholars of urban studies, human geography, economic and policy development or social science. The scholars built profiles of these cities by analysing domestic migration, spatial and social fragmentation, suburban development, squatter settlements and gated communities, poverty and inequality, urban housing, the informal economy and the scale of unemployment and underemployment, identifying the “drivers” of development within the metropolitan centres of the region.
This approach, described as development from below, culminates in sixteen “stories” about metropolitan “laboratories” written by “insiders”, who are not obliged to follow Western academic traditions but rather build their own narrative beyond their respective scientific traditions. The editors explain that this...