from insurgencies to social projects to recover the public city in East ...

IDPR, 36 (1) 2014 doi:10.3828/idpr.2014.2

Mike Douglass

After the revolution: from insurgencies to social projects to recover the public city in East and Southeast Asia From insurgencies to social projects in the public city in East and Southeast Asia Popular insurgencies are appearing in every quarter of the globe today, showing that networked civil society can achieve political reform in even the most repressive contexts. While discourses on social discontents underlying these insurgencies have tended to focus on state–civil society relations, the discussion here directs attention to contemporary global–urban economic dynamics that are appropriating the urban space for the construction of privately managed corporate cities that are eroding the spatial foundations for associational life and democratic governance. Social mobilisations against these trends are ultimately ephemeral if they do not spread beyond protest movements to generate social projects to create an inclusive public sphere in which residents can directly participate in the social and political life of the city. The discussion draws from experiences in East and Southeast Asia to illustrate the ways in which people are mobilising to reclaim the public city for social and cultural life. Keywords: insurgency, corporatisation, public space, public city, social media, East Asia, Southeast Asia, democracy

The second decade of the twenty-first century presents us with a paradox: constitutional democracies in the world are increasing in number but the ability of people to actively participate in the public sphere of governance is decreasing (WMD, 2008; EIU, 2010; Freedom House, 2010). The growing number of democracies is the outcome of longer historical processes associated with a worldwide urban transition characterised in part by the rise of urban middle and working classes demanding political freedoms that today is aided by new cyber-technologies enabling political mobilisations from local to global scales. However, throughout the world governments, elites and corporate interests have responded to these reforms by decreasing political participation in at least two major ways. One is the tightening of controls and surveillance of media in ways that create a panopticon effect inhibiting that transformation of political thought into action. Especially since the 9/11 2001 attacks on the United States, governments everywhere have been emboldened to draft broad anti-terrorism laws that are used to regulate all manner of public assembly (Kline, 2004; Whiting, 2006). Mendoza (2011), researching for the Associated Press, found that before the 9/11 event arrests for terrorism numbered less than 100 per year globally. From 2001 to 2010 the yearly average became 12,000 people arrested under terrorism laws in 66 countries. These numbers do not include secret arrests or arrests that governments refuse to confirm. Violence against journalists has also noticeably increased over the past decade, further Mike Douglass is Professor at the National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute, ARI at 469A Tower Block, Singapore 259770; email: [email protected]

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inhibiting the dissemination of information about state and corporate wrongdoings (Freedom House, 2010; CMFR, 2010; Amurao, 2011). The other method of quashing direct forms of participatory democracy is to close off, redesign or completely eliminate physical spaces needed for face-to-face political dialogue to occur (Mitchell, 2003; Lim and Padawangi, 2008). Because governments that take this form of curtailing political mobilisations can still claim that democratic institutions are still in place, this approach is even more deceptively anti-democratic than are regulations of the media. Very large ‘no-go’ zones around centres of power with free speech allowed in limited spaces far away, fencing and redesigning public spaces to prevent large rallies, ‘kettling’ or surrounding marchers with militarised police to prevent them from reaching rally sites, permanently stationing police in public spaces and placing surveillance cameras on almost every street corner to intimidate would-be insurgents are among the techniques used to shut down the spaces that are vital for free speech, public assembly and protests. All of these mechanisms sum up to what is being called ‘electoral authoritarianism,’ a term used to capture the existence of democratic institutions, including freedoms of speech and multi-party elections, experiencing increasing pushback by governments and elites that use legal and other means to repress counter-regime political mobilisations (Case, 2011). Beyond these mechanisms is a new and equally pervasive trend toward the privatisation of public spaces, which has accelerated under neoliberal policy regimes appearing from the 1980s onward. From Potsdamer Platz in Berlin to public parks of Hanoi, privatisation of vital urban spaces is rampant around the world. Yet the impact of privatisation on reducing spaces of everyday forms of political exchanges within civil society falls under the radar of indices constructed to measure progress toward democracy. Nothing could be more vital to the practice of democracy than having spaces in which people of all walks of life can freely meet and engage in discussions about issues of the day at arm’s-length from the state and commerce. Political activations in cyberspaces can topple regimes through mobilising massive occupation of politically potent urban spaces, but either before or after the revolution, everyday forms of public and civic spaces that allow for associational life and chance social encounters must be produced for democracies to flourish. The institutionalisation of democracy as a citizen right and responses by governments to limit democratic freedoms have thus formed a ‘pattern of protest and repression’ (WMD, 2008, 1) that characterises the current phenomenon of insurgencies around the world. This pattern is also appearing in East and Southeast Asia where social protests have even toppled governments but then re-emerge after new regimes create new regulations and spatial controls to inhibit political activism. Such protests range from large-scale rallies for clean government in Malaysia, autonomy movements in Indonesia’s outer islands and the first ever reported anti-government rallies against lack of food and basic amenities in North Korea (Li-sun, 2011; Timber-

From insurgencies to social projects in the public city in East and Southeast Asia

lake, 2011; Channel News Asia, 2011; Global Post, 2011; Chosun Ilbo, 2011; Haggard and Noland, 2010). In countries in which democratic government is constitutionally established, notably South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, large-scale protests and state actions to repress them have become part of the urban fabric. Because governments hold the legal monopoly over police, law-making and regulatory powers, most of the attention given to the question of deliberative democracy has focused on state–civil society relations. However, the rapid opening of Asian economies to direct investment and corporate ownership of urban land, businesses and other assets in recent decades has seen political discontent also turn toward confrontations against the corporatisation of the urban space-economy. Along with corporatisation has come the shift from public governance to corporate management of urban space. This process is intertwined with neoliberal policies to shrink public interference with private interests that takes a number of forms. Those that are stirring the greatest resistance include massive land and housing dispossession in lower middle and working class neighbourhoods and the urban fringe, privatisation of public spaces, including commercialisation of public parks, displacement of locally owned shops by corporate chains and franchises and mega-projects such as corporate business hubs and huge gated-housing enclaves that visually display in the built environment the widening inequalities in income and wealth. The spatial manifestation of corporatisation is the city transformed into gated enclaves, privately policed business establishments and corporate buildings, and everlarger private urban archipelagos that are effectively taken out of the public city, i.e. out of public oversight. This ‘denationalization’ of territorial space (Sassen, 2006) is also resulting in what Graham (2010) calls cities under siege: namely, the fortification and militarisation of cities along class and ethnic lines that are legitimated by governments and elites as necessary responses to threats of violence and terrorism. While many urban residents aspire to be part of the affluence and modernity of the corporate city, others become the flotsam from the massive clearing of life-spaces of the many for the lifestyles of the few. Unlike insurgencies seeking democratic reform, the current waves of protests are responding to the inequalities and dispossessions rising with the corporate city and government complicity with it.

Spaces of political engagement and civil resistance in East and Southeast Asia Asia has been declared the ‘world’s largest prison for journalists, cyber dissidents and Internet users’. (Gomez, 2004) While the region has been undergoing a process of democratization with the waning of authoritarian governance in the last two decades, state actors in Southeast Asia

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are becoming more sophisticated and subtle in their attempts to censor and restrict opinions and expressions. (Lutfia, 2011, 1)

At first glance, East and Southeast Asia appear to have an exceptionally wide diversity in levels of political freedom. In terms of freedom of the press, for example, Japan is ranked 12th in the world while North Korea is ranked 178th, or next to the last. Further, while some governments such as Japan have a high level of freedom in using the Internet, others such as China and Vietnam are bent on monitoring and punishing those who use it for political messages or any other purpose deemed inappropriate by government. In between is an array of countries with various degrees of political freedom, though at least half are below the international average score (Freedom House, 2010). Despite the wide range of freedoms, the pervasiveness of trends in clamping down on the freedom of assembly and speech is common to almost all countries in Asia (Shields, 2007; IJNET, 2010). The principal differences can be said to be matters of which tools are being used. While some governments use exceptionally vague laws concerning sedition or treasonable actions carrying very severe penalties to actively inhibit the exercise of these freedoms, others use protest, permitting processes and forms of harassment such as intensive questioning by police, toward the same ends of quelling political voices that are critical of the status quo. For example, in Indonesia the successful democratic reforms of 1998 were seriously jeopardised by anti-terrorism regulations increasing police powers and allowing for detention without trial, which had been previously rejected by parliament, but were adopted after the Bali bombing in October 2002. In addition fences have been erected around Monas, the iconic national monument, to block attempts at mass rallies (Lim and Padawangi, 2008; Lim, 2010). As concluded by Amurao (2011, 1) concerning Southeast Asia: Freedom of expression continues to come under attack in the region where even the more established democracies are witnessing steadily increasing threats in the form of violence against the media and efforts by various segments of society to censor and control the free flow of information […] There is little sign of political will to address impunity by the governments in the region.

Separating genuine responses to terrorist threats from regime maintenance or corporate interests and media control has become nearly impossible. The tools used for any of these elements are the same, and they are multiplying through the reshaping and restructuring of urban space. Authoritarian regimes can be expected to have low levels of freedoms of assembly and speech. The more revealing cases are those in which democratic forms of elected governments have been put in place and these governments then move to reduce spaces for a participatory democracy. In Indonesia, for example, political rallies are banned in West Papua, and foreign journalists are subject to immediate expulsion if found filming such events (Koenig, 2010; Global Post, 2011). As summarised by Lutfia


(2011, 1), an international activist in human rights and freedom of expression, ‘Governments in the region are increasingly abusing the rule of law to carry out censorship in order to serve their own political interests.’ Through all of these techniques, civil protests become more and more difficult to move from smartphone texting to actual sites in the city. The civil marches in several cities in Malaysia organised by the ‘Bersih’ (‘Clean’) Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections from 2007 to 2012 are illustrative of how participation in political life can be quashed by controlling spaces of peaceful public assembly (Weiss, 2014, this issue; Rathina-Pandi, 2014, this issue; Pak, 2011; Welsh, 2011; de Verteuil, 2011; Sen, 2011). Using the pretext of not issuing a parade permit allowed government to claim that freedom of speech was still a citizen’s right as government police blocked the marchers’ routes, closed protest gathering points and, in 2011, put the city under a 22-hour lockdown. Police arrested about 2,000 people for defying the parade ban. In 2012 the number of marchers reached 80,000, with police using water cannon and tear gas as part of its arsenal (Economist, 2012). Concerning the Internet and electronic media, in presenting a comprehensive coverage for Asia in 2010 Amurao (2011) underscores the adoption of new secrecy laws in Indonesia, the establishment of cabinet-level Internet monitoring unit in Malaysia where the government has set up a ‘special unit’ to monitor the Internet, the harassment and arrest of bloggers in Vietnam and the emergency decree in Thailand to allow censoring of the Internet through various ministries that led to 400,000 websites being blocked without any judicial review (Boymal, Martin and Lam, 2007). China has the biggest number of Internet-users in prison (Gomez, 2004). In several countries murder of journalists followed by failure of government to pursue the cases is found to be pervasive. The result of online and on-the-ground clampdowns is that unless a tipping point is reached to create such a level of anti-regime or anti-corporate response that everyone is swept into it, protests have a high chance of failing even before they begin (D’Anieri, 2006). This situation is made all the more problematic by the increasing intensity of corporatisation of cityscapes and city economies.

The city, civil society and the third wave toward the corporate city We have all intentions to develop MTT [Muang Thong Thani new town, Bangkok] as a complete city run by private-sector people. (Kristof and Sanger, 1999, 1) This year Montreal’s infamous countercultural event is declaring all-out war against the corporate powers that are transforming the city. Over the past year Montreal has seen a proliferation of abusive advertising practices, attempts by corporations to destroy

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authentic culture, and the ongoing corporatization of the city’s festivals. (Montreal Infringement Festival, 2011) Of the 2,162 minimarts across the capital [Jakarta], only 67 have official licenses to operate. Almost every neighborhood now has one or more minimarts standing side by side. Most are franchises of three corporations, Alfamart, Indomaret and Circle K. Demonstrations against the illegal operations have failed. According to a local shop owner, ‘We’ve lost heart because we’re fighting against a bigshot’ in government. (Jakarta Post, 2011; Jakarta Globe, 2011b)

As noted above, civil protests have been portrayed mostly as being directed toward the state. However, contestations today are also directed at corporate ownership and control of urban space. Even many that are directed toward government seek to either compel government to better regulate corporate behavior or to stop government officials from colluding with big business at the expense of local shops, neighbourhoods and communities. Over the past two decades cities throughout the world have become the focus of intensive corporate-driven land redevelopment, privatisation of public space, elimination of vernacular architecture and historic buildings and commercialisation of public venues. In addition to mega-projects that erase entire neighbourhoods, corporatisation is replacing the public market with the chain supermarket, local eateries with global franchises, open public shopping areas with enclosed private malls and peri-urban farms with gated housing enclaves. The Vancouver Public Space Project (2009, 1) provides a useful definition of the corporatisation of cities as a process characterised by the increasing ‘influence of corporations on shaping the material design of cities and, by extension, the public realm’. More specifically, it refers to the process (and material components) of ‘the privatization of public space by corporate entities’. At the global level, the principal public institutions driving this process are the World Trade Organization, the various regional trade organisations such as APEC, the Asia Development Bank, the World Bank and the IMF, all of which can be included under the umbrella of neoliberal institutions and the push toward shifting the city of public governance to the ultracompetitive corporate city of private management for private gain (Dittmer, 2007). Resistance to the many faces of corporatisation has also become global. From Seattle to Genoa and on to Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Honolulu and even Singapore, protests have either occurred or have been attempted at the meetings of the organisations such as the WTO, APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Asia Development Bank, not to mention G-8 and G-20 summit meetings, that are widely seen as representing the interests of global corporate capital. From 1999 to 2010 at least 60 major international protests against corporate globalisation took place at these meetings in 25 countries (Wikipedia, 2011). Care must be taken to underscore that these protests are neither


‘anti-globalisation’ nor anti-business or private sector, but are instead focused on a specific form of globalisation, namely, neoliberal agenda for corporatisation of local economies that also undermine local democratic governance (Ha and Lee, 2007). The corporatisation of cities in East and Southeast Asia can be divided into three waves following the postcolonial restructuring of the nation-state in the region. The first, which began in the late 1960s, was the coming of a new international division of labour that shifted low-wage manufacturing from the Europe and the US to a limited number of export-oriented manufacturing ‘miracle economies’, namely, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Japan’s magnificent recovery from devastations of World War II would also commend its inclusion in this group. From the late 1970s some aspects of this wave began reaching Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia with mixed outcomes. In terms of cities and urbanisation, this wave magnified national patterns of spatial polarisation by accelerating migration to emerging mega-urban regions. However, with its focus on export-processing zones, deep-water container ports, large airports and trunk highway systems, it remained largely peripheral to these cities (Jones and Douglass, 2010). When compared to what was to come with phase 2, the urban core remained largely untouched during this first phase. Suburban housing estates were also yet to appear on a massive scale. Phase 2 of the corporatisation of the city in Asia began in the early 1980s and arose from three major sources. One was the emergence of a large urban middle class in the newly industrialised economies that began to shift cities from centres of production to centres of global consumption. This brought a host of urban displacements: enclosed privately owned shopping malls began replacing traditional markets and shops along public thoroughfares; global food franchises began to displace local restaurants in prime business and amenity areas; big box mega-stores and supermarkets, with government support, systematically replaced open, fresh food public markets; and entertainment complexes featuring global spectacles, products, movies and promotions overwhelmed local entertainment possibilities. Most recently, minimart chains have begun to saturate big cities, leading to the demise of family-owned shops, first in East Asia and currently moving through Southeast Asia. In each country, two or three corporations own or control all of the thousands of mini-marts that are spreading even to the more remote outer islands of Indonesia. Another source was the worldwide advent of a new era of mega-projects that come to East and Southeast Asia in scope and scale unmatched by any other world region. The world’s tallest buildings, super-airports, global business hubs, very fast trains and more were, on a world scale, heavily concentrated in East and Southeast Asia. The footprints of these mega-projects cover entire urban districts, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. On the urban fringe came a new era of vast private new towns and gated housing enclaves built for up to 1 million residents (Shatkin, 2008; Douglass and Huang, 2010).

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The tremendous scaling up of the size of urban projects was greatly assisted by the globalisation of finance capital that began reaching deeply into Asia in the 1990s, only to generate an abrupt crisis in 1998. Through the emerging global interconnections among banks, investment brokers and land developers, consortia of investors spanning the globe raised the ante of urban projects from millions of US dollars in the 1970s to billions per project by the 1990s. With large city regions seemingly destined to continue to grow unabated, targeting the urban core and its fringe for mega-projects was as much a physical packaging of speculative financial investments as it was an investment in housing or other urban needs. Speculation has contributed to great swings in land markets and bubble economies, with the result that cities today around the world, including in Asia, are littered with abandoned projects, empty new towns and shopping malls and skeletons of buildings never completed, all of which are corporate-owned but contribute nothing to the economy. This second phase was politically propelled by the advent of global neoliberalism from the early 1980s. Among the tenets of this ideology are privatisation, wide opening to world trade and global investment, and small government with limited expenditures on social welfare. Enforcement of this ideology came via international lending institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, which began to require privatisation as a condition for receiving loans in such vital areas as urban water systems and as part of structural readjustment loans intended to reduce public debt. By the end of the 1990s, neoliberalism had become so entrenched that a new vocabulary had ascended to the top of development policy. Hyper-competitiveness replaced intercity cooperation as the imperative for city planning, public–private partnerships replaced government leadership as the source of guiding and regulating the economy and ‘let some get rich first’ replaced goals of equity. By the time of the 1998 Asia finance crisis a new corporate landscape was already covering large shares of expanding metropolitan regions of East and Southeast Asia. Public space was under constant threat of being privatised or occupied by global hotels, franchises and entertainment complexes. Few new public spaces were planned or built as governments yielded city planning and policy to globally linked land developers and architecture firms, which began claiming shopping malls to be Asia’s new public space. Public spaces for city social life were shifted to enclosed private domains solely for economic interests. Yet the 1990s also saw the rise of civil society demanding greater political freedoms. Insurgencies were high in the 1990s, and in several countries they won the day by deposing authoritarian regimes and instituting democratically elected governments. South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia all experienced dramatic openings in democratic governance. However, counter trends toward restricting newly gained freedoms have also appeared with the advent of the third phase in the rise of the corporate city that arrived with the Asian finance crisis of


1998. In addition to further consolidating corporate power in the hands of ever larger conglomerates, the crisis provided the opportunity for neoliberal institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and Asia Development Bank to force agenda of privatisation and substantially wider openings to global flows of investment as conditions for bailout loans. Instead of chastening the reckless behaviour of the corporate economy in creating the finance crisis, the 1998 crisis resulted in governments more earnestly competing for global capital through city marketing and ever larger mega-projects that were even more destructive of pre-existing urban fabric (Macan-Markar, 2006). By 2010 East and Southeast Asia had constructed 41 of the 100 tallest buildings in the world (Emporis, 2013; Kim, 2008a). Gigantic, private new towns slated for tens of thousands of residents were being constructed for elite residents in peri-urban areas of large cities (Douglass and Huang, 2010; Douglass, Wissink and van Kempen, 2012). Global business hubs with exclusive residences and amenities are occupying large land areas in almost every major city (Kim, 2008b). Songdo, in Incheon, for example, is said to have total costs of over US$30 billion (Guardian, 2013). In the two-year period of 2012 to 2013, Jakarta was slated to add 461,000 square metres of shopping mall floor space to a city already hosting more than 60 shopping malls (Tempo, 2008; Knight Frank, 2012; Wikipedia, 2013). In Hanoi the public markets were quickly being closed down as government gave its support to global supermarket chains. In Beijing preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics reportedly displaced 1.5 million people (Beck, 2007). Rights of free speech and assembly so hard earned in the 1990s also continued to be manifested in protest movements against this third wave of corporatisation. Even in countries where reforms had not occurred, protests against dispossessions of land for corporate land development became rife. In China as many as 100,000 protests per year against unfair compensation have been recorded by government (Douglass, Wissnik and van Kempen, 2012). Where democratic institutions are in place, rising protests range from those against corporate mega-projects in Korea (see below) to those demanding government to stop the spread of franchise minimarts in Indonesia (Jakarta Globe, 2011a). South Korea represents a revealing experience of a seesaw engagement between democratisation and government reassertion of control over civil protest that is tightly linked with corporatisation (Hankyoreh, 2009; WMD, 2008). Along with successful political reform after decades of mass struggles against authoritarian rule, in 2004 the democratically elected mayor of Seoul opened with great fanfare Seoul Plaza, a renovated public space in front of City Hall for citizens to gather freely. In addition to social events, within a few years the park was drawing large-scale protest rallies of all kinds. The government response was to completely surround the small park with police buses. Violent clashes with militarised police using batons and tear gas sprayed with coloured water from water cannon became frequent. Finally, in 2009, the city

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government passed an ordinance banning political assembly in the park, and the park was cynically renamed ‘half-plaza’ by some (Hankyoreh, 2011). However, in 2010 the government reversed itself and rescinded its regulations, and Seoul Plaza was again opened to political as well as social assembly. The ebb and flow of protest movements and government responses focused on Seoul Plaza have occurred in direct response to episodes of large-scale corporate land development projects that have surged in number (Riseup.net, 2011; Park, 2008). A case in point occurred in January 2009 when the Government of Korea sent 1,500 police to attack 42 people protesting eviction without just compensation from a low-income neighbourhood that was slated for demolition to make way for, among other things, a 152-storey skyscraper that was to be the centre of the ‘Second Miracle on the Han’ (SMG, 2008; Seoul Global Center, 2008). Samsung, Posco and Daelim, three of Korea’s powerful chaebol, or global conglomerates, received the development rights to ‘Yongsan Newtown’. They expected to make US$4 billion in profits from the redevelopment and sale of the land, while the compensation given to most shop owners was not enough to relocate their business and start anew. The police attack, which was reinforced by thugs hired by unrevealed sources, resulted in six people being killed (Yonhap News, 2009; AsiaNews, 2009). Remaining protestors were arrested and jailed without judicial hearing. Public protests escalated after this brutality, with candlelight vigils and gatherings in Seoul Plaza. Police quickly moved to shut down these protests. Out of the original 890 tenants, 763 abandoned their homes or businesses due to the violence against them and pressure from the government-sponsored Redevelopment Cooperative. Neither the police nor the private security forces were found to have any responsibility for the Yongsan incident, but protesters were given five-year jail sentences for obstructing the police (Shin, 2008; 2009). The Seoul Plaza-Yongsan episode is but one of many in Asia, and by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the corporate city is well in place. Large corporations now build almost all structures. People no longer build their own houses, and smaller locally owned shops are disappearing. Public parks, sidewalks, lanes and other civic spaces are giving way to privately owned pseudo-public spaces. Few cities in Southeast Asia now have plans to build new public parks or expand per capita areas of public space to keep pace with population growth. The need to clear land for global investors in mega-projects has become endemic in city governance, with the net result being a steady dispossession of farmers and other landholders and a chronic search for more public land to sell to corporate interests (Donigan, 2008). Hogan et al. (2011) warn against a knee-jerk transplanting to Asia of the ‘dystopianism of Anglophone academic treatment’ of privatisation of the city as an ‘urban nightmare’. However, care must also be taken to separate the private construction of a family store from the corporate replacement of a whole working-class neighbour-


hood by a corporate mega-project. Failure to sort our different kinds of ‘private’ muddies the waters of inquiry into the social and political possibilities of a city. A case in point is Manila’s Eastwood City, a privately owned shopping and entertainment district with exclusive condos that is presented as ‘exemplifying public life flourishing in privately owned spaces’ (EPH, 2005, 3). By defining public space simply a space that most people can enter, and public life as a fun consumer experience, Disneyland would qualify as a public space by Eastwood’s definition. Even taking a photograph is prohibited in its spaces festooned with Orwellian banners proclaiming Eastwood to be ‘Your City’. The main point of the Eastwood reference is not to debate about public versus private ownership, but rather between a city that has a public life with a public sphere of governance that is manifested in its public spaces versus a city composed of controlled spaces in which people have no rights of assembly, political engagement, protest or even spontaneous gatherings for non-consumptive purposes. Some private spaces, such as traditional teahouses or coffee shops, can fulfil this public charge, but the current corporatisation of the city is inimical to it. As corporatisation advances, its direct and indirect impacts on civil society and urban political, economic and social life become intertwined. The elimination of local shops and public markets in favor of chain stores and franchises, for example, is also an elimination of conversations along streets (Geertman, 2011; Chang and Huang, 2008). Spot-checking a few Internet users, violence against even one journalist and new laws threatening imprisonment to those speaking out against government all have mutually reinforcing dampening effect on people’s ability and willingness to engage in political life (Amurao, 2011; Boymal et al., 2007; Zhang and Nyíri, 2014, this issue). Using landscaping to prevent people from gathering in parks does the same (Lim, 2010). Yet in the face of all of this, people do rise up and do go beyond resistance to create spaces for public life.

Reclaiming the public city: resistance and spaces of hope One of the most important social characteristics of cities is the provision of public spaces in which relative strangers can interact and observe each other, debate and learn politically, and grow psychologically from diverse contacts. (Calhoun, 1986, 341) Streets are as old as civilisation, and, more than any human artifact, have come to symbolise public life, with all its human contact, conflict and tolerance. (Boddy, 1992, 123, quoted in Aurigi and Graham, 1997, 2)

If civil protests are to become accepted as being part of a healthy participatory democracy, they must necessarily go beyond resistance and into projects to protect and create spaces for public life. Without such projects, the moral high ground is quickly lost

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to a multitude of competing identities that can become divisive or even violently confrontational. Such projects to reclaim the public city can be found in many cities in Asia (Douglass, Ho and Ooi, 2010; Daniere and Douglass, 2008). Many are in the smaller spaces of neighbourhoods. Others find spaces in those places that are otherwise not perceived to be economically worthwhile by investors. Some projects focus on re-occupying abandoned factories or construction projects, as was the case in Pathum Thani, Thailand, where evicted farmers, who were promised homes in exchange for their agreement to yield their land to a corporate interest, attempted to create living spaces in an abandoned factory (Bangkok Post, 2011). These actions are among the many in a worldwide phenomenon of rebuilding housing and community life from discarded places, such as the well-known Bonnington Square in central London (BSGA, 2011) and the uncompleted 46-storey Tower of David in Caracas, Venezuela, in which 2,500 people are building apartments and shared spaces in a situation of no electricity, no water, no elevators and, in some places, no outside walls (NYT, 2011). Cities in many countries, including China and Japan, are now seeing shopping malls and entire sections of cities emptied by the closure of failed retail projects and corporate factories moving jobs to distant places where labour is cheaper. Reclaiming the city for its social meanings occasionally has bigger stakes, such as saving a public park and then renovating it with the participation of its users, as in the case of resistance to privatisation of Thong Nhat Park in Hanoi (DiGregorio, 2011; Douglass and Mochida, 2010). Built by the people with their own manual labour in the late 1950s after the liberation of Vietnam from colonial rule, Thong Nhat Park has exceptional social meaning to the people of Hanoi. Today, from very early in the morning before the park officially opens and throughout the day, the park fills with people of all ages coming to exercise, play sports, walk and jog, sit and chat, and join with friends and strangers alike for ballroom dancing. However, with the opening of Vietnam to the world economy from the late 1980s the park has experienced repeated attempts to commercialise it. In 2007 and again in 2008 the government of Hanoi set aside large areas of the park for private international developers to construct commercial activities. In 2007 VINCOM, a major land developer in Vietnam, was chosen by the government of Hanoi to develop an amusement park and shopping centre in the park. None of the many thousands of park users were informed of this plan, but when news of it leaked to the press, public response was immediate, and park users, retired urban planners, NGOs and journalists were able to join together to successfully pressure government to cancel the plan before groundbreaking began. In 2009 another undisclosed project appeared in Thong Nhat Park in the form a five-star hotel that broke ground behind a newly fenced off site in the park. Supposedly based on an old agreement of friendship with a Scandinavian government, the project was actually being run by a company registered in Singapore that now joined


in a partnership with Vinacapital, a Canadian investment firm, and the Accor Group, with TOSERCO, a state-owned tourism services company, serving as minority partner. Again, when a non-government organisation began investigating the mysterious project and discovered how it misrepresented the original agreement, the press, academics, retired urban planners and citizens at large launched a peaceful campaign against it. After significant public protest, the prime minister rescinded the project permit, marking a significant turning point in contemporary Vietnam history as civil society organisations formed and rallied to pressure government to stop the privatisation of public space. Government action to stop a project already underway also represents a new moment in state–civil society relationships in Vietnam’s transition to a market economy. Realising that an attempt to commercialise such a valuable area of land could happen again, several NGOs joined together in 2011 to request permission from the Hanoi People’s Committee to launch an open contest for the redesign of the park. The HPC agreed, and the contest was held in July 2011. The main stipulation of the contest was that applicants agreed to actively work with park users to redesign the park, which had never been done before. A winner was chosen, and the participatory planning process was begun. The purpose of the project is not only to renovate the park, but to also signal a long-lasting commitment to keep this vital space public. Projects to reclaim the sociability of the city and as public sphere can take many forms. As social projects that go beyond resistance against the state or corporate invasions they are also creating spaces for participatory democracies. In Lefebvre’s (1991) idea of the right to the city, these projects are claiming the right to make and change the city, a right that large-scale economic interests have usurped in recent decades. Civil protests have their own place in democratic societies, and they can be important in changing structures of government as well as pushing for laws and regulations to translate the economy into socially just outcomes. The world has entered an indeterminable period of turbulence, social discontents and political unrest. Whether the world system is on already in a process of collapse (Wallerstein, 2005), needs immediate interventions at the highest levels to correct its course, as called for by the United Nations (2011), or will right itself through its own internal mechanisms (Cienski, 2002), remains to be seen. In the meantime, it is not currently serving to secure livelihoods, habitat or livable cities for very large shares of the world’s population. The response has been a worldwide proliferation of protests and insurgencies. Successful resistance alone is not guaranteed to lead to a socially just city. Hope must also be placed on projects big and small to actively reclaim the city and its spaces for a participatory public sphere to proceed on a daily basis. Such a hope might seem naïve in a world full of sharp divides, widening inequalities and marginalisation of many. Yet as Entrikin (2002) details, experiences show that cooperative engage-

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ments that are rooted in place-specific experiences can build upon a shared humanity in ways that transcend religion, political ideologies and other differences to move toward social and political engagements that create what Young (1990) calls ‘differential solidarity’ arising from a heterogeneous public. This is a hope urgently in need of attention as Asia rapidly moves toward completing its urban transition.

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