Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities

Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 9, 1503– 1512, 2002

Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities Lily Kong and Lisa Law [Paper received in nal form, May 2002]

Landscapes as Contested A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been in ected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the eld, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture which takes into consideration contestations between groups, evident in city contexts—for example, in the imposition and demolition of monuments, the struggle for public space and its meanings, and the appropriation and transformation of landscapes and signi cations from the dominant culture by subordinate groups as forms of resistance. A body of writings has since developed which acknowledges that cultures and landscapes (including urban landscapes) are politically contested. In this literature, there is explicit recognition of the existence of a plurality of cultures that are time- and place-speci c (that is, grounded in localities), eschewing previously implicit as-

sumptions of a unitary ‘culture’ with unitary impacts on urban form. In reminding cultural geographers to pay explicit attention to such pluralities, and to ideas of domination, hegemony and resistance, Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) prompted an analysis of landscapes as contested. Simultaneously, in urging cultural geographers to focus beyond the rural and the exotic, they also provoked an analysis of urban landscapes through these retheorised lenses.

Landscapes as Socially Constructed In deconstructing contested landscapes, one of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings is the notion that landscape identities and meanings are socially constructed, rather than given. As socially constructed outcomes, Massey (1992) notes that they are subject to constant attempts to x identities and meanings—for instance, through place marketing or expressions of nationalism. However, landscapes and places are complex sites of meaning a place is formed in part out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location. And the singularity of any individual place is formed in part

Lily Kong and Lisa Law are in the Department of Geography, Nationa l University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link, Singapor e 117570. Fax: 65 6777 3091. E-mail: [email protected] g and [email protected] . This Special Issue of Urban Studies is the outcome of a workshop of the same title held at the Nationa l University of Singapor e on 3 and 4 June 2001. All but three of the papers were originally presented and discussed at the workshop, which was made possible by a grant from the Nationa l University of Singapor e (R-109-000-033-112). 0042-098 0 Print/1360-063 X On-line/02/091503-10 Ó 2002 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080/0042098022015162 8

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LILY KONG AND LISA LAW

out of the speci city of the interaction which occur at that location (Massey, 1992, p. 11). This reveals the obvious but previously unacknowledged nature of landscape and place identity as dynamic, provisional and contingent (Massey, 1992, pp. 12– 14). The un xed, dynamic and divergent nature of landscape identity and meaning is what opens landscapes to con icts, contestations and negotiations. Plural groups, with their divergent socially constructed landscape uses and meanings, exist at times in uneasy alliance, at other times in overt con ict and, quite commonly, engage in negotiation and renegotiation of meanings on a daily basis. To understand the contestations of landscapes involves unsettling extant social constructions and exposing dominant ideologies that underlie such constructions, the institutions that aid those constructions, the groups that are privileged by them and the urban landscapes that naturalise them. In the construction of landscapes and meanings, dominant groups often seem able to create structural oppositions in which they conceive of themselves and their landscapes as ‘normal’ and ordinary while subordinate groups and their landscapes are treated as ‘other’ or extraordinary. Dominant groups assume that their own identity is unproblematic dominant groups still manage to efface their own actions by implying that they are somehow outside the process of de nition (Jackson and Penrose, 1993, p. 18). Landscapes of the ‘other’ are then constructed by the dominant group as disruptive of the ‘normal’ order, to be eradicated, or at least contained and managed. On the other hand, attempts are made by the ‘other’ to construct their own landscapes or invest their own meanings in landscapes of the dominant. Deconstructing such socially constructed, yet often naturalised landscapes is a signi cant way ahead in disrupting assumptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Concern for ‘Real’ Landscapes The geographical focus on texts about landscapes, and the treatment of landscapes as if they were texts, have been strongly associated with ‘new’ cultural geography and with post-structuralist theory. This has been evident in some expositions of cities—for example, in the analysis of Kandy, Sri Lanka, as text (Duncan, 1990). This textualism has been heavily criticised for a lack of empirics and political weakness (Badcock, 1996; Gregson, 1993; Thrift, 1994). Nicky Gregson (1993, p. 529) criticised a geography that was “seduced by text” and that had “lost the desire to say anything about this empirical social world”. Nigel Thrift (1994, p. 110) was concerned that the textualist approach “does not give suf cient room to issues of power and oppression” and that there is often “little sense of a world out there”. Similarly, David Harvey (1992, pp. 315– 316; 1996, p. 438) concluded that “practical politics begins” where “discursive re ection ends”. In this volume, we emphasise the need for research to be grounded in a concern for the outcomes of ideologies that inform and constrain spatial expressions of culture in urban areas. We have brought together a series of essays that address the material outcomes of ideologies in Asian cities and which explore how these outcomes can be guides in evaluating the desirability of such ideologies and to whom. This does not obviate the importance of texts, only to say that they are made important by the crucial role they have in (re)producing power relations. Landscapes of Power and Power of Landscapes Power and the domination it entails are multivalent, ranging from open command and authority, to veiled control via persuasive strategies—that is, the exercise of hegemony. Often, the latter—when successfully used— is more effective, as those dominated adopt the ideological positions of the dominant and powerful and are subject to control without recognising it. Power may be exercised by a

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE

range of groups, from states to capital to social groups such as gender, racial and religious groups. The role of landscapes is frequently integral to the exercise of power. The direct control of landscapes for particular uses or non-use is apparent as a form of dominance. The hegemonic role of landscapes on the other hand relies on their naturalisation of ideological systems, made possible because of their dominance in everyday lives and their very tangible and visible materiality, making that which is socially constructed appear to be the natural order of things. Cities, as cultural landscapes, are excellent examples of medium and outcome of power relations. The concepts of ‘ideology’ and ‘hegemony’ are central to understanding the power of landscapes and landscapes of power. J. B. Thompson (1981, p. 147) outlined three approaches to the understanding of ‘ideology’. His preferred reference is to ideology as “a system of signi cation which facilitates the pursuit of particular interests” and sustains speci c “relations of domination” within society. While acknowledging two further de nitions, Thompson (1981) criticised the rst (“the lattice of ideas which permeate the social order, constituting the collective consciousness of each epoch”) for being overgeneralised and the second (a “false” consciousness which “fails to grasp the real conditions of human existence”) for being too narrow and pejorative. In this volume, we adopt Thompson’s preferred de nition of a belief or meaning intended to bene t certain interests and to determine power relations. Gramsci (1973) argued that ‘hegemony’ is the means by which domination and rule are achieved. Hegemony does not involve controls that are clearly recognisable as constraints in the traditional coercive sense. Instead, hegemonic controls involve a set of ideas and values that the majority are persuaded to adopt as their own. In order to persuade the majority, these ideas and values are portrayed as ‘natural’ and ‘commonsense’. This is ‘ideological hegemony’. The most successful ruling group is the one that attains power through ideological hegemony

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rather than coercion. When hegemonic control is successful, the social order endorsed by the political e´lite is, at the same time, the social order that the masses desire. One of the key ways in which power can be expressed, maintained and enhanced, is through the control and manipulation of landscapes. In the many examples of urban landscapes in this volume, authors illustrate how the powerful social groups will seek to impose their own versions of reality and practice, effecting their ideologies in the production and use of landscapes, as well as dominant de nitions of their meanings. What they produce are therefore landscapes of power: landscapes that re ect and reveal the power of those who construct, de ne and maintain them. These could be landscapes crafted by the powerful state, capital, or by particular races, genders or religions. Once constructed, these landscapes have the capacity to legitimise the powerful, by af rming the ideologies that created them in the rst place. This is achieved through their naturalising role. As Duncan and Duncan (1988) argue, landscapes naturalise ideologies and social realities because they are “so tangible, so natural, so familiar … unquestioned”. In other words, they do not only re ect and articulate ideologies and social relations, they actively institutionalise and legitimise them by reifying them in concrete form, thus contributing to the social constructedness of reality. In brief, landscapes, including cities, are simultaneously medium and outcome of power. Because landscapes are everywhere in our everyday lives, they have central and signi cant roles in the playing-out of power relationships. In both real and symbolic terms, they enable the exercise of power and, as we illustrate in the next section, are also an expression of resistance. Con icting Ideologies, Contested Landscapes In as much as power relations may be expressed, maintained and enhanced through landscapes, so too may contestations and re-

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sistances to power and ideologies be expressed through landscapes. In this volume, contributors emphasise a reading of power relations that includes con ict and collision, negotiation and dialogue among groups. While political power gained and maintained through hegemony is more effective than that gained and maintained through force, Gramsci (1973) also made clear that hegemony is never fully achieved—that is, those seeking to gain/maintain power will always be challenged in some way by other social groups. As Giddens has contended, no matter how great the scope and intensity of control superordinates possess, since their power presumes the active compliance of others, those others can bring to bear strategies of their own, and apply speci c types of sanctions (Giddens, 1987, p. 11). Foucault too argues that there are possibilities for “revolts to the gaze” and contends that resistances to power are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised [and that] like power, such resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies (Foucault, 1980a, p. 142). Speci c forms of resistance may be overt and material but they could as well be latent and symbolic. In other words, while resistance represents political action, it can be conveyed in cultural terms—for example, through the appropriation and transformation of the material culture of the dominant group (see, for example, Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hall et al., 1978). Of particular interest in this volume is the perspective that hegemonic control and resistance are constituted both at the discursive and practical levels of social reality. Con ict and negotiation may occur as a result of the collision of discourses but, more often than not, exist at the level of habitual practice as part of everyday life, and through urban form and its use. It is in daily encounters that power can be studied

in its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship with … its object, its target, its eld of application, … where it installs itself and produces its real effects (Foucault, 1980b, p. 97). It is at this level too that subjugation is achieved, challenged, or in ected. The “concrete space of everyday life”, to borrow Henri Lefebvre’s term, is not only enframed, constrained and colonised by the disciplinary technologies of power, but is also “the site of resistance and active struggle”. The commonsensical, pragmatic circumstances of everyday life not only provide the context for the ‘experience of culture’ (Cohen, 1982) but, in as much as everyday encounters are embedded within and shaped by the larger discursive/political context, ordinary people in turn affect political discourse, not least through their inscriptions on landscapes. Indeed, the centrality of landscapes in such encounters cannot be overemphasised, as the essays in this volume illustrate. In as much as the powerful leave their imprints on landscapes, the oppressed can and do challenge the powerful ideologically through built forms which they see as unjust, and buildings have been symbolically destroyed and/or occupied in various struggles: student protests, opposition to despotic government regimes and race relations, for example (Laws, 1994, p. 9). But the oppressed are not the only ones who challenge and resist, for the powerful e´lite which attempts to maintain the status quo or to keep ‘out’ the non-e´lite will also oppose and contest landscape developments that threaten its worldview and landscape experience. In short, landscapes are central to the exercise of power and contestations arising. Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities It is with these critical perspectives in mind that we now turn to landscape contests in Asian cities. While analyses that have developed and deployed these perspectives have sought to grapple with changing landscapes


in Western cities—examining a host of ‘urbanscapes’ such as heritage sites, shopping malls, streets, theme parks, housing and monuments—contemporary Asian cities have not been subject to the same interrogative lens, save for a few exceptions. As Carolyn Cartier (this volume) suggests, this discrepancy in research emphasis re ects a number of factors including tensions between ‘area studies’ and theory, and between disciplinary approaches, territorial biases and local agendas within the tertiary education sector of many Asian countries (see also Kong, 1999; Morris-Suzuki, 2000; Olds, 2001). We must also remark on the sheer heterogeneity of urban spaces in Asia, which are in ected with different modernities (and post-modernities), distinct cultural spatialisations and different relationships with colonial histories that do not always include Europe. Indeed, we explicitly acknowledge that the space we have conveniently termed ‘Asia’ for this volume is fraught with dif culties. In a century where global affairs are shaped by events in Asia—the so-called Paci c Century—we do, however, deem it important to provide a culturally perceptive, critical resource on the transforming terrain of Asian cities. Before proceeding with what this might entail, a few quali cations are in order. First, the papers collected here do not provide a rigorous codi cation of Asian landscapes or Asian landscape types that can be added to a list of ‘urbanscapes’ detailed above. As critiques of the unitary concept of ‘culture’ have shown, cultures (and therefore landscapes) are plural. This is certainly the case for Asian landscapes as a whole and for the contested landscapes of the individual countries and cities discussed. Secondly, our focus on Asia does not suggest that Asian landscapes are somehow ‘outside’ the West—an untenable claim in an era of globalisation, transnationalism and diaspora. Rather, our intention is to initiate a critical discussion about the dynamics of Asian urban spaces that does not lose sight of the different ways of organising, experiencing or even looking at or reading landscapes in the region. Although taking on board theories of

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urban space that have developed in different contexts is a thorny way forward, it would be imprudent to disregard theoretical developments in the eld that can enhance our understanding of the landscapes discussed in this Special Issue. The authors of these papers discuss a number of issues that demonstrate the impossibility of a ‘pure’ space called Asia: transnational urbanism in China, Christian landscapes in Singapore, cosmopolitan migrant labour in Hong Kong, modernist architecture in Malaysia and so on. Yet the authors are sensitive to how Asian landscapes are constructed through different ideologies, politics and cultures that necessarily require a profound knowledge of ‘the local’: situated democracy struggles, different ways of embracing economic development and the historical speci city of nostalgic relationships to place, etc. As Massey (1992) would advocate, they proceed with full knowledge of the speci city of the local contexts in which these landscape contests unfold. Sensitive local analyses are important not just because they more closely approximate how people experience these contests; explicit attention to local and regional speci city helps to keep the readership of this Issue inclusive of Asian scholars and students interested in the dynamics of cities outside more ‘exotic’ Western contexts. The papers collected here, with their fresh perspectives on Asian cities, raise different questions that (we hope) inspire new theoretical perspectives on urban life, rather than being just ‘another case study’ with existing theoretical structures. They represent theoretically driven empirical work that is sensitive to complexity and difference, but that is not bound up in the universalising ethnocentrism of earlier versions of ‘area studies’. Our collective conception of Asia moves beyond what Appadurai et al. (cited in Olds 2001) term ‘trait geographies’ or perspectives on Asia that include civilisational views on language, Confucianism, feng shui, kinship patterns, folklore, Islam, etc. as part of an understanding about an ‘area’ unproblematically called Asia. Our conception of Asia is

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more attune to ‘process geographies’ that imagine regions as “problematic heuristic devices” that provide the “initial contexts for themes which generate variable geographies, rather than xed geographies marked by set themes” (Olds, 2001, p. 129). It is within this terrain that we wish to place ‘Asian landscapes’. From our vantage-point in Singapore, we cannot deny that this ‘context’ is both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’. A Mandarin dialogue between two characters from a recent Singaporean lm, Eating Air, helps us to illustrate this point. Girl and Boy are two courting youths sitting atop a government at in Singapore, gazing out to the north: Girl: Boy: Girl: Boy: Girl: Boy: Girl: Boy: Girl: Boy: Girl: Boy:

Where’s that place over there? Johor Bahru. I know. What’s after that? The rest of Malaysia. And then? Thailand. And then? Vietnam. And then? China. And then? My grandmother’s house.

Although the dearth of research on landscape contests in Asia may have helped us to imagine Asia as a ‘region’ for this Issue, we do not wish simply to hallucinate Asia as a region worthy of landscape studies. At the same time, we do not want to lose sight of the historical, economic and cultural process and ows that help to produce Asia as a region: migration, language, cultural practices and so on. Borrowing the metaphors of Donald Emerson (1984) from his seminal piece on the imagining of south-east Asia, the Asia we imagine for this Issue is somewhere between a ‘unicorn’ and a ‘rose’. Unicorns are representations of what does not exist, while roses are assumed to have some tacit reality that exists independently—even by any other name. Emerson (1984, p. 1) suggests that “in between lie names that simultaneously describe and invent reality” and it is in this spirit of nding new terms and

representations that we now turn to the papers of this Special Issue. Organisation of “Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities” We begin the Issue with the article by Carolyn Cartier, whose analysis of the development of Shenzhen explicitly deals with the importance of moving beyond ‘area studies’ approaches to landscape analysis in Asia. Her article examines the landscapes of transnational urbanism in Shenzhen, which have transformed the city from a manufacturing zone to a ‘world city’. This re ects the city’s local and regional goals, its aspirations to national status and globality. The planning and construction of the city by international property development and architecture rms have produced new high-rise buildings and other amenities but at the same time have distinctly conserved or created structures that portray cultural and historical signi cance. An example is the construction of the new city-centre complex that has imperial design avours. The blending of post-modern urbanism with ‘traditional Chinese’ culture seeks to re-articulate regional identities in south China and makes the cities transnational in outlook. Cartier reiterates the power of capital and designers in reshaping urbanscapes. The next two papers, by Paul Waley and Sallie Yea respectively, explore issues of memory, identity and ideological inscriptions in the landscape. Although Waley explores the meanings of a nostalgic part of Tokyo, Japan, and Yea the memorialisation of cemeteries in Kwangju City, Korea, their analyses show how national histories and futures are bound up in people’s experiences of place. Paul Waley focuses on the relationship between urban space, memory, social identities and political visions, using Shitamachi, a atlands area to the east of Tokyo city, as a case study. Shitamachi is not now and never has been an administrative district with neat borders, but is the outcome of a particular imagination, subject to multiple and uid interpretations. The uidity masks a long


process of marginalisation. Shitamachi had ceased to be the centre of Tokyo a long time ago and is identi ed with an outmoded way of life that the country’s e´lite consider inimical to their own vision for Japan. However, Shitamachi has been reinvented by Tokyoites as a space for nostalgia and an attraction for tourists. It is seen as a more feminine space for the community and serves as a place of imagination and memory. It has become part of a wider ideological agenda rede ning and reasserting Japan’s distinctiveness. Sallie Yea looks at the process by which the Kwangju Uprising has become reinterpreted, memorialised and subsequently contested in the late 1990s in Kwangju city through a number of memorial sites, including Mangwol-dong Cemetery, where the victims of the uprising are buried. It focuses on the implications of state-sponsored memorialisation processes for local inscriptions and meanings. It also looks at how the two Mangwol-dong cemeteries are sites where people can experience democracy at the old site or national history at the new site. The memorialisation by the state has created rather than resolved con icts over the meaning and signi cance of the uprising through effective muting of the voice of the democratic movement. For others, though, the state’s efforts are met with approval as the sites are seen as the means to restore the memory of the victims and do justice to their deaths. In different ways, the papers by Lily Kong and Janette Philp and David Mercer raise issues about sacred spaces in Asian cities. Both papers highlight how ‘of cially’ sacred places (i.e. Christian churches, Buddhist pagodas) can take on ‘unof cially sacred’ meanings, become the site of political contests, government involvement and personal commitment. Lily Kong’s paper examines the micro-politics of this ‘unof cially sacred’ in secular, multireligious Singapore, with an emphasis on how planning policies affect the on-going location and relocation of house churches throughout the city. This focus on secular places used for Christian worship re ects on-going struggles over the relation-

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ship between the sacred and the secular in a city-state that is built on principles of ‘ef ciency’, ‘pragmatism’ and ‘orderly growth’ but that pays explicit attention to a plural and multireligious populace. The state of cially compartmentalises the secular and the religious in planning policy and land-use allocations, allocating land for religious buildings based on planning standards that relate to population numbers in particular areas. It is within this context that Kong discusses the Bukit Timah Evangelical Free Church (BTEFC), a Christian house church that was located in a premier residential area until it was forced by the state to relocate in 1999. Although the BTEFC had been located at King Albert Park for more than 30 years, the government’s planning report for the area deemed it unsuitable for the largely residential character of the area. Despite launching several appeals, the church relocated to Woodlands in 1999. Kong shows how the experience of BTEFC sheds new light on the politics of religious space, with attention to the politics of inclusion, hybridity, nationalism and impermanence. The article by Janette Philp and David Mercer explores the tensions and negotiations between tradition and modernity, and memory and forgetting, in how landscapes are produced and contested in Burma (Myanmar). The two cities under investigation are Yangon, the British colonial capital, and Mandalay, the last seat of the monarchy. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), Burma’s authoritarian military regime, has appropriated the symbolic meanings of these landscapes for nation-building purposes and contestations are only ever latent or symbolic—given likely retribution from a regime that does not look favourably upon resistant assembly or protest. Using the examples of two pagodas from Yangon and Mandalay—Shwedagon Pagoda and Mahamuni Pagoda respectively—it is possible to see how Theravada Buddhist sites can be simultaneously used as sites of patriotism and resistance. On the one hand, the SPDC promotes these sites to propagate the Buddhist faith and legitimate its

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authority through its patronage. On the other hand, the democracy movement has drawn on the symbolic power of pagodas by occupying them throughout various points in history. The paper demonstrates how these seemingly hegemonic sites of military authority can be inscribed with new meanings of struggle and political opposition. Continuing the theme of landscape re-inscription, the papers by Mandy Thomas, Lisa Law and Bruce Missingham show how marginal groups or the populace more generally can transform the meaning of places in ways unintended by planners, architects or the state. Thomas’ paper on public spaces in Hanoi deals with public space used for ‘nonpolitical’ activities which nevertheless have political signi cance. Similarly, Law’s paper on Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and Missingham’s paper on rural protesters in Bangkok show the dif culty in separating political and non-political meanings in everyday gatherings. Mandy Thomas examines the changes in the use of public space in Hanoi, particularly in Ba Dinh Square and around Hoan Kiem Lake. These spaces can be understood in terms of the economic and social changes in contemporary Vietnam that have spawned transformations in the ways in which streets, pavements and markets are experienced and imagined. Struggles over space in Hanoi show how contests over the Vietnamese national imagery can be understood through the speci c ways in which the public occupies space. Public spaces are increasingly attracting crowds for non-political activities—for example, for religious festivals, street celebrations after football matches, public gatherings at the law courts and funeral attendance of a popular singer. Thomas’ analysis suggests that cultural practices have provided the public with the means to transcend the constraints of of cial, authorised and legitimate codes of behaviour in public space, and that the state has had to adapt to these changes. Lisa Law’s paper examines transforming public spaces in Central Hong Kong with a view to understanding the temporary production and use of ‘Little Manila’, an ethnic

enclave created by Filipino domestic workers and their advocates on Sundays. Little Manila re-inscribes the meaning of Central from a business district in a global city to an ethnic enclave of migrant workers with its own history, culture and ways of gathering in public space. A history of this district reveals that on-going make-overs of Central—from colonial times to the present—are laden with tensions that have simultaneously seen more democratic access to the area as well as more surveillance, regulation and policing. This tension is apparent in Little Manila. Although this gathering represents a use of Central’s public spaces in ways intended by urban planners and architects, it is also heavily policed by security guards and government of cials attempting to ensure smooth passage through the area. While this policing may be indicative of the demise of public space, Law contends that the ‘disappearance’ of public space is a contention thoroughly entwined with post-colonial politics. She suggests the importance of paying attention to actually existing public spaces that provide clues to the cosmopolitan nature of Hong Kong’s public sphere. Bruce Missingham reports on the Assembly of the Poor protest/demonstration in Bangkok in 1997, examining the geography and symbolic meanings of a protest that attracted more than 25 000 people and lasted for 3 months. The Assembly transformed the streets in front of Bangkok’s Government House into the ‘Village of the Poor’, a community populated by rural villagers and nongovernment organisations committed to government policy change on a number of issues to do with industrialisation, the agricultural sector, compensation for large-scale government projects and rural– urban migration. The Villagers challenged the underlying ideology of ‘national development’ in part through problematising the relationship between rural and urban areas in processes of development. The Assembly also strategically drew on the symbolism of earlier rallies directed at the Thai government, literally plotting their struggle on a map of the ‘road to democracy’—a protest poster which de-


picted earlier geographies of protest against military control and dictatorship. Missingham explores these symbolic geographies, and the strategies and tactics the Assembly used to constitute this everyday site. Continuing the theme of marginalisation, Harriot Beazley explores how street girls (rendan) in Yogyakarta transgress the norms of Indonesian society through their visibility in and use of public spaces. The use of space by women and girls in Indonesia is shaped by the of cial gender ideology of ‘New Order’, better known as ‘State Ibuism’, a patriarchal ideology that narrowly de nes women’s roles as mothers and housekeepers within the nation. Although many workingclass women do seek employment, their participation in the labour force is often limited to work in markets and factories and as domestic workers. In any case, girls are socialised to fear the streets as dangerous spaces where they should be ‘well behaved’ and it is within this context that street girls are understood as de led, sexually permissive, ‘bad girls’ that transgress gender roles prescribed by state ideology. Although the street can be seen as a site of freedom from domestic responsibility, patriarchal ideology continues to shape the sub-culture of street children as street boys nd the rendan’s presence unacceptable. Beazley shows how the girls carve out niches in this hostile environment, such as city parks, where they are able to shield themselves from both the scrutinising public and street boys. Tim Bunnell’s paper takes the kampung as a starting-point for his analysis of the government of the Malay subject in urban Malaysia, discussing how the kampung has simultaneously come to denote both a ‘problematics of Malayness’ and a concept upon which future urban development might be lived and imagined. From the 1970s and onwards, government-sponsored migrations of Malay kampung villagers to urban areas have been seen as providing an opportunity for socioeconomic enhancement while at the same time improving ‘values’ and ‘morals’. Many migrants affected by these policies ended up living in squatter kampungs in cit-

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ies such as Kuala Lumpur, however, which were considered an eye-sore to urban development and a failure of attempts to ‘urbanise’ the Malay. It is against this backcloth that Bunnell tells the history of Block 94 of the Putra Ria apartments on Jalan Bangsar, a site where Malay squatters had been resettled and which the general public understood as an example of the maladaptation of the Malay to high-rise living. Yet Bunnell also optimistically detects kampung ‘norms and forms’ that are gaining prominence in conceptions of Malay (and Malaysian) urbanity where they can be reimagined as models of ‘collective environmental responsibility’ where values such as ‘neighbourliness’ and ‘community’ might be literally translated into an urban context. These contested meanings of kampung living, however denigrated or valorised, reveal their own politics of exclusion and inclusion. In the nal paper in this Special Issue, Nihal Perera examines Colombo’s historical landscapes by presenting a different angle of vision from which to read processes of colonisation and indigenisation that took place in the city between the 1860s and 1880s. In strategically deploying the term ‘indigenisation’ as part of a ‘reverse-Orientalist’ perspective on the colonial city, Perera draws our attention to the important role of Ceylonese social and cultural practices in shaping and making sense of this hybrid landscape. The development of a national e´lite, Buddhist revivalism and migration to the city all helped to shape the Colombo landscape in ironic and ambivalent ways. The manor houses of the Ceylonese economic and political e´lite, the widespread establishment of Buddhist temples around the city and the emergence of a variety of forms of working-class housing for migrants not only shaped the landscape but induced changes in its meaning. These processes of indigenisation were not antithetical to colonialism, but were a response to colonialism that produced hybrid, ambivalent landscapes. As the papers in this Special Issue demonstrate, Asian cities are crucial sites where the production and reproduction of economies

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and politics, and societies and cultures are being played out. The cities discussed here— Shenzhen, Tokyo, Kwangju, Singapore, Yangon, Mandalay, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Yogyakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Colombo—are constituted through unique constellations of Asian histories, cultures, state– society relations, global capitalism and multicultural and gender politics (to name only an important few) and are simultaneously bound up in global cultural economies that affect the everyday texture of urban life. The landscapes that constitute these cities—transformed, as they are, by forces ranging from transnational capital to migrant populations, and from popular culture to religion and tourism—are producing new sites of experience, meaning and contest. The authors draw on critical debates in cultural geography and urban studies, and chart new ways of recognising and comprehending the emerging landscapes of culture and power in this dynamic region. In mapping these transforming terrains that constitute Asian cities, we invite you to engage with these people and places as part of an on-going project of understanding the dynamics of urban space. References AGNEW, J. A., MERCER, J. and SOPHER, D. E. (1984) (Eds) The City in Cultural Context. Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin. BADCOCK, B. (1996) ‘Looking-glass ’ views of the city, Progress in Human Geography, 20, pp. 91– 99. COHEN, A. P. (1982) Belonging: the experience of culture, in: A. P. COHEN (Ed.) Belonging: Identity and Social Organization in British Rural Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. COSGROVE, D. and JACKSON, P. (1987) New directions in cultural geography, Area, 19, pp. 95– 101. DUNCAN, J. S. (1990) The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DUNCAN, J. S. and DUNCAN, N. (1988) (Re)reading the landscape, Environment and Planning D, 6, pp. 117 – 126.

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