New Book

Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia

24th Jan 2019

Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia

Edited by Jamie Doucette, University of Manchester, and Bae-Gyoon Park, Seoul National University

https://brill.com/abstract/title/34395  50% off until 31 Jan; Discount Code 71012

Developmentalist Cities addresses the missing urban story in research on East Asian developmentalism and the missing developmentalist story in studies of East Asian urbanization. It does so by promoting inter-disciplinary research into the subject of urban developmentalism: a term that editors Jamie Doucette and Bae-Gyoon Park use to highlight the particular nature of the urban as a site of and for developmentalist intervention. The contributors to this volume deepen this concept by examining the legacy of how Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitical economy, spaces of exception (from special zones to industrial districts), and diverse forms of expertise have helped produce urban space in East Asia.

Contributors: Carolyn Cartier, Christina Kim Chilcote, Young Jin Choi, Jamie Doucette, Eli Friedman, Jim Glassman, Heidi Gottfried, Laam Hae, Jinn-yuh Hsu, Iam Chong Ip, Jin-Bum Jang, Soo-Hyun Kim, Jana M. Kleibert, Kah Wee Lee, Seung-Ook Lee, Christina Moon, Bae-Gyoon Park, Hyun Bang Shin.

Readership

Readers interested in the topic of East Asian cities, the production of urban space, the influence of the Cold War and post-Cold War on regional development in East Asia, and the complex politics of urban resistance will enjoy this volume.

Reviews:

 “This original and provocative collection is the first critically to interrogate the nexus of urbanism and developmentalism in East Asia, mobilizing in the process the kaleidoscopic lens that is geopolitical economy. Highly recommended, the book inaugurates new ways of thinking about cities, urban theory, and (late) developmental states, both within the region and beyond.”

— Jamie Peck, Canada Research
Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia

“Taken as a whole, Developmentalist Cities? breaks important new ground by connecting the afterlives of Cold War developmentalism to new forms of neoliberal urbanism in East Asia. As these rich, interdisciplinary essays demonstrate, we cannot understand our urban present without understanding the histories, political economies and contested practices of developmentalist cities. This book is a timely and significant intervention into today’s critical debates around urban growth and migration, gentrification and globalization, and the cities, zones and regions that mediate them.”

–– Jini Kim Watson

New York University

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

This collection demonstrates the usefulness of urban developmentalism as a process that cannot be easily unpacked based on existing models of urbanization in Western countries. This book ultimately celebrates the vitality of scholarship that has called for methodological and conceptual innovation in order to understand East Asian cities as form, process, and imaginary.

–– Choi, Byung-Doo

University of Daegu

Co-Founder of the East Asian Regional Conference on Alternative Geography