Worlding Cities
Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
Studies in Urban and Social Change
1. Edition July 2011
376 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Short Description
Worlding Cities is the first serious examination of Asian urbanism to highlight the connections between different Asian models and practices of urbanization. The text demonstrates how references to Asian power, success, and hegemony make possible urban development and limit urban politics. It includes important contributions from a respected group of scholars across a range of generations, disciplines, and sites of study. This inter-generation and interdisciplinary group of authors offers the first serious examination of diverse actors, energies, and conditions at play in defining new worlds of inter-Asian urbanism.
Worlding Cities is the first serious examination of Asian urbanism to highlight the connections between different Asian models and practices of urbanization. It includes important contributions from a respected group of scholars across a range of generations, disciplines, and sites of study.
* Describes the new theoretical framework of 'worlding'
* Substantially expands and updates the themes of capital and culture
* Includes a unique collection of authors across generations, disciplines, and sites of study
* Demonstrates how references to Asian power, success, and hegemony make possible urban development and limit urban politics
Notes on Contributors
Series Editors' Preface
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global
Part I: Modeling
Part II: Inter-Referencing
Part III: New Solidarities
Conclusion: Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams
Index
--Tim Bunnell, National University of Singapore
"The contributors to Worlding Cities bring new ethnographic attention to urban sites of innovation, cultural connections, and potentially transformative aspirations. They connect what is happening in cities to the ways changing relations among cities are remaking connections across national boundaries. And in the process they help to remake social science with new connections among anthropologists, geographers, and urban planners. Focused mainly on Asia, this is work that matters globally."
--Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council
"A refreshing and wide-ranging volume that makes a timely contribution to debates in urban studies, geography, and planning. Rather than attempt to identify the features of a 'global' city or trace the reproduction of 'Western' forms in Asian cities, this collection examines how projects of 'worlding' are actively assembled and urban futures envisaged. It uncovers diverse routes through which cities inter-reference one another and are produced as distinctive spaces of experimentation and aspiration in contexts of uncertainty and inequality."
--Colin McFarlane, Durham University, UK
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent publications are Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (2008) and Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate (2010).