ABSTRACT
In the first decades of national independence after World War II the idea of the city in most of East and Southeast Asia was constructed by newly created developmental states that promised gains in material welfare in exchange for compliance to centralized authoritarian rule (Woo-Cummings 1999). Stunning records of economic growth were achieved in several “tiger economies.” However, by the 1980s, urbanization and the rise of civil society witnessed rising contestations over negative impacts and uneven distribution of benefits that resulted in democratic reforms in several countries. Along with these reforms, cities also began shifting from command economies toward what Friedmann (1962, p.76) summarizes as “a form of collective life” and as a polis of participatory public decision-making. Global neoliberalism also appeared in Asia in the 1980s. Promoted and
enforced by powerful international lenders, corporatization of government began to substantially limit the scope of government in pursuing remedies to social concerns. Deregulation of control over urban land development, accelerating privatized public spaces, and blurring corporate-government lines through “public-private partnerships” all contributed to a new era of corporatization of cities that proceeded without political accounting (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003). Corporatization recast the city as an ultra-competitive engine of growth socially justified by a simplified version of trickle-down economics (Economist Intelligence Unit 2012). Corporatization is radically transforming cities and city systems, locally
and globally. Friedmann’s (1986) seminal contribution on the emergence of world cities as basing points for corporate decision-making through global urban networks sparked a new field of research on the globalization of urbanization (Sassen 1991; Taylor 2000). The coupling of city and nation that had seemed so obvious in the 1960s was supplanted by writing on the denationalization of urban space (Sassen 2003). Friedmann (2002) went further by postulating that the world was increasingly composed of de facto city-states directly embedded in the global corporate economy. These formulations also highlight the destruction by corporatization of “the city’s lived spaces”
of social meanings and community bonds (Friedmann 1999, p.4). Sassen (2015, p.1) extends this theme by stating that corporate mega-projects are eliminating the “urban tissue” of publicly accessible spaces, concluding that corporatization is “de-urbanizing” citymaking as it “alters the historic meaning of the city.” While Brenner and Schmid (2014) proclaim that we have entered an era of
planetary urbanization that incorporates every corner of the world into a global urban matrix, inspection on the ground reveals the paradox that corporatization is not producing cities as historically understood to be spheres of social and political action. Many scholars have coined terms for this condition: geographies of nowhere (Kunstler 1994), the city as a theme park (Sorkin 1992), secessionary urban spaces (Graham & Marvin 2001), de-socialized spaces (Gleeson 2006), and globopolis (Douglass 2009). This is the context in which in some instances grassroots mobilizations are capturing urban government to reclaim cities as progressive theaters of social and political action.
