ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, political analysis of urban growth politics in Western democracies has been dominated by growth machine and urban regime theories. At the same time, the ascendancy of these theories has made them the subject of critical scrutiny. In the context of transitional societies undergoing rapid economic growth, urbanization and democratization, one might expect that growth-oriented local businesses and their coalitions would emerge as dominant stakeholders in the formulation of urban policies. This expectation might be consistent with how urban political theories have driven the development of Western democracies, but recent studies of urban regimes and growth machine theories beyond Western settings such as cities in Asian countries show somewhat different patterns of urban political economy. This paper argues that the missing link in Western experience-based urban theories is the role of the ‘state’. I argue that the role of the state should be clearly conceived to provide the basis for an understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying both political-economic and social change in Asian cities. The rapid development of big cities such as Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore and of small cities as well requires a more comprehensive understanding of the role played by a strong state in framing the urban political agenda as it nurtures the growing power of business and social forces at the sub-national level. At the same time, the globalizing economy also carries with it an ambiguous set of implications for politics in these cities. Through theoretical and empirical sketches of Asian city politics, this paper attempts to reformulate urban theories from a comparative perspective.
