Asian cities are often categorized as an ‘exotic others’ in relation to their Western counterparts, by being elevated onto a mythical pedestal, yet Asian cities should not only be explored through their unique qualities, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ expressions, but also by looking at how they influence and are influenced by other cities (Ren & Luger, 2015).
by topics
Topic: Comparative urbanism
C
Colonialism
Colonialism is a system of domination whereby an external, sovereign country willfully and forcefully occupies another, independent country/territory in order to exploit the latter’s human and natural resources. In the process, the colonizing country imposes its system of governance, laws, culture, religion, language, education, and economics on its colonial objects (Sackey, 2012).
C
Compact cities
‘Cities of a form and scale appropriate to walking, cycling and efficient public transport, and with a compactness that encourages social interaction’ (Jenks, Burton & Williams, 1996, p.3).
C
Comparative urbanism
The systematic study of interlinkages, similarities and differences between cities and urban processes (Mayhew, 2015a).
D
Developmentalism
Developmentalism is a wide-ranging and complex philosophical position that sustains the idea of development – understood to be modernization as Westernization as a normative goal (Watts, 2009).
D
Discourse
This concept is ‘often used to vaguely refer to spoken and written language while at other times it includes all forms of representation and refers quite specifically to theories derived from the work of post-structuralism in general and the work of Michel Foucault in particular. Foucault’s theory of discourse concerns how we know what we know, where knowledge comes from, who is authorized to profess it and how, ultimately, “truth” is established’ (Cresswell, 2009, p.211).
D
Disrupted city
Urban life suffers from the failure of urban infrastructures as the infrastructural disruption ‘tends to cascade between different networks and across geography and time in highly unpredictable and nonlinear ways’ (Graham, 2010, pp.25).
G
Garden city
A planned settlement, as conceived by Ebenezer Howard, with low housing density, and many parks, open spaces, and allotments; the maximum population size to be about 30 000 (Mayhew, 2015a). The land should be developed under ‘municipal ownership’ (Howard, 1989, pp.76-77).
G
Gentrification
‘A process of neighbourhood transformation in which working-class and poor residents are displaced by an influx of middle-class residents’ (Hammel, 2009, p.360).
G
Global cities
Cities that contain ‘large clusters of internationally orientated producer services firms’ (Derudder, 2009, p.262). Sassen's concept of the global city emphasises ‘the flow of information and capital. Cities are major nodes in the interconnected systems of information and money, and the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows—financial institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms, and media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly bound to national boundaries and systems of regulation; so the dynamics of the global city are dramatically different than those of the great cities of the nineteenth century’ (Fainstein, 2005, pp.28-30).
I
Informality
Informality refers to ‘the collection of firms, workers, and activities that operate outside the legal and regulatory frameworks or outside the modern economy’ (Loayza, 2016, p.2).
M
Megacity
Megacities are distinguished by their large population (usually over 10 million) and concentration of economic activity (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2015).
M
Megaprojects
Projects ‘involving the politics of large-scale government investments in physical capital facilities’ … ‘to revitalize cities and stimulate their economic growth.’ (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003, pp.1-2).
M
Modernity
Modernity refers to a set of cultural, political, economic, and spatial transformations that have fundamentally influenced the nature of social life, the economy, and the use and experience of time and space. The general characteristics of these relationships include: an emphasis upon rationality and science over tradition and myth; a belief in progress and improvement; confidence in human mastery over nature; a focus on humanism, individuality, and self-consciousness; a close association to the birth and development of market capitalism; and a strong reliance upon the state and its legal and governmental institutions (Linehan, 2009).
M
Modernization
Modernization is ‘the sum of the processes of large-scale change through which a certain society tends to acquire the economic, political, social and cultural characteristics considered typical of modernity’ (Martinelli, 2005, p.5).
N
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a short-hand term for the economisation of social life. It is distinguished by the decline of the welfare states, deregulation, entrepreneurialism and the advent of the individual initiative as a means of ensuring economic and social well-being (Larner, 2009).
O
Orientalism
As Edward Said has pointed out, Orientalism as a discourse is productive, and what it produces are authorities’ statements that constitute a hegemonic description of its object: The Orientals. In the process, Oriental subject is rendered mute while the culture of the producers of such ideas ‘gains in strength and identity' by contrasting with the Other as a 'sort of surrogate and underground self’ (as cited in Schein, 2002)
P
Paradigm city
A city that sets benchmarks for other cities to emulate or appears as the site of emergent urban trends.
P
Post-socialist cities
Post-socialist cities have a defining relation to the socialist past, representing a project of catching up, of reducing the imagined distance in both time and space with the Western cities (Ferenčuhová & Gentile, 2016).
P
Postcolonial cities
Postcolonial cities refer to those cities that were previously colonized. Post-coloniality ‘may also imply a particular critique, one which not only emphasizes the distinctive impact which colonialism has had on the economy, society, culture, spatial form, and architecture of the city but also on the way the city itself is understood and represented’ (King, 2009, p.321).
S
Slum
A slum is ‘a residential area with substandard housing that is poorly serviced and/or overcrowded, and therefore unhealthy, unsafe, and socially undesirable’ (Harris, 2009, p.157).
S
Smart city
A smart city makes ‘use of software systems, server infrastructure, network infrastructure, and client devices’ … ‘to better connect seven critical city infrastructure components and services: city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities’ (Washburn and Sindhu, 2010).
S
Starchitects
Architects who have gained three forms of recognition (profession, global commercial and public), and whose individual celebrity status and marketability leads to many cities commissioning landmark projects designed by them (Knox, 2011; McNeill, 2005).
U
Urban worlding
Urban Worlding practice refers ‘projects (or practices) that attempt to establish or break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city.” They “instantiate some vision of the world in formation’ (Ong, 2011, pp. 4,11).
W
World Cities
World cities ‘function as the economic, geopolitical, and ideological-symbolical powerhouses of the capitalist world-system’ (Derudder, 2009, p.262).
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