Abstract
Southeast Asia is of course one of the world’s rapidly growing regions, containing many notable cities. Two of them, Manila and Jakarta, can be found on most global lists of the 10 largest urban areas. The region has however suffered from a comparative lack of scholarship on its urban histories and conditions. Part of this may in fact be rooted in the great cultural complexities of the region, and the great heterogeneity of architectural and urban forms to be found there. The diversity of Southeast Asia’s cities seems to be mirrored by the widely divergent paths recent scholarship has taken to come to terms with them. Three texts, Urbanization in Southeast Asia: Issues & Impacts edited by Yap Kioe Sheng and Moe Thuzar, Javanese Culture and the Meaning of Locality: Studies on the Arts, Urbanism, Polity, and Society by Bagoes Wiryomartono, and Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, 1920-2010 by Danielle Labbé, attempt to come to terms with urbanism at the multinational, regional, and local levels respectively.
Urbanization in Southeast Asia: Issues & Impacts is a sprawling tome with no less than 19 different contributors, mainly professionals in policy and planning fields. It is the result of workshops cosponsored by the Center for Liveable Cities and the ASEAN Studies Center, conducted with the intent to foster collaborations between ASEAN member states and understanding of issues that the region faces. The text of Urbanization in Southeast Asia is therefore very much concerned with contemporary policy making. In fact, what appears immediately after the general introduction is a summary of the workshops’ findings, as summarized by the text’s editors, under the broad headings of “networking,” “developing more responsive policies,” and “increasing capacity.” What then follows is a chapter by Yap on challenges related to these goals. Subsequent chapters by different contributors are grouped under thematic headings. “Cities as Engines of Development” contains chapters focusing chiefly on economic issues, including privatization, competition, and infrastructure. “Inclusive Cities” contains a chapter on urban poverty issues, a chapter on Singapore’s Housing and Development Board estates (incongruously local in its focus), and a chapter on urban–rural interfaces. “Cities and the Environment” features a chapter each on planning for climate change, urban green spaces, and waste water management. The next section, “Governance, Decentralization, and Urbanization” focuses primarily on various issues regarding political hierarchies, responsiveness, and accountability. Finally, the concluding chapter is a call for an integrated approach to urbanization in Southeast Asia.
While Urbanization in Southeast Asia may be useful to many as a handbook on contemporary policy discussions and as a source of informative statistics (particularly in its many charts and diagrams), it generally lacks an historical perspective. Beyond some generalizations about colonial past in Myo Thant’s chapter “Regional Cooperation and the Changing Urban Landscape of Southeast Asia,” one would be hard pressed to find discussion with more than 20 years’ depth in this book. Given its context, it generally also assumes that greater regional integration is always positive, and while that is undoubtedly true in infrastructure and environmental planning, its value in other fields may well be contested. The book also largely ignores important influences on regional planning from outside the region, and to have no mention of the looming influence of China particularly seems a strange omission. Many chapters assume neo-liberal political and economic conditions as a foundation. Little discussion of the cultural uniqueness of the region or its constituent states occurs, as most of the experts and policy makers involved reflect Western positivism and assume the general value of the Modernist project. The other two texts in this review seem to react to the dominance of this sort of framing of urbanism in the Southeast Asian context.
Bagoes Wiryomartono’s Javanese Culture and the Meanings of Locality: Studies on the Arts, Urbanism, Polity, and Society takes a radically different perspective than the internationalist agendas of regional and global integration. Wiryomartono, a faculty member in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Pelita Harapan, foundationally reconsiders the frame of Javanese urbanism. The author rightly points out that Western authors have been responsible for most published considerations of the Javanese built environment, and he seeks to rectify this, fully utilizing his own native understanding of Javanese traditions and language in the endeavor. Wiryomartono’s project is very largely an anthropological one, with a distinctively semiotic focus.
The author arranges his book into five chapters. The first, “Aesthetics in Javanese Culture and Tradition,” addresses the parameters and regional understandings of the arts generally in Javanese culture ranging broadly from sculpture to theatrical and musical performances. In this, he reflects also some of the Post-colonial scholarship in esthetics that has been conducted in South Asia. This is followed by two chapters, “Pra Kuta Negara: Pre-Islamic States and Formative Urbanism in Java Indonesia” and “Kuta Negara: The Javanese Idea of the City/State and its Historical Evolution,” that deeply consider the origins of the idea of city in Java. Wiryomartono’s analysis of the urban condition largely centers on unpacking Javanese language and its history, which reflect a notion of city (negara) based on polity. The language, behaviors, and protocol surrounding royal courts define urbanity in this assessment, not necessarily simple concentrations of population. The presence of the space of royal ritual and the market, both centers of gathering rather than dwelling, make manifest the Javanese understanding of the city. The fourth chapter, “Javanese Way of Living,” focuses in contrast on the village and the places of everyday life, and how these mark a separate kind of space and way of framing existence. The final chapter, “Javanese Pride, Patronage and Prophecy: Political Culture in Indonesia” then chiefly concerns itself with unpacking the traditions of polity and hierarchy that long dominated Javanese culture and their legacy in the modern world, where he sees them in a highly problematic relationship to the modern state and democracy.
Javanese Culture and the Meanings of Locality is an admirable attempt to wrest considerations of urbanism away from a solely Western framework. The book does, however, have certain challenges and deficiencies that may prove a barrier to readers. As written, it assumes a specialist knowledge of Indonesia. The text is very largely consumed with hermeneutics at the expense of the materiality of culture. While some change over time is admitted, the quest for an “essential” Javanese understanding of urbanism over the course of a millennium or more is problematic for most historians (although admittedly it is in part a byproduct of semiotic/structuralist methodologies). For those of us who have been able to wander about the historical core of a city like Yogyakarta, the spatial component of the semiotic discussions is to an extent apparent, but additions of diagrams would greatly help all readers in better apprehension of the many relationships under consideration. Some of the other faults of the book may not so much be laid to the fault of the author, but unfortunately the editors and the press. The text desperately needs a glossary. As the text is in English, one would assume it is at least partially aimed at a non-Indonesian readership, and for nonnative speakers keeping track of all of the terms under consideration is truly daunting. Grammatical problems and certain redundancies in the text also create issues for the reader eager to understand the relationships and issues the author wishes to convey. The extension of the project of Javanese Culture and the Meaning of Locality into more clear and concrete terms, either by Dr. Wiryomartono or others, has the possibility of however being an enormous contribution to global urban history.
Danielle Labbé’s Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, 1920-2010, is an engaging, well-written, and insightful urban history that takes as its starting point a relatively small community but produces expansive insights. Labbé’s text rests on comprehensive and labor-intensive research including importantly of both historic governmental records and dozens of carefully compiled oral interviews. The latter are in and of themselves a remarkable achievement, as they capture a history which might be readily lost or ignored and enable her to reconstruct urban history as it actually happened in a way that a history of policy would not. Her focus, the peri-urban community of Hòa Mục, started out as a relatively small village, but its proximity to the urban center of Hanoi led to a great deal of dynamism and creative adaptation across the 20th century.
Labbé, a professor of urban planning at the Université de Montréal, charts the history of the community chronologically from its rural origins to its current condition of immersion in the capital’s urban expansion. In doing so, it charts the inhabitants’ continued quest for livelihoods and community amidst changing political structures. The first chapter, “The Early Urban Transition (1920-1940),” recounts the village’s initial status as a home of household economies reliant on “complimented agriculture” and the supplanting of some traditional household supplementary industries with weaving as the result of the global linkages brought about by Hanoi’s status as colonial capital. The second chapter, “Uneven Socialist Revolutions (1940-1965),” recounts how, while rural areas in the hinterlands were subject to radical land reform by the revolutionary government, previous economic patterns, social structures and community hierarchies were maintained in the mid-20th century due to official tolerance, in turn based on the economic value of household run small businesses after the withdrawal of colonial large industry. Chapter 3, “Eating by Points and Coupons is Not Enough (1965-1980),” traces how legislative unevenness and only partial land reform in a time of scarcity resulting from Communist central planning still allowed households to make ends meet through individual initiative in gathering supplementary income. The fourth chapter, “The New Urban Territorial Order (1980-2010),” follows Hòa Mục into the era of economic reform. For the first half of the period, Hanoi’s expansion provided the villagers with an economic windfall due to their continued ownership of their residential lots. This was however short-lived for some, and then challenged by the expanding master plan of Hanoi, featuring high-rise development resulting from collaboration between government and large private investors. Finally, the fifth chapter, “Land for Fresh Ghosts, Land for Dry Ghosts” deftly discusses how Hòa Mục’s history led into the contemporary environment where some (chiefly infrastructural) components of Hanoi having grown around and beyond the village are praised, but other repercussions of development (chiefly related to community self-determination and control) are resisted.
In her conclusion, Labbé makes her case for the usefulness of history. By understanding how popular agency reacted to and was accommodated by official practice, Labbé sees emergent possibilities for more effective planning and governance practices. Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, 1920-2010, though small in its area of focus, could well provide a valuable model in its orientation for histories of the creative space of the urban edge, in its methodologies for histories of Southeast Asian cities, and in its skillful study of continuities and changes over time for urban histories generally.