Urban Asias – Essays on Futurity Past and Present

288 VII. Asia in New Geographies of Theory
reasons. First, we need to move beyond our situated knowledge (perspectives
in themselves are not epistemologies)—that is, beyond our claims to
ontological difference (of novelty or uniqueness) and the attendant politics
of identity (cultural, linguistic, ethnic, sexual, class, and/or geographical difference).
It is right that we relativise the hegemonic centers of world-systems
but we cannot simply stay inside the comfort zones of critique and self-assertion
and not also acknowledge our common humanity and the universal
material challenges of making, doing, and living in our cities. Second, we
are also compelled to do so if we are to solve many of the serious challenges
to human survival—building and living in sustainable and livable cities is
now synonymous with solving all aspects of human survival. Most of these
solutions necessarily are going to have to be sought inside the geographical
marker of Asian hyper-urbanist scapes.
Asia today is the center of global urbanizations and urbanisms. It is
number one for the number of megacities and for the speed and intensity
of these processes. In a world of rapid urbanization and hyper-urbanism it
is hard to see past the gargantuan metropolitan archipelagos to spot new
trends and new sites of urban innovations. The trends in megacities however
are clear enough even as their meanings are not and their diversities are
complex. The modern epoch of city making has been an artefact and an effect
first of the emergence of the industrial cities of trans-Atlantic modernity
and then subsequently their imperial expansion, domination, and replication
across the globe. This process has expanded, intensified, and sped up
with each passing decade. A first question then can be asked: The modern
Asian megacities have been absorbing trans-Atlantic technology innovations,
planning regimes and social imaginaries since at least the turn of the twentieth
century, but is this simply a mimetic process or are Asian cities generating new
innovations—superadding world history-making inventions, systems, cultures,
and experiences into the global urban soup? All culture is mimetic and every
copy—however faithful—is necessarily different by virtue of its performance
in a different time, place, and context. Even in the context of the
unequal power dynamics of the center-periphery, metropolitan-provincial
circuits of world-systems, there are also differences in experience and feedback
loops in appropriation, adaptation, and innovation. 3
Here is a little schema for thinking about contemporary forms of
global urbanization processes that endeavors to capture emergent, dominant,
and declining epochs and regimes of city building and how these shift
across civilizations, cultures, and regions, but in one emergent world-system:
1. Industrial urbanism: Late eighteenth and nineteenth century
Britain cities are the epicenter here. The industrial city of Britain and its