Ideas of the City in Asian Settings 9462985618, 9789462985612

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Edited by Henco Bekkering, Adèle Esposito, and Charles Goldblum

Ideas of the City in Asian Settings

Ideas of the City in Asian Settings

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interests are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organization of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Asian Cities The Asian Cities Series explores urban cultures, societies and developments from the ancient to the contemporary city, from West Asia and the Near East to East Asia and the Pacifijic. The series focuses on three avenues of inquiry: evolving and competing ideas of the city across time and space; urban residents and their interactions in the production, shaping and contestation of the city; and urban challenges of the future as they relate to human well-being, the environment, heritage and public life. Series Editor Paul Rabé, Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) at International Institute for Asian Studies, The Netherlands Editorial Board Henco Bekkering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Charles Goldblum, University of Paris 8, France Xiaoxi Hui, Beijing University of Technology, China Stephen Lau, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Rita Padawangi, University of Social Sciences, Singapore Parthasarathy Rengarajan, Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Gujarat, India

Ideas of the City in Asian Settings

Edited by Henco Bekkering, Adèle Esposito and Charles Goldblum

Amsterdam University Press

Publications asian cities 10

Cover illustration: Clément Musil, 2016 New era of property development in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 561 2 e-isbn 978 90 4853 676 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462985612 nur 740 © Henco Bekkering, Adèle Esposito & Charles Goldblum/ Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

UKNA was funded by a grant awarded by the Marie Curie Actions “International Research Stafff Exchange Scheme” (IRSES) of the European Union (2012-2016)

About the Three UKNA Volumes This book is part of a series of three edited volumes published in the Asian Cities series of Amsterdam University Press and the International Institute for Asian Studies, and coordinated by editors from the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA): – Volume 1: Ideas of the City in Asian Settings – Volume 2: Cities in Asia by and for the People – Volume 3: Future Challenges of Cities in Asia The UKNA was established in 2012 with a grant from the European Union’s Marie Curie Actions International Research Stafff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) mobility scheme to bring together scholars from thirteen universities and planning institutions in greater China, India, Europe and the United States around collaborative research on urbanization in Asia 1. Since then the network has expanded to include also other partners in Northeast Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, and today represents a broad coalition of scholars and practitioners united by a common objective of promoting “human flourishing and the creative production of urban space”. The focus is on cities across Asia, as well as cities beyond Asia in comparative perspective. UKNA seeks to influence scholarship on cities as well as on policy by contributing insights that put people at the center of urban governance and development strategies. The emphasis is on immediate problem solving as well as the identifijication of long term, transformative processes that increase 1 The original UKNA partners that participated in the research stafff exchanges covered by the IRSES grant comprised: Ambedkar University Delhi (India); College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Beijing University of Technology (China); China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (China); CEPT University (India); Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (China); Development Planning Unit, University College London (UK); Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville (France); Department of Architecture, Hong Kong University (Hong Kong SAR); International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (the Netherlands); Indian Institute for Human Settlements (India); School of Architecture, Tianjin University (China); Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands); and Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California (USA).

the scope for the active engagement of people in the creative production and shaping of their cities—particularly in the realm of knowledge. UKNA seeks to develop a new, multi-disciplinary body of knowledge on cities, one that goes beyond the ‘scientifijic’ approaches transmitted in the curricula of classic urban studies programs. It seeks to encompass alternative epistemologies of the city rooted in everyday urban life. These epistemologies seek to embrace non-Western knowledge and traditions and the contributions of a wide range of methods of investigation in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. These three edited volumes represent the output of urban scholars who participated in the UKNA mobility schemes from 2012 to 2016, as well as other scholars who were invited to contribute to the series through separate calls for papers. The diversity of essays in these volumes represents the diversity of the UKNA itself, which brings together young scholars, including PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers, as well as established contributors from over twenty countries and from a multiplicity of backgrounds and interests. The wide range of topics covered in these three volumes, reflecting crossdisciplinary perspectives and diffferent kinds of expertise, embodies the “diversity of ways to read the city” that UKNA propagates. The three volumes would not have been possible without the generous support of the European Union in making possible the exchanges of scholars that were at the basis of the collaborative research that led to many of the book chapters. In addition, UKNA wishes to acknowledge the following institutions and UKNA partners for their fijinancial support and initiatives in bringing together the chapter authors and editors: the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center; the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore; the Bartlett Development Planning Unit of University College London; the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture of Paris-Belleville; the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of Delft University of Technology; CEPT University; the City Government of Pingyao, Shanxi Province, China; and the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. Paul Rabé, D.P.P.D. UKNA Coordinator and Editor, Asian Cities book series



Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum

15

Part 1  Images and Symbols 2 The Spectral Coloniality of Calcutta’s Ochterlony

45

3 ‘Centering’ the City

81

Sayandeb Chowdhury

The Upattasanti Pagoda as Symbolic Space in Myanmar’s New Capital of Naypyidaw Donald M. Seekins

4 Transitions

107

5 Global Dynamics and Tropes of Place

141

The Form and Meaning of the ‘New Philippine City’ after 1898 Ian Morley

‘Touristed’ Spaces and City-Making in Macau Sheyla S. Zandonai

Part 2  Tales of the City 6 A City for All

175

7 A World Garden City in the New Millennium

209

8 Delhi Incognita

245

Perspectives from Colonial Calcutta Anindita Ghosh

Chengdu at the Crossroads of Verbal Representation and Global Vision Kenny K.K. Ng

Challenging Delhi’s Collective Memory by Writing about Illegal Settlements and Eviction Johanna Hahn

Part 3  Political and Urban Discourses 9 The Physical Manifestation of Political Ideologies in Ali Sadikin’s Jakarta(1966-1977)

279

10 Religious Gentrification: Islam and the Remaking of Urban Place in Jakarta

307

11 Invisible Technologies and Loud Narratives

331

12 Changing ideas of Hanoi

355

13 Conclusion

383

Pawda F. Tjoa

Hew Wai Weng

A Critical Deconstruction of the Songdo ‘Smart City’ Project in Korea Chamee Yang

State, citizens, markets Hans Schenk

Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum

Index 407

List of Figures and Tables Figures Figure 2.1 Uncoloured lithograph of a panorama of Calcutta drawn after nature by Frederick Fiebig and printed by T. Black of Asiatic Lithographic Press in Calcutta in 1847 Figure 2.2 Photograph from Samuel Bourne’s seven-part series of the panoramic view of Calcutta from Ochterlony Monument, taken in the 1860s Figure 2.3 Photograph by Oscar Malitte, dating to the 1870s, from an album entitled Photographs of India and Overland Route Figure 2.4 A congregation of people near the Monument on a monsoon day

62 62 63 70

Figure 2.5 Photograph taken by Ahmed Ali titled ‘The Business Centre of Calcutta, 1960’ 70 Figure 2.6 A rally near the Monument in 1970 71 Figure 2.7 A balancing game-show in progress near the Ochterlony; photograph by Santanu Mitra, dated 19 September 1981, from the series Occupations 72 Figure 2.8 Publicity material announcing a rally, issued by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 74 Figure 2.9 Publicity poster for noted Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s film Bari Theke Paliye (The Runaway Boy, 1958). The artwork is by theatre designer, painter, and illustrator Khaled Choudhury 75 Figure 3.1 Region of Naypyidaw 83 Figure 3.2 Site of Naypyidaw 90 Figure 3.3 The Union Parliament complex in Naypyidaw, which is not only vast but also displays traditional Myanmar motifs 92 Figure 3.4 A roundabout or circus, often decorated with large artificial flowers, marks the intersections of major highways in the new capital 92 Figure 3.5 The Upattasanti Pagoda, a Shwedagon Pagoda replica, built by Senior General Than Shwe at Naypyidaw 94 Figure 3.6 The Upattasanti Pagoda seen from a distance, on the road between Pyinmana and Naypyidaw 99 Figure 3.7 Brightly decorated interior of the Upattasanti Pagoda 103 Figure 4.1 The McMillan Plan for Washington DC, 1901-02 112 Figure 4.2 The view eastward within the Mall towards the Capitol Building in Washington DC, USA 113 Figure 4.3 A photograph dating from the late 1890s showing an estero in Manila 117 Figure 4.4 The plan for Manila as proposed by Burnham and Anderson in 1905 118 Figure 4.5 A plan of Burnham Green, showing the Luneta, Ocean Boulevard (labelled as Cavite Boulevard), a site for a new hotel, and the new pier 123 Figure 4.6 A panoramic view of Rizal Park as it appears today; the space was originally proposed by Burnham in 1905 to be a Mall lying immediately to the west of the Capitol 125

Figure 4.7 The Rizal Monument, Rizal Park, Manila as seen on Rizal Day in 2015; designed by Richard Kissling, and opened in 1913, the monument is dedicated to the memory of Rizal, a ‘patriot and martyr’ 126 Figure 4.8 The Capitol Building in Lingayen, Pangasinan Province; with landscaped grounds to its rear and front, and a large roadway (today known as Maramba Boulevard) connecting the district to the Spanish-era settlement, this civic centre helped shift life in the city away from the Spanish-style plaza mayor (‘major plaza’), to the new Plaza de Lingayen and surrounding public edifices 128 Figure 4.9 A photograph dating from 1915 showing the view in Baguio from the National Government Buildings to the City Hall (in the background) 131 Figure 4.10 Burnham’s proposed civic centre for Chicago as part of the 1909 plan 133 Figure 5.1 Grand Lisboa casino-hotel 142 Figure 5.2 Locations of the casinos in the Macau SAR 146 Figure 5.3 Ferreira do Amaral Square 155 Figure 5.4 Macau Historic Centre 156 Figure 5.5 Avenida Almeida Ribeiro, 新馬路 (san ma lou) 160 Figure 5.6 Rua da Palha 162 Figure 6.1 Old Courthouse and Street, by Thomas Daniell, from Views of Calcutta, 1788, coloured aquatint with etching 179 Figure 6.2 Typical view of the built-up ‘streetless’ Calcutta at the start of the twentieth century, from E.P. Richards, Report by Request of the Trust on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas. Calcutta: Calcutta Improvement Trust, 1914 183 Figure 6.3 Ferry Steamer, woodcut print, n.d. 202 Figure 6.4 Steam, woodcut print, n.d. 202 Figure 7.1 The obelisk in the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park) in Chengdu; the public monument was dedicated to the victims of the Railroad Protection Movement in 1911 217 Figure 7.2 A historic teahouse inside the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park) 218 Figure 7.3 Public market in Bronze Goat Palace 221

Figure 7.4 Bronze Goat Palace 221 Figure 7.5 The Christian Church on Sishengci Street 222 Figure 7.6 Modernised alleyway of Wide Lane, a new tourist attraction 227 Figure 7.7 East Main Street (Dong Dajie) in downtown; it remains the commercial hub of the city 227 Figure 7.8 Current site of the Sichuan Provincial Government on Viceroy Court Street (Duyuan Jie), the exact location of the Viceroy’s yamen in Qing Dynasty Chengdu 229 Figure 7.9 West Main Street (Xiyu Jie) under urban renovation 229 Figure 7.10 A roadside billboard in Chengdu advertising a new commercial arcade 230 Figure 7.11 The statue of Mao erected in Tianfu Square (Tianfu Guangchang) in the heart of the city—at the former site of the Imperial Palace 230 Figure 7.12 The people of Chengdu thronged to the Imperial Palace to celebrate Sichuan’s independence on 27 November 1911 232 Figure 7.13 People’s Road South (Renmin Nanlu), looking from Tianfu Square 232 Figure 7.14 The Du Fu Caotang Memorial 234 Figure 7.15 Tianhui Town 234 Figure 7.16 A renovated street and shops in Tianhui Town 236 Figure 7.17 An old street with grocery stores in Tianhui Town, reminiscent of Xingshun Grocery in Ripple on Stagnant Water 236 Figure 7.18 A traditional-style tea garden in Tianhui Town, like the one in Ripple on Stagnant Water 237 Figure 7.19 A 1911 Chengdu map illustrating certain important locations in Li Jieren’s novels 238 Figure 7.20 A contemporary Chengdu map, n.d. 239 Figure 8.1 Cover of Trickster City 249 Figure 8.2 Aerial photographs of Nangla Manchi before (2004) and after (2006) the demolishment 252 Figure 8.3 The raid of Yamuna Pushta 252 Figure 8.4 Map of Delhi indicating resettlement of inhabitants of the former Nangla Manchi to Savda Ghevra 256 Figure 8.5 Page of Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes 257 Figure 8.6 Cover of Bahurūpiyā Śahar 259 Figure 8.7 Illustration `Eviction’ in Trickster City 261

Figure 9.1 The main avenue studied Figure 9.2 Comparison between the existing road network (left) and the proposed expansion (right) Figure 10.1 Muslim Gated Communities in Peri-Urban Jakarta. This map includes both completed housing projects and those that were under construction in 2016. It does not cover all existing Muslim gated communities, only those the author is aware of Figure 10.2 Advertisement for Muslim housing complexes: `­Living in Modern, Green and Islamic Atmosphere’. This advertisement of the Orchid Village in Depok claims it to be an `interesting investment’. It states that that the Orchid Green Village is free from the risk of floods and equipped with facilities such as a mosque, club house, jogging track, Muslim swimming pool, Qur’anic learning centre, one-gate security system, and Biopori environmental system Figure 10.3 ‘Pilihan Tepat Keluarga Muslim (Right Choice for Muslim Families)’—advertisement of the Pesona Darussalam in Bogor, claiming that Pesona Darusslama is situated in a strategic location (close to Bojong Gede train station) and has facilities such as a one-gate system, praying facilities, sport facilities, and mini markets Figure 10.4 ‘Islamic Green Living’—advertisement of the Pondok Nurul Fikri in Depok, stating that most of the units at Pondok Nurul Fikri have sold out, with the exception of the Samarra and Cardova types. It lists the facilities inside the housing complexes, including 24-hour security, a sports hall, mosque, and access to toll ways and a school Figure 11.1 Map of Songdo, Incheon Figure 11.2 Central Park, Songdo Figure 11.3 Tomorrow City Plaza, Songdo; architects: SPACE Group Figure 11.4 Tri-bowl Gallery, Songdo; architects: iArc Architects Figure 11.5 Entrance to the ‘Compact Smart City’, a promotional venue of the city Figure 11.6 Central Control Tower, Songdo Figure 12.1 Sketch map of Hanoi, indicating locations mentioned in the text

286 291

311

312

313

315 332 342 344 344 345 349 357

Figure 12.2 KTT Quynh Mai 360 Figure 12.3 Private housing in a former village 366 Figure 12.4 KTT block deformed by ‘hanging balconies’, KTT Quynh Mai 367 Figure 12.5 New high-rise apartments replacing KTT blocks, KTT Kim Lien 373 Figure 12.6 Housing in New Urban Village Lang Cot, Cau Giay District 376 Figure 12.7 Road pattern of Lang Cot 377 Tables Table 3.1 Myanmar’s three capitals and their spaces

87

1 Introduction Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. (Calvino 1974: 44)

In 2015, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) organised the exhibition After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art, which featured a collection of contemporary artworks reflecting upon humanity’s quest for ‘the ideal’. The curators, Tan Siuli and Louis Ho, referred to Thomas More’s fictional island Utopia, which in Greek designates an ideal place… but also, the absence of that place. On these etymological bases, the curators explained that utopia contains the impetus of human endeavours for the achievement of a better world and, conversely, the seeds of a bitter deception vis-à-vis the impossibility of creating such a world. ‘The City and its Discontents’ was one of the themes through which the artists expressed this problematic quest. Is there still space for a ‘utopian thought’ in the context of the ‘bankruptcy of our urban milieus’? Are ‘cities—and the hope for a new world—still relevant’ in ‘an age when even human interaction has retreated into the non-space of the cyber universe?’ (Siuli and Ho 2015: 27) The exhibition questioned the contemporary role of cities as both physical entities that concentrate people and human activities, and objects of desire and imagination that people project their idealistic aspirations upon. The works of art gave voices to those people who have reasons to be discontented with these processes—evicted artists; city dwellers suffering from disfranchisement and pollution—and whose daily life, needs, and aspirations have been forgotten or overlooked by political and economic rationales. They shared the purpose of giving visibility to Asian cities’ pullulating social life and painful secrets. Seen together, these works of art raise a host of intriguing questions: Which human and social realities do the new residential estates of Asia’s developing cities conceal? What does

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch01

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Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum

the city mean and represent for the people who live there? How do citizens perceive the social and environmental problems caused by intense urbanisation? How are they affected by the loss of inherited forms, buildings, and landscapes? How does the State react to the attempts of social movements to shape places and meanings? Who selects and transfers urban memories, how, and for what purposes? An excerpt from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is quoted in the exhibition’s brochure. It evocatively suggests that answers to these questions are far from obvious, as cities keep a lot of secrets that will not be revealed to the uninitiated eye. Asian cities can be considered crucial places for questioning the aspirations that are projected onto urban environments, as well as the evolution of the role of cities in globalisation. Asian cities have indeed experienced unprecedented dynamics of urban development during the last fifty years, triggered by ‘programs of economic development and reform that are profoundly transforming the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people and creating enormous societal upheaval’ (Winter and Daly 2012: 6). In recent years, Asia has shown the world’s highest urbanisation growth rates: the United Nations (2014) expects that 64 percent of the Asian population will live in an urban environment by 2050. This intense pace of urbanisation has ‘been influenced by a number of interrelated economic trends’ (Ho and Hsiao 2006: 3), which have taken place in three subsequent waves of investment: first, the East Asian Miracle (1960s-1970s); then, flows of foreign capital converging in Southeast Asian cities (1980s and the 1990s); and finally, the development of cities in China and the former Indochina since the mid-1990s (ibid.). Idealistic narratives and confident political discourses have sustained these dynamics. Conversely, political discourses have drawn on the rapidity and intensity of these phenomena to provide evidence of the progress made by Asian countries, as driven by their ever-expanding urban economies. Asian cities are more and more dematerialised, as they come to be perceived as the backdrop for economic activities and a fulcrum where flows of people and resources converge. At the same time, urban sprawl into greater territories and extended urban regions (McGee 1991) call us to question the very idea of the city as a recognizable spatial entity embedded with cultural, political, and social values. Such radical changes have created uneasiness for several categories of actors: professionals, politicians, and academics have all warned against the dangers of losing Asian societies’ historical roots, homogenizing urban landscapes, resulting in increases in social injustice, and generating unsustainable growth. At a time when the dynamics of urban development puzzle and disorient a majority of people, we believe it is useful to produce knowledge of the concepts, representations,

Introduc tion

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ideas, and aspirations that underpin the contemporary production of Asian cities. The objective of this book is to look into what Italo Calvino designates as the ‘everything that conceals something else’ (1974) in order to shed more light on the vast array of rules and perspectives that make cities into complex objects that are continuously ‘in the making’. We are mindful that the geographical boundary of this book—‘Asia’— includes a great variety of different realities. As Tim Winter and Patrick Daly remarked, ‘Asia is a fluid and complex concept as well as a region of immense cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity, often within individual countries’ (2012: 6). Historically, Asia is a site of great ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. Pluralism has characterised the making of the cities in this continent. Asia is also home to ‘plural societies’ that comprise distinct social orders living parallel to each other under one political entity, which have few opportunities to associate into common programs and activities with the exception of the market (Furnivall 1980). In contemporary times, the pluralism of Asian cities has been renewed and has taken new shapes. Whilst claims from ethnic and religious communities rooted in historically layered plural societies have strengthened the segmented organisation of Asian urban populations (Evers and Korff 2000), new forms of political, economic, and cultural association have also been aroused through ‘civil society’ organisations (Daniere and Douglass 2009), epistemic communities (Haas 1992), and social movements. Moreover, the opening of socialist countries to countries with market economies and the strengthening of supranational networks of political and economic cooperation has brought a great diversity of actors into Asian cities, including investors, developers, consultants, communities of expatriates, and international companies. Generalised economic growth has sustained the rise of the middle classes, which are presently constructing their own tastes, styles, and standards of comfort. The production of images and discourses circulating at the global and regional scales transform symbolic orders and introduce new ideas of social status that find expression in the materiality of the city (Harvey 1989; Guillot 2007; Fauveaud 2015). Further, recent processes of urban development have amplified social injustices and inequalities, with the formation of slums and social enclaves suffering from poverty and disfranchisement as a result. Asia also has a long tradition of maritime and commercial exchanges that have flourished since the fifteenth century (Reid 1988; Ravi, Rutten, and Goh 2004). In colonial times, connections between Asia and Europe prevailed, with intense cultural, professional, and economic exchanges between the colonial powers and the colonised (Herbelin 2016) that strongly influenced urban planning, architecture, and heritage conservation (Rabinow 1995;

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Mangin 2006). Later, in postcolonial times, Asian cities, especially the metropolises, connected to networks of transnational, regional, and international cooperation. The transfer of knowledge through international development assistance, flagship projects promoted by national authorities (Olds 2001), the dissemination of architectural types and styles, and regional and international companies investing in the real estate sectors (Douglass and Huang 2007) are some of the main forms of supranational connection that have influenced the shaping of the ideas of the city. In these contexts, ideas assemble (Ong and Collier 2005) at a particular time and place into a ‘skein’ made of explicit and unconscious references that different actors project onto the urban environment. While we resist any temptation to essentialise ‘Asian urbanism’ in a way that would consider urban development in the region as fundamentally specific and different from that in other parts of the world, we recognise processes, changes, and pressures that are now faced by many (if not most) Asian cities (Daniere and Douglass 2009). These commonalities justify our consideration of the cities of Asia under a common theoretical and conceptual umbrella while, at the same time, questioning the dialectics between shared dynamics and striking diversities in different cities in this continent. The eleven chapters that compose this book show that the ideas of the city are constructed by linking localities to places beyond (Massey 1993, quoted in Olds 2001). This means that the producers and users of the city capture and make use of diverse arrays of cultural content and urban references that circulate through multi-layered and multiscale networks. In this respect, one of the objectives of this book is to follow the threads of the ideas of the city back through their historical trajectories and origins. In doing this, the authors engage with the long cultural exchanges between Asian and Western powers, as well as with the recent history of internationalisation in urban politics. The focus on the historical and multiscale circulation of the ideas of the city is advantageous for two main reasons. On the one hand, it helps in moving beyond the traditional dichotomy that has opposed ‘the European’ to ‘the Asian’ city. On the other hand, it questions the relevance of Western urban patterns and models for understanding the historical evolution of Asian cities (Evers and Korff 2000; Olds 2001; Goh and Yeoh 2003). As a response to these debates, the chapters that compose this book unpack the fluidity and the abrupt shocks between diverse meanings of space and place, through the perceptions and different forms of production of Asian urban societies in colonial and postcolonial times. While we make no claims of completeness and are mindful of the gaps that we will inevitably leave unexplored in addressing such a broad theme

Introduc tion

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as ideas of the city, we hope that the geographical and methodological diversity of the chapters that compose this volume will be able to address the ‘rich terrain of complexities’ (Goh and Yeoh 2003: 3) that coproduce contemporary Asian cities.

1.1

The Dialectics Between Past and Present Urban Narratives

Two main thematic and methodological specificities define the approach to this volume. First, the editors analyse the ideas that shape contemporary Asian cities in their relation to the urban past and, in particular, to the pivotal historical moments that marked their evolution. Great stories and founding myths run throughout Asian urban history. Ideas and ideals of the city emerged with these narratives of cosmogenesis, in which the principles of cosmic order dictate the precepts shaping ancient urban settlements (Wheatley 1969). Angkor, the capital site of the Khmer Kingdom between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, is one of the most emblematic realisations of the ‘galactic polity’1 (Tambiah 2013). The seven capital cities built by successive kings materialised the cosmic order on earth through spatial orientation and symbolisms embedded in both architectural and urban space (O’Naghten 2000). Later, the European colonial powers introduced principles of modern and rational planning into Asian countries (Rabinow 1995; Sundaram 2010). Cosmic and religious symbolisms progressively lost their role as leading principles in urban planning, with the few exceptions in Southeast Asia being new national capitals founded in modern and contemporary times that sought to revitalise religious traditions through their architectural and urban shapes (Mandalay and Naypyidaw in Burma/ Myanmar; Putrajaya in Malaysia). Different ‘concatenations of meaning’ gained increased influence in the processes of urban planning and shaping. Especially in postcolonial contexts, these involved political ideologies that young Asian nations and authoritarian national and local powers projected onto the urban environment through planning. One example is Chandigarh, founded as the capital of Punjab following the independence of India from British rule in 1947, 1 Tambiah (2013: 503) ‘coined the label galactic polity to represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. The label itself is derived from the concept of the mandala, which according to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition is composed of two elements—a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (la)’.

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and planned by Le Corbusier on the basis of a previous plan by Albert Mayer. In more recent times and across different contexts, urban planning has increasingly stated the pragmatic objective of rectifying the defects of the urban environment and improving the functioning of the ‘urban machine’, especially in emerging Asian countries that have been targeted by international development assistance (Musil 2013). Following the global ‘external shocks’ that, since the 1990s, have had political, economic, and social consequences in Asian countries,2 a number of cities, especially in Southeast Asia, have started to implement urban projects rather than the overarching urban plans that had largely depended on national authorities’ support and approval. While they have increased their independence from the national and federal states, municipalities and urban authorities have been competing with each other to increase their international attractiveness, with coalitions of private and public actors implementing ambitious projects branding the city by renewed urban images (Pinson 2009). However, in several under-regulated contexts in Asia, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, the failure of overarching urban plans has also facilitated an increase in disconnected urban projects (Esposito 2012; Fanchette 2015; Fauveaud 2015). The urbanisme de projets (‘urbanism of projects’, Goldblum 2013) has indeed produced fragmented and dysfunctional urban environments that are shaped and transformed by the rationality of private, and sometimes volatile and speculative, capital. In the face of an increasing fragmentation of the urban fabric, have the ideal visions of the city been suspended and the great narratives exhausted? Have planning and urban design abandoned the objective to provide not only spatial layouts, but also ‘plans’ for society? Have new narratives and utopias emerged that target the rising middle classes and the competitive rush of Asian municipalities? Tracking urban history as a source of urban ideas and ideals that have been revived, dismissed, neglected, or even rejected in contemporary times, this book questions the dialectic, and sometimes controversial, relationship between past and present narratives and imaginations in the construction of contemporary visions of the city in Asia, and their consequences for urban planning, urban design, and urban transformations. The second specificity of this book is that it investigates the ideas of the city by looking at the relation between urban concepts and techniques of representation. The term ‘urban concepts’ includes the vast array of 2 These external shocks concerned deep transformations of production systems, the end of ‘spatial Keynesianism’, and changes in the socio-economic structure of the population (Pinson 2009).

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knowledge, models, and doctrines that shape urban planning and design. By ‘technique’, we refer to the tools and means of expression and representation of architectural and urban space. Beyond the complex relationship between ‘content’ and ‘form’, it is possible to unpack the reciprocal influences between concepts and techniques throughout history. In Europe, the Quattrocento is a key moment in this historical process, as the invention of perspective durably restructured the interplay between content and form. The invention of perspective established a complex link between the city and the art of painting. The city, or parts of it, has been considered a privileged object for practicing perspective through painting. Since then, perspective has become one of the main constitutive elements of modern urban design, as Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991 [1927]) has insightfully shown. The invention of photography introduced new elements of complexity in the relation between the city and its representation, as Walter Benjamin (quoted by Gilloch 1996) has thoroughly theorised. Images capture the changing visage of the metropolis at a specific moment in time: they are ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Benjamin 1999: 10 [1935]) fixing a continuously vanishing past that can only be brought back into light through remembrance. Therefore, images are ‘historical’ because they allow the extrapolation of the past into the present. While the relationship between the past and the present is linear in a temporal sense, the historical image and the present gaze establish a figurative relation in which the old and the new are intertwined. The dialectical image arrests the moment in which the forgotten past can be remembered (Gilloch 1996). The meaning of the past depends, then, on the particular constellation it enters into and forms with the present. In this volume, this reflection frames the understanding of the role and interpretation of the urban past in present times that is made possible by an analysis of iconographic elements. More broadly, the dialectical relation between the ‘there’ and ‘then’ and the ‘here’ and ‘now’ that Benjamin conceptualised, provides insight into the multiple resurgences of the past into the present treatment of urban space. Some chapters in this book deal with the politics of heritage, the mental images of the city, feelings of nostalgia face to the disappearing of the historic fabric, and religious traditions and their revival. In contrast, other authors show that, modern urban planning makes explicit its relation to the urban past only in terms of denial and produces new imaginations of the ideal city that draw on political and economic ideologies. Although featuring in very different—and sometimes diametrically opposite—solutions, the past appears to be an inevitable and recurrent resource and reference contemporary cities have to come to terms with.

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1.2

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Producers of cities and urban productions

Common people, associations, experts, writers, professional elites, developers and investors, state authorities, and supranational entities are all important actors that animate the theatre of alliances and conflicts underpinning the physical making of contemporary Asian cities. To give an account of this social diversity, we see urban development as a human enterprise that takes place at various entwined levels of human connectivity and association. Taken together, the chapters that compose this book show a clear distinction between the producers of cities and urban productions. Far from being limited to the traditional opposition between the professional and the vernacular, this distinction concerns, on one side, architects and urban designers and, on the other side, political, economic, and religious powers. As such, foreign architects, planners, and urban thinkers have not played the role of unilateral cultural brokers in Asia. Just to cite a few remarkable examples: Patrick Geddes and Daniel Burnham have respectively imported the English-based Town Planning Movement and the American-based City Beautiful Movement into Southeast Asia; Ebenezer Howard invented the urban model of the garden city, the principles of which later inspired urban planning in different non-Western contexts such as Japan, South Africa, and Hong Kong; Bruno Taut extensively studied Japanese architecture, which he appreciated for its minimalist simplicity; and more generally speaking, the work of famous architects like Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, or Kenzo Tange, and the international expertise of well-known urban planners like Charles Abrams have facilitated Asian cities’ access to the reference universe of international urbanism in a time when architects and planners are conceptualising ideas of ‘the modern city’. (For the emblematic case of Dhaka, see Habib and De Meulder 2015: 230.) Designers’ approach to the city sharply distinguishes itself from the aforementioned forms of political, economic, and religious power that operate in contemporary Asian cities. In some cases, these refer to discourses of modernity; in others, their modus operandi resorts to ‘classical’ religious, political, and economic narratives that crystallise national identities around a set of common values and objectives for the development of a great nation. More broadly, religious, political, and economic powers generally fall outside the realm of professional and innovative thinking in the field of architecture and urbanism. Instead, they draw on inherited architectural and urban vocabularies that correspond most with their visions, intentions, and expectations. Under these circumstances, urban planning and design appear as fields of specific assemblages for these vocabularies that are put at the service of the narratives sustaining these forms of power.

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Other chapters in this book focus on different forms of urban production that develop through the relationships that multiple actors establish with the inherited city. While they do not explicitly request the power to build, demolish, and reconfigure urban landscapes, they are based on the common people’s ability to assign meaning and embed the architectural space (monuments, sculptures, and, more broadly, architectural and urban signs) with narrative content expressed through literary writing or iconography, or with the occupation and ordinary practice of urban space. Extensively drawing on Michel de Certeau (1980), contributions to this book deal with micro actions and tactics that negotiate pre-established orders and rationalities ‘in the midst of the field of power relations that link localities to a wider world’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 5). These contributions question the distinction between the city as an ideological construct and the city of everyday life (Evers and Korff 2000). The approach of this book consists, then, of looking at the great variety of concepts, representations, and memories that these actors project onto the built environment, at their appearance and disappearance over time, or, on the contrary, at the ways and processes through which they come to be entrenched in the urban fabric through heritage, topographies, and specific objects that are heavily charged with cultural and political meaning. The aporetic character of the ideas of the city 3 (Goh and Yeoh 2003) emerges once the plurality—and the pluralism—of the urban society of Asian cities is taken into account. Asian cities concentrate cosmopolitan populations, activities, and cultural influences and, for this reason, offer the conditions for the development of a diverse urbanity and social life. It is our purpose to question how Asian cities make and produce sense, and how meaning comes to be associated with various patterns of desirability that express the aspirations of the specific actors who have put them forward. Nevertheless, what ‘desirable’ means depends on a wide range of individual and collective aspirations that include wealth, comfort, innovation, economic development, memories and sense of belonging, order and rationality, social inclusion and justice, aesthetics, and amenities. In all its complexity, the authors of this edited volume analyse how the power to shape and bring ideas onto the stage may influence the power to act in the urban space (Mosse 2011), and how conflicts do not only concern the power to build, 3 Goh and Yeoh have insightfully argued that ‘the meaning of the city is constituted in a variety of ways and perspectives, each of whose value and persuasiveness will depend upon the context of engagement; and that city sites are indeed aporetic, if the totality of these competing significations is taken into account’ (2003: 6).

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but also the power to impose a prevailing sense. We conceive of ideas, then, not as theoretical reflections disconnected from the physical and spatial dimensions of the city, but as political constructs and ‘embodied practices that shape identities and enable resistances’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 6).

1.3

Taking Ground in the Academic Field

This approach to the study of cities is grounded in a longstanding research tradition that has looked at human perceptions and practices in urban environments (Lynch 1977 [1960]) and has investigated the relationship between society and the production of urban space (Lefebvre 1974). It also draws on poststructuralist approaches to place-making that, since Michel Foucault (1980), have endorsed the ‘idea that power relations permeate all levels of society, with a field of resistances that is coextensive with them’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 6). Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977 [1972]) and Michel de Certeau’s (1980) works are particularly valuable, as they accent the practices of social agents, showing how human beings reinterpret and appropriate culture ‘in the midst of the field of power relations that links localities to a wider world’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 5). These contributions have laid the groundwork for understanding the production of urban space as a collective endeavour that constantly negotiates the political power and ideologies of the state. Acknowledging the plurality of meaning that shapes the city, research in urban studies has looked at urban cultures as sites of difference and contestation. Culture is not seen as a coherent and stable body of knowledge, but rather as a dynamic and controversial process that gives the account of a particular moment in the evolution of a human society or group (Featherstone and Lash 1999; Herzfeld 2005). In the wake of this understanding, Hans-Dieter Evers and Rüdiger Korff (2000) have claimed the need for an ‘emic’ approach to the city that would retrieve the many-faceted meanings that the city has for its inhabitants. Urban studies have developed multiple pathways that address the relationship between ‘cultures’ and ‘cities’ in specific sectors (e.g. heritage, political ideologies, semiology of the built space, and literary and artistic perceptions of cities) and take root in different disciplinary backgrounds, such as anthropology, geography, urbanism, sociology, and cultural studies. More particularly, two edited volumes entitled Imagining the City—which mainly focused on Western contexts—have investigated ‘the active role of human imagination in organising discrete perceptions into constellations of meaning’ (Emden, Keen, and Midgley

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2006, vol. 1: 1) as well as ‘the ways in which urban spaces have been defined historically, on the function of cities as places of cultural interaction and demarcation, and on the role that cities can be seen to play in the preservation and transmission of cultural memories’ (ibid.: 19). References to Asian cities seldom appear in these cultural approaches toward urban modernity. In the large and well-documented first part of Gary Bridge’s and Sophie Watson’s A Companion to the City (2000) entitled ‘Imagining cities’, Patrick Guinness’s article ‘Contesting imaginings of the city: City as locus of status, capitalist accumulation, and community. Competing cultures of Southeast Asian societies’ (ibid.: 87-98) is the only one that deals explicitly with Asian cities. Based on Terry McGee’s Theaters of Accumulation (Armstrong and McGee 1985), Guinness’s account shows how ‘religious or spiritual images as a key locus of identity comes into conflict with the dominant urban imaginary imported from the West that of capital accumulation challenges conventional Western views of modernity and the City’ (Bridge and Watson ibid.: 8). Wishing to depart from the reference to McGee’s approach, Robbie Goh’s and Brenda Yeoh’s Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text (2003) has tried to fill this gap. Presenting itself as a tentative ‘exploration of the textual dynamics of the Southeast Asian City’ (ibid.: 6) in the framework of postcolonial urban studies, the book assumes a critical position regarding the ways of reading the city. Based on case studies of a limited number of cities (and mostly referring to the Singaporean context), it focuses on the ideologies at work in urban discourses and city symbols rather than on the underlying ideas of the city. Drawing on this theoretical background, our volume aims to bring together the complexity and interconnectedness of the ideas of the city through eleven chapters that, from different perspectives, ask how cultural and political backgrounds shape the production and practice of contemporary Asian cities. To give an account of the commonalities and diversities across Asia, we have felt it particularly important to expand the scope of this book to case studies located in East Asia (Chengdu in P.R. China; New Songdo City in South Korea; Macao); Southeast Asia (Naypyidaw in Myanmar; Manila and Baguio in the Philippines; Hanoi in Vietnam; Jakarta in Indonesia); and South Asia (Delhi and Calcutta/Kolkata in India). In all their diversity, the chapters engage with the diverse modes of expression and interpretation of contemporary Asian cities. They examine these modes from a technical angle, or from other relevant approaches that help decode the ideas, imaginaries, and ideologies of the city at a particular moment in time. Hence, they reveal the reciprocal relationship between representations and the urban fabric: the first is based on the latter, but also contributes to its shaping.

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The authors have used different sources and looked at different objects to analyse the ideas of the city in Asia. These are simultaneously used as both the means and objects of investigation: iconography and other visual materials, interviews, field notes, literary writings, historical archives, architectural projects and urban plans, and urban policies and discourses. Coming from various backgrounds, their contributions define the city as the object of an interdisciplinary inquiry that includes not only the traditional tools of architecture, urbanism, and geography, but also ethnographic methods, textual and discourse analysis, semiology, and conversational analysis.

1.4

Content and Structure of the Book

The book has three parts: Part 1 Images and Symbols Part 2 Tales of the City Part 3 Political and Urban Discourses. The following pages have a twofold objective: on the one hand, we present the content of each of these parts on the basis of the content of the individual contributions; on the other, we problematise the research themes that emerge from putting together diverse research perspectives, case studies, and analytical methods under a common thematic umbrella. 1.4.1

Images and Symbols

‘Images’ and ‘symbols’ are very broad concepts. For this reason, we feel it is necessary, in the first instance, to narrow their definitions in reference to the content and theoretical orientations of the chapters that compose this edited volume. ‘Images’ are mental representations: impressions that have often been deliberately created and can be used to legitimise local and national authorities (Nas 1993), to foster tourism (Selwyn 1996), or to attract investors, companies, and new residents. A symbol has been defined as ‘something’ (e.g. an object or other form of expression), ‘that stands for something else’ (Schneider 1980 [1968]: 1): generally, an idea of a rather abstract nature (Nas 1993). According to Roland Barthes (1994 [1985]), a symbol is a syntagmatic or paradigmatic organisation, which means that there is no regular correspondence between the signifier and the signified. Rather, their connection is approximate or ambiguous and may change over

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time: ‘the signified are like mythical beings, of an extreme imprecision, and because at a certain moment they always become the signifiers of something else: the signified pass, the signifiers remain’ (ibid.: 416). The analysis of urban symbolisms and images is based on the assumption that all human space is a ‘signifying space’ (Barthes 1986). This assumption was given evidence by Kevin Lynch’s pioneer work, The Image of the City (1977 [1960]), which conceived of the city as a readable object composed of discrete units that have specific meanings. According to Lynch, every city is made of the alternation and juxtaposition of marked and non-marked elements; that is to say, of units that have or are deprived of meaning. Further studies on cities have tried to ‘excavate this jungle of symbolism’ (Nas and De Giosa 2011: 286). They have dealt with the objects—urban spaces—but also with the city as a whole, both of which reflect symbolic configurations and shifting images that reveal tensions, conflicts, and social changes (Erdentug and Burçak 1998). Part 1 provides fresh perspectives on the study of symbols and images. Sayandeb Chowdhury (Chapter 2) introduces us to the volatile nature of urban symbolism. His chapter focuses on Calcutta’s Ochterlony Monument. This early nineteenth century edifice (1828) was a triumphant British war memorial, later replete with stories of colonial engagements around it, until it trespassed into the period of post-coloniality as the chief site of Calcutta’s political spectacles and multitudinous congresses. Built of mixed architectural traditions, this unique, erect form is a most pregnant repository of both a cultural and a visual imaginary. It was a foundational symbol of metropolitan Calcutta as part of the British Empire that was repeatedly photographed, mined, and cited in endless visual reproductions. Later, an act of symbolic purging of its legacy rebaptised it as an Indian war memorial co-opted as a tourist site. The author argues that the Ochterlony Monument’s unique trajectory as a colonial and postcolonial site of transformational power and meaning provides us with a critical vantage point enabling a reading of cultural heritage that can radically reimagine the history of the transformation of an ambivalent colonial past into an equally ambivalent post-coloniality. The complex series of associations between the built object and symbolic meanings are made possible thanks to the consensus of a group—the colonial elite—and, later, the broader endorsement of postcolonial Indian society, which accepts that the Octherlony’s meaning is reformed. Chowdhury’s chapter shows how emblematic built objects are entitled to express values that hierarchically prevail within a given society, once they are legitimated by a powerful group or by wide social consensus.

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However, the ‘world of correlations’ between the signified and the signifiers cannot be imprisoned in a full or final signification, as they may be the object of further change and recomposition, as Roland Barthes insightfully argued (1986). In the same line of thought, Peter Nas (1993) argued that urban symbolism is established by a stable power structure or by a strong elite. This is evident not just in the ancient Asian urban foundations that determined the structure and morphology of the city through cosmological principles (Tambiah 2013[1976]; Wheatley 1983; O’Naghten 2000), but also in colonial and postcolonial settings such as Calcutta where foreign and national elites have successively enjoyed strong power over the field of urban planning and design. The city appears as a ‘unitary power structure’ (Nas 1993) whose overall image derives from its prominent parts that are extensively represented through iconography. Ian Morley (Chapter 4) provides an insightful understanding of the circulation of images of colonial Manila that conveyed an encompassing idea of the city. The American colonial government implemented in the Filipino capital the principles of the City Beautiful Movement, as modelled on the ideas of Daniel Burnham. The implementation of these principles in Southeast Asia produced new types of urban spaces, healthy living environments, and grand civic districts. The mediatisation of images representing the emblematic urban spaces crafted in line with this urban movement created a new ‘perceptive space’ that aimed to foster the assembly of nationhood. Morley argues that, while city planning was utilised to articulate the superiority of American civilisation—partly because the Americans viewed the Philippines in 1898 as being ‘backward’ in nature—it was also a vital element in the manufacture of Philippine nationhood. Given this historical backdrop, Morley offers a treatise on the spatial and cultural concept of the American city in the Philippines, and how the form of the ‘new city’ illuminated the contrast between the modern age and a unified Filipino population on the one hand, and the ‘uncivilised’, that is to say tribal, condition of society during the Spanish era (1521-1898) before the advent of the American colonisation, on the other. The circulation of images therefore corresponds to the branding of a new identity that breaks with the urban past and engages with the path of progress and modernity—not only for the city, but for all society. In a postcolonial environment, Donald Seekins (Chapter 3) gives an account of the emblematic role of the Upattasanti Pagoda, which distils the overall symbolic meaning of Naypyidaw, a city founded by the military regime as the new capital of Myanmar. As a spiritual fulcrum that expresses the religious conservatism of the leading power’s ideology, the

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pagoda represents the new political and spiritual centre of the nation. The urban composition is indeed articulated around the pagoda; its spaces and buildings express and reinforce the same symbolic organisation. In these controlled urban landscapes, no space is left for individuals to negotiate other forms of symbolic organisation that may compete with the official one (Nas 1993). On the contrary, the sanctuary is aimed at building up and fostering social cohesion around this strong symbol established by the Burmese government, or even its absolute leader at the time of building the new capital from scratch: Than Shwe. The cases of Calcutta, Manila, and Naypyidaw, as these are presented in this volume, show how political power imposes an overarching ‘symbolic regime’ (Leeuwen 2011) and image of the city, which it aims to disseminate worldwide through iconography and photography. Specific parts of the city stand for the whole, and through these emblematic parts the whole city is gathered around a unitary—but simplistic—idea that avoids counternarratives as well as dissent. From a different standpoint, Sheyla Zandonai (Chapter 5) provides an insightful analysis of how the contemporary image of the city of Macao is concomitantly constructed as both a UNESCO World Heritage site and a gambling city. This twofold image takes ground in a complex set of social and political practices that draw on different parts of the city, which are alternatively promoted as heritage or gambling spaces. Both aspects contribute to define the identity of a ‘fantasy city’ where culture is commoditised for tourists looking for mild cultural experiences as well as for the excitement and entertainment of the gambling environments. Zandonai’s definition of Macao as a ‘fantasy city’ echoes the ‘hypercity’ (Nas and Samuels 2006) that is based on the concept of ‘hyperreality’ (Baudrillard 1994; Eco 1986). The hypercity ‘encompasses the totality of the urban signifiers or symbol carriers that combine in a dynamic process of signification to represent the city, both to its inhabitants and to the rest of the nation-state, the region and the world’ (Nas, Jaffe and Samuels 2006: 8). The symbolic side of the city is so compelling that it can eventually be seen as detached from reality. Coherence is then achieved when the production of signifiers conforms to the overall urban symbolism, and moreover coincides with the one the consumers of the signifiers agree on. Consistently, the commodification of Macao for tourism does not integrate social meanings or experiences of history and place, but on the contrary flattens the meaning of the city to the overall consumerist symbolism that strengthens the city’s vocation as an international tourist destination. The case of Macao is representative of a broader tendency of contemporary cities to use urban image branding to attract national and international capital in order to improve their

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positioning in global economic and diplomatic networks (Vanolo 2008). City branding has major impacts on urban economies, especially in the field of tourism (Paddison 1993). More particularly, urban labels such as World Heritage status play a major role in these strategies by improving the visibility and reputation of cities in the global scenario and, for these reasons, they become key components of urban policies (Fournier 2014). Urban labels are closely associated with the production of images and the reshuffling of symbolic regimes. In Macao, as in other urban contexts (Eizenberg and Cohen 2015), images celebrate entertainment, pleasure, and festivity, and its symbolism stands for the consumerist values of an international public of tourists and city users. 1.4.2

Tales of the City

Si la ville est là, c’est qu’elle fonctionne. Pour et par ceux qui l’habitent, y travaillent, la vivent, en vivent, la visitent, mais aussi en rêvent, la bénissent ou la haïssent. Et la disent. Car plus que tout autre objet, la ville fait parler les gens. Peut-être même en tant que telle, elle parle elle-même, à travers l’ensemble de signes qu’elle porte et qui la portent jusqu’au cœur des hommes. Elle fait parler, et davantage peut-être encore, elle les fait être. Au travers d’une géographie secrète, de multiples visages, que seuls révèlent les écrivains. (Racine 2004: 77) In English: The city exists because it functions well. For those and by those that inhabit the city, work and live there, visit it and dream of it, bless it or hate it. And for those who tell about the city. Because people speak about the city more than any other object. The city speaks for itself, through the signs that lay within it, and that bring it into the heart of people. It makes people talk, and maybe even more, it allows people to exist. Only writers are able to uncover its secret geography and its multiple faces. (Translation by author)

In this text, Jean-Bernard Racine echoes Italo Calvino and mentions the secret geography of the city, suggesting that only writers may be able to disclose its multiple faces. Following a similar line of thought, Mary Ann Caws (1991) draws a parallel between cities and poetry, based on the fact that the two are subject to their readers’ (and users’) multiple emotional experiences and interpretations. Through literature, cities can therefore be recounted as ‘objects of experience’ (Scheen 2016), as literary writings are able to express such emotional and intellectual variety. The real and

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the imagined, the factual and the experienced, ‘transform each other in a multidimensional discursive praxis’ (ibid.: 15). Imagination can be used not only for broadly conveying feelings and experiences, but also for projecting people’s hopes and existential aspirations onto the urban environment that becomes their scenery. Especially in the context of the intense urban transformations of colonial and postcolonial Asian cities, the rapid reshuffling of urban systems puzzles and disorients. Literature is used as a tool that gives voice to these discomforts, and as an alternative, virtual space of representation for people that have been marginalised in the framework of new urban orders. In this book, Anindita Ghosh (Chapter 6) deals with nineteenth-century Calcutta, which was in the midst of fundamental change. From a constellation of three trading and farming villages, it was being transformed into the centre of the British Empire in India. Its rapid growth, stretching longitudinally along the banks of the Hooghly, also saw segregation in the residential settlement pattern—between the White Town with largely European inhabitants populating the area around the fort, and the teeming Black Town peopled by Indians squeezed into the northern part of the city. The infrastructural layout also mimicked the racially distinct habitations, as metalled roads, gas and later electric lights, and updated sewage disposal mechanisms, ubiquitous within the borders of the European parts of the city, were either virtually non-existent or painfully slow to reach the northern indigenous quarters. Ghosh questions how this divided city was represented in contemporary writings and what this tells us about the ways in which the urban sphere was made by its people, and not just by the material and administrative infrastructure that was part and package of the colonial city. Gleaning materials from contemporary Bengali memoirs, songs, dramas, and street literature, her chapter presents the city as shaped by the everyday experiences of its people. It investigates how the residents responded to the technologisation of the city and to its infrastructural changes, and what their conception was of the new urban space and work time regularity. Ghosh also shows in what ways their sensibilities were shaped by, and how they in turn impacted, the city’s municipal vision. In all of this, the author argues that each social constituency that composed Calcutta’s human landscape claimed a distinct sense of ownership. Multiple histories of colonial Calcutta can then be written that encompass such diversity and deal with the complex entanglements between the ‘factual and historical city’ and the ‘literary imaginings’ of it (Scheen 2016). Ownership claims reflect the fundamental quest ‘for happiness, or simply’ for ‘some place to dwell securely’ (Caws 1991: 10). This quest for ‘ontological

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security’, which Anthony Giddens (1991: 35-69) defined as a sense of order and continuity in regard to individual experiences, has been endangered by the contemporary urban development of Asian cities that often occurs at the expense of the weakest layers of the urban societies. As Johanna Hahn shows in her chapter on contemporary Delhi (Chapter 8), literature can be used as a way to give visibility to marginalised experiences of the city. The author asks how young slum dwellers imagine the Indian city, and why they needed to transfer their written experiences from blog entries into a published book. She explores strategies of inscribing deviant vernacular ideas of the Indian capital into mainstream memory discourses, which are dominated by Anglophone city biographies and memoirs that celebrate Delhi’s ‘glorious past’. Hahn focuses on everyday life, semi-fictional accounts of the experience of eviction from the Nangla Manchi neighbourhood. This informal settlement was previously located on the banks of the Yamuna River in central Delhi and was bulldozed in a ‘beautification action’ in 2006. The story collections By Lanes (‘Galiyom se’), and Trickster City and its Hindi original bahurūpiyā śahar constitute a counterbalance to the dominant narratives and images feeding into collective memory. The publication has literalised vernacular texts, as it has transposed them into a proper book—a medium that is still considered to be the most appropriate channel to inscribe alternative images into a dominant memory discourse. Stories serve as a medium of collective memory and self-immortalisation. They inscribe symbolic marks on the collective lieux de mémoire—‘sites of memory’—(Nora 1996 [1992]) that become meaningful not only for the writer but also for the reader. They also fulfil a semi-official function as documents by which the authors stake their claim as city dwellers who have rights on the urban space from where they were evicted. As Nepveu and Marcotte (1992) argued, drawing on literary writings on Montreal, the city exists in literature when ‘it becomes a question’ and when it ‘asks questions’ (ibid.: 8). In this respect, both Delhi and Calcutta represent valuable literary cities, as they pose the problems of social segregation, memory making, and ownership of urban space across colonial and postcolonial times. The two chapters reflect which critical answers are provided by and through literature to the questions that define urban ethos: ‘how to be “at home” in a world where our identity is not given, our being together in question, our destiny contingent and uncertain’ (Raichman 1991: 144). The political role of literary writings can also go hand in hand with the creation of ‘urban mythology’: ‘a symbolic grid’ that characterises and make possible an intimate contact with the city through literary writing (Lévy 2006: 41). This dimension predominates in Kenny Ng’s chapter (Chapter 7) on Chengdu, which

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looks with critical eyes at its contemporary urban transformations driven by the slogan ‘World Modern Garden City’. In this framework, historical preservation is used as a strategic economic project to increase the city’s cultural capital and boost tourism. In a time of ‘global urbanism’, the chapter interrogates the interplay of physical urban space with the literary representation of the city in the historical novels written by Li Jieren (1890-1962). The author of the chapter takes on the role of the ‘flâneur’ (aimless stroller) and walks in Li Jieren’s novels’ footsteps to highlight the affective bond of ‘topophilia’ that literature facilitates between people and places. The writer holds the interpretative keys to the city (Nepveu and Marcotte 1992) and participates in the ‘mythification’ of places by associating them with images and symbols. The evidence of this power lies in the Ng’s fidelity to the places described in Li Jieren’s novels. By walking the city, he re-inscribes those meanings into the urban space and gives them an additional visibility through his photographs that could not be provided by historical novels. The originality of Ng’s chapter lies precisely in his twofold perspective: on the one hand, he writes the ‘pessimistic story’ of the transformation of the historical landscape introduced by global urbanism (Finnegan 1998); on the other, he provides a contemporary reinterpretation of literary memories that contributes to giving them a new life. Taken together, the three chapters of this section pose questions about the existence of communities in the urban space that self-recognise themselves—and are recognised as such—because they share claims, memories, and affects that are celebrated in the literature on them. Thus, literary writings witness the existence of these communities. They also reinforce their power, as they express and reproduce their values and the ‘sense of beyond’ (Young 1986: 21) that comes from the perception of the positive inexhaustibility of human relations in the city that one cannot grasp as a whole, but can only experience through variegated literary productions. As David Jarraway (2002) showed in the case of Wallace Thurman’s uncomfortable identity as a gay and a Black in early twentieth century America, literary writings recount the city’s openness—or lack thereof—to the coexistence of strangers in all their unassimilated otherness and multiple subjectivities. 1.4.3

Political and Urban Discourses

The four chapters that compose Part 3 develop an entwined, twofold perspective on the analysis of urban planning: on the one hand, they examine the discourses that underpin and accompany the elaboration and implementation of planning and projects; on the other hand, they look at planning and, more broadly, at the form of the city, as discourses.

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The first approach is informed by Michel Foucault’s theory on discourse (1969). 4 Foucault defined discourse as a ‘normally unacknowledged substrate of human communication that crosses disciplinary boundaries and determines which statements are considered as generative and truthful at a given time’ (Tett and Wolfe 1991: 196). Within this conceptual framework, plans can be considered as visual representations of discourses, and models, spatial patterns, and architectural objects as integral parts of discursive strategies. Planning reinforces discourse by transposing it into a material form that becomes the environment of everyday life. Foucault also argued that discourses are based on knowledge claims. However, their rationality is only superficial, as they hide deeper dynamics of power that play out within and between competing discourses (Richardson 1996). The second approach is based on Roland Barthes’ argument (1994) that the city has constituted a discourse since Greek antiquity: ‘the city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it’ (ibid.: 415). In this discussion, Barthes drew on the ground-breaking contribution of Lynch (1977 [1960]), who investigated the readability of the city. Analysing the discrete units that compose urban space and the way they are experienced and interpreted by urban dwellers, Lynch associated the city, its symmetries, opposition of sites, and spatial layouts, with a text whose grammar and syntax could be analysed through the ‘laws’ organising the process of sensory perception provided by the Gestalt. Following these two connected research approaches, the chapters that compose Part 3 question the social and political processes that embed architectural and urban forms with ideologies, beliefs, and values. They show how different forms of power appropriate knowledge and weave it into urban discourses that, through planning, argue the beneficial value of political, religious, and economic ideologies, and question the various forms of materiality that urban discourses help generate. Two chapters deal with political ideologies and their materialisation in the urban space. Hans Schenk retraces the idea of the modern socialist city in Hanoi, which finds expression in neighbourhoods of social housing (Chapter 12). The author highlights the tension between the attempts to plan the city and shape the society in line with Soviet models and ideas (Kopp 1970), 4 Unlike Michel Foucault (1969, 1971, 1980), Jürgen Habermas (1987: 294-326) conceived of discourse as a type of communicative and critical rationality that is constructed and discussed by equal actors.

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and the modest realisations of the collective housing complexes associated with industrial facilities that created self-contained communities. Other ideas of modernity have replaced the socialist one since the 1980s, when the economy was restructured and the role of the state in providing welfare programs such as subsidised housing was minimised. Private small-scale construction activities consequently emerged. In the era of economic opening, semi-legal—locally branded as ‘popular’—private building activities of all kinds mushroomed, in which all categories and classes of the local population were involved, while planners and public authorities seemed paralysed. From the 1990s onwards, the state developed new options with regard to urban development and housing. Market orientations have come to the fore: development corporations and policy makers designed and implemented large-scale housing estates, mainly catering to the urban middle and upper classes. Multiple real estate developments—sometimes inappropriately designed as ‘projects’—replaced the idea of an overall plan for the city. In contrast, drawing on the case of Jakarta between 1966 and 1977, Pawda Tjoa shows how urban planning can be a consistent materialisation of a political ideology (Chapter 9). The period of research coincides with the governorship of Ali Sadikin, a towering figure to whom all subsequent governors of Jakarta have been compared and have tried to equal. Utilising a main artery that stretches from the northern historic colonial town of Kota Tua (‘Old Town’) and passes through the present commercial centre into one of the first satellite towns in the south, called Kebayoran Baru (New Kebayoran), Tjoa traces how the political ideology became physically manifest during the transition from the end of Soekarno’s Guided Democracy to the first decade of Suharto’s New Order. She shows that even though the ideology of development was presented as a tool to create order, it became a powerful means of distancing and differentiating between ethnic groups and social classes. Thus, ideology continued to be used as a catalyst to create difference. In fact, the successful execution of the urban plans during this time has been in part attributed to the development of categories and ‘heterotopias’ of deviance, which in the longer term cultivated a mind-set of fear that would define the continued growth of Jakarta for at least the subsequent twenty years. The Indonesian case reveals that urban and political discourses are closely intertwined with a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion (Karsten 2009). It is aimed at inventing a desirable representation of place that legitimates power, creates value for a property, and shapes a preferred identity. Hew Wai Weng (Chapter 10) shows how these two latter aspects are interconnected in the

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making of contemporary Malaysian and Indonesian cities underpinned by a revival of religious values. Using Depok (Indonesia) and Bangi (Malaysia) as case studies, the author examines how and under what conditions middleclass Muslim identities and aspirations are being materialised in urban settings through processes of place-making. By proposing the term ‘religious gentrification’, the author argues that urban renewal and religious revival are co-articulated processes. On the one hand, urban places are redefined to accomplish Islamic principles; on the other hand, Islamic practices are adapted to modernised urban patterns. Both the Malaysian and Indonesian suburbs embody an idea of desirability that appeals to the rising middle classes and associates religious identity with the attractiveness of a new type urban environment. In a country where Muslims represent a majority, but not the totality, of the national population, urban design becomes part of a hegemonic project that serves a specific group and strives to impose Islamic ethics as a dominant interpretative frame (Giddens 1979). A complementary perspective is offered by Chamee Yang (Chapter 11), who deals with economic ideologies in the context of global neoliberalism that fosters competition between cities. Taking a close look at the case of the ‘smart city’ project in New Songdo City (on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea), Yang elucidates the political economy of contemporary urban redevelopment and the discursive practices strategically employed to justify certain (dis)investments. Yang conducts a ‘discursive analysis’ of the various local media sources that allows the deconstruction of the dominant narrative of the smart city into its three prominent themes: the ‘growth’ of the city as an imperative in the age of global competition; the building of an ‘international’ and ‘multicultural’ city; and the utopian vision that believes in technological innovation as the solution to modern—urban—problems. The futuristic urban narrative nourishes the attractiveness of the city based, on the one hand, on new ways of imagining and, on the other, on a moral order that uses technical parameters to identify a ‘good city’ (Vanolo 2013). While the focus on technical parameters tends to depoliticise the meaning of the city and to instead demonstrate the rationality of the urban discourse that allows the hyper-technologisation of the urban environment, the production of well-performing urban environments implicitly argues for the beneficial nature of the political power that has made them possible. Nevertheless, the ‘smart city’ limits the opportunities for urban dwellers and users to counteract. Not only do its controlled spatial patterns leave little opportunity for inhabitants to appropriate and transform the urban space, but Songdo urban management also closely monitors spatial practices and the use of public and collective services, resulting in far-reaching threats to

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individual privacy. The apparently depoliticised urban discourse conceals mechanisms of oppression of the possible alternative ways of occupying and shaping the urban space. The smart city discourse thus achieves the creation of ‘docile’ and ‘disciplined’ urban environments (ibid.). At the same time, it introduces new forms of governmentality where urban attractiveness, based on the argument of well-performing functionality and extreme security, conceptualise the city as an autonomous engine of economic growth that, eventually disconnected from the state, manufactures its own development.

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Leeuwen (van), R. (2011), ‘A Touch of Tragedy: Pre- and Post- Tsunami Symbolism in Banda Aceh’ in Cities Full of Symbols, Nas, P. (ed.), 153-172. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974), La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lévy, B. (2006), ‘Géographie et littérature: une synthèse historique’, Globe. Revue genevoise de géographie, 146(1): 25-52. Lynch, K. (1977), The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press [1st edition 1960]. Mangin, F. 2006. Le patrimoine indochinois. Hanoï et autres sites. Paris: Editions Recherche IPRAUS. Massey, D. (1993), ‘Questions of Locality’, Geography, 78(2): 142-149. McGee, T.G. (1991), ‘The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia. Expanding a Hypothesis’, in The Extended Metropolis. Settlement Transition in Asia, Ginsburg, N. J., Koppel, B., and McGee, T.G. (eds.): 3-25. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Mosse, D. (ed.) (2011), Adventures in Aidland: the Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. New York: Berghahn Books. Musil, C. (2013), La coopération urbaine et l’aide publique au développement à Hanoi: un appui à la fabrication de la ville par la structuration du réseau de transport métropolitain. PhD thesis, University of Paris East. Nas, P. (1993), ‘Jakarta, City Full of Symbols: an Essay in Symbolic Ecology’, in Urban Symbolism, Nas, P. (ed.), 13-37. Leiden: Brill.. Nas, P., and De Giosa, P. (2011), ‘Conclusion: Feeling at Home in the City and the Codification of Urban Symbolism Research’, in Cities Full of Symbols, Nas, P. (ed.), 283-292. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Nas, P., and Samuels, A. (eds.) (2006), Hypercity: the Symbolic Side of Urbanism. London: Kegan Paul. Nas, P., Jaffe, R. and Samuels, A. (2006), ‘Urban symbolic ecology and the hypercity: State of the art and challenges for the future’, in Hypercity: the Symbolic Side of Urbanism, Nas, P., and Samuels, A. (eds.), 1-20. London: Kegan Paul. Nepveu, P., and Marcotte, G. (eds.) (1992), Montréal imaginaire. Ville et littérature. Québec: FIDED. Nora, P. (1996), Realms of Memory—The Construction of the French Past. Vol. 3: Symbols. English language ed. by L. D. Kritzman, trans. by A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. French original ed. (1992), Les Lieux de mémoire. Tome 3:, Les France. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires). O’Naghten, H.M. (2000), Les temples du Cambodge. Architecture et espace sacré. Paris: Geuthner. Olds, K. (2001), Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific-Rim Mega Projects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part 1 Images and Symbols

2

The Spectral Coloniality of Calcutta’s Ochterlony Sayandeb Chowdhury

Abstract Recent research on the cultural semiology of architecture has tried to initiate a new study of history through the complex and interdisciplinary project of unearthing sites of memory, leading to a substantial re-imagining of the modern metropolis. The city of Calcutta is a productive site for complex interrogations into nineteenth century modernity, colonial memory, and spatial critique of the post-colony. In a city of audacious British-era architecture, the Ochterlony Monument stands as one of Calcutta’s most pregnant repositories of sustained cultural and visual imaginary. This early nineteenth-century edifice was a triumphant British War Memorial that was transformed, in the post-colonial era into the chief site of Calcutta’s political spectacles and multitudinous congresses. Built in mixed traditions, this unique, erect form was also photographed and cited in endless visual reproductions. Drawing from visual and spatial theory, this chapter reimagines the representational politics of the Ochterlony as contingent upon the interplay of various ‘visualisations’ of the city’s cultural pasts. In doing so, the paper asks whether the Ochterlony’s unique trajectory as a site of memory foregrounds an effective critique of colonial metropolitanism itself, while also radically reimagining the history and scope of post-colonial visuality. Keywords: Calcutta, Empire, Photography, Post-colonial, Visuality

History’s goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place. A generalised critical history will no doubt preserve some museums, some medallions and monuments—that is to say the materials necessary for its work—but it would empty them of what, to us, would make them lieux de mémoire. (Nora 1989: 9)

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch02

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Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigmata of personhood: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. They present, not just a surface, but a face that faces the beholder. (Mitchell 1996: 72) First, monuments, like graves, are not only expressions of the dream of renewal; they are paradoxically expressions of the dream of containment: through the monument, the dead will be given a proper place and kept in this place. (Greenblatt 1996: 36)

2.1

The Octherlony as a Photographic Object

In his book, Calcutta’s Edifice: The Buildings of a Great City (2004), the American architect Brian Paul Bach has rather poetically described the feeling of entering and climbing the stairs inside of a most visible Calcutta landmark 1: the Ochterlony Monument. I am tempted to quote him in entirety: After entering the burial vault looking metal doors, one suddenly faces 215 whitewashed corkscrew steps, made of Chunar stone. Suddenly there is a deserty feel, rather like climbing the minar of an ancient arid fortress. For here at the bottom of the steps, is an instant remoteness from the city centre, tempered by the magic of the insulator Maidan. Poised at the base of the tube, a draft of air spirals upwards—the smokestack principle. Yet the perspiration flows in the closeness, adding to the utter, unexpected sensuality exuded at every angle, up, down, and out the tiny air/light perforations, which appear with far too little regularity on the way up. Light is also taken away far too soon, though the passage is small enough for one human body to feel its way onward by the sliding of palms, knees, elbows, shoulders, even cheeks, along the smooth and cooling walls. The effect is quite similar to the inside of the ‘Iron’ Pagoda in Kaifeng, China. There are audio tricks as well. Anyone talking inside the column’s entrance can be clearly heard at the top of the stairwell so many metres above. Near the top, the stairs become ultra-narrow, which increases the urgency of the inevitable anticipation. Then, like 1 Since the paper covers the time before the renaming of Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001, I have preferred to call it the same. As it is, all the documents and sources referred to call the city Calcutta as that was the official name of the city until 2001.

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the burst of freedom at the top of all such vertical tunnels, light, high Maidan ionosphere (it seems), and altered realities present themselves, proving that we have arrived at a castle in the air. (Bach 2006: 529-530; my italics)

If one can imagine a cinematic moment when a figure climbs this monument blindfolded and then, only when at the top, is allowed to ‘oversee’ the city of Calcutta below—an altered reality—which also happens to be that figure’s first sighting of the city, one can get close to the idea that this paper is trying to foreground. In other words, the paper proposes to put forth a visualisation of the city from the heightened vantage point of one of its iconic monuments without dissociating itself from the cultural history of that monument itself and its complicated relationship to the spatial formations below. There can be thousands of ways of looking at a city for the first time, both temporally and ontologically. However, not all of these vantages carry equal weight. Some ways of looking become institutionalised over time, mostly—if not only—through acts of representation/repetition of that particular vantage point. One can propose this problematic from the other end: over time and a range of cultural reproductions, a certain vantage point becomes more visible than others, having enjoyed the advantages of repetition through representation, and seems to stake a claim to being foundational. The Ochterlony Monument in Calcutta is one such prominent and pregnant repository of both cultural and visual imagination. The early nineteenth century edifice (built in 1828) was once a triumphant British war memorial; then the site of colonial visualization of the panorama of the city till it trespassed into the period of post-coloniality as the chief site of Calcutta’s political spectacles and multitudinous congresses. Built of eastern architectural traditions, this unique, erect form was also at the same time a foundational symbol of metropolitan Calcutta, repeatedly photographed, mined, and cited in endless visual reproductions, both in the colonial period and since. Later, as an act of symbolic purging of this ‘history’, it was rebaptised as an Indian war memorial (called the Shaheed Minar or the ‘Martyr’s Tower’) and co-opted as a tourist site, with a complex representational relationship with the urban spaces around it, while being available for all forms of impervious gazing at the downtown city-space. Calcutta, the city-space below, is a rather complex formation in itself. Birthed, governed, administered, and sustained for over two and half centuries as an archetypal ‘colonial’ assembly, Calcutta per se was born into colonial modernity, was largely without a recorded history of the premodern, and was sustained by a colonial logic of administrative dispensation and

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governance. For most city historians, Calcutta is best dated to an August day in 1690, when thanks largely to the adventurism and industry of a cunning English trader called Jobus Charnock, was officially founded as a new trading post. Within a little more than a century, Calcutta assumed the explicit shape of a colonial metropolis, invested with the efficiency and industry of being the capital of a large empire. Growing at a rate that was unimaginable anywhere else in India, colonial Calcutta was not unused to spectres of violence and conflict; however, the surety of its energetic subsistence managed to prevail over the uncertainty of its anxieties. It grew faster than any other Indian city before or after, sustained by commercial energy, immigrant aspirations, and colonial instrumentality, first ushering in almost every mark of the modern Indian state within its own, fervent confines. Most things that Calcutta housed were to become fundamental to South Asia itself: the modern judiciary, civil services, postal service, railways and transportation, electricity, science and invention, telegraph and telecommunication, printing, radio and broadcasting,and later in the colonial period, social reforms, modern letters, photography, the stage, and cinema. No wonder early in its colonial life it came to be known as the Second City of the British Empire, the seat of both technocratic power and modern intellectual ambition, of settlers and immigrants from across the globe, of local enterprise and global trade, of mighty architectural monuments and great modern institutions of education and knowledge. In many ways, Calcutta was a spectacular, secular reimagination of a European city. Calcutta’s becoming a visual site is intrinsic to its attractions as a primary site of colonial modernity in South Asia.2 Why it was able to become such a success is, however, a matter of deep disagreement. The swampy conditions of Calcutta’s topography attracted virulent disapproval from the very early days, when in the 1760s Warren Hastings, buoyed by his victory over the local Nawab, planned to shift the the company’s administration from the imperial city of Murshidabad to the emergent new urban dispensation downstream on the Hugli, which was by then known as Calcutta. To bypass the unfavourable conditions, writes Natasha Eaton, Hastings’ supporters—in good Whig tradition—wanted to recast the city in mythic terms. If one part of this mythologising was the 2 The Calcutta High Court, designed by Walter Granville, was inspired by the Cloth House in Belgium’s Ypres city, including the famous, 180 feet belfry. The Old Mint resembles the Temple of Minerva in Athens while the Kedlestone Hall in Derbyshire provided the inspiration for the Governor House. There are several buildings with Corinthian, Gothic revivalist, Ionic, Eton and Italian Doric influences. There are also several examples, from the late colonial era, of the Art Deco style.

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creation of the Black Hole episode (Chatterjee 2012), the other concerned the spatial appropriation of the city’s central districts. Eaton writes: In the development and codification of the modern city, public monuments, architecture, as well as maps and artistic and pathological topography (as a form of ‘paper memory’) performed a crucial role in the consecration and maintenance of history as colonialism’s lieux de mémoire. Like early maps of the city, topographical views highlight the tiny colonial district between the Esplanade and the Town Square as being the most fashionable as well as political heart of the ‘White Town’. (Eaton 2013: 68)

Eaton’s critique helps us to relook at how a small trading outpost, competing with more established trading hubs upstream the Hugli, became the commercial epicentre of British India and a touchstone of colonial modernity. Drawing from Eaton, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the mythical projections of its early rulers were concomitant to how that space came to be visually imagined, mapped, reconstituted, and discursively disseminated. In other words, Calcutta’s spatial and conceptual urbanity is ontologically a condition of its coloniality and should hence be understood within that historical and genealogical legacy. Further to its origins having been reimagined in hyperbolic projections, Calcutta’s spatial legacy remains coupled to the conditions under which they came to the fore. As Swati Chattopadhyay writes in her book-length critique of the European instrumentality of establishing a historical vantage point for colonial cities: The complex multi-layered landscape of colonial Calcutta demands a multicentred approach. Instead of a fixed-point perspective from historian to artefact, we need to adopt a mobile perspective that describes the heterogeneous topography of power. Such a mobile perspective would help us recognise the historicity and ideological underpinnings of the knowledge we have inherited about the city, and the stories we perpetuate. (Chattopadhyay 2006: 10)

The Ochterlony should hence be seen as one of the sites in the multiple topographies of power that subsequently achieved a degree of mobility within its cultural representation. In the gradual transformation of its cultural, spatial, and conceptual value, the Ochterlony provides a significant archive of colonial memory-making. The Ochterlony’s pre-eminence is further enhanced by it being an obvious site of activity from the earliest days

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of photography in Calcutta. Though it is difficult to assign a particular date to the arrival of photography in Calcutta, it is helpful to remember that the earliest existing records of the city’s imaging show a considerable fondness for Ochterlony, both as an object of looking into as well as a site of looking from. More than one history of the city’s photography refers to this prospect. In The Coming of Photography in India, Christopher Pinney writes: Daguerre’s discovery [also] provoked three long articles on the subject in the Bombay Times in December of the same year (1839) and by January 1840, the Calcutta firm of Thacker, Spink & Co was advertising daguerreotype cameras for sale. By March 1840 the Calcutta Courier was able to record what was almost certainly the first daguerreotype produced in India. Reporting on a ‘highly delighted’ meeting at the Asiatic Society the Courier noted how ‘Several [photographs] were exhibited to the meeting, of the Esplanade and other parts of Calcutta.’ (Pinney 2008: 9; my italics)

There is no consensus as to who this first photographer might be. A surviving reproduction of a daguerreotype of the Sans Souci Theatre—a Parthenonshaped theatre building on what is now Park Street—could be one of the photographs from this ‘lost’ period, since the theatre was partially destroyed by fire in mid-1840s and declined soon after. Siddhartha Ghosh, Calcutta’s own historian of photography, mentions the photograph of the Sans Souci Theatre and dates it to about 1840, which is exceptionally early. He further writes, ‘Calcutta was witness to battle between the photographers of Talbot’s School of calotype and the Daguerrean artists, operating from photographic studios and the Daguerrean galleries respectively’ (Ghosh 1990: 143). One of the early Daguerreans mentioned by Ghosh is Monsieur F.M. Montairo, who was advertising in the Englishman as early as July 1844. One Mr. Schranzhoffer is credited with opening the first full-fledged calotype studio in 1848. Other than this, the earliest extant photography on Calcutta dates to the end of the 1840s at the latest. But the collection Pinney talks about consisted certainly of daguerreotypes. Given the heat and humidity of Calcutta and the price of glass negatives, it must have been a major challenge to reproduce a large panoramic city space on a daguerreotype. Hence most art historians associate the emergence of panoramic photography with the coming of the collodion process. So, it is interesting if not surprising that the first views of Calcutta’s buildings were already being exhibited in the early 1840s. The art historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta, whose work on India’s colonialera art is considered seminal, notes another series of photographs from the same period that could also stake claim to inaugurating Calcutta’s

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long history of imaging. In the catalogue to an exhibition she co-curated, Guha-Thakurta writes: Little is known about the career of the amateur lithographer and photographer Frederick Fiebig who produced [these] images of Calcutta in the 1840s. He is in London in 1856 offering for sale to the East India Company a series of nearly 450 of his hand coloured salt prints of the ‘the principal buildings and the other places of interest at Calcutta, Madras, the Coromandel Coast, Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope.’ Marking photography’s inaugural history in the city [of Calcutta] Fiebig’s works underline the close interface of the camera with pictorial and graphic arts of the period. The fascination with panoramas and use of Calcutta’s favourite landmark, the Ochterlony monument (erected by public subscription in 1828) for the taking of such views is exemplified by a 1858 ten-part series by another little-known pioneer, Josiah Rowe. Over the next decades, the photography of the city’s grand vitas and buildings took off with the arrival in the 1860s and 1870s of Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd and John Edward Sache, and the opening of studios across Calcutta, Bombay and the North Indian hill stations. (Guha-Thakurta 2011: 48-49; my italics)

Incidentally, Josiah Rowe had established a reputation for continuing to privilege the daguerreotype much into 1850s, even when it was already de rigueur to move to the calotype process. Rowe later had a career as an academic at Presidency College, Calcutta. Unlike Rowe, Fiebig was primarily a lithographer based in Calcutta, who took to photography in the late 1840s and produced close to 500 collotypes of the principal buildings and streets of Calcutta, Serampore, and Madras, and then later Singapore. Since the 1840s daguerreotypes mentioned by Pinney are not extant, we have little option but to consider Fiebig and Rowe as the first systematic photographic ‘eyes’ on Calcutta, and the Ochterlony could well be said to be already emerging as a foundational vantage point for photographing the city. Ghosh provides a more detailed account of the extant daguerreotypes of this very early period. He writes that: very few daguerreotypes have survived the hot and humid climate of Calcutta but there are notable exceptions. Two excellent views taken from the top of the Ochterlony Monument by an unknown artist, lie somewhat over-preserved, in an iron chest in the Victoria Memorial Hall. As far it is known, only one daguerreotype taken by (JW) Newland still survives in the competent custody of the Science Museum on London. (Ghosh 1990: 144)

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Before I proceed to the photographs of the monument, we need to briefly look at the details of the monument itself. The Ochterlony Monument was erected in memory of the distinguished British general David Ochterlony, who led Britain to victory in the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814-1816). He was the first British soldier in colonial India to be awarded the Knight of the Grand Cross (GCB) for his services to the British military. A charismatic and influential military commander in his heyday, he fell afoul of the British Governor-General William Amherst and had to quit the army. By then he had converted to Islam and had settled into a lavish Persian life in Delhi with thirteen concubines and an army of servants and elephants. He later ran out of money and died penniless in Meerut in 1825. Partly for architectural reasons and partly as a tribute to his colourful life, the Monument built in his name in Calcutta in 1828 to oversee the vast expanse of green known as the Maidan, was entirely of Middle-Eastern (or West Asian) design. It was built with about Rs. 35,000 raised through public inscription under the supervision of the architect J.P. Parker, who executed the design of Charles Knowles Robinson. It is 165 feet in height, about 40 feet less than the Christopher Wren-designed 202 feet London Monument to the Great Fire, built in 1677, to which the Ochterlony bears a not so surprising element of similarity. The Ochterlony’s cube-shaped base or plinth is an example of Egyptian square-fluted architecture; the column that narrows up to two round-fenced balconies on top is Syrian, and the dome and metal cupola are typically Turkish. The foundation of the edifice is made of up to eighty two 20-foot-long teakwood logs that were pressed 2.4 metres into the soil. On them stand 2.4 metres of masonry built of chalk, burnt bricks, and stone chips. There are 215 (in some accounts, 218) steps inside the Monument that lead to the top. The steps were built as a spiral with one end of each step held together by cast iron while the other end secured into the brickwork. It was a unique undertaking in Calcutta’s history to dedicate such an expensive public monument to a soldier whose connections to Calcutta were, at best, tenuous. Most of Calcutta’s other colonial buildings were dedicated to the offices of the colonial government or to emerging legal, economic, and educational initiatives. The rest were museums, cathedrals, theatres, or mansions for private use. The last bit of Calcutta’s imperial public memorials—marble statues of the British royalty, governors-general, figureheads of the colony, and other functionaries—were common and adorned various public spaces in Calcutta for a long time.3 But an erect, soaring edifice in the 3 There are two major exceptions to this catalogue. The f irst is the unmissable Victoria Memorial, which shares the mnemonic ambivalence of the Ochterlony by embodying the name

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heart of a city, to a figure who had forsaken both the Christian world—which as a Scot he was born into—and the colonial military service to whose highest ranks he had climbed, resists easy taxonomy. Architecturally, the Ochterlony remains a unique structure whose spatial deportment and locational prominence has not only secured it from oblivion, but has in fact ensured for it a surprisingly vibrant afterlife as part of a wide range of political and cultural usages to which the images used in this paper attest. ‘Afterlife’ is here meant as a very specific concept, borrowed from a recent scholarly discussion. As Deborah Cherry writes: The term ‘afterlives’ is adopted here to suggest the restless multiplicity of coexisting versions, representations, imag(in)ings, and interactions taking place in widely distributed circuits of use, replication, and interpretation. Afterlives are constructed in the corporeal, mnemonic, and sensory engagements between people—individuals, groups, institutions—and sites, objects, texts, and images. (Cherry 2013: 3)

Taking the above observations as points of departure, this paper hopes to offer an alternative reading of Calcutta’s emergence into a metropolitan identity by connecting a range of photographic practices over a period of 150 years with the singular figure of the Ochterlony at their centre, either as the optic fulcrum or as the optic object. By atypically juxtaposing pictorial images, this paper intends to interrogate the politics of representation that is contingent upon various ‘visualisations’ of cultural pasts through a complex interplay between real space and imaginary space. In other words, through a close and illustrated discussion of this magnificent monument and its reception in cultural forms, the paper proposes to foreground a identifiable, image-regime that is at play in visualising a site of foundational meaning-making in Calcutta. At the same time, this paper is not an attempt to historicise the photographs of one particular Indian colonial-era monument. Rather, it is an attempt to probe the underlying nature of the photographic gaze as it transported in its physical form from one moment in history to another. This question is more powerfully posited by Christopher Pinney in his most recent essay ‘The Look of History: The Power of the Aesthetic’, in which he foregrounds a method of writing history from a of a sovereign whose real connections to the city remains problematic. The second example is the ‘memorial’ built to the ‘white’ victims of the so-called Black Hole tragedy—based on the accounts of John Holwell—in the form of a 50 ft. Egyptian obelisk by George Nathaniel Curzon, who was the Viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905.

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visual-materialist praxis rather than seeing the visual as a supplement to conventional historiography. He writes: We can approach this question through the following formulation: does the visual serve simply as an illustration of what we already know, or can history be written through the visual and material? Can we escape from the process Carlo Ginzburg describes in which ‘the historian reads into images what he has already learned by other means’? (Pinney 2014: 119)

To that end, the paper proposes to ask, first, if a symptomatic reading of the various visual representations of this site can re-imagine a certain historical memory of the city; second, if the complex interplay of gaze(s) can provoke a rethinking of the history of the transformation of an ambivalent colonial site into an equally ambivalent post-coloniality; and third, if such a critical interrogation could lead towards understanding the Ochterlony as lieu de mémoire [site of memory].

2.2

The Contested Aesthetics of Colonial Photography

But the argument this paper tries to foreground remains half-uttered if we only look at Ochterlony’s importance as a critical vantage point for imperial image-making. It is no less critical to understand how the monument attained such layered mimetic signification over time. To do so, one needs to look closely at recent debates in photography scholarship, which not only challenge simple connections between the object and the image but also those between the object and the conditions of its reproduction. This distinction is extremely crucial for understanding photography’s complex role in the colonies, because, when applied to colonial photographic practices, recent scholarship reveals a good deal more than what is usually considered to be a visual compendium of a sweeping Orientalist project. As Sumathi Ramaswamy writes in her introduction to a recent anthology of writings on the politics of colonial visuality: We are interested not so much in making a case for the sovereignty of the image—that would be a futile, even undesirable exercise—as in arguing against treating it as merely an eye-catching accessory. At the very least, by placing the ‘colonising’ image (and its linked technologies and subjectivities) at the center of our thinking, theorising, and writing, we aim to expand and complicate the archive on the basis of which both

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imperial histories and the histories of modern vision in the industrial age have been written so far. (Ramaswamy 2014: 3)

Extending Ramaswamy’s claims to the case of the Ochterlony Monument, this section proposes an ontological shift from the established notions of colonial visual aesthetics in India towards a more complicated trajectory of colonial photography. More specifically, by ‘complicating the archive’ on the basis of new scholarship on both photography and colonialism, it is possible to interrogate whether and how the Ochterlony’s repertoire in early Indian colonial photography goes well beyond the standard perception of seeing such sites only at the receiving end of the colonial optic. Lately, there has been a proliferation of academic and popular writing, exhibitions and catalogues,4 monographs and books on colonial photography in India. James R. Ryan’s book on colonial photography, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (1998) and Christopher Pinney’s Camera Indica (1998) are now considered to be older books. In recent years, Pinney (2008), Zahid Chaudhary (2012), and Malavika Karlekar (2005; 2013) have made important new contributions to the burgeoning field of enquiry into colonial photography in India. But we must start at the beginning and with Ryan’s book. In his review of the book, Peter Hoffenberg sums up the politics of visuality that Ryan more generally, as well as others working in a specifically Indian context, have claimed were foregrounded by the Empire. Hoffenberg writes: Photography helped address the compelling Victorian obsession with cataloguing and measuring, making some sense out of the twin dilemmas of distance and variety. Common metaphors are important here. To contemporaries, the Empire brought ‘light’, as did photography; the Empire invaded privates pace, as did photography; the Empire penetrated ‘darkness’, as did photography. Both took advantage of distance and mystery to make things close and demystified. Both were allegedly accurate and scientific. (Hoffenberg 1999: 556-557)

The general critical consensus is that colonial photography came to be the chief tool among Empire’s apparatuses of actual and desired control, and studies have highlighted many specif ic instances of how the new recording device was utilised for political mobilisation after 1857. Zahid R. Chaudhary, for example, has written persuasively on how the British Empire, once it assumed full administrative control of India after 1857, sought to launch an anthropological blitzkrieg across India, arming its

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envoys with the fresh technology of photography. In Afterimage of Empire, Chaudhary argues: Following the well-travelled rules of global capital, photography arrives in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that extends and transforms sight for photographers and the body politics, British and Indian alike. Such perceptual transformations are congruent not only with the techno-material changes within photographic practice but also with transformations at the level of aesthetic forms. (Chaudhary 2012: 1)

In a related essay, ‘Phantasmagoric Aesthetics: Colonial Violence and the Management of Perception’ Chaudhary explores the work of Felice Beato in Lucknow after 1857 in which, he claims, a necro-politics (i.e., the skeletons of deceased Indian subjects were exhumed and arranged in front of bombarded ruins for photographic effect) was at work to create the requisite hype for the British victory in the 1857 Mutiny. Chaudhary is rightfully disgusted by the disposition on part of the British administration to concoct a triumphalist visual rhetoric through political uses of photographic evidence. Chaudhary’s postcolonial imperative in perceiving photography as an apparatus of colonial control is obvious, and his outrage is understandable. Drawing from Pinney’s seminal work Camera Indica, Karlekar also stresses the imperial gaze of the years just before and after 1857. Like Chaudhury, she convincingly writes about the increasingly louder argument in the administrative-intellectual circles of British India about the imminent need to make the new-fangled discovery of photography a successful apparatus of control and governance. In the field of medical anthropology and criminology, photographic evidence, says Karlekar, had important import for the colonial state. Karlekar writes: As it moved into becoming a vital part of the colonial state’s structures of surveillance and control, the camera was identified with veracity and truthful representation. This was clearly vital in a climate of growing distrust particularly after 1857, where the rulers felt that they had to embolden themselves with objective evidence and information about a people so different in race, temperament and inclinations. (Karlekar 2005: 39)

The use of photography to construct a new visual regime at the behest of the Empire is not immediately contestable. This is because there is critical consensus that the impetus of newfound ‘realism’ drew out photography’s skewed anthropological importance more powerfully than anything else at

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the time. But this was by all means not the only picture, literally. Without underestimating the Empire’s politics of manufacturing perception, one must also note that there was almost a two-decade gap between photography’s arrival in India and its appropriation as part of the official apparatus of colonial management. To equate photography’s arrival with its imperial uses would be, I argue, somewhat reductive. Moreover, Pinney, and especially Chaudhury and Karlekar, were looking at photographic material that was largely concerned with military symbolism, quarantined ethnicity, medical anthropology, and carte-de-visite portraiture. Much less attention has been paid to architectural and site-specific photography, particularly of more originary spaces like Calcutta, than to those of ‘evidential’ necessity. This is not to claim that urban site-specific photography—of landscapes and monuments—was entirely innocent and hence benignly programmatic in their documentary intention. But it can well be argued that the colonial methods of whitewashing imperial design with photographic certitude, like the Lucknow of Beato or those of India’s ethnic exotica, is much more immediately perceptible than, say, the idiomatic imagery of architectural sites. Such spaces, like Calcutta (and Bombay and Madras), involved a photographic practice that was without the impertinence of the event. Hence, the invisible design of photographing ‘peacetime’ architecture and urban spaces is pregnant with a much more complex interplay of vital possibilities than may always be accessible to the postcolonial critical apparatus. I would propose that considering all kinds of photography to be part of a grand colonial deportment—which strengthens the postcolonial eye, but weakens a historiography of the visible—risks foreclosure of at least four such possibilities, any or all of which could be at play in the constitution of colonial image-aesthetics in the first two decades after the unveiling of the daguerreotype in 1839. These four possibilities I denote as (a) technological ingenuity, (b) the ‘being there’ factor, (c) the metropolitan imaginary, and (d) commercial comportment. To understand how new discoveries of photographic technology might have triggered a newer kind of visual imperative, it is important to look at a general history of photography. Ian Jeffrey (1981) argues that Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process, invented in 1851, inaugurated an age of ‘instantaneous’ photography, signalling a substantive improvement on the popular daguerreotype. One of the pioneers to make use of collodion was Dillwyn Llewelyn, whose Tenby photographs attracted significant attention in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Jeffrey writes: These remarkable images of vapour and breaking waves survive. Yet even after many generations of instantaneous photography they still look

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unusual, largely because they allot such an inferior place to man. Dillwyn Llewelyn, intent on clouds and drifting steam, reduces human involvement to a minimum. Figures in the distance blend with the settings. The pictures, with their large open spaces, sea and sky, have distinctly fatalistic implications. (Jeffrey 1981: 33)

Exactly at the time Llewelyn was breaking new ground, one of the first images of Calcutta was being recorded from the heights of the Ochterlony. And the similarity of composition is unmistakable. Josiah Rowe’s photographs show a distinct tendency to minimise human agency and instead capture the large vistas, open skies, and spatial alignments of the city’s premier colonial settlements (the ‘White Town’). And this was merely the beginning. That Rowe’s ideation of the panorama is not accidental is attested by the fact that the Ochterlony served as a scopic vantage point repeatedly over the nextfew decades as more prominent photographic entourages arrived in the city, most notably the Frenchman Oscar Malitte and Englishman Samuel Bourne (see Figure 2.2 and 2.3). Further, during the Prince of Wales’ tour of Calcutta in 1875 and in the first mapping of the city’s topography done by Survey of India in the dying decades of the nineteenth century, Ochterlony continued to be used for the panoramic imaging of the city space below. This fact helps us to foreground a visual regime connected exclusively to the Ochterlony, to which the paper returns in the last section. But presently, one should note that, even if not for the entire repertoire, at least in the case of Rowe, Malitte, and Bourne, there was surely a technological imperative of eyeing the city from atop its heights. The fact that their work exists in Albumin prints attest to their familiarity with the collodion process—wet or dry—emboldened by which, like Llewelyn, they might have set out primarily to grasp in kaleidoscopic sweep the reach and scope of the photographic apparatus. As commercial photographers, it would only be natural for them to explore the depths of the imaging that collodion could produce. Further in his discussion about the first generation of photographic practitioners, which also draws attention to my second proposed possibility, Jeffrey gives considerable space to Francis Frith. Frith set out to the ‘east’ a number of times—the earliest trip was to Egypt—to take photographs. What distinguished Frith from his immediate peers was that Frith’s commentaries were less about the monuments and sights as eternal objects of contemplation, and more about the fact of his travelling as a witness to these remote places. Jeffrey writes:

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In Frith’s photographs, the focuses become thresholds, opening into continuous spaces […] To some degree Frith photographed in this way in the late fifties because his medium allowed him to do so—the collodion process […] But it is also true that Frith worked with a new emphasis: above all he wanted to give the feel of things, to show just what it was like to be there, on those roads, among just those rocks. (Jeffrey 1981: 35)

Can we not underline a similar trajectory for Rowe, Mallitte, and Bourne? Or other early Indian photographers like Edward Sache, John Murray, Linnaeus Tripe, or Edmund Lyon? Calcutta may not have had the aura of a Cairo or Constantinople, but for many British and European citizens it embodied the Empire’s most discernible achievements in the East. So it would not be erroneous to identify a sentiment similar to that of Frith at work here too, provoking among photographers the need to be in Calcutta and to be able to observe the new city from the vantage of its chief site of elevation. Also, many European photographers were travelling across Asia, strengthening the case for travelling photography that was focused on locations rather than pandering to structural surveillance on behalf of the Empire. In Calcutta, Oscar Mallitte was one such figure. It should be noted that Frith is a special case as far as early Calcutta photography is concerned. There is no proof of that Francis Frithcame to India, but a large number of pictures of old Calcutta are incorrectly assigned to his name. This is because a group of photographers, of which Oscar Mallitte was the most prominent, had most likely sold their India collection to Frith’s company in the late nineteenth century. It could be possible that having missed out on his India voyage, Frith quickly acquired a large collection and ascribed his name to them, to continue with his pronounced fascination to be at the scene himself. But many of these photos actually belong to the little-known Mallitte, who remains an intriguing figure in early photography in India. Neither of these two possibilities—technology and locationality—entirely undermine a programmed politics of representation, but neither of them are the same as being at the beck and call of the Empire’s controlling ministrations. The study of colonial photography should hence distance itself from exclusively referring to the photographs in terms like ‘light and darkness’, ‘techno-materiality and perception’, and ‘surveillance and control’. Such photography also lends itself to a more visual vocabulary of looking and seeing, continuity and confrontation, engagement and enumeration, that reinforces a colonial scopic regime that is wider than the imperial lens.

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The third possibility is of a more complicated nature, whose import is much more historically nuanced than technological innovation or a travelling impetus. It concerns Calcutta’s emergence as a visual motif, concomitant to its gaining of prominence as one of modernity’s most effective metropolitan manifestations in the colonies. Somewhat like the European capitals of modernity—primarily Paris and London—but on a lower scale, Calcutta’s burgeoning architectural and commercial flamboyance was unmistakable fodder for knowing, mapping, and recording, as much as for the photographic lens. In another context, the postcolonial scholar Neil Lazarus argues that the modernist scholarship that considers mid-nineteenth century metropolitan space as intrinsic to, not only a site of, modernity should extend naturally to other colonial cities. He writes: The radical transformation of the built space of the city, subject to creative destruction of capitalist development, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, is not peculiar to London, Paris, Berlin, or New York. Strictly contemporary with developments in these cities—and linked precisely to them—are analogous developments in St Petersburg, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Istanbul and Cairo. In the latter contexts, also, we can note the existence of crisis of representation—an attempt to register ‘the shock of the new’, as the forms of space consciousness and time consciousness demanded by life in urban contexts in which the commodity has become the dominant social form are counterpoised with inherited ways of seeing and knowing. (Lazarus 2011: 60; my italics)

In that sense, if early colonial photography of the city’s spectacular new architecture were to establish a certain politics of visual determinism, it would nonetheless be true that that same politics could only be measured either against itself or against similar other metropolitan formations in Europe. Unlike Delhi, Cawnpur, or Lucknow, there was no template of urbanity that could be juxtaposed against the emerging, imperious control of the Empire. Since Calcutta’s architectural and spatial landmarks were mounted on an imaginary, blank slate of memory (i.e., there was no identifiable inheritance and hence no violation of that memory), there is no way to understand the degree of colonial control of the visual space unless the objects in the picture refer back to themselves. To that end, my understanding is that the new possibility of early colonial photography in Calcutta cannot be said to have served the Empire’s interests in any obvious way. If at all, it only sought to create a flattering portrait of a grand city-in-the-making, to the point of almost mimicking the emergence of the modern metropolis in Europe.

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The final possibility is factual. Many of the early photographers, as per the records and minutes of photographic societies—especially in Calcutta and Bombay—were primarily amateur photographers looking to establish businesses around the new invention, smelling great commercial opportunities. Most of them went on to set up shop in Calcutta with a dedicated customer base not only of the British elite, but also of a growing number of Westernised Indians. The most famous among these studios were Bourne and Shepherd (which shut down as late as 2016) and Johnston and Hoffman, but advertisements in The Statesman, the premier English-language daily newspaper, reveal, at least from 1875 onwards several establishments in and around the Chowringhee: Harrington and Norman, W. Newman and Co, John Blees, Stanley Oakes and Co, J. Murray and Co, F. Kapp and Co, Kodak, Bengal Photographers, Bathgate and Co, photo artists Captain Stretton and Raymond, and the pioneering Anglo-American Bioscope Company Pathé, which had its Indian headquarters in Bombay and dedicated agents in Calcutta’s Great Eastern Company (1992). These establishments advertised a range of photographic services from outdoor photography to portraiture, and sold everything from camera and films to early cinema paraphernalia like animatographs and oxyliths. It would be not wrong to assume that a robust commercial culture in and around Calcutta’s business districts grew out of photography’s unique appeal, both personal and public, which expanded the cultural sphere around photography both as a recording tool and as a symbol of modernity. Either way, photography’s popularity undercuts scholarly claims of the exclusive use of photography for colonial control.

2.3

Architectural Imperium as Colonial Memory

Having discussed the Ochterlony’s significant claim as an architectural vantage point and the possibilities that could have informed the earliest extant photographic specimens in which it appears, we should turn to an ontological reading of the various likenesses of the object of enquiry. A materialist/historicist enquiry would doubtlessly look more closely at the conditions of the production of the images and the life of the imagists. But we should look at the images only as they exist, with less emphasis on the photographing subject or the photographic apparatus. This is partly to invoke a visual narrative of the Ochterlony’s symptomatic dominance of the scene of enquiry, as well as to connect it ontologically to the city’s founding—even if contested—claim as a site of colonial modernity. In other words, it would be helpful to compare photographs of the same object

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Figure 2.1 Uncoloured lithograph of a panorama of Calcutta drawn after nature by Frederick Fiebig and printed by T. Black of Asiatic Lithographic Press in Calcutta in 1847

Courtesy of the India Office Library Collection, British Library, London, United Kingdom

Figure 2.2 Photograph from Samuel Bourne’s seven-part series of the panoramic view of Calcutta from Ochterlony Monument, taken in the 1860s

Courtesy of the India Office Library Collection, British Library, London, United Kingdom

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Figure 2.3 Photograph by Oscar Malitte, dating to the 1870s, from an album entitled Photographs of India and Overland Route

Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, from the collection acquired from F. Frith and Company

over time—partially invoking the idea of Barthes’s ‘community of images’ (1982)—to interrogate whether they reveal Benjamin’s idea of the ‘optical unconscious’ (2008a/1935). This idea is explored further in Benjamin’s essay ‘A Little History of Photography’(2008b/1931), where he claims that photographic object(s) that remain hidden to the unaided eye manage to phantasmagorise those same object(s) through recurrent fetishism. In other words, through repeated reproduction, photography ends up sequestering the object from the conditions of their actual existence, thereby inducing them with a sense of sacred or giving them a halo. Let us turn to Figure 2.1 to 2.3, all of which display how the Ochterlony helped to reproduce the central governing district of the city. The photographs attest to the recurrent theme of using the Ochterlony as a vantage point from which to look at the burgeoning city from above. One could gain substantial height on reaching the top of the Ochterlony, and the panoramic view reinforces the sensation of lording over the scenery. All three images show the large expanse of the habitation on the upscale Chowringhee Road as it was taking shape in the mid-nineteenth century, when Calcutta’s gains

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in commerce, art, and education were considerably higher than most other colonial cities. As clear as the sky that frames them, the photographs extol the spectacular spatial magnificence of the colonial metropolis emerging from what were originally large swathes of swamp on the eastern bank of the Hugli. Figure 2.1, dated about 1847, shows a lithograph by Frederick Fiebig, whose salt prints are possibly the earliest existing photographs of Calcutta. He had done a substantial amount of lithographic work when based out of the city in the 1840s, before turning to calotype photography towards the end of that decade. Quite a few of his handprinted salt prints survive, but here we see an uncoloured lithograph of Calcutta’s panorama that was ‘drawn after nature’ by Fiebig. This collection of lithographs was printed and published in 1847 by one T. Black, who owned the Asiatic Lithographic Press in Calcutta. It is of significance that the vantage point of seeing in this lithograph is almost exactly the same as Rowe’s photographs taken in or about the mid-1850s. There is but one crucial difference: Fiebig’s lithograph seems to be indicating that the river Hugli flowed behind the Governor’s House, which would be toward the city’s east, distorting the real movement of the river that flows north to south, with the House lying at some distance from its nearest point—a distance that Rowe’s picture makes clear. It is most likely that Fiebig takes adequate liberty, not too unusual for a lithographer, to bring both the Governor’s House and the river within the same scopic field while continuing to claim the image was ‘drawn after nature’. Suffice it to say that, starting with Rowe, the amateur photographers also started to look for a similar kaleidoscope, albeit emboldened by the camera’s realist prospect. Rowe’s images show the expanse of the Maidan from the Ochterlony stretched—as it was—to the river on the horizon. Primarily a surveyor, Rowe was appointed a professor of drawing and surveying at Presidency College, Calcutta in 1856. A bit is known about him from John Falconer’s A Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Photographers in South and Southeast Asia, which is an appendix to his seminal work on India’s pioneering photographers (Falconer 2001: 140). At the same time, Rowe had exhibited five collotype views of different parts of Calcutta at the Photographic Society of Madras that were deemed to be ‘clearly focused, well printed and of a good tone’, as per the Indian Journal of Art, Science and Manufacture (1856, 2nd series, 1(4): 175)—although, ironic as it may seem, the journal also criticised Rowe for placing his horizon too high, arguing that ‘the lines of perspective in consequence too sudden and angular in the foreground to be pleasing’. However, his five collodion views of Calcutta and 25 daguerreotypes (including a five-part panorama of the city) displayed

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at the Photographic Society of Bengal Exhibition of March 1857 received great acclaim. The Society meeting of 21 January 1857, cited in the Journal of the Photographic Society of Bengal (no. 3, 20 May 1857) commented: ‘some daguerreotypes by Mr. Rowe, comprising a panoramic view from the top of the Ochterlony Monument. Nothing but a strong magnifying glass could do justice to the minute accuracy and beauty of these pictures’. In Figure 2.2, Samuel Bourne virtually repeats the gaze of Rowe, except that Bourne highlights the Governor’s House with unfailing acuity. This picture, taken in the late 1860s, exhibits unusual clarity, highlighting not just Bourne’s image-sense but also his command over the dry-collodion process, which Rowe, a dedicated practitioner of the daguerreotype, lacked. Oscar Mallitte’s lens in Figure 2.3 captures the belfry of what was then India’s Supreme Court (and has since the shift of capital in 1911, become the High Court). The court is at a distance, visible in its Ypressian glory, which dates the picture to 1872 or after. Malitte was a French photographer working in Calcutta in the 1860s who taught photography at the School of Industrial Art. He is said to have sold most of his collection to Francis Frith’s company in England; his photographs are available in several archives under the title Photographs of India & Overland Route. Samuel Bourne’s life as a pioneering commercial photographer is well documented. The son of a Staffordshire farmer, Bourne bloomed early under the tutelage of the distinguished daguerreotypist Richard Beard. Having found fame in England as a landscape photographer, he came to Calcutta, looking for money and fame, in 1863. He was, by most accounts, full of conceit for his origins and bullying towards the natives but had a ‘lunatic persistence in pursuit of his hazardous expeditions. Getty Images curator Sarah Macdonald (2005) and Xavier Guégan (2011) testifies to the same. He found Calcutta already flourishing with photographic business. He left for Kashmir and the Himalayas and came back only when his partnership with Colin Shepherd matured in 1867 as the studio ‘Bourne and Shepherd’. 4 It cannot be denied that the Monument makes it possible for the first time to view the city as an organic, spatial entity, if not in full at least in a substantial measure. Undeniably, within two decades of its completion this 4 ‘Drawn from Light: Early Photography and the Indian Subcontinent’, IGNCA New Delhi, August 2014; ‘An Eye on Empire: Photographs of Colonial India and Egypt’, University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2014; ‘The Colonial Eye: Early Portrait Photography in India’, Berlin, Museum für Fotografie, 2012; ‘Through the Colonial Lens: Photographs of 19th and 20th Century India’, Pacific Asia Museum California, 2011; ‘Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation 1850-1900’, Fowler Museum, UCLA, California, 2004; India Through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911, Dehejia, V. (ed.). Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2000.

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memorial to a special British military officer had come to serve a completely different purpose, as the panoptical apparatus through which the city could be semi-aerially considered for the first time. Calcutta one of Empire’s most protracted metropolitan enterprises after London was now available in full view, under the overarching, omnipresent gaze of the photographic eye. In a brief essay on panoramic photography in colonial Singapore, Jason Toh has highlighted the technical virtuosity that was needed to get the full benefit of the photographic device. According to Toh, panoramic photography was an arduous, technically meticulous process since each glass plate had to be prepared, exposed, and developed individually and even exposures had to be achieved to ensure a consistency of tone and definition. Such technical virtuosity was not possible without the dry-collodion method available since the mid-1850s, as the wet-collodion method necessitated the development of the glass negative on the spot after making the exposure (Toh 2008: 26). Toh further discusses the privileged position that the commercial colonial photographer offers the viewer, providing unprecedented access to the gradual emergence of the colonial city of Singapore. Images 2.1 to 2.3 attest to almost the same conditions, to the extent that even the colonial governor’s residence, seen here as central to the scope of the image, is replicated in the Singapore pictures too. Toh stresses the fact that panoramic photographs were popular across the colonial world because they made excellent commercial sense. The penchant for panoramic vistas go back well into the history of the British East India Company’s painters and, in that sense, the new panoramic photography provides a continuity with older methods of envisioning the burgeoning city’s magisterial edifices. On the other hand, photography arrived across the world with the completely unique claim of embodying properties that could provide unmistakable fidelity to nature, and hence evidence of documentation. In between this continuity and contestation lies the real nature of the genre of panorama. On closer inspection, Rowe’s and Malitte’s photographs are also connected by the lonely equestrian statue of Henry Hardinge, Governor General of India from 1841 to 1848. With the advantage of its height, the Ochterlony Monument seems able to dwarf a leading colonial figure’s imperial posture into near insignificance. Symbolically, the photographs generously embrace the city’s open and large spaces and reduce the agency of its human architects to a bare minimum. Compared with earlier photographs, it is also interesting how new buildings have emerged at the background of the more recent photographs—homes of the colonial elite, department stores, missionary offices, and the institutions of education and instruction that still dot much

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of Chowringhee Road. The optical measure of these photographs can be compared to aerial photography and the imagination of control that is intrinsic to such a spatial organisation of vision. On the other hand, the dwarfing of the Hardinge statue and the emergence of a series of buildings can also be read as a symptom of the coming of age of a metropolis—from a colonial outpost with specific outlets to service the commercial hunger of The East India Company,to a city on the full flight of modernity. It is the moment of Calcutta’s coming into a full consciousness of its spatial deportment, a consciousness that is projected onto the viewer from the heights of the Ochterlony. Hence these pictures mark the historic moment when the city came to look at itself, through photography. There are further theoretical issues that we need to consider.In her book The View from Above: The Science of Social Space, Jeanne Haffner (2013) discusses the new science of social space that gained currency in interwar France. Haffner writes: To illuminate the role of aerial photography—a novel twentieth century technique of observation and representation that was closely associated with the French colonial state and military—in the emergence of this new way of conceptualising socio-spatial relations. For (Marcel) Griaule, or for his student the ethnographer and urban sociologist Paul Henry Chombart de Lauwe [the main figure of this book], the view from the airplane was crucial for connecting the ‘social’ with the ‘spatial’. Yet just a few decades later, proponents of the ‘social space’ concept—not least Henri Lefebvre—expressed much suspicion of the aerial perspective, calling it the ‘space of state control’. (Haffner 2013: 3; my italics)

Haffner’s main contention is that photography may be used to dictate social control through spatial control, but the gaze of aerial photography emerged long before that gaze could be understood as captive. A similar retroactive tendency helps us locate the essentialist streak in the kind of photographic critique that sees colonial aesthetics to be in service of a postcolonial reading of history that, to recall Pinney’s observations, ‘we already know’. According to this postcolonial reading, the ideology of the image as available to us is transferred back to the photographer, and thereby confirms its status as subservient to the wanton ministrations of the Empire. If we read the images outside of this imperative, as I have tried to do above, we can get dramatically different results. My reading of the images further taps into what Rancière calls studium. In The Future of the Image, Rancière offers a critique of Barthes’ main

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contentions in Camera Lucida (1982), which Rancière argues celebrates images for their punctum. Rancière takes the opportunity to develop the idea and put his weight behind the contrarian idea of the studium. He writes: [Barthes] wants to establish a direct relationship between the indexical nature of the photographic image and the material way it affects us: the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect that he contrasts with the studium, or the information transmitted by the photograph and the meanings it receives. The studium makes the photograph a material to be decoded and explained. (Rancière 2010: 10)

Further, Rancière insists that the photographic image confronts the mythologist in Barthes, but Barthes refuses to acknowledge it: What you are taking for visible selfevidence is in fact an encoded message whereby society or authority legitimates itself by naturalising itself, by rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. Barthes bends his stick in the other direction by valorising, under the title of punctum, the utter selfevidence of the photograph, consigning the decoding messages to the platitude of the studium. (Rancière 2010: 10-11)

Unimpressed, Rancière wants to side with the studium. ‘[Studium] tells us that the image speaks to us precisely when it is silent, when it no longer transmits any message to us [… when it is] the abolition of all chatter’ (Rancière 2010: 11). From this discussion, it can well be understood that the way colonial production of photography has been read foregrounds its immediate results, the punctum. But once we read the image by foregrounding the studium, the pictorial articulation of space continues to hold forth long after the Monument’s relationship with its surroundings has changed. This is also the moment when the photographs given above graduate from being just recorded objects in the service of a greater imperial design into objects that solicit a language of their own, what Rancière calls ‘the discourse encoding a history’. To that end, then, the veracity of the photograph’s claims, whether justified or suspect, is not concurrent with its relationship with the governing order that was contemporary to its actual date of production. In other words, the Monument’s relationship with the surrounding buildings, especially the Governor’s House and Supreme Court, remains unchanged even when seen from the silence of the future, and is therefore always pregnant with a continuity that can be denied to an image that too readily lends itself to the probes of historicity of its production.

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The post-colonial Ochterlony

It is this sense of continuity that informs my reading of more recent— postcolonial—representations of the Ochterlony. From the theoretical understanding of visuality, I argue that as the city developed well beyond the Ochterlony’s panoramic gaze it was necessary for a more intimate aesthetics to evolve. The importance of the Ochterlony as a vantage point did not continue much beyond the early 1900s, not only because the romance of its elevation died down, but also because of the emergence of other, more fraught sites that embodied newer visual imaginations of the city. This could well parallel the narrative in Europe where, at least in topographic photography, the flâneur eye replaced panoptical sight in the late nineteenth century. Michel de Certeau’s (1984) and George Simmel’s (1950 [1903]) now-classic works on the metropolis stand at the cusp of this change. Such a narrative is usually denied to a city like Calcutta, not least because modernity and post-coloniality have come to be seen as complex modes of simultaneous—and discontinuous—habitation—a discontinuity that does not readily apply to the European cities. However, this discontinuity is far from total and irreconcilable. On the contrary, an image-aesthetic travelled well into the post-colonial period, even when a form of aggressive decolonisation often led to the purging of the colonial memory and symbolism of monuments. This is similar to Ashish Chadha’s argument in an essay on the politics of heritage formation in the context of a colonial cemetery in Calcutta. Chadha writes: [In this paper] I argue that postcolonial ambivalence is to be found in the invisible hyphen between the post and colonial of the postcolonial. These monuments of colonial memories are signs of temporal ruptures, which disturb the dichotomy of the colonial and the postcolonial and reveal the discomfort of postcolonial ideology in dealing with its colonial past, a past, which spills over into its present. (Chadha 2006: 341)

The colonial Ochterlony, like the cemetery, can be similarly said to be infused with the possibility of both containment and remembrance, eventually reflecting each in the representations that it lends itself to. Given the proliferation of photography by the mid twentieth century, as signalled by the maturation of the newspaper industry, photojournalism, various amateur practices, and improvements in technology, one runs the risk of generalising what could be specific set of illustrations. For this reason, it would be helpful to remember that the next set of pictures has been chosen

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Figure 2.4 A congregation of people near the Monument on a monsoon day

Source: Google Archives of Life Magazine, 1951, Commons

Figure 2.5 Photograph taken by Ahmed Ali titled ‘The Business Centre of Calcutta, 1960’

Courtesy of Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive, CSSS, Calcutta, India

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Figure 2.6 A rally near the Monument in 1970

From the personal collection of photojournalist Aloke Mitra

for this paper symptomatically, but not metonymically. They provide clues to a visual regime, but do not necessarily represent generic undertakings in photography. These four images of the postcolonial Ochterlony—each representing a different decade and photographic practice—show the Ochterlony in various figurative functions: spatial (Figure 2.4), topographical (Figure 2.5), congressional (Figure 2.6), and occupational (Figure 2.7).

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Figure 2.7 A balancing game-show in progress near the Ochterlony; photograph by Santanu Mitra, dated 19 September 1981, from the series Occupations

Courtesy of Chitrabani, Calcutta and Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive, CSSS, Calcutta, India

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Figure 2.4, which is dated 1951 and taken from Life Magazine, shows the Ochterlony on the right, overshadowed by the cloud and Whiteway, Laidlaw & Co.’s by-then-defunct luxury store in the distance. The two colonial era buildings and the Morris Minor taxis add a sense of obvious incongruity to the mass of people in between, scurrying under their umbrellas on a monsoon afternoon. This is an archetypal street-level view of the Maidan area in which the colonial-era buildings are deliberately poised as distanced and forlorn, as if to stress the city’s post-colonial present. But it is those very buildings that deny any easy passage of time within the image. This is similar to the tensions inherent in Figure 2.5, dated 1960, where we see an assortment of buildings jostling for spatial prominence in the downtown areas of Chowringhree East and Dalhousie. In this picture by professional photographer Ahmed Ali, what catches the eye is of course the Howrah Bridge rising prominently above the skyline, unequivocally subverting the Monument’s spatial claim to the city. In isolation, the diminutive Monument stands like a captive moment from the colonial past. The summit of the Monument, once preferred in the visual articulation of the colonial period, is now part of the figuration of a new visual vantage, to whose expansive gaze the once-mighty Monument is held captive. The panoramic imperative is obvious in the image and hence establishes a sense of continuity with the older images, while unmistakably highlighting the spatial relationship between the Governor’s House and the Monument. Figure 2.6, taken c.1970, is crucial because it is equally symptomatic of the Monument’s presence. This image was chosen carefully to highlight the Monument standing against the scene of a dispersing crowd after a political rally. It is important to note here that in August 1969, on the 22nd year of India’s arrival into the post-colonial period, the Monument was renamed by the local government as the Shahid Minar—Martyr’s Tower—an insistence that a dogged vernacular re-naming be forcefully imposed on erstwhile colonial monuments. Previously a Monument to the triumph of British colonial conquest, it was now to be remembered as a monument to the deceased martyrs of India’s colonial struggle. While the Monument was being renamed, the political dispensation—consisting of various subgroups with belligerent ideological formations—were staking claim to governance. Bengal, as a constituent state of the independent Indian republic, was on the verge of a political collapse, having seen three elected governments dismissed in the short, turbulent period between 1967 and 1972. This picture attests to one of the many rallies that were convened during those days of unflinching turmoil. While this context is important to understand the full force of the photograph, its visual impact remains undiminished even when

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Figure 2.8 Publicity material announcing a rally, issued by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

divorced from its newsworthiness. Spatially, the photograph attests to a congressional scenario in which the silhouetted Monument stands distanced from the overpopulated, hyper-occupied space around it. Contrary to Ahmed Ali’s continuity, photojournalist Aloke Mitra’s photograph establishes an immediately identifiable contrast with the colonial images of depopulated urban scenery. Moreover, with the people’s backs to the Monument the towering memorial is reduced to being merely incidental to the scene, while also being the exclusive marker of this metropolitan space. The last photograph, Figure 2.7, brings us close to the present, when the site around the Monument has settled into a practiced insouciance. By the 1980s, when this photograph was taken, the Monument had become a visitor’s touchpoint: a slapdash, touristy tedium. The picture shows a crowd in the background watching Madarir Khela—a kind of amateur, balancing-act version of trapeze. The crowd with its back to the imposing structure carries the full meaning of temporary habitation around the Ochterlony. Most of the crowd and performers here are daily visitors to the city, daily wage-labourers, whose relation to the city is merely transactional. The image transfers their unawareness of the Monument’s immanent meaning into the imminence of the pleasure that they seek in transitory entertainment.

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Figure 2.9 Publicity poster for noted Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s film Bari Theke Paliye (The Runaway Boy, 1958). The artwork is by theatre designer, painter, and illustrator Khaled Choudhury

Before concluding, I want to touch upon a final set of images that are not photographs, but make deft use of images of the Monument. The image depicted in Figure 2.8 is an announcement for a rally of the leftist political parties at the Monument; Figure 2.9 is a publicity poster for the film Bari Theke Paliye (The Runaway Boy, 1958). Made by the noted Bengali auteur Ritwik Ghatak, the poster is a wonderfully cheeky illustration of a young boy’s day out in the city: a jumble of objects and buildings dominated by the rotund form of the Ochterlony on the front left beside the traffic guard. In both of these images, the Monument is extrinsic to the declaration that occasions it pictorialised for the purpose of very different significations. During its days of political mobilisation and then as a governing order, the Leftist political conglomeration in Bengal claimed ownership of the site around the Monument. For it, the renamed Monument carries the right kind of spatial ethic to commemorate their long days as the oppositional political force in the 1960s and 1970s. The film poster, on the other hand, makes use of the Monument’s easy identifiability with the city. Here the Ochterlony stands not as metonymy for the city, but for its easy familiarity and sense of mobility. In that sense, if the first stands for a call to symbolic political action, the other is a plea for popular approval. At one level, both the images tap into mass recollection of the site. Both images are in a headlong rush

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to retrieve the Monument from cultural memory to moderate their own authority. In doing so, they convert the sight of the monument, decoupled from its actual site, into a mobile sign.

2.5 Conclusion In their co-authored introduction to the section titled ‘The Imperial Optic’ in Empires of Vision, Martin Jay and Sumati Ramaswamy (2014) highlight two interrelated concepts as critical to the understanding of colonial photography: interocularity, originally proposed by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge as a constituent element of the cultural field; and intervisuality, as proposed by Nicolas Virzoeff. Interocularity takes note of how the different forms of media—from photography to theatre, from advertisement to chromolithography and film—were all working together and cross-referencing each other in the late colonial period. Intervisuality refers to ‘interacting and interdependent modes of visuality’ that make it possible for each visual illustration—from the odd postcard to grand paintings—to erupt with the possibility of something produced prior to it. In the imperial context, these two ideas are particularly useful, they write, in ‘tracking how incoming “colonial” practices ally with or disrupt more established ones, trigger prior associations, catalyse submerged memories, render the unfamiliar recognisable and frequently reconfigure the recognisable’ (Jay and Ramaswamy 2014: 29). My chief contention in this paper is to achieve something similar not only in the context of the colonial but also in the post-colonial. I have tried to challenge the existing critical reception of colonial photography, especially in the context of Calcutta, by juxtaposing a series of images that open a number of possibilities in the theoretical conceptualisation of visuality—as both a historical and an aesthetic practice—both as an inter-ocular object and an intervisual symptom. Photographic representations of the Ochterlony—itself a memorial of containment (to refer back to Greenblatt’s 1996 essay)—are constant registers of the uncontainability of the city, first as a colonial metropolis exploring a compressed sense of progress and time, and then as a post-colonial conglomeration subject to wanton reorganisation of space, causing it to inhabit a permanent sense of ambiguity. To register this shift, as I have tried to do in the paper, one can look not just into the new regime ushered in by Calcutta’s early photography, but also how that regime administered a compressed sense of time through the reorganisation of its public image into a charged photographic order. In the confrontation of that order—which encountered the colonial at the

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precise moment that it accosted the modern—lies the affect of colonial spectrality, the legitimate registry of the site de mémoire.

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Guégan, X. (2011), ‘Visualizing Alienation: Symbolism and Duality in Samuel Bourne’s Photographs of British India’, Visual Culture in Britain, 12(3): 349-365. Guha-Thakurtha, T. (2011), The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories. Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. Haffner, J. (2013), The View from Above: The Science of Social Space. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hoffenberg, P.H. (1999), ‘Review of James R. Ryan’s book Picturing Empire: Photography and Visualization of British Empire’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 31(3): 555-557. Indian Journal of Art, Science and Manufacture, 2nd series, vol. 1, 1856: 175. Jay, M., and Ramaswamy, S. (2014), ‘The Imperial Optic’, in Empires of Vision, Jay, M., and Ramaswamy, S. (eds.), 25-45. Durham: Duke University Press. Jeffrey, I. (1996), Photography, A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson [1st edition 1981]. Journal of the Photographic Society of Bengal (1857), 3(20), May. Karlekar, M. (2005), Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. — (2013), Visual Histories: Photography in the Popular Imagination. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lazarus, N. (2011), The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macdonald, S. (2005),’Man of his Time’, B&W (Getty Foundation): 94-95. Mitchell, W J.T. (1996), ‘What Do Pictures “Really” Want?’,in October, 77: 71-82. Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between Memory and History: Lieux de Mémoire’, Roudebush, M. (trans.), Representations 26: 7-24. Pinney, C. (1998), Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (2008), The Coming of Photography in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. — (2014), ‘The Look of History: The Power of the Aesthetic’, in New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices, Chatterjee, P., et al. (eds.), 115-138. New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Ramaswamy, S. (2014), ‘The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empire’, in Empires of Vision, Jay, M., and Ramaswamy, S. (eds.), 1-22. Durham: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2010), The Future of the Image, Elliot, G. (trans.). New Delhi, Navayana. Ryan, J.R. (1998), Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, G. (1950), ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Wolff, K. (trans.), 409-424. New York: Free Press [1st German edition 1903]. Toh, J. (2008), ‘Photographic panoramas by German and Chinese photographers in Singapore’, IIAS Journal (Leiden) 46: 26.

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About the author Sayandeb Chowdhury is Assistant Professor in the School of Letters at Ambedkar University, Delhi and a doctoral fellow in the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, where he is working on the history and practice of early photography in and on Calcutta. He was a UKNA Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden in 2015 and a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow, 2016. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Film International, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, South Asia Review, The Economic and Political Weekly, European Journal of English Studies, and thematic anthologies published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Karnac Books, University of Brussels Press, and University of Nebraska Press. He also regularly contributes to leading Indian publications on books, politics, and cinema. Email: [email protected]

3

‘Centering’ the City The Upattasanti Pagoda as Symbolic Space in Myanmar’s New Capital of Naypyidaw 1 Donald M. Seekins Abstract In November 2005, Myanmar’s military regime, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), announced the relocation of the country’s capital from Yangon (Rangoon) to an entirely new site in central Myanmar that was named Naypyidaw (‘Abode of the King’ in the Burmese language). This article discusses the motivations of SPDC Chairman Senior General Than Shwe in undertaking this huge and costly project and compares Naypyidaw in design and layout to the earlier capitals of Mandalay and Yangon. It argues that Than Shwe’s construction of a huge stupa, the Upattasanti Pagoda, in Naypyidaw’s centre was meant to assert its identity as an authentically Myanmar national capital, in the spirit of ‘to be Myanmar is to be Buddhist’. Keywords: Naypyidaw, Myanmar (Burma), Pagoda religion, Theravada Buddhism, Traditionalism

The relocation of the capital of Myanmar (Burma) from Yangon (Rangoon) to Naypyidaw in late 2005 surprised both Burmese and foreign observers (see Figure 3.1). Myanmar is one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries. According to Asian Development Bank statistics, the proportion of Myanmar’s population living below the poverty line, 25.6 percent, is higher than in any other country in Southeast Asia, save for East Timor (49.9 percent), Laos (26.0 percent), and Cambodia (25.9 percent) (Asian Development Bank 2014). 1 I wish to express my deep thanks to the Graduate Research Program of the University College of the University of Maryland (UMUC) for providing me with a grant in 2012 that made possible fieldwork in Naypyidaw. UMUC has electronically published an earlier version of this paper.

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch03

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The construction of an entirely new city to be the national capital was not only prohibitively expensive in a country that desperately needed investment in health and education, but also seriously disrupted the smooth running of the state, as thousands of civil servants were obliged to move from their old homes in Yangon to their new worksite in the centre of the country. There was considerable waste of scarce resources; for example, facilities such as a National Library and National Museum had been built in Yangon after 1988 but were built again in Naypyidaw. Yangon has a Zoological Garden built during the British colonial era, but another zoo was set up in the new capital, complete with an air-conditioned pavilion where penguins happily frolic, protected from the merciless tropical sun (Beaton 2008). Myanmar has been governed by a military regime for more than half a century, following General Ne Win’s establishment of a revolutionary junta in 1962, overthrowing the parliamentary democracy of Prime Minister U Nu; his authoritarian, socialist-oriented regime collapsed in the face of massive public demonstrations in 1988 and was replaced by a new junta, the State Law and Restoration Council (SLORC), whose leader, General Saw Maung, was both a crony of Ne Win and a representative of the younger generation of military officers. In general, the SLORC followed the contours of earlier economic reform in the People’s Republic of China begun in 1978, presiding over a dismantling of the socialist economic system and promoting trade and investment ties with foreign countries. But it also perpetrated a wide variety of human rights violations that inspired international criticism and sanctions from western countries. In 1992, the ailing Saw Maung was replaced by Senior General Than Shwe as SLORC chairman and head of the Myanmar armed forces; in 1997, Than Shwe reorganised the SLORC, renaming it the State Peace and Development Council, or SPDC. However, Myanmar’s capital remained at the old colonial site of Yangon until 2005. After 2005, there was much speculation concerning Than Shwe’s motivations for decreeing the capital’s shift. Surveying the academic and journalistic literature since that year, one discovers that the motivations attributed to him can generally be placed into one of three categories, which in order of descending credibility are: (1) strategic factors, especially the military regime’s fear of continued popular unrest in the crowded old capital of Yangon and the advantages of moving the capital inland in terms of controlling the unstable ethnic minority and border areas adjacent to China, Thailand, and India; (2) historical and symbolic factors, including the long history of Burmese kings building new capital cities for themselves and Than Shwe’s desire to quit a city whose built environment is a reminder of

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Figure 3.1 Region of Naypyidaw

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd, based on Lubeigt 2012: 20

the shameful colonial past; and (3) occult factors, particularly the Senior General’s fears—stirred up by his personal astrologer—that if he did not quit Yangon, his regime would fall.2 However, as the description of the Upattasanti Pagoda given below makes clear, the establishment of the new capital was not bereft of a positive 2 See, for example, Maung Aung Myoe, ‘The Road to Naypyidaw: Making Sense of the Myanmar Government’s Decision to Move its Capital’ (2006); Dulyapak Preecharushh, Naypyidaw: the New Capital of Burma (2009); Donald M. Seekins, ‘“Runaway Chickens” and Myanmar Identity: Relocating Burma’s Capital’ (2009); and Guy Lubeigt, Nay Pyi Taw: Une Résidence royale pour l’armée birmane (2012).

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vision, since Than Shwe did not only want to establish a new and more easily defensible power centre, but also a distinctly Burman or Myanmar capital, appropriately ‘centred’ through the construction of a new Buddhist holy place. To pro-democracy Burmese and their supporters abroad, the shift of the capital was testimony to the SPDC’s indifference to the hardships and suffering it caused to its own people, including the forced relocation of villagers living in the new capital district. But following the disbandment of the junta in early 2011, the establishment of a formally civilian (but militarycontrolled) government, and the generally successful cooperation between Than Shwe’s successor, President Thein Sein, and the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s political system now has a measure of international legitimacy, and Naypyidaw’s raison d’être is no longer severely questioned. In 2013, the new capital served as host city for the Southeast Asian Games, and in May and November of the following year summits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were held there, featuring the attendance of US President Barack Obama, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and other world leaders who have supported the resumption of development aid and private sector investment to Myanmar. Presently, Naypyidaw remains Myanmar’s capital, while Yangon functions as the country’s commercial centre. In January 2012, I visited Naypyidaw to do fieldwork, looking around the new capital’s built and natural environments and talking with local residents. The results of my research visit do not necessarily refute the view, expressed by a human rights activist, that the new capital ‘is a fantasy land of male military vanity, the embodiment of their own delusions of grandeur’ (Mydans 2007). But I have tried in this paper to give that view greater historical and cultural depth.

3.1

Tradition, Modernity, and Traditionalism

If the establishment of Naypyidaw (which in Burmese means ‘royal city’ or ‘abode of the king’) was itself a mystery, Than Shwe’s inauguration of the construction of a major pagoda on a hill between Naypyidaw and the old town of Pyinmana in November 2006 surprised no one. Since 1988, when the military junta came to power, it has carried out what one foreign observer has called a ‘Buddhist building boom’, sponsoring ambitious religious construction projects in Yangon and other parts of the country (Fraser-Lu 1997: 4-5). Some of this construction was supported by foreign companies

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with investments in post-socialist Myanmar who wished to gain the favour of the SLORC/SPDC top commanders.3 In this paper, I describe the role of Theravada Buddhist pagoda religion as a form of traditionalism in post-1988 Myanmar, looking specifically at how the construction and devotional rituals performed at Than Shwe’s stupa, known as the Upattasanti Pagoda, constitute an attempt by the Senior General and his successor to legitimise the new national capital and a new constitutional order. 4 The immense and gaudy pagoda is also a symbol of Myanmar’s premier status among Buddhist countries, where the religion forms the core of the national identity (as expressed in the old phrase, ‘to be Burmese is to be Buddhist’). If modernity often creates confusion about what is ‘native’ and what is ‘foreign’, ‘eastern’ and ‘western’, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’—spawning a kind of mental homelessness and alienation—traditionalism is designed to show people what is authentic, what is ‘real’, what actually belongs to ‘us’ as a national, ethnic, or racial community. By clearly defining ‘Self’ and keeping the ‘Other’ at a psychological distance, social harmony and stability can be defended, even in the face of unavoidable or unwanted foreign influences. In other words, while the autocratic Than Shwe was aware that the Myanmar Kingdom of the pre-colonial past could not be restored (despite naming the new capital ‘the abode of the king’), he attempted to—in part— reconstruct it, to create what one Myanmar journalist called ‘a kingdom without a king’.5 And in Myanmar, the most readily available medium through which this can be done is the sasana, the Buddhist religion, which brings people together on the platforms of pagodas alongside (or under) their leaders, to offer homage to the Buddha and his teachings. Than Shwe and Thein Sein do not live in the world of Anawrahta, Bayinnaung, and Alaungpaya, the three old conqueror-kings whose statues glare down upon a parade ground in the Military Zone east of Naypyidaw where Myanmar’s most important secular holiday, Armed Forces Day, has been observed by the country’s top leaders every year since 2006 on March 27. 3 For example, the South Korean company Lucky-Goldstar donated an elevator to the Shwedagon Pagoda so visitors would not have to ascend a long stairway to the pagoda platform (Seekins 2004: 576). 4 After a very long period of deliberation by a constitutional convention, the new basic law of the ‘Republic of the Union of Myanmar’ was ratified in a popular referendum in May 2008. 5 Comment made to me in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2003, referring to the vision of a state and society that is (technically) modern, but also imbued with traditional ‘Myanmar’ values of hierarchy and deference to superiors. In other words, Myanmar’s constitution and state structure are republican (there is no ruling dynasty), but its values are traditional and monarchical.

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Their world is much the same as our modern world: a world in which the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, dominated by capricious big countries, especially the United States and China, where the steady ‘globalisation’ of Myanmar’s population, including the influx of foreign influences in everything from political thought to fashion and music, feeds discontent and unrest, and in which a devil’s deal with resource-greedy foreign businessmen seems, in the post-socialist world, to be the only way to ensure the economic development of the country and the military elite’s own survival. In this inhospitable environment, the leaders’ promotion of Buddhist symbols (especially the ‘royal pagoda’) offers a refuge through which ‘Myanmar identity’ can be protected and nurtured—and national unity maintained. While orthodox Theravada Buddhism teaches the need for radical non-attachment in order to attain Enlightenment, which is universal and impersonal, in the Myanmar context traditionalism tries to attach individual citizens or subjects to the illusion of a recoverable past and past identity that are non-universal, specific to a single national or ethnic community—although how this can be done is usually reduced to sterile ritualism, an attention to appearances rather than an inward transformation. Without claiming that the top generals in Myanmar use Buddhism and its symbols cynically as a means of manipulating the superstitious masses (there seems no doubt that most of them are, in their own way, devout Buddhists), it also seems true that the Buddhist belief system in the country has undergone a crucial transformation: from a universal truth, which in the past nurtured in the minds of Burmese Buddhists an all-encompassing worldview (reflected, for example, in everything from hierarchical human relationships to the design of the traditional royal capital), to a core element of a Myanmar identity that struggles to assert itself in a diverse, modern world. Thus, the militant, pagoda-building piety of the old conqueror-kings is regarded by the founders of modern Naypyidaw in a singularly idealised and ‘romantic’ way, though certain historical details—for example, their un-Buddhist cruelty and violence in pre-colonial wars with other Southeast Asian kingdoms—may be conveniently forgotten.

3.2

The Contours of the New Capital City

Naypyidaw, with approximately 1.06 million people, has become Myanmar’s third largest city, narrowly surpassed by the old royal capital of Mandalay with its population of 1.063 million (CIA World Factbook

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2014). In part, this results from the inclusion of older settlements such as Pyinmana and Lewe within the new capital district (Pyinmana alone has a population of 200,000) (Lubeigt 2012: 110). Yangon, reconstructed by the British as their colonial capital after 1852, presently has 4.46 million people, assuring its status as Myanmar’s prime city, despite the capital relocation (CIA World Factbook 2014). The presence and design of a royal pagoda appears as an element of distinction between the three Burmese capitals, and—as far as Yangon is concerned—between two successive periods (see Table 3.1). Table 3.1 Myanmar’s three capitals and their spaces Capital City

Mandalay Yangon (pre-, post-colonia) Yangon (colonial) Naypyidaw

Design: the equivalence of the macrocosm and the microcosm  × × ×

Sacred spaces: ‘royal’ pagoda(s)

  × 

(key:  - presence; × - absence)

Of the three capitals, only Mandalay, built by King Mindon (r. 1853-1878) in the 1850s after his realm’s defeat in the 1852 Anglo-Burmese War, displays a design that was once a distinct feature of Mainland Southeast Asian royal capitals: a structural replication of the Cosmos (or the macrocosm) in the microcosm of the palace, according to Hindu and Buddhist concepts. This schema had been used in building earlier Myanmar royal capitals such as Inwa (Ava), Amarapura, and Sagaing. Surrounded by a moat, the Mandalay palace walls, eight metres high and about two kilometres long on each side, form a square aligned to the four cardinal points of the compass; each side is pierced by three gates, which are surmounted by wooden pyat-that (‘tiered roofs’) in the elegant Burmese style. Within the walls, the teakwood palace was constructed on a platform, and its centre was the grand audience hall, also surmounted by a seven-tiered pyat-that. The grand audience hall of the palace complex was seen as analogous to Mount Meru, the axis mundi (‘centre (pillar) of the world’). Just as Indra, the king of the gods, dwelt on the summit of this mountain surrounded by other gods and goddesses, so the king, his earthly counterpart, occupied the throne surrounded by his courtiers. According to Robert Heine-Geldern,

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not only the physical design of the palace but also the royal administration and even the number and status of the royal wives were meant to convey a cosmic balance and meaning (Heine-Geldern 1956: 5-7; Dhida Saraya 1995: 106-207). However, the design of nineteenth-century Mandalay did not neglect practical considerations. The walls of Mindon’s palace-city were designed to afford maximum security in an environment of political instability and chronic rivalry within the royal family and were so firmly built that repeated Allied bombardments in March 1945 failed to breach them (Allen 1984: 420-424). Naypyidaw’s equivalent to Mindon’s sturdy walls are surface-to-air missiles meant to protect it from air attack and a system of underground tunnels and shelters that were constructed by North Korean engineers, who are considered masters in the design of subterranean fortifications (Lubeigt 2012: 93, 95, 101-102). In their layout, however, neither colonial Rangoon (Yangon) nor Naypyidaw possesses a structural equivalence of macrocosm and microcosm and are both, in their own distinct ways, ‘modern’ cities, designed to function efficiently as administrative, military, and (in the case of Rangoon) commercial centres. In other words, they contain preponderantly profane rather than sacred space, ‘infrastructure’ and ‘real estate’ rather than places that provide a psychic or symbolic connection to a higher order of Reality. After the Second Anglo-Burmese War left the old port city of Yangoun (‘the End of Strife’ in Burmese) largely devastated, British military engineers constructed what could be called a ‘generic’ colonial port city, which possessed: a grid pattern of streets; an extensive waterfront along the Rangoon River where products for the tropical export trade (especially rice, teak, and petroleum) could be easily loaded onto ships; light industrial areas where rice could be milled and timber sawn; a Merchant Street lined with banks and trading companies; the Cantonment, controlled by the British Indian army; the Government House and the offices of the British Indian civil service; and dwellings for a multi-ethnic population of whom Burmese people were a minority, including spacious residences for Europeans and wealthy Asians (mostly Indians and Chinese) north of the central business district. Although not lacking in monuments (including a statue of Queen Victoria in Fytche Square, right across from the High Court building, and a Jubilee Hall celebrating her 60th year on the throne), with its many sombre red brick and masonry buildings Rangoon resembled not only its tropical sister cities of Singapore, Penang, and Saigon, but also provincial towns back in Britain, where urban design was guided not by visions of a cosmos or higher Reality, but by considerations of profitability and efficiency, presenting a

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noisy, utilitarian spectacle that often proved a disappointment to western travellers in search of the exotic and mysterious.6 Naypyidaw’s modernity is distinct from that of Yangon not only because of different architectural styles and technologies, reflecting the early twentyfirst rather than the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also because of the two capitals’ different physical environments: while Yangon is located on the banks of a river in a low lying, alluvial region near the sea, northeast of the fertile Irrawaddy Delta, the Naypyidaw capital district is built in the upper valley of the Sittang River, a transitional zone between Lower and Upper Burma, on the fringes of the Dry Zone of central Burma. Though it is bordered by the Pegu Yoma range of low hills to the west and the Shan Plateau to the east, it is a large and relatively unsettled area filled with creeks, rice paddies, and low-lying hills, affording plenty of space for the construction and expansion of the new city. According to the geographer Guy Lubeigt, the capital district, consisting of the three townships of Pyinmana, Lewe, and Tatkon, has an area of 7045 square kilometres (Lubeigt 2012: 23). While Yangon is a dense, tightly packed grid of east-west and north-south streets, at least in its central area, Naypyidaw is spread out: a diffuse array of official buildings, housing, shopping centres, and other facilities connected by wide and (at the present time) usually empty highways. Thinly interconnected by these highways, its built environment follows the contours of the land rather than the humanly imposed (or cosmically imposed) pattern of the old royal city or the generic colonial capital (see Figure 3.2). Thus, Naypyidaw’s layout is decentralised, composed of clusters of worksites, settlements, and recreational areas constructed around peripheral sub-centres, which include: the area where government ministries and other organs of the state are located; the civil servant housing area; an extensive luxury hotel zone where foreign visitors can stay (including diplomats of foreign countries, most of whose embassies are still located in Yangon); golf courses; the old towns of Pyinmana and Lewe; the airport at Ela; the heavily guarded Military Zone (which is not shown on official maps and where foreign visitors cannot usually enter); and recreational facilities such as the new zoo, safari park, and the National Landscape Garden, a theme park-type place that recreates in miniature Myanmar’s most famous natural 6 In The Gentleman in the Parlour, novelist Somerset Maugham wrote that ‘It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din. They have no history and no tradition’ (Maugham 1995 [1930]: 150).

90 Donald M. Seekins Figure 3.2   Site of Naypyidaw

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd, based on Lubeigt 2012: 21

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and manmade wonders inside an area that has been constructed in the shape of the whole country, on the shores of the Yezin Reservoir. Much of the architecture is inspired by the abstract and geometric designs of the early twenty-first century, rather than those of the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries. These include the Myanmar International Convention Centre, a large facility where the government held the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summits in 2014, the Zabu Thiri Sports Stadium, and the establishments inside the luxury hotel zone which cater largely to foreign visitors. Others, such as the ministry buildings and the apartments for civil servants (numbering as many as 1200 multi-family buildings), look similar to the conventional modern structures found in cities such as Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. Only a few of the buildings embody specifically Myanmar architectural styles, most notably, the Hluttaw (national legislature) building, which is constructed on a huge scale, and the Naypyidaw City Hall, which was inspired by the semi-traditionalist design of the colonial-era Rangoon Municipal Corporation building and displays the pyat-that roof style. Although there are open-air markets and arcades similar to those found in other Myanmar cities and towns, there are also modern shopping malls or ‘hypermarkets’ in enclosed spaces, imitations of those found in affluent countries. In one, the Junction Shopping Centre, located near the hotel zone, there is a local equivalent of Starbucks on the ground floor serving coffee and sweets—quite different from the traditional Myanmar teashop, which since at least colonial times has been a major contributor to the vitality of urban life. While teashop patrons traditionally linger for a long time, often perusing books or newspapers or falling deep into conversation with their friends, this new type of coffee shop invites shoppers to have a quick snack and be on their way. With its ample spaces and apparent lack of a centre, an American visitor to Naypyidaw could easily be reminded of one of those thinly populated and strung-out suburban developments that were built in semirural areas of his or her own country before the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007, in which transportation is possible only along wide and largely empty freeways and public transport is virtually nonexistent.7 Unlike Mandalay or Rangoon, in the new capital there does not seem to be much genuinely open or public space, easily accessible from all parts of the city, where people can congregate and enjoy each other’s company—a negative feature of

7 As Guy Lubeigt writes: ‘In consequence, nobody really knows where the centre of Naypyidaw is located’ (‘Par suite, nul ne sait où placer le centre géographique de Nay Pyi Taw’) (2012: 24).

92 Donald M. Seekins Figure 3.3 The Union Parliament complex in Naypyidaw, which is not only vast but also displays traditional Myanmar motifs

Photo by the author

Figure 3.4 A roundabout or circus, often decorated with large artificial flowers, marks the intersections of major highways in the new capital

Photo by the author

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Myanmar’s new urban life that seems similar to the over commercialisation and anonymous spaces of suburban Middle America. Roundabouts or circuses, often decorated with large artificial flowers, mark the intersections of these major highways and provide Naypyidaw with a ‘galactic’ array of sub centres (see Figure 3.4). Again, in contrast to the crowds and liveliness (and social unrest) of Yangon and Mandalay, the visitor to the new capital is likely to be reminded of Gertrude Stein’s famous comment about Oakland, California: ‘there is no “there” there’ (Stein 1971: 289). It is unclear whether Than Shwe’s new city can be understood as a model for future urban spaces in other parts of Myanmar. However, the ‘galactic’ nature of the city’s subcentres might prove useful in an age when much if not most of Myanmar’s trade will be overland, and highways and possibly railways may connect the country with China, India, and Thailand just as sea lanes connected Yangon with the colonial metropole and other parts of Asia during the colonial era. In the twenty-first century, the shift of much of Myanmar’s commerce from sea to land routes, as reflected in the construction of the Asian Highway network in Mainland Southeast Asia, will mark its deeper integration into the Asian Mainland. Naypyidaw may also function as an ‘urban laboratory’ with its radically new design featuring so much anonymous space, which will be tested over the passage of time to see whether its large-scale and decentred landscape will be effective in stifling the sort of urban unrest that has long occurred in Yangon and even Mandalay.

3.3

A Zedidaw (‘“Royal” Pagoda’)

It is a mistake, however, to consider Naypyidaw to be completely without a centre. In the Naypyidaw Exhibition Hall, located in the National Landmark Garden, there is a huge relief model of the capital district; a console containing buttons labelled with all of the major landmarks is provided for the benefit of visitors (who are prohibited, apparently for security reasons, from taking photographs inside the building). By pressing a button, one can see each spot of interest illuminated with a small light. Right in the centre of the model, which fills a very large room, is the Upattasanti Pagoda, whose golden spire can also be seen at a distance from many parts of the city—much as the Shwedagon, the pagoda that inspired its design, can be seen from different points in Yangon. In other words, the Upattasanti Pagoda serves as Naypyidaw’s ‘sacred core’ or ‘sacred centre’ in a settlement that seems otherwise rather incoherent or decentred.

94 Donald M. Seekins Figure 3.5 The Upattasanti Pagoda, a Shwedagon Pagoda replica, built by Senior General Than Shwe at Naypyidaw

Photo by the author

According to Buddhist legend, the Emperor Ashoka built 84,000 pagodas or stupas throughout his empire in the Indian Subcontinent in the third century BCE, in order to make it possible for his subjects to perform devotions and earn merit at the sacred sites. In our own time, Myanmar is unsurpassed

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among Asian countries for the plenitude of these Buddhist relic chambers, which number in the tens of thousands since they continue to be built—and the more famous ones renovated—even today. A close examination of one of the maps of Naypyidaw published in Myanmar shows small symbols representing pagodas spread throughout the countryside around the new capital, and not only in areas of relatively dense human settlement such as Pyinmana.8 Some are venerable, having a long history of patronage and devotion, but only the Upattasanti Pagoda, constructed by Than Shwe, can claim the status of Zedidaw, a ‘royal pagoda’. Using the term ‘the buddhif ication of space’ (‘la ‘bouddicisation’ de l’espace’), Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière argues that a pagoda cannot be constructed in a location that does not have an association with Buddhist legend or history, so the construction of a major pagoda in a (new) city asserts the urban space’s connection with the Buddhist religion—what she calls the ‘urban imagination’ constituted by Buddhism (Brac de la Perrière 1998: 45). Burmese rulers, establishing their authority in territories where they have established a Buddhist regime, manifested this principle through construction of such monuments situated in a local imagination within Buddhist space. In the cities, the legends of these pagodas formed the weft of the urban imagination, and the shafts of the stupas became landmarks and poles that functioned as points around which space was oriented, at different levels in a hierarchy (ibid.: 45). In this manner, the establishment of King Mindon’s new capital of Mandalay was legitimised in terms of a prophecy allegedly made by the Buddha when he visited Myanmar: twenty-four centuries after the establishment of his religion, a glorious Buddhist city would arise in the plains below Mandalay Hill (Ministry of Union Culture 1963: 9). Mindon asserted the connection of his new capital with the life and teachings of the Buddha through the construction of many Buddhist sites, of which the Kuthodaw (‘Royal Bounty’) Pagoda is the most famous. Within this sacred space there are small pagodas containing marble steles inscribed with the entire Buddhist scriptures, 729 in all, making this, in the words of tour guides, ‘the largest book in the world’, constructed in order to commemorate King 8 ‘The Map of Naypyitaw’, which has no publication information but was sold on the street in Yangon near the former National Archives. It is one of the few available flat maps (as opposed to map books) that gives a clear indication of the city’s districts and configuration—that is, the location of each area in relation to the others. However, the map does not include the ultra-secure Military Zone. For sectional maps, The Naypyitaw Directory 2011 is extremely detailed though selective in its display of the city’s landmarks.

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Mindon’s sponsorship of the Fifth Great Buddhist Conference in Mandalay in 1871—just as the Kaba Aye (‘World Peace’) Pagoda in Yangon commemorates the Union of Burma Prime Minister U Nu’s holding of the Sixth Great Buddhist Conference in 1954-1956. A royal pagoda is recognised as one that not only has the patronage of the king or the ruler, but meets other criteria, namely: – through his donations, the king/ruler creates the opportunity for the common people to make their own donations and earn merit, thus expressing, like Ashoka, his compassion for his subjects; given this context, the royal pagoda becomes (or is supposed to become) a special locus for community life and collective action – the pagoda asserts the king or ruler’s domination over the region where it is located – the pagoda is believed to have especially strong protective powers, ensuring social stability, prosperity, and peace. Historically, the most prestigious Zedidaw is the Shwedagon, located on the top of Theingottara Hill north of Yangon’s central business district, which is considered by the Burmese to be the holiest Buddhist sacred space, and the most revered pagoda, in Myanmar—if not in the entire Buddhist world. It is said to contain the relics of not one but four Buddhas (thus, it is referred to as the ‘four relic pagoda’) and is closely connected in legend to the lifetime of Gautama Buddha, who according to fifteenth-century Mon chronicles is said to have given eight hairs from the top of his head to Mon merchants to take to their own country (in what is now modern Yangon) to enshrine on the hill where the other three relics were concealed. Since at least the fifteenth century, the Shwedagon Pagoda has received homage and donations from Myanmar’s most powerful monarchs, and in the post-colonial era from the country’s civilian and military leaders—including the SPDC, which sponsored the donation of a hti (‘finial’) to the pagoda in 1999. The presence of the Shwedagon gives the city of Yangon a rather unusual status. Never a royal capital, it only functioned as a seat of political-administrative power between 1852, when it became the centre of British-controlled Lower Burma, and 2005, when Than Shwe decreed the capital shift. However, it still contains Burma’s premier sacred space, its most powerful spiritual centre. As Table 3.1 shows, Mandalay, pre- and post-colonial Yangon, and Naypyidaw all contain(ed) royal pagodas. However, under British rule from 1852 to 1948 the Shwedagon and other Buddhist sites were ‘disestablished’, since the rulers themselves were non-Buddhist and sought to promote a policy

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of religious neutrality and the confining of religious life to the private—or community—sphere. Despite imperial support for the activities of the Church of England in British India, the spheres of religion and public affairs were seen as separate and discrete. When colonial Rangoon was constructed during the 1850s, the new government gave grants of land to each of the religious communities—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etc.—to build or maintain their own sanctuaries. It established a legal framework in which the Shwedagon Pagoda was administered by lay trustees, who by the end of the nineteenth century were elected by members of the Burmese Buddhist community (Win Pe 1972: 108, 127; Pearn 1939: 177, 195). The government’s impartiality and disinclination to interfere in the life of any of the religious communities was seen by the foreign rulers as key to their colony’s stability and prosperity, but it created problems for the relations between the British and Burmese because colonial religious neutrality severed the traditional connection between the Buddhist religion and the ruler, which had previously been made material and concrete through royal sponsorship of the Zedidaw. This policy was made explicit when the British prohibited King Mindon from personally coming to Yangon to donate a new hti to the Shwedagon in 1871; although the royal gift of a pagoda finial was accepted by the colonial authorities and it was placed on top of the Shwedagon, the British permitted this only under the condition that the elevation of the hti be recognised as the meritorious work of the Buddhist community of British (Lower) Burma, rather than of the king himself (Pearn 1939: 220; Seekins 2013: 146-148). Because of the ‘royal’ as well as the sacred nature of the Shwedagon and certain other pagodas, the British constantly encountered problems trying to integrate them into their colonial legal and social framework. In the end they failed, and the Shwedagon—aside from being a sacred site—emerged as the most potent public space for resistance against the colonial regime, as students, monks, and other activists made the pagoda platform and the monasteries located around the stupa ‘strike centres’ for the launching of nationalist campaigns against the British government. This practice continued during the post-colonial era, as the Shwedagon became a rallying point for the opposition to the socialist regime of General Ne Win in 1988 and the so-called ‘Saffron Revolution’ led by Buddhist monks, a series of popular demonstrations against the SPDC which took place in September 2007 (Seekins 2013).

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3.4

Building the Upattasanti Pagoda

A year after the formal announcement of the establishment of the new capital, in November 2006, a ceremony was held to consecrate the ground upon which the new stupa would be built. Than Shwe, his wife, and his close military associates played the major roles, including the driving of nine ‘bejewelled’ stakes into the ground with golden hammers and the anointment of the area with perfumed water (The Irrawaddy Magazine 2006). Although topographically prominent—located north of a main road running between Pyinmana and the new sites of Naypyidaw under construction—Shwelinpan Hill, the site chosen for the stupa, seems an odd choice for the construction of a royal pagoda, since it is said to contain an old cemetery which people in Pyinmana traditionally considered inhabited by malevolent nats or spirits. According to Guy Lubeigt, during the celebrations marking the completion of the pagoda in March 2009 these spirits were rumoured to have appeared, frightening away some spectators! (Lubeigt 2012: 117, 118, 126)9 However, construction of the sacred site, including not only the main stupa but the subsidiary buildings on the pagoda platform, was carried out without interruption: the regime campaigned vigorously to collect donations of gold, gemstones, and other precious items from laypeople, including top military officers and ‘crony capitalists’ with close ties to the SPDC. Gold plates and leaf were needed to gild the exterior of the structure. Buddha relics (including Buddha images made of precious materials, votive plaques, and small artificial trees with leaves of gold, jade, and silver) were collected and sealed inside the pagoda (large numbers of these ‘tribute trees’ can be seen at the museum on the platform of the Shwedagon in Yangon, where donations to the Yangon stupa are displayed). Than Shwe and his family contributed what was the most prominent relic: a replica of the renowned Buddha Tooth Relic, which is enshrined in a Buddhist monastery near Beijing, China, and had been brought to Myanmar twice during the 1990s on China-sponsored missions of ‘relic diplomacy’, designed to promote a friendly image of the atheist communist regime in a devoutly Buddhist country (The Irrawaddy Magazine 2009). In this way, the Senior General made sure that Myanmar’s present as well as two former capitals each possessed a Tooth Relic replica, since he sponsored the building of two pagodas in Yangon and Mandalay in the 1990s, each housing such 9 In fact, an accident reportedly occurred during the inauguration of the pagoda at an amusement park on the platform, which resulted in the death of twenty people (The Irrawaddy Magazine 2009).

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Figure 3.6 The Upattasanti Pagoda seen from a distance, on the road between Pyinmana and Naypyidaw

Photo by the author

a replica. In addition, four jade images of the Four Buddhas of the present era (whose relics are said to be enshrined in the Shwedagon Pagoda) were placed inside the ‘cave’ or hollow cavity of the Upattasanti Pagoda (New Light of Myanmar 2009a: 10). The status of this reproduction of an original tooth relic is a matter of considerable importance. Because Myanmar Buddhists believe that the power and prestige of a relic can be ‘reproduced’ by placing an ordinary object (such as a piece of elephant ivory) in proximity to an older, allegedly genuine Buddha relic such as the Chinese Buddha Tooth Relic, doing so allows a connection between the Upattasanti and Buddhist legend and history to be established. It is unclear whether the ‘manufacture’ of a valuable Buddha relic is the cause of great scepticism among Myanmar Buddhists.10 Of greater public concern may be the source of the original relic, since 10 According to Lubeigt (2012: 124, note 246): ‘In the Buddhist tradition, the act of placing a replica in proximity to an authentic relic bestows on the replica the same value as the original relic.’

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criticism of China’s increasingly dominant role in Myanmar’s developing economy has increased since the civilian government was initiated in 2011. Indeed, Myanmar’s post-2011 political liberalisation can be seen as an effort to put space between the country and its giant northern neighbour by winning investment deals from other countries such as the United States, EU nations, and Japan.11 The Upattasanti Pagoda was completed and inaugurated in elaborate ceremonies in early March 2009. A total of 1080 monks (an auspicious number) were invited by the regime to preside over the celebrations and were given customary offerings as well as state-conferred honorary degrees confirming their high status within the ranks of the Sangha, or community of Buddhist monks (Lubeigt 2012: 125, 126). The hti (‘umbrella’) that adorns the spire of the pagoda was raised by Than Shwe and his family, again playing the most prominent role in the ceremonies as described by the official media, followed by their raising of the yadana seinbudaw (‘diamond orb’) and yadana hngetmyatnadaw (‘pennant-shaped vane’) into position above the hti (New Light of Myanmar 2009b: 1, 8-9; 2009c: 1, 8-10).

3.5

A Shwedagon Replica

The claim that Naypyidaw is a royal city (‘abode of the king’) derives from the presence within its boundaries of a royal pagoda, the concrete manifestation of Than Shwe’s ambition to re-establish a seamless connection between the power of the state he controls (or controlled) and the spiritual realm, the teachings and person of the Buddha (or Buddhas, since 25 or 28 Buddhas are recognised in the Theravada canon). This ambition was evident during the ‘Buddhist building boom’ after 1988 but was expressed most extravagantly in the construction of the new capital’s sacred centre. The official name of the pagoda, Upattasanti, is taken from a ‘minor paritta’ (Buddha sutta or scripture) of the sixteenth century, and can be translated as ‘peace’, ‘stability and development’, or ‘protection from calamity’, according to different sources.12 The Upattasanti paritta was customarily recited during times of peril to obtain supernatural protection (Lubeigt 11 President U Thein Sein’s cancellation of the China-f inanced Myitsone Dam project at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River has been interpreted as a tactic to exploit widespread anti-China feeling among Burmese. 12 The name of the pagoda can be Romanised in various ways: Upattasanti, Uppatasanti, or even Ouparta Thandi Pagoda.

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2012: 117; comment of Yangon resident to author, January 2012). The naming of this colossal religious project reflected Than Shwe’s preoccupation with the threat posed by disruptive (foreign and internal) forces, giving credibility to those observers who argued that the establishment of the new capital was motivated largely by strategic considerations. However, not only the site of the pagoda (allegedly an ancient cemetery), but also its design raises questions about the message the Senior General wished to send in sponsoring its construction. From the exterior, the Upattasanti Pagoda is a faithful replica of the Shwedagon, although its height is 30 centimetres shorter than the original in Yangon (which is approximately 99.4 meters). In one major way, however, it differs from the ‘four relic pagoda’: it is hollow, containing a huge, enclosed space under its dome supported by a central column rather than a solid structure. While images of the Four Buddhas of the present era are placed in tazaung (‘prayer halls’) on the periphery of the Shwedagon stupa, at the four cardinal directions of the compass, their equivalents in jade are placed around the Upattasanti stupa’s central supporting pillar inside the hall. In being hollow, the Upattasanti Pagoda resembles several famous pagodas in Yangon, such as the Botataung, Maha Wizaya (sponsored by the socialist dictator Ne Win), and the Tooth Relic Pagoda (the last also sponsored, as mentioned, by Than Shwe). It is interesting that while some observers, such as Michael Aung-Thwin, interpret Than Shwe’s decision to relocate the capital as his determination to return the seat of power to the Myanmar (or Burman) ‘heartland’ of the Upper Burma Dry Zone,13 the Senior General’s most important religious monument—meant to be ‘his’ pagoda and the symbol of the new capital—is built along the lines of a pagoda in Lower Burma, whose origins in legend and history, in fact, are not Burman but Mon. If indeed Than Shwe (a native of Kyaukse, near Mandalay) was motivated by the desire to return to his Burman ‘roots’, it is surprising that his personal stupa was not modelled on those of Bagan (Pagan) or another old Upper Burma capital. It is also clear that by deciding to build the stupa 30 centimetres shorter than the original, he did not wish to challenge the premier status of the ‘four relic pagoda’ as the holiest Buddhist site in his country. In other words, in his new capital he has attempted to assert ‘Myanmar (religious) identity’ in terms that are not at odds with the expectations of ordinary Myanmar Buddhists.

13 ‘The Dry Zone of Upper Burma […] is the ancestral home of the Burmese people, and is very much part of their psyche’ (Aung-Thwin 2005).

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3.6 Conclusions Like other royal pagodas, the Upattasanti provides a place where Buddhists can congregate for collective devotions, presided over by the ruling elite—an arrangement that is mutually beneficial as it provides the people with the opportunity to make merit and the leadership to acquire political as well as spiritual legitimacy. Such devotions include sponsorship of the reciting of paritta (protective Buddhist verses) by monks, the release of animals from captivity, and the offering of robes and other items to monks by devout laymen, especially the military leadership and their families. Because of the Upattasanti’s high status as the new capital’s royal pagoda, it has become the locale of special state-sponsored events. For example, in June 2010, a white elephant was found in the forests of Rakhine (Arakan) State and was conveyed with great ceremony to a pavilion adjacent to the pagoda. In Southeast Asian Buddhist folklore, the appearance of a sacred white elephant in a country is a sign that it will enjoy peace and prosperity, and the title ‘Lord of the White Elephant’ was highly prized by old Burman and Mon monarchs. By autumn of 2010, the white elephant, a female to which was given the name ‘Bhaddawadi’, had been joined by four others; in the following year, she gave birth to still another white elephant (Khin Maung Nyunt 2010: 8; New Light of Myanmar 2010: 1; 2011a: 1). The abundance of such highly esteemed creatures, which look very much like ordinary elephants but have certain identifying signs, has been much celebrated in the state media since one was discovered in Rakhine (Arakan) State in 2001 and housed near the White Stone Buddha complex, a major project in the post-1988 ‘Buddhist building boom’ in northern Yangon.14 According to Dr. Khin Maung Nyunt, this was the first white elephant to be found in Myanmar since 1958 (Khin Maung Nyunt 2010: 8). When the People’s Republic of China allowed the original Beijing Buddha Tooth Relic to be brought to Naypyidaw in November 2011, it was transported around the Upattasanti Pagoda by one of the white elephants in an elaborate ceremony (New Light of Myanmar 2011: 1, 8). Although thinly interconnected by wide and mostly empty highways and ultramodern in its layout and design, the new Myanmar capital of Naypyidaw conforms to the traditional expectations that a royal city must have a major pagoda at its spiritual, if not physical centre, connecting the 14 The chief patron of the White Stone Buddha project was Lt.-Gen. Khin Nyunt, Secretary-1 of the SPDC, the third most powerful figure in the junta until he was purged and placed under arrest in autumn 2004.

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Figure 3.7 Brightly decorated interior of the Upattasanti Pagoda

Photo by the author

capital to the history and legends of the Buddhist religion. What is interesting in the case of Naypyidaw is that, just as Than Shwe sponsored the creation of reproductions of the original Buddha Tooth Relic enshrined in China in order to have relics of his own, he also ordered the construction of a reproduction of Myanmar’s most revered stupa, the Shwedagon, in order to have his own pagoda. Although not without a certain history and identity of its own, the site of Naypyidaw, the upper valley of the Sittang River, does not loom large in Myanmar’s dynastic or Buddhist history. For Than Shwe, that may have been an attractive feature, since the region presented a tabula rasa where he could construct ‘his’ capital, complete with ‘his’ royal pagoda. However, the success of his pagoda-building enterprise is open to doubt because, in contrast to the perpetually crowded platform of the Shwedagon in Yangon, the Upattasanti Pagoda seems to be largely deserted, even on occasions when major state-sponsored rituals are held. For the foreign visitor, Yangon’s ‘Golden Pagoda’ provides ample opportunities for watching and interacting with local people, while the Upattasanti Pagoda has an empty, gloomy atmosphere.

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The continued popularity of the Shwedagon could also be interpreted as a rebuke to the Senior General and his regime, especially since the Yangon stupa was the site of a pivotal speech by Aung San Suu Kyi in August 1988, when she said the student protests of that year constituted a ‘second struggle for national independence’; in 2007, it became the centre of renewed demonstrations by monks and laypeople during the ‘Saffron Revolution’.15 Although the military elite has striven to use pagoda religion for its own purposes, through generous donations and the building of still more stupas and other Buddhist sites, a counter-discourse of resistance to the state has also grown up around the pagoda, which runs deeply through Myanmar’s colonial and post-colonial history. Doubts also arise concerning the whole project of asserting Myanmar identity through Buddhism. The experience of other countries suggests that traditionalism is much more successful at drawing boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and stimulating intergroup (or international) conflict than it is in preserving traditional values, especially religious values, inside a society. Political liberalisation and friendlier, more constructive ties with western countries indicate that political conditions inside the country after the retirement of Than Shwe in 2011 are improving; but Buddhist-Muslim violence, which broke out in Rakhine (Arakan) State in 2012 and in the central Myanmar town of Meiktila in 2013, as well as an ongoing military campaign by the Tatmadaw (‘government armed forces’) against the largely Christian Kachins in the northern part of the country, show that creating a society of Buddhist insiders and non-Buddhist outsiders is sowing the seeds of new disorder, which could undermine not only progress toward democracy and development, but also Myanmar’s national unity.

Bibliography Allen, L. (1984), Burma: the Longest War, 1941-45. London: Phoenix Press. Asian Development Bank. 2014. Basic Statistics 2014. adb.org/sites/default/files/ publication/42007/basic-statistics-2014.pdf (Last accessed 6 January 2015). Aung-Thwin, M. (2005), ‘From Rangoon to Pyinmana’, in The Bangkok Post (28 November). Available: http:// www.burmanet.org. BurmaNet News (Last accessed 2 May 2013). 15 Of course, Yangon has between five and six times the population of Naypyidaw and surrounding settlements, but the SLORC/SPDC-sponsored pagodas in the old capital are also said by local informants to be unpopular.

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Beaton, H. (2008), ‘Penguins and golf in Burma’s hidden capital’, in The Independent (19 September). Available: http:// www.burmanet.org. BurmaNet News (Last accessed 23 May 2013). Brac de la Perrière, B. (1998), ‘Urbanisation et légendes d’introduction du Bouddhisme au Myanmar (Birmanie)’. Journal des Anthropologues, 63: 41-63. CIA World Factbook (2014), Central Intelligence Agency, United States. Available: http://cia.gov (Last accessed 8 January 2015). Fraser-Lu, S. (1997), ‘A Buddhist Building Boom: Works of Merit Sponsored by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)’, Bulletin of the Burma Studies Group, 59: 4-5. Heine-Geldern, R. (1956), ‘Conception of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia’, Data Paper 18. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program. Irrawaddy Magazine, The (2006), ‘Than Shwe Watch’ (12 November). Available: http//www.irrawaddy.org (Last accessed 15 November 2009). — (2009), ‘Than Shwe’s New Pagoda hides more than a Buddha Relic’ (11 March). Available: http:// www.burmanet.org. BurmaNet News (Last accessed 7 May 2013). Khin, M.N. (2010), ‘White Elephants of Myanmar’, The New Light of Myanmar, 29 August: 8. Lubeigt, G. (2012), Nay Pyi Taw: Une résidence royale pour l’armée birmane. Paris: Les Indes savants. Maugham, S. (1995), The Gentleman in the Parlour. Bangkok: White Orchid Press [1st edition 1930]. Maung, Aung Myoe (2006), ‘The Road to Naypyidaw: Making Sense of the Myanmar Government’s Decision to Move its Capital’. Working Paper 79, November 2006. Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Ministry of Culture, Union of Burma (1963), Mandalay Palace. Rangoon. Mydans, S. (2007), ‘Junta in Myanmar has few options beyond the use of force’, International Herald Tribune (25 September). Naypyitaw Directory 2011, The (2011), Naypyidaw: the Naypyitaw Development Committee. New Light of Myanmar, The (2009a), ‘Four Images of Maha Manimaya Buddha Patima conveyed into cave of Upattasanti Pagoda’, 2 March: 10. — (2009b), ‘Upattasanti Pagoda hosts ceremony of enshrining upper reliquary and hoisting Shwehtidaw’, 8 March: 1, 8-9. — (2009c), ‘Senior General Than Shwe, wife Daw Kyaing Kyaing and family hoist Yadana Seinbudaw, Yadana Hngetmyatnadaw atop Upattasanti Pagoda’, 9 March: 1, 8-10. — (2010), ‘Fifth White Elephant arrives in Nay Pyi Taw’, 22 October: 1. — (2011a), ‘President U Thein Sein and wife Daw Khin Win attend ceremony to convey sacred Buddha Tooth Relic from PRC and conservation ceremony’, 7 November: 1.

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— (2011b) ‘White Elephant Bhaddawady gives birth to female white elephant’, 29 November: 1. Pearn, B.R. (1939), History of Rangoon. Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press. Preecharushh, D. (2009), Naypyidaw: the New Capital of Burma. Bangkok: White Lotus. Saraya, D. (1995), Mandalay: the Capital City, the Centre of the Universe. Bangkok: Muang Boran Publishing House. Seekins, D.M. (2004), ‘Rangoon’s Changing Buddhist Landscapes: ‘Pagoda Religion’ and Military Rule in Burma’s Capital City’, in Asia in the New Millennium: APISA First Congress Proceedings, Amitav, A., and Lee, L.T. (eds.), 564-594. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic. — (2009), ‘“Runaway Chickens” and Myanmar Identity: Relocating Burma’s Capital’, City 13(1): 63-70. — (2013), ‘Sacred Site or Public Space? The Shwedagon Pagoda in Colonial Rangoon’, in Buddhism, Modernity and the State in Asia: Forms of Engagement, WhalenBridge, J., and Kitiarsa, P. (eds.), 139-159. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Stein, G. (1971), Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Cooper Square. Win Pe (1972), Shwe Dagon. Rangoon: Printing and Publishing Corporation.

About the author Donald M. Seekins, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. He specialises in historical and contemporary Myanmar, including developments in society, religion, and politics. His publications include The Disorder in Order: the Army-State in Burma since 1962 (White Lotus, 2002), State and Society in Modern Rangoon (Routledge, 2011), and a forthcoming new edition of The Historical Dictionary of Burma (Myanmar). Dr. Seekins keeps his finger on the pulse of the country through frequent visits, as Myanmar has transitioned from military rule to limited democracy. Email: [email protected]

4 Transitions The Form and Meaning of the ‘New Philippine City’ after 1898 Ian Morley Abstract The colonisation of the Philippines by Americans following the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 radically reshaped the nature of local society and, in conjunction, the form and appearance of Philippine settlements. Whilst structuralist interpretations of American City Beautiful urbanism in Southeast Asia have emphasised the contrast in the urban forms crafted pre- and post-1898, to date little is known about what the design of the American/modern urban environment meant to either the colonisers and the Filipinos. Given this historical backdrop, this work offers a treatise on the spatial and cultural concept of the American city in the Philippines, and how the form of the ‘new city’, as modelled on the ideas of Daniel Burnham, illuminated the difference between the modern age and a unified Filipino population with the ‘uncivilised’—that is to say, tribal—condition of society in 1898. In so doing, the chapter accentuates two matters: first, why urban design was such an important constituent of American colonial governance; and second, the need to put the Philippines within the larger picture of urban-planning historiography, namely within the early 1900s evolution of city design practices already noted by scholars with regard to North America, South America, Australasia, and Europe. Keywords: The Philippines, Manila, American colonial governance, City Beautiful, Daniel Burnham

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch04

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4.1 Background The Spanish-American War of 1898, and consequently the fall of the Spanish Empire, led by the end of that year to the United States (US) acquiring jurisdiction over the Philippines. With the grounding of US colonial governance in three principles—to uplift, to civilise, and to Christianise1—a determined effort was made to transfigure a country that was previously considered antiquated and undeveloped (Hendrickson 2009: 274; Willis 1905: 1). Important to understanding why societal reform was felt to be necessary are a number of observations made by Americans circa 1898 about life in the Philippines. These included: 1. Filipinos were seen to be neither culturally advanced nor homogenous: a ‘thousand islands with twice a thousand tribes, many tongues, many religions’ (Ireland 1899: 220). In view of this, it was ‘a fundamental mistake to think of the inhabitants of the Philippine islands as one people’ (Stuntz 1904: 31). 2. Filipino identity, it seemed, was not tied to any conventional concept of nationhood but was instead centred upon belonging to a particular tribal/ethnic group. Filipinos were identified as possessing no knowledge of how to govern for the public good (Winslow 1902: 14), or how to administer without resorting to autocracy. As an outcome of their experience under Spanish colonial rule2 and the American view that Spanish authority had been corrupt and oppressive (Halstead 1898: 93), Filipinos were considered to have no acuity in democratic codes and political responsibilities. 3. Public health standards were poor. Disease was rife (Bellairs 1902: 12); clean water and sanitation were lacking. Life expectancy was low: in Manila, the mean life expectancy was just 20.8 years by the onset of the twentieth century (United States 1905: 9). Moreover, three out of every four of the 18,000 buildings in the city at that time were described as ‘shacks’ (United States 1902: 184). 4. Poverty was endemic. Filipinos were said to be ‘always poor, but some are poorer. If there is comparative plenty, there are two or three meals a day, but if food is scarce there is but one’ (Miller 1906: 223). 5. Only a small minority of the population was literate: ‘To say that five per cent of the people can read and write would be grossest flattery’ 1 The purpose of American rule was outlined by President William McKinley in what is known as the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation on 21 December 1898 (Blount 1913: 149-150). 2 Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines began in 1565 and ended in 1898.

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(Ireland 1899: 220-221). Spanish, the lingua franca of education and government, was spoken by less than 10 percent of people (United States 1902: 65-66). Due to this understanding of Philippine society, the Americans repeatedly emphasised that their colonial authority and culture would contrast with Spanish conventions. They also stressed that their presence as rulers was impermanent and that they would not enslave or exploit Filipino people (Miller 1982: 17). Instead, they asserted, they had come to Asia to facilitate the planting of a higher scale of civilisation so that the local population could become civilised, unified, and self-ruling in the future.3 City planning was harnessed to aid the task of planting advanced civilisation and, unsurprisingly given the nature of US colonial thinking, urban design schemes implemented by the early-1900s entailed much more than merely instilling a new tectonic order in existing urban settlements: the beautification and restructuring of cities away from Spanish colonial plazas became a fundamental of American colonial urban planning. Yet, to return to the broader motive of US colonial governance, in order to bequeath advanced civilisation the US inevitably had to construct in the Philippine Islands a society with different/’superior’ attributes in comparison to what had, as noted beforehand, existed before. Such an evolution was in some respects unavoidable given the detected flaws with life in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. However, the desire to impart ‘development’ was also fuelled by the mind-set that, as the self-declared civilisers of the world, Americans had a moral obligation to erode the disparity between their modern civilisation and life in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. As an outcome of this judgement, it was concluded that Filipinos were not only culturally immature (Mahan 1899: 249), but that the previous colonial regime had ultimately done little to elevate the peoples’ lot (Grunder and Livezey 1951: 17).

3 Early US colonial rule was centred upon a ‘policy of attraction’, i.e., attracting Filipinos to American governance by winning their trust. This strategy was designed to ensure there was no deceit or concealment on the one hand, and a concern for democracy and the dignity of individuals on the other. Tied to this strategy were aspects of contemporary cultural-racial theory: due to their un-advanced cultural condition, Filipinos were viewed as living in ‘childlike’ ways. Given this perspective that the imported US notions of governance were ‘superior’, it was rationalised that US rule was for the interests and benefit of Filipinos because the US colonial government would attend to the failings and needs of those they governed. In this context, race was a mode of knowledge and power that was fundamental to formalising US authority.

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Cities, especially Manila, 4 exemplif ied within the framework of American colonial discourse the dissimilarity between the American and Filipino ways of life, and this variance impressed onto the colonisers a duty to impart ‘advancement’. A profound repair of Philippine society was thus required, yet it could only transpire through establishing robust policies that cultivated local civilisation in the likeness of American society (Harris 2011: 24). Urban design, as shown subsequently, was to be a vital element in the instigation of national development and, with reference to Manila, the utilisation of modern urban planning practices was to help convert it from ‘one of the foulest of the many foul-smelling places in the Far East’ (Crow 1914: 41) to a ‘pearl of the orient’. In addition, the local economy was to be developed, with the additional benef it of also altering the Filipinos’ character, as perceived by the Americans, from languorous with few and simple wants to industrious with new wants and necessities (Sullivan 1999: 41). Broadly speaking, by taking up urban design procedures as a basic facet of colonial governance—other primary policies included political reform, economic growth, the development of road and rail infrastructure, the creation of public health and education systems, and the proliferation of the English language—Philippine culture would be upgraded, and the character of Filipinos shifted. In turn, this would disconnect the local population from the ‘black behaviours’5 evident during the Spanish colonial period and ensure that the politico-cultural experiences encountered prior to 1898 would never occur again. The corollary of this progress would be that Filipinos, as the US’ ‘little brown brothers’, could for the first time uncover their true character (Pardo de Tavera 1928: 171). To appreciate the form that urban planning took in the Philippines, it is f irst necessary to recognise the character of city design in North America at the end of the 1800s/start of the 1900s. It must also be realised that towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of significant developments took place within American society that affected both the built form and meaning of the city in the US. Amongst these transitions was a shift in architectural tastes (Wright 2008: 47), an issue that accentuated the aesthetic faults of existing built environments and, in addition, 4 The city’s population in 1903, the date of the f irst US Census, was 223,059. The national population was 7,635,426 (United States 1905: 14-15). 5 American thought about the nature of Spain’s imperial ways was influenced during the nineteenth century by what was known as the black legend (la leyenda negra). Applied in written literature, Spanish people came to symbolise barbarity, misrule, backwardness, tyranny, political intolerance, cruelty, etc., in much American fiction (DeGuzman 2005: 4-5).

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implored designers to assume more responsibility in guiding contemporary urban growth. Allied with this move was a growing mindfulness of the role and value of urban design for society’s evolution. Not only did city planning become recognised as a tool to (re)conf igure urban environments, it also became identif ied as an instrument to enrich the social and cultural condition of the country. Fundamental to this situation was a reform group, the City Beautiful Movement, which sought to resolve the social and environmental flaws that were apparent within urban communities. Inspired by Beaux Arts design practices and placing great value upon the creation of orderly spaces and civic districts (Ward 2002: 35), by the start of the twentieth century the City Beautiful Movement was able to bequeath a new urban vision to American society. This image, notably, promoted two allied cultural and political matters: beautiful cities represented moral, intellectual, and governmental progress (Robinson 1903: 17); and urban design and citizenship were coupled with each other (Wilson 1989: 72). When seeking to understand the impact of the City Beautiful, two cities—Chicago and Washington DC—must be given attention. In Chicago, in 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition was held, and in spite of its temporary existence the event redirected America’s urban design narrative (Robinson 1903: 275). With a large number of grandly formed buildings laid out according to a monumental axial plan, the event showcased the prudence of carefully siting buildings, green spaces, statuary, and water features within an urban context. Designed by Daniel Burnham, albeit with assistance from landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, the organised exposition environment proved to be an object lesson in urban design: it immediately demonstrated to the American public the effectiveness of grouping buildings in orderly relation to each other. Consequently, the nature of the event’s setting had far reaching impacts (Burnham and Bennett 1909: 6). Among other things, it demonstrated that modern American civilisation could be distilled into a distinct spatial form manufactured by a trained individual, the architect-planner. Significantly, by 1901 an opportunity arose to execute such a grand plan within an existing American settlement: arguably the US’s most important settlement, Washington DC. Designed by Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Charles McKim, and Augustus Saint-Gaudins, the scheme to revitalise the US’ capital city—the McMillan Plan (see Figure 4.1)—generated a new peak for the modern American urban design narrative. The creation of the plan had enormous practical and symbolic implications. Because Washington DC was the political nucleus of the nation, redesigning the city awoke the

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Figure 4.1 The McMillan Plan for Washington DC, 1901-02

Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMillan_Plan#/media/File:McMillan_Plan.jpg

country to the spiritual root of the settlement’s built form, that is to say Pierre L’ Enfant’s 1792 urban plan (Reps 1965: 514). Crucially, and partly by re-establishing ‘the hegemony of France in the planning of Washington and the influence of Paris on its plan’ (Field 2007: 118), the scheme turned the city into a model modern environment (Wilson 1989: 51). With City Beautifulites arguing that urban design had a central role in promoting civic values, it is important to appreciate the impact that the revamped Washington DC had on the American public, municipal authorities, and the nation’s architectural community. Furthermore, while the McMillan Plan revealed that urban design was a vital element in attaining municipal betterment as the city was renewed during an age when American nationalism was enlarging, a matter in part connected to the hegemony of the Republican Party in national political circles, Washington DC’s aggrandisement aroused much patriotic fervour (Peterson 2003: 79). Hence the transformation of the city became associated with America’s evolving sense of nationhood and, to cite Thomas Hines, ‘evoked an image of imperial splendour that planners had deemed pertinent for the capital of the emerging American empire’ (1972: 35). As Washington DC possessed capital-city status, and since capitals represent the identity, standing, and power of their nation-state (Rapoport 1993: 32), its post-1901 built form endowed more than a locale for citizens to gaze at and, in turn, admire. Instead, the renewed city became a locale with distinct urban panoramas

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Figure 4.2 The view eastward within the Mall towards the Capitol Building in Washington DC, USA

Photo by the author

that the country could identify with and, notably, replicate overseas, given the unfolding US imperial narrative. To appreciate the physical form of Washington DC after 1901, it is important to concentrate on one feature: the Mall (see Figure 4.2). Comprising a broad, long, tree-lined lawn, the space emphasises the axial relationship between the Capitol, the White House, and the city’s prominent monuments (Penczer 2007: 30), as well as providing a magnificent vista towards America’s principal public building, the Capitol. Following this example, similarly designed spaces were proposed in numerous settlements in the US (e.g. Cleveland in 1903); as American cities at that time were venturing to be both beautiful and ‘progressive’, such spaces became central to defining modern American urban design: ‘the creation of grandiose architectonic productions, that is, processional sequences of spaces and buildings arranged as orderly units as modelled on the theories and practices of Daniel Burnham’ (Morley 2010: 237). Moreover, because citizenship was allegedly encouraged by ‘good city planning’ (Burnham and Bennett 1909: 123), placing buildings, roads, and spaces into a systematised configuration was equated with the manufacturing of an improved form of citizenship.

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The City Beautiful and ‘Uplifting’ the Philippines

In 1904, the US’ leading architect-planner Daniel Burnham was commissioned to visit the Philippines for the purpose of composing two urban plans: one for Manila; and the other for the new summer capital in Baguio (in the north of Luzon Island). By mid-1905, Burnham, with assistance from Pierce Anderson, submitted the Report on Improvements at Manila (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 627-635) to the US Department of War. Guided by the broad US colonial government objective of socially engineering the local society, the report suggested the need to implement a new urban form. As the first urban environment of its kind in the Philippines, and because the Americans from 1898 were coming face-to-face with unfamiliar cultural and climatic conditions (Rebori 1917a: 324), renewed Manila was a laboratory for spatial transformation and cultural enhancement. Even though the 1905 Manila plan has been described as having a ‘simplicity and cognisance of Philippine conditions and traditions’ (Hines 2009: 203), in actuality it touched upon a number of complex contexts that were considered central to the evolution of Philippine society post-1898: the augmentation of the economy; the eradication of disease; national political reforms; and the development of a common identity amongst Filipinos. These matters palpably affected both the structure of Manila’s reorganised built form and what the new environment represented to the Americans and the Filipinos. Without referencing the historical background it is easy to downplay the ways Burnham and Anderson’s scheme supported the US colonial mission, of which three matters in particular must be acknowledged. First, the deep-seated importance of Manila to national political, cultural, and economic affairs: ‘It is a common saying that Paris is France. In the same sense Manila is the Philippines’ (Blount 1913: 225). Second, US colonial governance was meant to promote betterment by means of both education and by providing an example (Far Eastern Review 1904: 4). Third, the use of urban planning as a constituent of colonial administration was not fortuitous. Its value was identif ied as early as 1901, when Elihu Root (then the US Secretary of War) remarked that the Senate Park Commission—the organisation responsible for the McMillan Plan in Washington DC—should visit the Philippines to proffer advice ‘as to the treatment of the City of Manila’ (Moore 1921: 177). By 1904, the US government was considering sending one of three high-ranking American designers—Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., and Daniel Burnham—to the Philippines to compose city plans. When Burnham was finally selected to travel to Asia (in late 1904),

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the Philippine Commission6 was serious about implementing any urban design scheme he would create in due course. In January 1905—before the plan was formally tendered—Burnham’s initial concept design for Manila was met with vociferous approval: ‘Mr. Burnham has prepared what seems to me a stunning plan’ wrote the Commissioner of Police and Commerce, Cameron Forbes (1905: 131). Forbes, a powerful politician in the early years of American colonial rule in the Philippines, added that, although Burnham’s scheme would ‘take many dozens of years and millions of dollars’ (ibid.), even before its formal submission particular elements of the project were already being executed: in January 1905 negotiations to construct a grand hotel near the waterfront had begun (ibid.: 133); by February 1905, the moat around the walled district known as the Intramuros (‘inside the walls’) was being filled in (ibid.: 160); and in Spring 1905 land was being reclaimed from Manila Bay to extend the shoreline (ibid.: 228). It must also be emphasised that in the years following 1905 supplementary urban plans were devised in the Philippines,7 and numerous civic centres were built in the provinces—developments that reveal the importance of urban design in US colonial governance. 8 In light of the aforementioned nature of US colonial governance with its aspirations to uplift and civilize Filipinos, comprehensive strategies were vital for the Americans (Roosevelt 1915) to, first, exhibit their responsibilities as civilisers; and, second, reveal their capacity to genuinely establish benevolence, altruism, and progress. Of course, while there was much propaganda to be gained by Americans showing the world that they were munificent in intention and action, in pragmatic terms it must not be forgotten that taking City Beautiful urbanism to Southeast Asia also showed that the US was firmly in charge in the Philippines.9 What’s more, the importation of modern urban planning was necessary to set up environments that would improve Filipinos’ living conditions as well as supply physical surroundings that would be familiar to Americans10 within the alien tropical climate 6 This Commission was the US colonial government in the Philippines. Formed in 1901, it had legislative powers and limited executive authority. 7 By 1912, plans had been created for Cebu (on Cebu Island) and Zamboanga (on Mindanao) by Consulting Architect William E. Parsons. 8 By 1914, more than 30 new civic centres have been designed throughout the Philippines by William E. Parsons (Cameron 1914: 3-11). 9 The redesign of Manila has been examined as a tool for making Filipinos subvert to US imperialism (Duque 2009: 49). 10 Houses built in Manila by Spanish architects were said by one American visitor to be ‘very hot and uncomfortable’ (Sawyer 1900: 177).

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(Lico 2008: 243-250). While at first glance this point appears somewhat trivial, it is important to ponder whether many Americans after 1898 were likely to be attracted to Asia for the purpose of undertaking business or investing in the Philippine economy if local cities, especially Manila, were beds of disease and/or did not contain the facilities that were considered vital for ‘modern life’.11 Likewise, it is easy to dismiss the fact that by refashioning cities in a way that contrasted with Spanish urbanism,12 the Americans were explicitly revealing to Filipinos how their life after 1898 was to be radically different. Environmental improvements, as expressed through better housing, improved sanitation, beautification efforts, new public edifices, and new urban spaces imparted much symbolic capital. It revealed that post-1898 peoples’ lives were no longer governed by corrupt officials simply interested in lining their own pockets. Instead, these fraudulent bureaucrats had been replaced by enlightened statesmen (Moore 1921: 177); such dissimilarity was constructive in helping the Americans win the support of the influential Filipino upper class. Although just a few pages in length,13 the Report on Improvements at Manila aimed to act as a guide for the city’s future development. As an example of paradigmatic modernity, a process of modernisation in which clear-cut distinctions with what previously existed were to be established (Skirbekk 2011: 7), Burnham and Anderson recommended relocating the government’s core outside of the Spanish walled city known as the Intramuros to the suburban area labelled the Extramuros (‘outside the walls’). Hugely emblematic in meaning, this suggestion and their other proposals sought to profoundly alter life within Manila’s bounds. These transitions encompassed the rejuvenation of the economy, e.g. by enlarging the port, connecting the harbour to the rail network, building a quay alongside the Pasig River, and renovating esteros (estuarine ‘canals’)—whose ‘availability for the poorest boatman make them peculiarly valuable’ (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 11 Act No. 44 (1903) replaced horse-drawn carriages, a prominent form of transport in Spanishage Manila, with electric trams. Opening in April 1905—heralded in The Manila Times as a ‘red letter day’—transportation, health, and housing quickly became linked in Manila: the American and Filipino elites used the tram to establish suburban houses away from the impoverished/ diseased districts in the city (Pante 2014: 9). 12 Manila’s history as a colonial capital dates to 1571. The subsequent development of the walled city, Intramuros, was based on the template of the Law of the Indies, and thus rendered Manila one of the first colonial capitals in Southeast Asia. For an overview of Spanish urbanism as a tool of socio-cultural transformation in the Philippines, refer to works by Robert R. Reed (1967; 1974). 13 The report was presented by Pierce Anderson on 10 January 1906 at the convention of the American Institute of Architects. See Anderson 1906.

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Figure 4.3 A photograph dating from the late 1890s showing an estero in Manila

Source: American Historical Collection, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University

634). Suggesting that the canals should be widened, dredged, and lined with masonry banks, these waterways (see Figure 4.3)—the city’s principal traffic avenues for distributing cargo, given the inefficient city road system existing before 1905—were considered to be offering ‘an economical and unobjectionable means of freight handling that will greatly contribute to the prosperity of the city’ (ibid.). Significantly, owing to their filthy water and insanitary mud banks, the reputation of the esteros in the early 1900s was far from positive. Thus, suggesting that renovating their banks and widening and deepening their watercourses—thereby improving the water flow—would make the esteros cleaner and help visually transform them: they ‘can become, as in Venice, an element of beauty’ (ibid.). Aside from stimulating economic development, the Report on Improvements at Manila would sanitise the city, improve traffic circulation (e.g. by developing a new street system), and beautify the urban environment by establishing new parks, lining roads with trees, and constructing fountains and monuments. Grand public edifices were also recommended. But, akin to City Beautiful philosophy in the US, the aesthetics suggested in the report were to be merged with matters of utility: the marriage of beauty with functionality was labelled within the City Beautiful milieu as ‘beautility’ (Cullingworth and Caves 2009: 63). In light of this reasoning,

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Figure 4.4 The plan for Manila as proposed by Burnham and Anderson in 1905

Source: William E. Parsons, Burnham as a Pioneer in City Planning, in The Architectural Record 38 (July 1911)

the Intramuros moat was to be filled in and converted from a source of disease into a picturesque sunken garden that offered space as a playfield and, in visual terms, ‘a proper setting’ for the walls of the historic Spanish district (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 631) (see Figure 4.4). The walls, once an emblem of Spanish dominion in Asia, although retained as an outcome of their perceived architectural value—‘their imposing appearance gives them great monumental value’ (ibid.: 630)—were to be planted with hanging pines and so demoted from a citadel of authority into a place of leisure, e.g. an ‘attractive lounging place’ (ibid.: 631; Rebori 1917a: 319). On a whole, the proposed scheme (see Figure 4.4) would ‘create a unified city equal to the greatest of the Western world, with [the] unparalleled and priceless addition of a tropical setting’ (ibid.: 635). In short, Burnham’s city renewal scheme was to enable Manila to ‘become the adequate expression of the destiny of the Filipino people as well as an enduring witness to the efficient services of America in the Philippine Islands’ (ibid.: 635).

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The New Downtown

As mentioned earlier, a core constituent of Burnham and Anderson’s report was the relocation of the governmental centre. Whereas during the Spanish colonial era the city and nation’s primary government buildings were situated about the Plaza de Roma inside the Intramuros—a space that was basically out of sight to all but the Europeans—after 1905 the new civic core was accessible to all and highly visible from throughout Manila. Located in the suburb of Ermita, the new governmental core (known as the Government Group14) was composed in a single mass that amalgamated buildings with two sizeable open spaces. Demonstrating Burnham’s aptitude for civic design, an art that extends the sphere of influence of an architect into the domain of city design owing to it dealing with the relationship between buildings and their setting so that pleasing visual effects and convenience could be attained (Morley 2012: 11-14), Washington DC—the ‘best planned of all modern cities’ (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 631)—acted as the template upon which the Government Group was formed. Open spaces were placed in prominent positions within the district, to the front and rear of the Government Group’s principal edifice, the Capitol, helping to grant visual dignity (ibid.: 628) and formed in their own distinct shapes: the first, located near the centre of the Capitol’s rear elevation, was semi-circular, with its centre point marked by a national monument; the second, situated directly in front of the Capitol’s main elevation, was to be rectangular. Lined by trees, and with a substantial lawn, this space resembled Washington DC’s Mall. It not only presented, when looking east, an impressive view of the Capitol,15 but also, when looking west, a magnificent vista of Manila Bay, the inlet noted by Burnham and Anderson (1905: 633) as the oriental counterpart to the Bay of Naples. This westward view included a statue to a Philippine hero, which was, for all intents and purposes, Manila’s version of the Washington Monument in Washington DC. In the new government quarter, and indeed throughout the entire Extramuros, Burnham and Anderson proposed a street system comprising a grid plan cut by radial thoroughfares and diagonal boulevards. Employed in comprehensive planning schemes in nineteenth-century Europe (e.g. Paris, France and Barcelona, Spain), diagonal boulevards granted monumental 14 The Group comprised a library, museum, post office, exposition buildings, a Hall of Justice, and the Capitol. 15 With its large dome, the edifice was to have a silhouette similar to the Capitol in Washington DC.

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links between important destinations within cities and helped provide structure to urban environments before anticipated periods of urban growth and economic development (Jacobs et al. 2002: 3). Often broad in width and of substantial length—for instance, the Avinguda Diagonal in Barcelona measures over 50 metres in width and eight kilometres in length—diagonal roads, especially in Europe, had the important role of moving great volumes of traffic about cities (ibid.: 42). Such a purpose was also apparent in Manila. The radial streets and diagonal thoroughfares proposed in the 1905 city plan had the function of easing traffic congestion; as Burnham and Anderson believed that Manila had the potential to become a place of great spatial scale, diagonal streets would ensure that people’s movement was not ‘subjected to a serious loss of time and waste of energy’ (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 631). Referring to the predicaments of movement in Chicago, a city with a grid street pattern without diagonal boulevards, they stated that the lack of one’s ability ‘in “tacking” to the left and to the right to reach his destination caused an unnecessary waste of time.’ This situation ‘means enormous loss of money, and in case of fires may contribute to great disasters’ (ibid.). For this reason, Burnham and Anderson stipulated that the arranging of streets in Manila ‘should be so carried out that a person may pass from any given point to any other point in a reasonably direct line’ (ibid.); Washington DC’s configuration of streets with arteries diffusing out from the urban core to all important districts within its bounds (ibid.) offered a model upon which the road system within the Philippine capital should be based. In Manila the ability of the Filipinos/colonized population, i.e. the native people, the Japanese and Chinese communities, and the Mestizos, to see the Government Group should be appreciated. Views along thoroughfares and through urban spaces established by the 1905 plan generated the new ability of people regardless of their social class or ethnic background to observe the Capitol and its dome—the insignia of the US presence in the Philippines—and so behold an executive institution working on their behalf to uplift, civilise, and Christianise: the latter being not ‘to proselyte for Protestant churches’ but ‘to make people better Catholics’ (Taft 1900). In the milieu of the nation’s reformation, these vistas served a dual purpose: they sanctioned the public to look at government institutions, while at the same time enabling bureaucrats to look from public buildings, and thereby notice the public over whom they served. Such a ploy enforced the client-patron character of US colonial governance and how public responsibilities were. It is necessary to make two comments on this matter: first, members of the public were accountable to each other by

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ensuring, through enfranchisement, that politicians within these public buildings/institutions upheld their civil rights; second, those Filipinos—the elites16—put by the Americans into seats of power had to demonstrate bonds not only to their own class but to the public as a whole. As such, the elites of the late Spanish colonial age, while being permitted to maintain their social exclusivity by being granted seats in government,17 were harnessed within this process of authority so that they could not apply autocratic practices as a means to preserve their own power and/or social status. In offering the elites posts within local, regional, and national councils (Parades 1988: 44), the American colonial politic was deliberately endeavouring to integrate this powerful group, because without their support any attempts to reform the Philippines would be at risk of failure (Arcillo 2006: 137): ‘the new nation could not survive without the talents and resources of the wealthy and educated’ (Ileto 1999: 20). Importantly, too, by making the elites conform to American political ideals, such as the principle of democracy, as government officers, it uttered in the context of the impermanence of US rule18 that ‘with time if you do what is right, you will run the country’. Speaking in the abstract, any exercise to construct vistas to and from distinct features within the built environment permits citizens to acquire ‘ownership’ of what they see: ‘the spectator owns the view because all of its components are structured and directed towards his eyes’ (Cosgrove 1998: 26). In addition, such a strategy accentuates that the visible edifices belong to now; in political terms, the development of this sentiment aided the Americans in reinforcing the idea for the Filipino public that the Spanish colonial age belonged to the past. As previously indicated, the American’s 16 From the 1880s, due to their (often overseas) educations, the Filipino elites were known as Illustrados (‘enlightened ones’); as the colony’s f irst intelligentsia, they philosophically challenged the nature of Spanish colonial politics and the influence of the Catholic Church. Such an ideological confrontation led to the jailing and execution of many of this class, such as José Rizal, and their adoption of the label ‘Filipinos’—a term previously used only by Spanish creoles (Anderson 1998: 198-199). 17 The Americans believed that for the goal of Philippine independence to be achieved they had to garner the support of the existing Filipino elite. To overcome this group’s reservations about American interference in their country, in 1898 a colonial governmental strategy was formed whereby those Filipinos who were already in (low) positions of power would be elevated to mid-level roles in the colonial government. This process was referred to as ‘filipinisation’. It also demonstrated that modernisation in the Philippines was not only paradigmatic but gradualistic in nature, as it allowed for some continuation from the previous colonial age (Skirbekk 2011: 7). 18 In a document to President Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft stated: ‘the national policy is to govern the Philippines for the benefit and welfare and uplifting of the people of the Islands and gradually to extent to them, as soon as they show themselves fit to exercise, a greater and greater measure of self-government’ (United States 1908: 7-8).

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appraisal of Philippine society after the end of the Spanish-American War led them to believe that Filipinos could never become self-ruling until they became culturally advanced, homogenous, and trained in modern politics. Hence, as part of the post-1898 national development it was crucial that Filipinos be not only ‘modernised’, in part by grasping what good government is (Grunder and Livezey 1951: 84), but unified as well (Stanley 1974: 81). Consequently, as much as Burnham and Anderson’s urban plan embodied the message that a new State was in power and preparing Filipinos for selfgovernment, it also explicitly underscored that the ‘day of rule for the Latin race had ended’ (Marshall 1900: 445). Similarly, it denoted the construction of a new identity for Filipinos, one no longer based on a tribal-centred sense of self, but instead grounded in, for the first time, the notion of ‘the Philippine nation’. The newfound capacity of Filipinos to see the public edifices within Manila’s transformed built environment has been noted. Yet the ability of people arriving by boat to see the new public buildings—and so a different society than that of the years prior—was also important to the Americans, since this visual transition indicated that the dawn of a new age for the Philippines had begun, and with it the evolution of the local civilisation. Why was such imagery valuable? Whereas the Spanish ventured to bring citizens ‘under the bells’, after 1898 the development of Philippine culture was to be exposed through vistas from Manila Bay indicating the secular nature of local society, as well as the creation of a common identity for the local population as part of the country’s modernisation. By way of illustration, the position of the Capitol’s dome aligned with the siting of the Mall (230 metres long, 80 metres wide), a statue, the extended Luneta 19 (which also included a space called Burnham Green, see Figure 4.5), and a new pier, which was to be the ‘entrance of a great capital’ (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 633). By establishing a grand axis in the heart of Manila, when arriving in Manila by boat these prominent features collectively drew the eye to the Capitol and its dome (in the background). However, the aforesaid alignment did not only correspond with features on the land. The axis that defined the core of revitalised Manila extended westwards across the entirety of Manila Bay, terminating at a rocky outcrop at the mouth of the inlet known as the Isla del Corregidor (‘Isle of Correction’). 19 The extension of the Luneta was carried out after the passing of Act No. 1360 (on 26 June 1905). The law authorised the city government to reclaim land from Manila Bay, which subsequently was to be owned by the municipality. By 1907, Act No. 1657 had been passed to authorise the local government to sell or lease a portion of the land as a hotel site.

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Figure 4.5 A plan of Burnham Green, showing the Luneta, Ocean Boulevard (labelled as Cavite Boulevard), a site for a new hotel, and the new pier

Source: Manila Nostalgia, http://www.lougopal.com/manila/

Before 1905, Manila appeared to lie almost at the level of the water when viewed from a distance in Manila Bay (Williams 1913: 48). The only vertical elements visible within any panorama were the bell towers and domes on churches in the Intramuros. As a result of this cityscape, it was said that ‘China has her walls, India her pagodas […] the distinguishing feature of Manila is her churches’ (Miller 1906: 77). To alter this situation after the collapse of Spanish colonial rule, the visual attention of someone approaching Manila by boat was to no longer focus upon the Intramuros. As a replacement in ‘City Beautiful Manila’, as vessels approached the pier at the Luneta passengers’ eyes would be drawn to new/other architectural structures.

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Figure 4.6 A panoramic view of Rizal Park as it appears today; the space was originally proposed by Burnham in 1905 to be a Mall lying immediately to the west of the Capitol

Photo by the author

This modification was purposeful. It signified the change in the nature of Philippine society following the end of the Spanish Empire and was intended to signify the birth of a democratic state. How this symbolism was to be achieved was through careful construction of the aforesaid monumental axis between the Capitol and the Isla del Corregidor some forty kilometres away. With ships turning into Manila Bay from the East Asia Sea and then heading on a direct bearing to the centre of Manila, the on-looking eye approaching the city was instantaneously drawn to the pier, the Luneta,20 and the Capitol. Trees planted in proximity to the shoreline (e.g. along the newly formed Ocean Boulevard) were to act as a screen, concealing many of the existing Spanish-era architectural features in Manila. By providing this buffer, attention was tactically drawn to the Capitol—if only because the only part of the seafront without newly planted trees was the Luneta. Leaving this part of the waterfront exposed predictably made the Luneta, as an important social centre of the city (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 628), and the public buildings and spaces to its rear (see Figure 4.6) easily detectable symbols of the progression of society. 20 During the Spanish era, the Luneta was the principal promenade ground in Manila. When necessary, the space also coupled as a site for public executions (Lala 1899: 136).

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The City Beautiful and Philippine Spatial Abstraction

A major criticism levelled by the Americans against the Spanish was that before 1898 the Filipinos were never unif ied (Crow 1914: 14). To the Americans, this constituted a major failing of the Spanish colonial authority. In view of this, within a handful of years of acquiring jurisdiction over the Philippine Archipelago the US initiated a range of policies to establish a common language, traditions, and customs so that, in preparation for Philippine independence in the future, Filipinos could present themselves as a single ethno-political collective (ibid.: 16-17). I argue that urban design was not idle in this process, and played a noteworthy role in the US drive to construct Philippine nationhood. For example, Manila’s Mall, the city’s principal imperial space, was strongly affixed to the US-promoted concept of Filipinism. As the blending of the best and greatest in the Orient with the greatest and best in the AngloSaxon (Palma 1974: 57-72), Filipinism was off icialised by the use of law. In 1902, for example, Act No. 345 was passed to commemorate the death of José Rizal. Venerated as ‘the f irst Filipino’ (Anderson 1998: 227-234), Rizal, who in 1896 was executed near Manila’s Mall by a Spanish f iring

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Figure 4.7 The Rizal Monument, Rizal Park, Manila as seen on Rizal Day in 2015; designed by Richard Kissling, and opened in 1913, the monument is dedicated to the memory of Rizal, a ‘patriot and martyr’

Photo by the author

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squad, 21 was formally embraced by the Americans as a f igure who could arouse harmony among Filipinos (Constantino 1969: 7). Notwithstanding the fact that Act No. 345 made December 30—the date of Rizal’s death in 1896—a day of remembrance, as part of the memorialisation process Filipinos were also encouraged to hold ceremonies to the hero. 22 To bolster such celebrations, supplementary laws were passed so that statues of Rizal could be placed within newly formed urban spaces, like the Mall (see Figure 4.7). Consequently, and by no coincidence, in the years when US colonial governance was being created and US authority in the Philippines was most pronounced, the shared sense of ‘being Filipino’ emerged (Mojares 2006: 12). Within this timeframe modern city planning concepts were also implemented in the Philippines; because of the correlation between governance and nationhood, urban design exercises did much more than tectonically reorder the environmental form of Philippine settlements: instead, they aided the assembly of nationhood. To explicate this topic, attention must return to the grand central axis of the 1905 Manila plan. Within the spatial corridor between the Capitol and the pier at the Luneta (i.e., in the Mall) there is a large statue of Rizal. Tying the most important urban space in the ‘New Philippines’ to Filipinism, people arriving in Manila would be greeted by an impressive urban image23 comprising the hero’s monument framed by the Capitol in the background. Marking the individuality of the Filipino populace and their place in the modern world (Mojares 2006: 23), similar urban scenes were replicated throughout the Philippines as a result of the implementation of urban design schemes in the provinces. Analogous to City Beautiful urbanism in the US, with its goal of elevating citizenship, 21 Rizal was assassinated by firing squad after being tried and convicted in late 1896 of rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy. Because of his associations with some of the members of the Katipunan, a Philippine society that instigated a major revolt against Spanish rule in 1896, Rizal was implicated in the uprising. Consequently, he was arrested and imprisoned in Fort Santiago in the Intramuros. On the morning of 30 December 1896, Rizal was walked to an area close to the site later marked by Burnham for the Government Group, where he was, at about 7 am, shot and killed. Today the route taken by Rizal from the fort to the place of execution is marked by footprints, and forms part of a heritage trail. 22 Act No. 241 was passed in 1901 to allow public land in the Luneta to be used for a monument to Rizal. The Act stated that the monument, when built, would not only memorialise the Philippine hero, but also house his remains. 23 Burnham had a clear-cut idea of what comprised architectural beauty. It was based on two fundamentals: the attractiveness of an individual structure; and the splendour of an orderly and fitting arrangement of many architectural elements. Moreover, he stated, the association between all of the architectural elements in an environment is more important than anything else (Burnham 1903).

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grand Classical-inspired city planning in the Philippines likewise sought to raise the public spirit, albeit by magnetising formerly disconnected groups of people together in urban spaces. Using statuary to promote persons who had endorsed ‘national Filipino culture’ and the incipient concept of the ‘Filipino nation’, the implementation of four monumental urban plans and numerous civic centres before 1914 (see Figure 4.8) not only redefined the Philippine cityscape (moving away from the enclosed Spanish-developed plazas), but also the people’s sense of national belonging. It helped provoke them to consider that, by residing in the Philippine Archipelago and by having a history of their own progressive thinkers from the islands, they did encompass a single populace—i.e., they belonged to a distinct nation/civilisation. Figure 4.8 The Capitol Building in Lingayen, Pangasinan Province; with landscaped grounds to its rear and front, and a large roadway (today known as Maramba Boulevard) connecting the district to the Spanishera settlement, this civic centre24 helped shift life in the city away from the Spanish-style plaza mayor (‘major plaza’), to the new Plaza de Lingayen and surrounding public edifices

Photo by the author

24 The Capitol dates from 1918, but a plan to develop a civic centre dates from 1914. It involved the development of a 25-hectare site containing not only the Capitol but also a prison, storehouse,

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The assimilation of urban design and nation building was further evident in Manila via the diagonal boulevards in the 1905 plan. As already discussed, they granted vistas both of the Capitol but also, in the semi-circular space positioned near the building’s rear elevation, to a national monument. With one thoroughfare25 connecting Paco District and its new railway station to the Government Group, visitors to Manila from the provinces—just like visitors by boat or indeed the citizens of the city themselves as they went about their daily business—would be cognisant of the changed environmental setting. Accordingly, in both literal and figurative terms the urban environment’s new public edifices, spaces, and monuments permitted Filipinos regardless of class, gender, or age to recognise that a ‘constructive partnership’ between Americans and Filipinos was in active operation. The promotion of national cohesion was also evident in Burnham and Anderson’s urban planning work outside of Manila. Baguio, founded in 1905 as the colonial summer capital city in the mountains of North Luzon, not only overtly buttressed the value of creating organised built environments, but as an example of paradigmatic modernisation—in this particular scenario altering a hitherto wild, disease-ridden (United States 1906: 20) upland site into a beautiful environment where 25,000 people could live (Burnham and Anderson 1921: 197)—was also composed with a well-defined central axis marked by a park (Rebori 1917b: 424). Similar to Manila, where open, green spaces were established in the suburbs (of a form comparable to those in ‘any French city of even moderate size’) (Burnham and Anderson 1905: 629) and playgrounds (of a type similar to those created in Chicago) (ibid.) were scattered throughout the cityscape, public space in Baguio allowed people to intermingle in their leisure times. Using open space so that people could easily see the beautiful, pine tree-lined mountainous surroundings and so recognise the distinctiveness of their country’s landscape, the urban spaces bestowed sites for all social groups to mix together, thereby encouraging those considered less ‘civilised’—such as the native tribespeople of North Luzon—to become ‘uplifted’ through direct contact with people familiar with modern civilisation. This proliferation of a ‘higher scale of civilisation’ in a territory of the Philippines hitherto lacking in modern, advanced culture was, somewhat obviously, also useful for developing new local civic schools, playgrounds, courthouse, and residences for the provincial governor and treasurer. The estimated cost of the project (in 1914) was ₱500,000 (Cameron 1914: 10-11). 25 Although in the 1905 city plan the name of this new boulevard was not given, and today it no longer exists, some major thoroughfares proposed in the 1905 scheme do still exist in the Paco District and in the vicinity of Rizal Park. These roadways are known today as General Luna Street, Quirino Avenue, and United Nations Avenue.

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consciousness. To help comprehend this matter attention must turn to the esplanade at the heart of the Baguio plan. Baguio’s urban plan, akin to the 1905 plan for Manila, had public buildings located on prominent sites. In the case of Baguio its most significant public edifices were located at each end of the central planning alignment. The City Hall and National Government Buildings were placed at opposite ends of a kilometre-long valley and at similar heights so that they looked directly at each other. This axis, from which the entire configuration of Baguio was organised, spatially articulated US discourse on civilisation-building: because Baguio’s urban plan was formed to help impart ‘practical political education’ so that in North Luzon a shift from tribalism to modern civilisation could result (Moses 1913: 585-596), as an effect of educating the local elites about, for example, civil law and freedoms, and allowing the public to openly see public institutions, under American colonial logic societal development was to thus transpire. As a city that, like Manila, was considered to typify the modernisation of the country, the municipal and national government buildings facing towards each other symbolised the American dissemination of political training and the Filipino embracing of American political tutelage as part of the preparation for self-government. With the Filipino elites being induced into becoming adjuncts of colonial rule, the users of Baguio’s central park were not idle in the societal development taking place in the nearby public institutions. In visiting and using this urban space they were granted two ubiquitous vistas, one towards the City Hall and the other towards the National Government Buildings. In the philosophical framework in which US colonial authority operated, the alteration of Philippine urban forms away from Spanish plazas to new public spaces, and therefore the redirection of life away from Spanish control to American authority, was a rational method of bringing about societal betterment. It was a way too of breaking down the existing social barriers between ethnic groups who, broadly speaking, had only ever come into contact with each other before 1898 in times of war, and a means therefore of eroding social barriers between the elites and lower social orders. In the context of the post-Spanish period, in the American colonial era the Filipino elites—particularly through their work within municipal and regional governments—had to ensure that if the Americans were to ever leave the country/grant national independence to the Filipinos they had to know what good governance was. By establishing trust and respect between the Americans and Filipinos, and between different groups of Filipinos, city design was a useful tool for transmuting the US colonial government’s principle of benevolent assimilation into benevolent

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Figure 4.9 A photograph dating from 1915 showing the view in Baguio from the National Government Buildings to the City Hall (in the background)

Source: American Historical Collection, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University

action. Alongside the development of schooling for children and public health and transport infrastructure, as well as the spread of English as the common language of the people, spatial changes must be appreciated for their role in helping bring about cultural and political evolution within the Philippines after 1898. Although Burnham’s planning activities in the Philippines ended in 1905, his work in the City Beautiful movement continued in North America. In late 1905 he presented a grand plan for San Francisco (Burnham 1905), and in 1906 began working on a plan for Chicago (Danzer 1998: 145). Published in 1909, this project had two unique features: an unparalleled spatial scale, covering the entire metropolitan area (Peterson 2003: 216-217); and a vast quantity of technical data to explicate the scheme’s functional and aesthetic aspects (Ward 2002: 72). To date little attention has been given to the parallels between Burnham’s work in the Philippines and Chicago, but comparing the 1905 plan for the Philippine capital city with the 1909 Chicago plan26 enables certain commonalities to be identified. For example, the quality of both city plans lies partly in their connection to natural environmental features, e.g. the waterfront in Chicago and the esteros, Pasig River, and Manila Bay in Manila. Both projects’ basic components—streets and open spaces—also 26 The plan was created by Burnham in partnership with Edward Bennett. Commissioned by the Commercial Club of Chicago, it was presented to the public in July 1909.

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focused upon edifices at the physical and symbolic core of the cities, i.e., the City Hall (in Chicago) and the Capitol (in Manila). Furthermore, through the design of each city plan these core buildings were directly connected to their hinterland. In Chicago the road network was extended from downtown to beyond the city borders in order to tie rural Illinois with the city’s new civic core. New roads outside the city paralleling Lake Michigan were also proposed, and had the effect of linking the City Hall with the regional setting. In Manila a similar ploy was evident in tying the Capitol to the region: the giant alignment from the Capitol to the Isla del Corregidor glued the country’s most important public building to the island at the mouth of Manila Bay. In vertical terms, too, both the City Hall in Chicago and the Capitol in Manila dominated their cities. The dome of each building not only terminated the axes of roads or urban spaces and anchored multiple connections with the natural landscape, but as very tall edifices within their settlements they were omnipresent to citizens moving about their urban environments. With regard to both of these city plans and their attention to each place as a whole, diagonal boulevards and park systems were important features in the urban forms, with each plan dealing with matters of circulation and the creation of public spaces and public monuments. In Chicago such features set alongside the pervasive visibility of the City Hall (see Figure 4.10) were meant to promote civic harmony amongst the local population (Roche and Lasher 2009: 54). In Manila, statuary near to the Capitol, including the memorial to José Rizal in the Mall, promoted national sentiment among people who were believed by the Americans to have previously lacked any grasp of nationhood. Both planning schemes must therefore not only be recognised as interweaving functional and symbolic elements, but also their amalgam of practical needs with cultural ideals must be considered fundamental to the narrative of both places as ‘modern planned cities’. Notably, by using urban planning to emphasise visual and physical connection between different city districts, and between cities and their regions, the organisation of monumental civic ensembles, public landscapes, and broad thoroughfares to enable unfettered movement within urban places provided the means to engage with urban design precedents such as Haussmann’s Paris and the American exemplar of Washington DC. By doing this Burnham, amongst other things, was able to demonstrate that societal improvement could be heavily shaped by spatial processes. The Manila and Chicago plans, along with the McMillan Plan, the Cleveland plan, the San Francisco plan, and others, cultivated the view that city planning was vital to societal betterment, albeit in the case of Chicago the ‘advancement’ was to emerge out of the city’s own distinct past and circumstances, and in Manila reforming

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Figure 4.10 Burnham’s proposed civic centre for Chicago as part of the 1909 plan

Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan_of_Chicago#/media/ File:BurnhamPlanOfChicago-CivicCenterPlaza-JulesGuerin.jpg

the city’s environmental structure was to rewrite its political and cultural chronicle and banish the perceived ‘black influences’ associated with Spanish colonial rule. Put simply, without Burnham Manila and Baguio would not be the same ‘modern places’ as what they are today.

4.5 Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War the importation of City Beautiful urban planning to the Philippines formed an integral part of early US colonial governmental strategy. As indicated, Daniel Burnham and Peirce Anderson established a new urban form in Manila so that the broad goals of US governance could be attained. As Manila was the country’s economic, cultural, and political nucleus, it was thought that changes in the capital city would inspire those in the provinces to take up its example (The Manila Times 1903: 3), and with the provinces becoming ‘Manila-ised’ modern civilisation would ripple throughout the Philippines’ numerous islands. To bolster the process of altering local settlements, and ensuring that the City Beautiful model was adopted outside of Manila, city

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plans for Baguio, Cebu, and Zamboanga were created and new civic centres were built in towns and cities where new regional governments were placed. Such was the volume of urban design in the Philippines in the decade after the Manila Plan that only one other country was creating more Classically inspired schemes at that time—and that country was the US itself.27 And poignantly, the acceptance of Burnham’s urban template continued after the period of early colonial rule ended—that is to say after 1916, when the Philippine Autonomy Act was passed—as an effect of US-educated Filipino architects who were working in influential positions within the Bureau of Public Works. That is why, in the words of Thomas Hines, the City Beautiful movement accomplished its greatest success not on North American soil, but on colonial ground in Southeast Asia (Hines 1972: 50). As the first scheme to use ‘a modern form’ in the Philippines, the 1905 Manila plan was both practical and emblematic, and designed to make the Spanish system of urbanism (originally set out by the Law of the Indies in 1573) outmoded. With the spreading of the Burnham model into the provinces in the years following 1905, Philippine settlements were, in environmental terms, directed away from their plaza mayors to new architectural and spatial features signifying the ‘new nation’. As US colonial authority was both reactive and proactive in nature, the success of the City Beautiful in the US offered a precedent upon which Philippine cities could be sanitised, beautified, etc., for the profit of ‘the public good’ from 1905 because, circa 1898, the US had little knowledge of the Philippines and a lack of knowledge too among government personnel as to how to achieve the colonial administrative aim of uplifting the Philippines (Grunder and Livezey 1951: 68). Since in City Beautiful thinking improved urban environments spawned ‘social religion’ (Ross 1901: 200)—the emotion of belonging to a community—the application of modern city planning was obviously attractive to the American bureaucrats wishing to elevate an Asian society they considered to be ‘backward’. As this chapter has attested, the City Beautiful was utilised as an instrument for redirecting life away from what it was in 1898, partially through the provision of urban environments in which a new sense of nationhood could be shown. Utilising urban space to express the existence of ‘the Filipino nation’, Malls and parks alongside new public edifices and statuary promoted Philippine society as consisting of a single racial collective rather than countless tribal groups. This, when placed alongside the beautification efforts, sanitisation of cities, and expansion of local infrastructure, made city planning a critical 27 Schemes belonging to the City Beautiful form of urban design are listed in Peterson (2003: 176, 296).

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tool of colonial governance; ultimately, without the application of ‘modern city planning’ in the Philippines it would have been much more problematic for the Americans to have ‘well and truly dispatched to history’ (Morley 2012: 14) all that Spanish colonialism entailed. As an urban laboratory for the modernisation of its nation, post-1905 Manila was meant to present the colonial state as being of the people (in contrast to the American perception that Spanish colonialism was not for the Filipino people) (McGovney 1903: 87). The core planning elements in the 1905 plan—e.g. the creation of parks, a centrally located civic core with a boulevard road system radiating from it, the development of the waterways and shorefront, etc.—were all basic traits of Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago. Noted as the maturation of City Beautiful urbanism in the US (Wilson 1989: 281), the 1909 Chicago scheme incorporated many symbolic features within the proposal for the redeveloped urban form. One important meaning conveyed by the Chicago plan was that the US future was to be urban, and that physically and literally the heart of the American city was the key local government building, i.e. the City Hall. In the Chicago plan this was to be surmounted by a dome and, with streets dispersing from it, was to be a ubiquitous sight as one travelled about the city. Presenting a vision of spatial order and civic unity, the dome—as the anchor of the built form that, when taken in connection to the urban plan as a whole, ‘becomes the keystone of the arch’ (Burnham and Bennett 1909: 117)—was to be built on a large vertical scale that would vivify and unify the entire environmental composition (ibid.: 118). By showing that the government was the driver of the local economy and of cultural and social affairs in the city, the civic and physical ‘good order’ of the city exhibited the generation of material advancement (Burnham 1911: 369). With a religious-like quality, the dome encapsulated to Burnham what modern urban planning was about, and in turn it was he who from 1893 with each of his major projects ‘pushed the framework of City Beautiful planning beyond all its prior limits’ (Peterson 2003: 215), culminating in the 1909 Chicago plan, ‘a single, unified, colossal program’ (ibid.: 216). It may therefore be argued that Burnham’s Philippine experiences were vital to preparing him for this vocational apogee. If the Chicago project represented the City Beautiful at the grand scale, then so too did the Manila plan. Although not presented in a tome as visually magnificent as the 1909 Chicago Plan, Manila’s plan of 1905 was nonetheless a marker of functionalism meeting a civic-aesthetic vision within the City Beautiful movement. Crucially, too, that image, at least in proximity to the Manila Bay shoreline and the green Mall that is today called Rizal Park, has persisted and defines the centre of the Philippine capital city. It also, significantly, persists in the provinces in the form of Capitol buildings and nearby civic centres.

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Bibliography Anderson, B. (1998), The Spectre of Comparisons. London: Verson. Anderson,P. (1906), ‘Report on Proposed Improvements at Manila’, in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects, 135-151. Washington DC. Arcillo, J. (2006), ‘The Origin of the Philippine Political Elite’, Illes I Imperis, 8: 133-144. Bellairs, E. (1902), As it is in the Philippines. New York: Lewis, Scriber and Co. Blount, J.H. (1913), The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912. New York, London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press. Burnham, D.H. (1903), ‘Letter to the Hon. Lesley Shaw, Secretary of the Treasury’ (written on 2 July), in Burnham Papers. Chicago: Chicago Library of Art. — (1905), Report on a Plan for San Francisco. San Francisco: Sunset Press. — (1911), ‘A City of the Future in a Democratic Government’, in Town Planning Conference London 10-15 October 1910. Transactions, The Royal Town Planning Institute of British Architects (ed.), 368-378. London: The Royal Institute of British Architects. Burnham, D.H., and Anderson, P. (1905), ‘Report on Improvements at Manilla’, in Report of the Philippine Commission, Part 1: 627-635. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. — (1921), ‘Report on the Proposed Plan of the City of Baguio Province of Benguet, PI, October 3 1905’, in Daniel H. Burnham Architect, Planner of Cities Vol.2, Moore, C. (ed.): 196-202. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Burnham, D.H., and Bennett, E. (1909), The Plan of Chicago. Chicago: The Commercial Club. Cameron, H.F. (1914), ‘Provincial Centers in the Philippine Islands’, in Quarterly Bulletin, Bureau of Public Works: 3-11. Constantino, R. (1969), ‘Veneration without Understanding’, in Third National Rizal Lecture. Quezon City: Malaya Books. Cosgrove, D. (1998), Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Crow, C. (1914), America and the Philippines. New York: Doubleday Page and Company. Cullingworth, B., and Caves, R. (2009), Planning in the USA: Policies, Issues and Processes. Abingdon: Routledge. Danzer, G. (1998), ‘The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives’, in Envisioning the City, Buisseret, D. (ed.): 144-174. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeGuzman, M. (2005), Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend. Off-Whiteness and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Duque, E. (2009), ‘Militarization of the City: Implementing Burnham’s 1905 Plan for Manila’ Fabrications, 19: 48-67. Far Eastern Review (1904), ‘The Policy of the Administration’, 1: 4. Field, C.R. (2007), ‘Interpreting the Influence of Paris in the Planning of Washington D.C., 1870-1930’, in Paris on the Potomac, Field, C., Gournay, I., and Somma, T.P. (eds.): 117-138. Athens: Ohio University Press. Forbes, W.C. (1905), Journal of W. Cameron Forbes. Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library (FMS AM1365). Grunder, G., and Livezey, W.E. (1951), The Philippines and the United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Halstead, M. (1898), The Story of the Philippines. The Eldorado of the East. Chicago: Our Possessions Publishing Co. Harris, S.K. (2011), God’s Arbiters. Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hendrickson, D. (2009), Union, Nation, or Empire. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Hines, T.S. (1972), ‘The Imperial Facade: Daniel H. Burnham and American Architectural Planning in the Philippines’, The Pacific History Review, 41 (1): 33-53. — (2009), Burnham of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ileto, R.C. (1999), Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War, Philippine Studies Occasional Papers Series 13. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Ireland, A. (1899), Tropical Colonization: An Introduction to the Study of the Subject. London: The MacMillan Co. Jacobs, A., Macdonald, E., and Rofé, Y; (2002), The Boulevard Book. History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lala, R.R. (1899), The Philippine Islands. New York: Continental Publishing Co. Lico, G. (2008), Arkitekturang Filipino: A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Philippines. Quezon City: University of Philippine Press. Mahan, A. (1899), Lessons of the War with Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. Marshall, E. (1900), Exciting Experiences in Our Wars with Spain and the Filipinos. Chicago: The Educational Co. McGovney, D.O. (1903), Civil Government in the Philippines. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co. Miller, G.A. (1906), Interesting Manila. Manila: E.C. McCullough and Co. Miller, S.C. (1982), Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Mojares, R.B. (2006), ‘The formation of Filipino nationality under US colonial rule’, Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 34 (1): 11-32.

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Moore, C. (1921), Daniel H. Burnham Architect Planner of Cities, Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Morley, I. (2010), ‘The Cultural Expansion of America: Imperialism, civic design and the Philippines in the early 1900s, European Journal of American Culture, 29 (3): 229-51. — (2012), ‘The creation of modern urban form in the Philippines’, Urban Morphology, 16 (1): 5-26. Moses, B. (1913), ‘American Control of the Philippines’, Atlantic Monthly Journal, 111: 585-596. Palma, R. (1974), ‘Inaugural Address of Rafael Palma as Fourth President of the University of the Philippines’, in Rafael Palma: A Commemorate Brochure on his Birth Centenary, 57-72. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Pante, M.D. (2014), ‘Mobility and Modernity in the Urban Transport Systems of Colonial Manila and Singapore’, Journal of Social History, 47 (4): 855-77. Parades, R. (1988), ‘Origins of National Politics’, in Philippine Colonial Democracy, Parades, R. (ed.), 41-69. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pardo de Tavera, T.H. (1928), ‘The Filipino Soul’, in Thinking for Ourselves, Hilario, V. and Quirino, E. (eds.), 170-186. Manila: Oriental Commercial Co. Parsons, W.E. (1915), ‘Burnham as a Pioneer in City Planning’, The Architectural Record, 38: 13-32. Penczer, P.R. (2007), The Washington National Mall. Arlington: Oneonta Press. Peterson, J. (2003), The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rapoport, A. (1993), ‘On the Nature of Capitals and their Physical Expression’, in Capital Cities. International Perspectives /Les Capitales. Perspectives internationales, Taylor, J., Lengellé, J.G., and Andrew, C. (eds.), 31-67. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Rebori, A.N. (1917a), ‘The Work of William E. Parsons in the Philippines, Part 1’, The Architectural Record, 41: 305-24. — (1917b), ‘The Work of William E. Parsons in the Philippines, Part 2’, The Architectural Record, 41: 423-34. Reed, R.R. (1967), Hispanic Urbanism in the Philippines: A Study of the Impact of Church and State. Manila: University of the Philippines Press. — (1974), Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reps, J. (1965), The Making of Urban America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Robinson, C.M. (1903), Modern Civic Art, or The City Made Beautiful. New York: G.P. Putnam. Roche, S., and Lasher, A. (2009), Plans of Chicago. Chicago: Architects Research Foundation. Roosevelt, T. (1915), ‘Letter to W. Cameron Forbes’ (written on 6 April), in Cameron Forbes Papers. Cambridge: Harvard University, Houghton Library. BMS AM 1364(247).

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Ross, E. (1901), Social Control. New York: MacMillan Co. Sawyer, F. (1900), The Inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, Volume 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Skirbekk, G. (2011), Multiple Modernities. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Stanley, P. (1974), A Nation in the Making. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stuntz, H. (1904), The Philippines and the Far East. Cincinnati: Jennings and Pye. Sullivan, R. (1999), Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C. Worcester. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Taft, W.H. (1900), ‘Letter to Elihu Root’ (written on 13 October), in William Taft Papers, 8:463. Washington DC: Library of Congress. The Manila Times (1903), ‘Two Civilizations’, 10 September: 3. United States (1902), A Pronouncing Gazetteer and Geographical Dictionary of the Philippines. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. — (1905), Census of the Philippine Islands Vol. 3. Washington DC: United States Bureau of the Census. — (1906), Sixth Annual Report of the Philippine Commission, Part 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. — (1908), Senate Document 200, 60th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Ward, W. (2002), Planning the Twentieth Century City. Chichester: Wiley. Willis, H.P. (1905), Our Philippine Problem: A Study of American Colonial Policy. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Williams, W. (1913), The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission. Chicago: A.G. McClurg and Co. Wilson, W.W. (1989), The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Winslow, W. (1902), Governor Taft in the Philippines. Boston: Allied Printing. Wright, G. (2008), USA Modern Architectures in History. London: Reaktion.

About the author Ian Morley is an Associated Professor of the Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the design of urban environments in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with particular reference to the onset and evolution of American colonisation in the Philippines. He is the former Book Review Editor for the journal Urban Morphology and is currently a board member of the journal Planning Perspectives. Email: [email protected]

5

Global Dynamics and Tropes of Place ‘Touristed’ Spaces and City-Making in Macau Sheyla S. Zandonai Abstract Gambling in Macau was liberalised in 2002, when the People’s Republic of China was also campaigning for the city to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2005, while the opening of new monumental casino venues began to critically transform the cityscape, Macau’s Historic Centre became China’s 31st World Heritage site. In this chapter, I examine how the expansion of gambling and global recognition of the city’s heritage have generated urban and political ambivalences stemming from the intersections of global capitalism, identity formation, and development, despite new regulations and coordinated efforts across the fields of urban planning, heritage preservation, and land use. I analyse how China’s national program for Macau has entailed both the regeneration of gambling as a powerful regional industry and the ‘essentialisation’ of heritage, showing that the attendant processes of city-making and urbanism have continued to allow flexibility and improvisation under the pressures of tourism promotion. Keywords: heritage, casinos, urban planning, flexibility, Macau

5.1 Introduction Looming over the São Francisco Garden next to the old Military Club, an enormous, strangely shaped golden edifice emerges from a cluster of grey, decaying buildings belonging to a less dazzling past. The form of this edifice, I was once told, was inspired by the lotus flower, a Buddhist symbol of purity, which also appears in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Macau’s green-and-white flag. But the more widespread and accepted

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch05

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Figure 5.1 Grand Lisboa casino-hotel

Photo by the author, 2008

version states that the architect responsible for the design of this building took inspiration from the feather crown worn by a showgirl. Inaugurated in 2007, this building is the Grand Lisboa, one of the first casino-hotels erected after Macau’s gambling sector was opened to foreign competition in 2002 (see Figure 5.1). The ovoid structure embracing the base of the skyscraper is considered a symbol of good fortune and prosperity. An activity of Macau for well over a hundred years, gambling was liberalised while China’s campaign to add the city to UNESCO’s World Heritage List was still ongoing. In 2005, when the new gambling and entertainment venues were already starting to raise important economic and social stakes, Macau’s Historic Centre became China’s 31st world heritage site. I have chosen to focus on gambling and heritage because they are two complementary and slightly conflicting features of Macau’s contemporary city-making process. One is a dynamic, ever-expanding force; the other is a more self-contained, historical form in search of extended recognition. Harnessed as economic activities, both come together under the rubric of tourism and constitute domains with global constituents that struggle for space—albeit for different reasons and in different manners—in a jammed, wealthy city. Spatially, they form enclaves, and yet they are bound together

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by a particular economic relationship: the tax revenues from gambling fund heritage conservation. Although developed and regulated or protected by legal acts, they are constantly readjusted to meet ever-changing economic and social conditions. As a result, I argue, their actual form and the impact they have on the city’s character and morphology reveal the ‘undesigned product’ of human agency (Park 1915: 578) rather than efficient attempts at planning. Their interlock is thus one of ambivalence, drawing on the many angles arising from the intersections of global capitalism, identity, and urban transformation. Macau’s laidback atmosphere and maritime outlook have long surrendered to a city of congestion.1 The city accommodates a large network of historical sites and buildings, new and not-so-new densely urbanised areas, and two main gambling ‘districts’. Centuries old, its urban fabric is extremely complex, diversified, and saturated. I have analysed elsewhere how the social dichotomy that marked the long-term cohabitation of the Portuguese and Chinese has been accommodated into the organisation of the city’s material space (Zandonai 2014). Here, I aim to problematise the study of Macau’s urban formation by highlighting other complexities and contrasts—some historical, but most contemporary—that do not essentially pertain to ethnic lines, but rather to global dynamics and tropes of place. In this chapter, I examine how the development of monumental casino complexes and the politics and emergence of World Heritage in Macau have together transformed the city’s landscape, affecting the social and symbolic experiences of place. I analyse the production of Macau as a city that follows China’s national program by revamping its colonial past into a colourful rhetoric of East meets West, and by recasting its historical global positioning through the regeneration of gambling as a powerful regional industry. As many of the themes and views presented here are relatively new, they should be perceived as an attempt to illuminate phenomena that occupy the minds and lives of Macau residents, and that therefore deserve to be more systematically studied. The information analysed in this chapter draws chiefly on ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork in the city in 2014,2 combined with analysis of legislation and statistical data. In the pages that follow, I introduce the views and perceptions of various people I encountered, some of whom I have known since 2006, as an active observer in the life of Macau and its people for nearly five months in 2014.3 1 I borrow the idea of congestion from Koolhaas (1994: 10). 2 I have conducted fieldwork in Macau in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013, and 2014. 3 The principle that guides the production of scientific knowledge here is participant observation, in which the collection of data is regularly checked through different empirical methods:

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My informants are mostly specialists of some sort, including architects, designers, economists, and professionals directly or indirectly involved with heritage and planning, as well as people who, because of their activities, personal interests, or affective attachments to Macau, have devoted time to describing and explaining to me some of the social facts and events underlying the process of making the city today.

5.2

All in: China, Development, and the Global Economy of Gambling and Tourism

5.2.1

Variegated liberalisation: the political economy of gambling

Before the gambling market was deregulated to allow foreign capital investment and development in 2002, Macau’s Stanley Ho Hung-sun was the ‘King of gambling’ there for 40 years. Launched in 2001, the liberalisation of gambling (liberalização do jogo, 賭權開放) put an end to Ho’s monopoly held under the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM) through the granting of new gambling concessions to other companies. Harking back to a law that was drafted and approved in 1986 (Law no. 10/86/M) under the former Portuguese administration, the liberalisation act allowed the granting of concessions to a maximum of three holders, according to data from the Gaming Inspection and Co-ordination Bureau, (DICJa). Gambling licenses have been granted interviews, written sources (e.g. local newspapers), social interactions (e.g. informal conversations), etc. One classic definition of participant observation is ‘the up-close involvement of the researcher in some form of participative role, in the natural, “everyday” setting to be studied’ (Stewart 1988: 6). It is the anthropologist’s role to learn to listen and watch, seeking to move into ‘natural settings of social life, the places people would be, doing what they would be doing, if [he/she] were not there’ (Sanjek 2010: 247). Thus, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan claims, the ethnographer is a voyeur, but also a listener (1995: 78). Since the time of Bronislaw Malinowski, participant observation has been employed to grasp the imponderabilia of actual life, that is, the ‘flesh and blood’ of social phenomena and the intimate side of life (1961 [1922]: 14-15). ‘One’s job as an ethnographer is to account for what goes on, on the ground, in living colour’, explained Agar (2008: 10). The ethnographer ‘hangs around and ask questions’ (Agar 2008: 7). Participant observation is thus a ‘mode of continuous learning about topics—people, their cultures, their relations’ (Stewart 1988: 15), that is, an iterative process of learning moments and episodes. This kind of social involvement provides the means to understand culturally meaningful codes and conventions, which allow the anthropologist to formulate culturally appropriate questions (Sanjek 2010: 247). One of the aims and outcomes of this process (learning from and with informants) is to ‘draw large conclusions from small but very densily textured facts’ (Geertz 1973: 28). For more details on the question of ethnographic authority in the production of social accounts of particular phenomena, see Marcus and Cushman (1982).

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to the Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM)—a subsidiary of STDM-Wynn Resorts from North America, and Galaxy Entertainment Group (GEG) from Hong Kong. Though not initially envisioned by the liberalisation contract, further ‘sub-concessions’ emerged when Galaxy broke with precedent by granting a licence to Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands (USA). This initiative was then followed by the other two original gambling-licence holders: SJM granted a sub-concession to MGM Grand Paradise (USA) in a joint venture with Stanley Ho’s daughter, Pansy Ho, and Wynn Resorts granted one to the Australian group Melco Crown (former Melco PBL), which has another of Stanley Ho’s successors as its Chairman (DICJa) (see Figure 5.2). The granting of ‘sub-concessions’ is a legal dysfunction that has never been fully clarified by the Macau administration. In explaining the politics of concessions that shaped gambling liberalisation, one of my informants, João Dias, commented on the ambiguous practices occasionally allowed by the political system. An economist himself, Dias has been living in Macau for nearly 20 years. As a scholar and a regular contributor to the local press, he has been quite interested in the economic and political processes that have emerged during Macau’s development since the political handover from Portugal to China in 1999. Here is how he explained the outcomes of the liberalisation: ‘there are six. Actually, not six, there are three plus three [concessions]. This is one of Macau’s wonders. […] In fact, there are six concessions that they call concessions and sub-concessions.’ When Galaxy Casino granted a ‘concession’ to The Sands, it was not entitled to proceed—but instead of punishing Galaxy for this act, the administration chose to regulate it and the two other ‘sub-concessions’ that followed (MGM Grand Paradise and Melco Crown). Another irregularity emerged from the fact that ‘sub-concessionaires’ paid direitos de cedência (‘rights of cession’) to the original concessionaires, a financial duty that did not apply to the latter when their bids won the licenses from Macau’s government. ‘Wynn was building its [first] project when the possibility of granting a concession emerged’, continued João. ‘Wynn’s first casino, you can be sure about that, was built for free, with the money coming from the sub-concession, which was money that should have been reverted, if this was to be treated as what it is in fact—a new concession—to the Macau SAR.’ Instead, the original concessionaires made a business out of selling part of their rights, entering the local market with extraordinarily favourable conditions. ‘From a material point of view, there is no difference between the concessionaires and the sub-concessionaires. It is only out of convenience to call things differently, pretending that there has been no violation of the law’, concluded the economist. Having paid the grant to the initial contractors, the ‘sub-concessionaires’ then responded to Macau’s government by operating, in

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Figure 5.2 Locations of the casinos in the Macau SAR

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd, based on information from DICJ

practice, as actual concessions (e.g. by paying taxes). These legal dodges can be somewhat better understood in light of the political quagmire engendered by the illegal granting of investment rights and the allocation of public land to gambling developers—through closed door negotiations between investors and the government—which led to the condemnation of Ao Man Long, the then-Secretary for Transport and Public Works (DSSOPT), in 2006 (Liu 2008: 120). Not only discrediting the administration, Ao’s actions also left it nearly

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paralyzed for years to come after he was sentenced to 27 years in prison. While the public administration faced strong headwinds, gambling was permitted to thrive. Despite the drastic increase in domestic competition with more players joining the table, they have all been dealt good hands, as it were. Macau has two important attributes for avid entrepreneurs: exclusivity of gambling activity in China, and a huge consumer market right at its doorstep. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) banned the activity in the mainland in 1949, Macau has been the nearly exclusive location of legal gambling in China (Fifoot 1994: 54).4 In addition, it is strategically positioned in the highly populated area of the Pearl River Delta (PRD), where there is an emergent and ever-growing middle class of consumers (Simpson 2008a, 2008b). Macau’s position takes advantage not only of the fact that much of the tourist market in Asia is intra-regional, i.e., the majority of visitors come from neighbouring areas, but also from the fact that, China’s economy has grown more than twice as fast as Europe and North America since the 1990s (Hannigan 1998: 168, 169). Today, in spite of the fact that it is no longer the only gambling locale in Asia—Las Vegas Sands opened the Marina Bay in Singapore in 2010, and other countries in Southeast Asia have more or less legalised government-controlled forms of gambling (e.g. Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos) (Bromberg 2006: 78-83)—Macau’s gambling industry has been less subject to competition, at least in the PRD area. Historically, as William R. Eadington has argued, ‘casinos have often been introduced to capture economic benefits from “exporting” casino gaming to customers from regions where the activity is prohibited’ (1999: 186-87). Drawing on the example of the Foxwoods Resort Casino opened by the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation in Connecticut (USA), John Hannigan explains that Foxwoods’ success relies largely on the fact that the casino built on the 2000-acre reservation sits at the centre of a market population of nearly 27 million, which is 50 percent larger than the population surrounding Atlantic City (the United States’ third largest gambling market5), and on the interdiction of gambling in one of the neighbouring states, New York (Hannigan 1998: 153). Despite Las Vegas and Atlantic City’s appearance in the eyes of the public as the two major retreats of casino operators in the 1990s, riverboat (in Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, etc.) and tribal-run casinos were increasingly thriving (Hannigan 1998: 145). 4 Gambling on horses has been recently allowed in mainland China, the same and only type of gambling permitted in Hong Kong (Spencer 2008). 5 Pennsylvania, which opened its first casino in 2006, passed Atlantic City to become the second largest gambling market in the United States in 2012 (‘Christie to the rescue’ in The Economist, 2015).

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Praised as a new means of economic stimulation, job creation, and enhancement of tax revenues, states and national governments worldwide are increasingly relying on gambling revenues to support public functions (Stokowski 2004: 399; Hannigan 1998: 145). Indeed, in no other era has gambling been developed and institutionalised so fast around the world (Stokowski 2004: 405). Eadington has argued that, more often than not, jurisdictions that decide to legalise casinos are either resource-poor or under economic pressure (1999: 187). It is no coincidence that gambling was first legalised in Macau in the mid nineteenth century, when the Britishoccupied Hong Kong (from 1843) was deeply harming Macau’s regional trading position.6 Taking over a city on the edge of bankruptcy, the incipient Portuguese colonial administration sought a means of economic survival in the concession of the first licences to the commercial exploration of fantan (in 1849), then one of the most popular games in southern China with a distinctively ‘Cantonese touch’ (Paulès 2010: 184-85),7 and the Chinese lottery (in 1851) (Porter 2000: 94; Pina-Cabral 2002: 94; McCartney 2006: 38-39). Today, the formula of Macau’s success seems to rely on a combination of exclusiveness, gambling tradition, and strategic geographical location. Fierce competition in North America has probably played a part in pushing big contenders such as Las Vegas Sands and Wynn to seek alternatives in the Asian market. But when the liberalisation was launched in 2001, casinos in Macau were filled mostly with Hong Kong and Taiwanese visitors—certainly not enough to convince the bidding tycoons. João Dias explained that American investors would most likely have had little interest in establishing businesses in Macau had they not been guaranteed an effort from China’s central government to increase the potential gambling market. At first, he explained, the international gambling contractors didn’t want to come to Macau. This is something they don’t control, there is an agent that has the monopoly for forty years, there are problems with triads8 […] and the Americans are compelled to respect the American rules here. [Otherwise], they lose their licences in the US (see Eadington and Siu 2007: 19-20). 6 This economic strategy also benefited from the fact that the British government of Hong Kong opted for the prohibition of gambling in its newly acquired territory in 1844 (Law no. 14) (Eadington and Siu 2007: 4). 7 Fantan derived from divination practices, and is said to have origins in the Han dynasty. It consists of a gambling game based on a draw from a random number of hidden coins or tokens, requiring the player to guess a number out of one, two, three, or four (Paulès 2010: 179, 181-182). 8 Chinese criminal organisations.

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The Individual Visit Scheme enacted in 2003 by the Chinese central authorities—allowing Mainland Chinese citizens for the first time under Communist rule allowed to leave the country on an individual basis—was thus orchestrated, in a way, to spur an influx of mainland visitors to Macau every year. Akin to the privileged fiscal and customs regimes planned to attract foreign investment and trade in the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) (Cun 1990: 394; Smart and Zhang 2006: 486; Ong 2006: 18-19), this relaxation of movement controls, together with schemes such as land concessions to developers, was designed to stimulate Macau’s economy. 5.2.2

Zoning fun: an old formula for an alternative territoriality

Since China’s ‘renewed’ engagement with global capitalism (Hai 2010: 3),9 both the creation of the SEZ10 and the ‘return’ of Macau and Hong Kong as Special Administrative Regions (SAR) have been designed to operate as ‘alternative territorialities’ (Ong 2006: 98; Hai 2010: 15). With the launching of the Four Modernisations Reform (agriculture, industry, education and science, and defence) under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, these were sharp reactions to the collapse of an economic system based on stateled accumulation and the resulting absence of investment opportunities necessary for the stimulation of growth in a country torn by poverty and social inequalities (Zhao 2001: 27; Harvey 2005: 120; Nonini 2008: 158; Hai 2010: 10; Wu 2012: 622). In regional terms, the Reforms have translated into massive national and foreign investments in industry, infrastructure, and technology, engendering fast industrialisation, economic growth, and extraordinary social and urban transformations in the PRD since the opening of China’s coastal cities in the mid 1980s (Xin 2002: 120; Ong 2006: 104; Smart and Zhang 2006: 485-486). At the turn of the twenty-first century, authors writing about the PRD have argued that it has been seized by ‘an uncontrolled development of which [the] scale and pace has no precedent in the world’11 (Chang et al. 2000: 281; cf. Koolhaas 2000b; Breitung 2007: 27). According to Smart and Smart, the PRD already constituted then a ‘new kind of urban region’ in which ‘the complex amalgam of densely populated 9 Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and Janet L. Abu-Lughod (1989, see particularly Chapter 10, ‘All the Silks from China’) are among the most notable proponents of the Chinese Empire’s economic and geopolitical supremacy before the European expansion. 10 The first SEZ were established in the Provinces of Guangdong (Shantou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai) and Fujian (Xiamen) (Cun 1990: 394; Ong 2006: 104). 11 My translation from ‘un développement effréné dont l’échelle et la soudaineté sont sans précédent dans le monde’ (Chang et al. 2000: 281).

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agricultural areas [was] gradually being replaced by growing smaller cities, new factory towns, vast industrial development zones, new infrastructural developments, and Special Economic Zones’ (Smart and Smart 1999: 172). In 2018, the completed construction of a bridge connecting Macau, Hong Kong, and mainland China, which can be seen from Macau’s Outer Harbour on the north-eastern coast of the peninsula, is but one recent element that confirms this trend and the promise of further regional integration. With market and political advantages and transnational resources generously flowing in, the rebirth of Macau’s gambling economy highlights two trends or directions. First, it echoes a trend in the accelerated location of new spaces for capital accumulation—through privatisation, foreign investment, the opening of export markets, etc.—since China’s economic transition from a socialist planned economy to a socialist market one (Nonini 2008: 158; Wu 2012: 622, 625). Second, it follows the global development of the economy of gambling and tourism (Stokowski 2004: 403, 405). Reflecting on the case of gambling and the proliferation of different kinds of gambling activities in North America (cf. Stokowski 2004: 400; Eadington 1999: 176), John Hannigan draws on an expression crafted by Robert Goodman (1995), the ‘new landscapes of luck’, to argue that these have emerged not only as new sources of revenue for cash-strapped cities but also as new modes of entertainment (Hannigan 1998: 145). Hannigan includes localities in which casino gambling or ‘gaming’12 has been allowed into the broader category of themed entertainment developments or urban entertainment destinations (UEDs) (Hannigan 1998: 2). UEDs were set to transform ‘previously tired downtown cores […] by rooting their economic base less in traditional secondary manufacturing and more in the realm of tertiary tourism, sports, culture, and entertainment’ (Paradis 2004: 195). These are places ‘indicative of a new urban economy closely connected to global commerce, which emerge as new centers of entertainment and leisure’ (Hannigan 1998: 2, 4; Paradis 2004: 195). UEDs are typically ‘theme-o-centric’, aggressively branded, and isolated from surrounding neighbourhoods physically, economically, and culturally (Hannigan 1998: 1-4). Albeit often associated with urban renewal, the fabrication of cities as ‘touristed spaces’ has also been criticised due to the ‘theme park’ forms 12 Hannigan argues that the replacement of the term ‘gambling’ with ‘gaming’ was a corporate strategy designed to endow the sector with more respectability. It can be traced back to the entry of experienced hospitality providers into the casino business (e.g. the Hilton, the Sheraton), which engendered ‘a strong measure of legitimacy to an industry which had suffered for years from an association with criminal activity’ (Hannigan 1998: 149; see also Eadington 1999: 176).

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and increasing standardisation (e.g. Disneyfication) they entail of places that previously had a culturally distinct existence (Paradis 2004: 198-199). Labelling these ensembles ‘fantasy cities’, Hannigan argued that they had gradually increased in the United States of America and at a somewhat lower pace in Europe, but that in the Asia-Pacific Rim they had seen great development since the 1990s, e.g. in mainland China (Hannigan 1998: 2-4; Chapter 9). While Hannigan does not mention Macau, based on his definition of gaming as one of these fantasy cities’ ‘theming’ characteristics, I argue that the sector’s liberalisation can be seen as a strategy for resituating Macau as a recreational and entertainment destination in the new global economy of gambling and tourism. Generating roughly 90 percent of Macau’s GDP, gambling and its related sectors are important business for both old and new investors and for the administration. It moves extraordinary sums of transnational and regional capital—Macau and mainland China have separate monetary systems—in addition to increasing levels of material and human resources, which have reached new magnitudes to keep the local economy running. While the kind of transformations inflicted to Macau’s urban fabric and society that can be witnessed today had not yet come about, many residents I encountered in 2007 were keen to highlight the unprecedented scale of the change that the city was undergoing. I had then witnessed long unannounced power cuts caused by the high levels of electricity consumption required by the casinos to operate around the clock, seven days per week. Today, and despite the fact that the problem seems to be solved, it should be noted that Macau is not self-sufficient in water or sand, of which tons are constantly ordered from the mainland to satisfy the needs of land reclamation, which is growing at the same speed as casinos’ construction and the need for housing sites. The scale is, in fact, overwhelming for a city squeezed into a small territory (the area of the Macau peninsula measures roughly 9.3 km2),13 where public infrastructure development has not followed the average of 15 percent growth over the last ten years,14 and where urban projects often get done before they are approved or regulated, e.g. land reclamation or the unfolding of gambling concessions into ‘sub-concessions’. 13 With an estimated population of 607,500 inhabitants in 2013, the Macau SAR’s territory, comprising the Macau peninsula, Taipa, Cotai, and Coloane, corresponds to a total area of 30.3 km2 (Yearbook of Statistics 2013: 45; DSCC n.d.). Las Vegas, which had nearly the same intramuros population in 2010, i.e., roughly 600,000 inhabitants, has an area of 352km 2 (City of Las Vegas n.d.). 14 GDP growth rates in real terms for selected years: 26.9% in 2004; 8.3% in 2005; 14.7% in 2007, 26.5% in 2011 (Yearbook of Statistics 2013: 344).

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Following the launch of China’s Individual Visit Scheme, the influx of visitors from the mainland has been equally overwhelming, increasing by the millions from the second half of 2000 onwards (Breitung 2007: 100).15 The overall feeling among residents has been that public spaces have become crowded, traffic has worsened, and public transport conditions have deteriorated, while prices have continued to increase. In one of the interviews I conducted with Simão Penha, a Macanese resident who works at the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and who has been a regular informant since 2007, he stepped aside from his civil servant position for a moment to criticise the effects of development: ‘Macau’s dimension cannot bear all this. [It] became a place of transit for tourists, tourists and tourists’. The most recent estimates of Macau’s Census and Statistics Department (DSEC) show that roughly thirty-two million people entered the city in 2017 on visit purposes (Yearbook of Statistics 2017: 160). Larger population movements are a persistent component of this growth, and new migrant workers (‘non-resident workers’) also flood the city on a daily basis (Liu 2008: 122).16 Residents find it difficult to sympathise with the increasing numbers of outside workers, and this opposition has often translated into political propositions condemning the recruitment of illegal workers and insisting on the necessity of reducing labour importation (Ian 2008a: 4, Ian 2008b: 6).17 One of the reasons for this fraught situation, explained João, is that ‘it is a hectic growth of a population which is a population in transit […] with no connection to place (ligação à terra), no “attachment”, in continuous flux […] and a lot of those people are here for very short or rather short periods of time. It starts to be an important portion with all the impact it has on infrastructures, housing, social services, and so on.’ Undoubtedly, mainland China is the main source of both visitor and working population influxes to Macau. Although the movement of this floating population inside the city disrupts the life of residents on a daily basis, they are mostly concentrated in specific areas. On the one hand, as I discuss later, this corresponds to the attraction of Macau’s Historic Centre. On the other, this localised density is a result of the great influx of both 15 From roughly four million in 2002 to seventeen million in 2012. The same year, the total number of visitors to Macau amounted to 28 million (Yearbook of Statistics 2012: 180). 16 The number of non-resident workers reached 137,830 in 2013. The total population of Macau was estimated at nearly 607,000 inhabitants for the same year (Yearbook of Statistics 2013: 47, 77). 17 This type of proposition is often raised by civic associations that represent the interests of the working classes of Macau, e.g. the New Macau Democratic Association (Associação Novo Macau Democrático, ANMD), and the Macau Federation of Trade Unions (Associação Geral dos Operários de Macau, AGOM).

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visitors and workers headed for casino and construction sites—which are themselves often gambling-related or close to the casino areas. Operating hotels and casinos and casino projects under construction are concentrated in two main zones of the Macau SAR territory. The first, stretching between the ZAPE and NAPE areas (新口岸)18 —reclaimed during the 1920s and 1980s, respectively—in the eastern part of the Macau peninsula, is the original, old casino district (Karakiewicz and Kvan 1997; Zandonai 2015: 20). This area has also accommodated the first new developments since the liberalisation, such as The Sands, Wynn, Grand Lisboa, and MGM. Such design reveals a clear logistical continuity between the old and the new; the recent projects have actually sought to benef it from their location in the original gambling enclave due to its proximity to Macau’s Outer Harbour ferry terminal, which connects the city to Hong Kong, the primary source of tourists to Macau until 2003, when visitors from the mainland surpassed visitors from Hong Kong for the first time (Yearbook of Statistics 2003: 177). The second is the Cotai area (路氹城), whose name results from the combination of the first syllable of Coloane and Taipa, Macau’s southern islands. Reclaimed during the Portuguese administration, Cotai was initially destined to house developments for Macau’s expected demographic growth, offering integrated services of transport and logistics for people and goods, with support services for businesses and exports (Edmonds and Kyle 1998: 289). It would have linked the existing airport to a port and to a railway hub that connected Macau to China’s network. There was also a large logistics centre planned for the PRD, which would have been complementary to Hong Kong, as João Dias explained. However, when the politics of the gambling concessions got somewhat out of hand, the original development plan for Cotai never saw the light of day, and it was immediately converted into the new centre for gambling expansion. Although the area was not planned to accommodate the strip—the name inspired by the casino belt in Las Vegas—Dias argued during our interview that it makes a lot of sense today in terms of urban management. In his opinion, none of the new casino developments should have been built on the peninsula, but should have instead been consigned to Cotai from the beginning to reduce the pressure, both economic and demographic, that has fallen upon the peninsula’s already saturated territory.

18 ZAPE: Zona de Aterros do Porto Exterior; NAPE: Novos Aterros do Porto Exterior.

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5.3

Bounded Heritage: Binding Rules: ‘Commodification’, Planning, and the Lack Thereof

5.3.1

Framing and funding heritage

It is in the peninsula that Macau’s Historic Centre is located, at a short walking distance from the Lisboa Casino and Hotel, one of the first of the former STDM’s enterprises which started full operations in 1970. In this area, the gambling and the heritage enclaves are separated by only a few hundred metres on the Avenida do Infante Dom Henrique. The casino district is located in the vicinity of Ferreira do Amaral Square (see Figure 5.3), partly surrounded by the Grand Lisboa, the Wynn, and the Lisboa itself, stretching east to the Avenida da Amizade; the Historic Centre borders the Avenida Almeida Ribeiro, also known as ‘new road’ in Chinese (新馬路, san ma lou)—itself a continuation of Avenida do Infante Dom Henrique—where the Leal Senado Square, the quintessence of heritage in Macau, is located. Since its addition to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005, the Historic Centre carries the joy and burden of being both the city’s main historical site and its most frequented space off the casino areas. Comprised of two core zones (see Figure 5.4),19 the UNESCO classified sites and ensembles in Macau, though dominated by churches and temples, range across other Portuguese, Chinese, and foreign legacies, such as the Moorish Barracks and the Protestant Cemetery. Linking the A-Ma temple in the south-eastern part of the peninsula to the centre of the old Christian citadel, the Historic Centre embodies a ‘chronological corridor’ connecting the first point of encounter between the Portuguese and the Chinese to the former core of the trade and contact zone between the two. This is the official interpretation, which I gathered from Cristina Flores, an architect at the Heritage Department of the Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau or IC, as it is commonly referred to by its Portuguese acronym for Instituto Cultural. It is nevertheless clear that Macau’s built heritage goes beyond these sections of the city, appearing in a separate list as ‘local heritage’, which draws on previous listings created by the former Portuguese administration starting 19 The Core Zone 1, which comprises ‘the central area of the historic settlement of Macao […], includes a series of urban spaces and buildings representing the integration of Portuguese and Chinese elements along the city’s primary urban route, Rua Direita, which leads from the ancient Chinese harbour in the south to the old Christian city in the north’. Some of its ensembles are the Senado Square, the Saint-Augustine’s Square and the Lilau Square. ‘The Core zone 2, some 500m east of the zone 1, consists of the Guia Fortress (1622-38) located on the Guia Hill and incorporating Guia Chapel (1622) and Guia Lighthouse (1885) the oldest lighthouse in South China seas’ (ICOMOS 2005).

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Figure 5.3 Ferreira do Amaral Square

Photo by the author, 2014

in the early 1950s.20 These include other historical sites and buildings of architectural interest21 and artistic value. Spearheaded by the IC, there are also other efforts and projects concerned with extending the reach of heritage protection, which continues to be negotiated separately from UNESCO’s work and recognition. Finally, there are also individual initiatives, namely those promoted by the local representation of DOCOMOMO (International Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement), to raise awareness of the urban presence of modern edifices with potential aesthetic significance, which are rarely subject to protection because they do not belong to the ancient past.22 20 According to architect Cristina Flores, the oldest documented list of heritage (listagens do património) in the Cultural Affairs Bureau’s historical archives is from 1953. ‘It already catalogued fortresses of interest, churches, a few private buildings, buildings of civil architecture, such as the Senate (Leal Senado).’ In 1976, a new list of historical buildings and sites was created, and another comprehensive, rather official one followed in 1982 (Law no. 54/82/M) with the creation of the Instituto Cultural (Wan, Pinheiro, and Korenaga 2007: 19). 21 Category created in 1992, Law no. 83/92/M (Wan, Pinheiro, and Korenaga 2007: 19). 22 Some examples are the Grande Hotel (Avenida Almeida Ribeiro), which is abandoned and nearly in ruins today, and the building of the Portuguese School, former Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco, designed by the architect Chorão Ramalho in 1963.

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Figure 5.4 Macau Historic Centre

Source: Macau SAR Cultural Affairs Bureau, 2002 Legend: 澳門歷史城區 O Centro Histórico de Macau The Historic Centre of Macao 緩衝區 Zonas de protecção Buffer zones

In other works, I have identified the intrinsically conflicting nature of the political processes that, underlying the choices of preservation of specific sites and buildings, contribute to elucidating how local understandings and fabrications of heritage both espouse and contest the scope of what is considered to be heritage by mainstream bodies and agencies such as UNESCO (Zandonai 2017; Zandonai and Amaro, 2018). In evoking this discussion, I aim to suggest that a bottom-up or agnostic approach to heritage, drawing on empirical investigation that assesses social meanings and experiences of history and place, is crucial for striking a balance between what Christoph Brumann perceives as two rather problematic trends in heritage studies: that of heritage believers, who are persuaded about the ‘intrinsic value’ of

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heritage—something David Lowenthal has called the ‘creed of heritage’ (Lowenthal 1998: 5-6)—and that embraced by heritage atheists, who perceive everything as the ‘invention of tradition’ and seek, by contrast, to undermine heritage preservation (Brumann 2014: 173-74). By focusing here on Macau’s Historic Centre, my intention is to highlight the correlation between its clear and established spatial demarcation and the essentialisation of an idea of heritage that follows its rendering as potentially viable for tourism promotion. Undoubtedly, the legal framework that the former Portuguese administration prepared through decades of work, which accounts, architect Flores with the Cultural Affairs Bureau explained, for ‘the original ensemble of classified heritage’ in Macau (cf. Wan, Pinheiro, and Korenaga 2007: 19), served as the basis for the city’s candidacy to UNESCO. Yet China had a decisive role in securing Macau’s rise to World Heritage status, even before the city’s handover in 1999. In fact, Flores elucidated, ‘Portugal could never do it because, this being Chinese territory, the State Party could only be China’. According to her, before China resumed sovereignty over Macau, it had already been involved with the plan and preparation of the application’s format—particularly through the Luso-Chinese Liaison Office—which evolved in tandem with UNESCO’s operational guidelines and counselling from ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), the organisation’s scientific committee. When I asked her about the reasons for China’s interest in promoting Macau to World Heritage status, she claimed that ‘there was already an understanding in the sense of refining the idea to use the first opportunity, after the handover, so that the city could rise to prominence.’ Under UNESCO’s authoritative discourse, Macau’s long and constitutive global history gained a new dimension when the city’s Historic Centre became synonymous with World Heritage. In the processes of preservation and ‘fabrication’ shaped to transform history into heritage (Lowenthal 1998; Simpson 2008b: 1065), attention and efforts from local, national, and international stances of classification and protection have patently yielded global recognition, but also a bounded, and perhaps limited, approach to Macau’s material legacies and cultural past. Whereas this might have initially burdened plans to broaden the scope of ‘heritage’ beyond the World Heritage zones, it has, nevertheless, helped with identifying and protecting part of Macau’s legacies. The transformation of the city into a major tourist destination in the south of China by harnessing the ‘phenomenal rise’ of World Heritage as ‘a supreme mark of distinction for global tourism’ (Brumann 2014: 177) has created a further opportunity to broaden safeguard initiatives—not least, because gambling also contributes, though indirectly, to finance heritage preservation.

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Contrary to what might be expected, gambling and heritage are not entirely entangled in an equivocal relationship. Like Cristina Flores, the former president of the IC during the Portuguese administration Caetano Matos, who was born and works in Macau as an architect, understands that they are not incompatible and instead work rather well together, since gambling, by channelling mass tourism, captures the majority of visitors to the city, helping to decongest areas where classified buildings are located more sensibly. In an analogy with hotels, which have an important role in ‘fixing’ movement (McNeill 2008: 390), casinos consist of spaces that act between the flux and the static, temporarily localising and containing the impact of the mobility and movement they generate. Moreover, echoing the testimony I collected from Jacob Cheong Cheok Kio, the president of the IC’s Heritage Department from 2006 and 2015,23 Flores claimed that important financial resources for the restoration and reconstruction of Macau’s built heritage—i.e., much of the work which falls under IC’s jurisdiction—are actually supported by the taxes originating from gambling activity. Levying 35 percent of all (declared) gross gambling revenues, the Macau administration further charges casino operators an extra amount of 5 percent over gross revenues to finance social and cultural projects (up to 2 percent), in which heritage is included, and urban and tourist development (up to 3 percent) (Law no. 16/2001, Article 27). In 2017, gross gambling revenues reached MOP 265.74 billion (roughly US$32.86 billion) (DICJb). Consequently, Flores argued, ‘there is not, or there should not be any financial difficulties for cultural activities, or for the conservation of monuments. I hope there are not scant rations in a city that […] has all the resources necessary to allow the accomplishment of good work’. 5.3.2

Tourism ‘corridors’ and the changing experience of place

Cristina Flores has a point. There is likely enough money to build a whole new ‘historic centre’ from scratch. Drawing on the appeal and economic potential of heritage, some of the casinos have, indeed, channelled Portuguese and European influences in their designs and ambiance (cf. Paradis 2004: 201, 206). For example, a replica of the Praça do Rossio in Lisbon, sitting on a Portuguese-style pavement (calçada portuguesa), paves one of the halls of the MGM Grand. The Emperor Palace (SJM), opened in 2006, features décor inspired by old European symbols, with fountains and ‘Greek’ sculptures adorning the lobby of the casino-hotel. At its entrance, too, people come every day to watch ‘soldiers’ dressed in a British style perform the ‘change 23 I interviewed Cheong in November 2014.

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of the guards’. Wynn’s glowing reddish-brown building is supported by a discreet yellow façade of ‘neoclassic’ Portuguese style. Among the examples that abound in Macau’s ‘fantasy city’, the Venetian’s simulation of Venice’s architecture and channels with gondolas at Cotai remains arguably the most extreme case of hyper-reality, that is, ‘an exalted or idealised reality [which] produces images of something that never existed in the first place’ (Botz-Bornstein 2012: 7). Although these inventions, or imitations, do not seem to compete with what is considered historical heritage—and this, it should be noted, invites further research about the public’s perception of what it views as ‘genuine’ or not—the crowds are often dragged and amused by these artificial originals or, as Umberto Eco has put it precisely, ‘false authenticities’ (Botz-Bornstein 2012: 7). Yet casinos are not entirely alone in those operations that attach symbolic themes to products or places to elicit consumption (Paradis 2004: 201). In her study of the creation of the Wong Tai Sin temple in Jinhua municipality (Zhejiang Province) in mainland China, Selina Ching Chan claims that the construction of the temple emerged as a deliberate process of inventing heritage through the appropriation of festivals, legends, and stories to attract tourists, transnational investments, and economic development to the municipality (Chan 2005: 66-68). The appropriation of local and popular symbols, such as European ‘heritages’ in Macau and the Wong Tai Sin Taoist saint ‘heritage’ in Jinhua—the deity’s native place—seem ‘to serve the new dominant ideology in the PRC: market reform, consumerism and economic development’ (Chan 2005: 73). Capitalising on the demands and tastes of the Chinese middle class (Simpson 2008a), heritage in Macau has also lent itself to systematic commodification to attract tourism. In Leal Senado Square, several buildings have been subject to operations of façadism,24 lending their façades and interiors to the trade of standard goods and foreign brands—e.g. McDonald’s (now removed), Bossini, Mannings, Maxim’s Cake Shop—that catch the eyes of mainland visitors to sell high-end fashion, cosmetics, and food, to name only a few. In the course of identifying the types and histories of the business that exist today in san ma lou,25 I came to realise that only 24 Façadism is a practice that consists of reducing a building’s historic value to its façade, while its interior, refashioned, bears no reminiscence of the past or its original function (Loyer and Schmuckle-Mollard 2001: 12). 25 This is a project I developed in collaboration with Professors Tim Simpson and Benjamin Hogdes of the University of Macau, with the assistance of Zhong Li, while I was working there as a postdoctoral fellow. We mapped the whole area of san ma lou (Avenida Almeida Ribeiro) and the contiguous Avenida do Infante Dom Henrique, listing the names and main types of business in operation there, and also interviewing some of the staff and owners of those commercial spaces.

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Figure 5.5 Avenida Almeida Ribeiro, 新馬路 (san ma lou)

Photo by the author, 2014

a handful of shops had been established there for more than a few decades, usually family-run businesses that go back two or three generations: a couple of drug and jewellery stores, one restaurant. This is a remarkable change to a street that has been Macau’s main commercial artery for a century, connecting the Outer and the Inner Harbour and, previously, the former Portuguese and

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Chinese settlements (Amaro 1998: 73-74; Cody 1999: 52). Since Macau was granted World Heritage status, residents have felt compelled to gradually avoid this part of the city, due to the annoyance caused by increasing tourism congestion, but until recently, san ma lou was a place where residents used to visit for services (tailoring, lawyers, etc.), shopping, or having a meal with their family. Filipinos26 also had a special spot in front of the Post Office central building, where they used to gather and chat after work, but they have also had to find a space for social encounters somewhere else (see Figure 5.5). Apart from several areas that continue to remain nearly untouched by mass tourism and aggressive marketing and branding, constituting real ‘islands of peace’ in which life goes on in a routine manner, large ‘tourism corridors’ have emerged following the pattern of visitors’ mobility within the city, which repeats itself partially because of the options that travel and tourist agencies from the mainland offer their clients. The ways local spots are picked and promoted for tourism is a case that needs to be studied more thoroughly to understand what ideas of Macau are being crafted for the Chinese public and why. In truth, those happen to be nearly the same landmarks, streets, and squares that have been the attention of ‘heritage’ tourism visitors since I first visited Macau in 2006: Leal Senado Square, Rua da Palha, A-Ma temple (see Figure 5.6). There seems to be a correlation between the number of visitors to Macau’s main square and the large array of brand stores in that area, given that adjacent places of historical and architectural interest, located either in classified heritage areas (such as Saint-Augustine’s Square southwest across the hill) or in more residential neighbourhoods at the Inner Harbour on the west coast of Macau (such as the Mandarin House and Camões Garden), deprived of commercial stalls, remain largely unexplored by the tourist crowds. The increase in tourist activity has brought far-reaching consequences to the social and urban experience of place and the city, while entailing the ‘commodification’ of heritage-listed buildings. Economic pressure and a new wave of urbanisation ensuing from fast development show that the unbalanced coexistence of public and private interests has had an impact not only on the symbolic function, but also on the materiality of built heritage. In truth, institutionalisation and law enforcement over the last few decades have not prevented damages to or the demolition of classified buildings due to private development pressure. Adjoining constructions 26 With a population estimated at 28,688 in 2017, Filipinos constitute the second biggest population in Macau, after the ethnic Chinese, both locally born and from the Mainland (Yearbook of Statistics 2017: 56).

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Figure 5.6 Rua da Palha

Photo by the author, 2008

have caused damages to UNESCO-listed Moorish Barracks and Lou Kau Mansion, while a few properties under local listing have been completely or partially destroyed, e.g. the Loc Koc Teahouse in the Almeida Ribeiro Avenue, and the Pawnshop Tower in Virtudes Alley, no. 3 (see Wan, Pinheiro, and Korenaga 2007: 19, 20). Altimetry regulations and the respect for buffer

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zones have also been overlooked and violated in a few cases. Private development in the surroundings of the Guia Lighthouse and SJM’s casino Ponte 16 remain the most infamous examples—although social agency and pressure from UNESCO has aided countering some of the disruptions, particularly in the case of the Guia Lighthouse (Chung 2009; Zandonai 2017), whose complex—lighthouse, chapel, and fortress—constitutes the second of the two core zones inscribed in UNESCO’s World Heritage List.27 5.3.3

The laws of planning and flexibility

These cases suggest that ‘heritage’ is not only an institutional matter, and that preservation cannot be taken for granted. With the material and social changes brought by a rapidly expanding economy have come new challenges, especially with regard to urban development and planning, which have compelled the administration to alter how it has been thinking about and handling heritage. The classified historical sites, both those on and off UNESCO’s World Heritage List, have indeed been given some attention since the time of the Portuguese administration, but economic pressure over the last decade or so has also adversely affected protected sites and raised doubts about their preservation and the city’s sustainable growth. Yet in the last few years, the Government, the IC Heritage Department, the Land, Public Works and Transport and Bureau (DSSOPT), and the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM) have been coordinating efforts to provide the opportunity for debate and more sensible decisions concerning protected areas. There are increasing attempts to broaden safeguard initiatives and implement legislation more effectively. New advising and counselling organisations have also been created. One is the Cultural Heritage Committee, spearheaded by the President of the IC. Cristina Flores explained that this committee gathers ‘people that know Macau’, including architects, lawyers, people who work on urban restoration and rehabilitation, as well as individuals from the IACM, the DSSOPT, and from the private sector. Another is the Urban Planning Committee (CPU), a consultative agency of the Government established to provide advice on the elaboration, execution, revision, and modification of urban 27 The Guia Lighthouse, first built in 1865, is the oldest architecturally western-style lighthouse in the South of China (Teixeira 1997: 378-379; Macao Heritage Net). The building sits at the highest geographical point of the city, the Guia Hill (91 metres), and is surrounded by the Fortress, built between 1622 and 1638, and the Chapel, built in 1622, all named after Nossa Senhora da Guia (Our Lady of Guidance).

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plans. I have been to several of the committee’s meetings and conversed on several occasions with one of its members, Romano Lobo, an architect who has been living in and off Macau since 1977, and who is registered as a member of the Macau Architects Association (AAM). Lobo explained that the members of the committee, composed of architects, engineers, lawyers, and department directors, are nominated by the Secretary for Transport and Public Works. Both the heritage and the urban bodies constitute attempts to enhance the planning of Macau’s growth and urban development, as they appear attached to three new laws—the law of Cultural Heritage Protection (Law no. 11/2013), the Urban Planning law (Law no. 12/2013), and the new Land law (Law no. 10/2013)28 —all approved and put into effect between 2013 and 2014. Before the creation of these organisations, informal consulting among architecture and heritage professionals working in the public and private sectors has been common practice in the f ield, but was only partially backed by the force of law. According to Flores, ‘there has always been communication between colleagues, between […] architects from the Cultural Affairs Bureau and architects from the Public Works, or engineers, that is, making a call, asking that director, realising inspections together, this is part of the actual procedures.’ While this remains a practice today, it is no longer the rule in efforts to channel concerns and apply knowledge to heritage preservation. The IC’s architect has also argued that the three recently approved laws tend toward providing for safeguard practices, allowing the work of experts and civil servants to evolve more steadily. According to her: ‘Today, with the new law, the responsibilities of who acts upon what are very clear. It is clearly stated “in this case, it is the Public Works”, “in that, it will be the IC”. This was one of the difficulties from the two previous laws (Decretos-lei). They def ined that if one law overlapped with ours, it also had jurisdiction within certain areas, in juxtaposition with the IACM and, sometimes, the city’s public spaces were both classified spaces and areas of intervention from other public departments.’ She further claimed that one of the effective changes ensuing from this new, more clear-cut approach to heritage and urban planning in the legislative and political languages is that the IC’s recommendations are now ‘binding’. This is a point Cheong, the former president of the IC, also emphasised during our conversation. In the past, the proposals and 28 Respectively, lei de salvaguarda do património cultural, 文化遺產保護法; lei do planeamento urbanístico, 城市規劃法; lei de terras, 土地法.

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suggestions from the IC may or may not have been adopted in legal terms. However, the new, more comprehensive ‘paradigm’ envisioned for urban planning and heritage protection is not flawless. There are still loopholes and in the newly promulgated laws. For instance, while a Master Plan for Macau is legally defined (Law no. 12/2013, Article 2), the text states that it will be compulsorily revised when either: ‘1) five years have passed, e.g. since the plan has been put into effect or since the alteration to the plan has been put into effect following its revision; and 2) when the execution of projects of great public enterprises exerts a relevant influence upon the usage of soils and the arrangement of planning in general’ (Article 23, free translation from Portuguese). Nowhere in the 68 articles of the law is a definition of ‘great public enterprises’ given. One case in which the notion of a ‘great public enterprise’ might have applied emerged in 2013 regarding the development of part of Macau’s Light Rail Transit (LTR) at the city’s northern border with China, signalling how such this type of enterprise could concretely affect heritage. Construction plans in the area first triggered a deadlock, given that the original track would pass by the location of the old Barrier Gate monument (Portas do Cerco, 關閘),29 in front of the renovated checkpoint facilities—Macau and Mainland China are still separated by a border—inaugurated in 2004 (Breitung 2007: 46). If advanced, the plan would not necessarily entail changes in the Master Plan, or the destruction of the site, but could instead force its ‘relocation’. According to the new law of cultural heritage protection, cases of the relocation or ‘removal’ of classified buildings will be indispensable: ‘1) by reason of force majeure; 2) due to relevant public interest; 3) when the material protection of classified buildings or buildings in process of classification imperatively requires it’ (Law no. 11/2013, Article 33, free translation from Portuguese). These are the exceptions to the opening paragraph to the same article, which states that classified buildings cannot be either partly or totally relocated or removed from their original sites. After some careful consideration and the examination of alternative designs, the Department for Transport Infrastructure (Gabinete de Infra-estruturas e Transportes, GIT), finally opted to change the metro’s track, avoiding the monument’s relocation. 29 Also referred to as Gates of Siege (Pina-Cabral 2002: 61) and Barrier Gate (Breitung 2007: 33-35). It is the only terrestrial border that Macau shares with mainland China. The barrier was first erected in 1574, but the existing gate monument dates back to, approximately, 1870 (information diverges between different government departments, e.g. Macao Heritage Net gives 1871, and the Macao Government Tourism Office gives 1870).

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Conclusion: A ‘City of Fiction’?

Since the late Portuguese administration, the notion of urban planning in Macau has been a rather ‘malleable’ one. In one conversation with Lobo, he explained that the urban planning strategies elaborated on a regular basis during the Portuguese administration were rarely ratified or published in the Official Gazette. He claimed that this meant urban projects were often open to negotiation, allowing a ‘flexible regime of urbanisation’. Given the pressure exerted by economic growth and the expansion of mass tourism on Macau’s urban fabric—whether on account of heritage or gambling—flexibility continues to be an important word in the vocabulary of public and urban practitioners and policymakers. Years of political debate and normalisation have led to the creation and establishment of new acts that legislate the ways, circumstances, and limits according to which the city can be transformed. This has resulted in the coordination of regulations and work between the fields of urban planning, heritage preservation, and land use. And although these initiatives have generated and somehow formalised planning, the current processes of city-making and urbanism continue to allow flexibility and improvisation. The question that remains to be answered is how much of a stand the new regulations on urban planning and heritage protection will be able to take when the law tends to bend itself for businesses to profit. I argue that the complex and opaque interplay underlying the politics of gambling concessions, disrespect for heritage protection norms, and ambiguities marking the interpretation of new laws reveal a process of continuous and organic adaptation of urban norms and behaviours that characterises what Rem Koolhaas has called the generic city (2000a: 731). If exceptions often make the rule, planning may become rather a matter of protocols than applied policy and strong political will. This raises questions about the appropriation of land and public spaces by private interests for private uses. To what extent have private projects been replacing public space in the cityscape, signalling the same long-term trend that characterises the development of ‘fantasy cities’ in the United States, is also a question that should be raised here (Hannigan 1998: 7). Residents have often protested in public forums and voiced their concerns to the press, about casinos, hotels, and franchise shops’ occupation of buildings and land that could have been used for public purposes, e.g. social services, parks, and green areas, but still the city has given in to densification, mass tourism, and the commercialisation of social spaces. The liberalisation of gambling pushed Macau’s socio-economic development into another dimension that is clearly wealthier, but also hectic and

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problematic with regard to what ideas of the city residents, the administration, and private stakeholders agree on. The practice of allowing room for flexibility and informality does not stem from the lack of planning per se, since it has been regulated in detail. Rather, it responds to the gap between legislative language and political usage. Trapped in this logic, the identification and protection of heritage sites remains fundamentally subject to adjustments—often pushed by private development pressure—rather than to the principles of planning. As Beijing and UNESCO, as well as local agencies and people in this study involved with heritage matters, have stated, Macau’s ‘historical and cultural specificity’ have been acknowledged and valued as ‘heritage’. However, as an economic space bounded by global heritage narratives, historical sites and buildings have also been commoditised: to serve the needs of regional tourism and a growing Chinese middle class of consumers, and appropriated for the advertising of gambling venues—thereby pushing residents out of former places of encounter and socialisation. It is from those ‘undesigned’ outcomes of human agency that an ambiguous and disputed idea of the city emerges: private versus public, heritage at odds with tourism, gambling alongside heritage. When I asked Romano Lobo about how he thought the economy of tourism has been affecting the city, he commented: ‘there is demographic pressure, noise pollution, only a minority of tourists are actually interested in heritage. In fact, a lot of tourists generate a lot of pressure for very little appreciation. […] Macau stops being a provincial city, with a closer relationship with its inhabitants and their narratives’. He wondered whether, by stepping on the footpaths of gambling and tourism, heritage has been treated as a matter of advertising rather than a question of identity. Under tourism expansion, Macau has thrived, drawing on the resilience of a traditional economic activity and a syncretic past, rooted in material signs of prestige and distinction of an unparalleled history. But, as a dear friend in Macau told me in casual conversation over dinner, in this odd combination it has perhaps also become a ‘city of fiction’.

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Pina-Cabral, J. de. (2002), Between China and Europe: Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao. London, New York: Continuum. Porter, J. (2000), Macau: The Imaginary City. Boulder: Westview Press. Sanjek, R. (2010), ‘Ethnography’, in Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology, 2nd edition, Barnard, A. and Spencer, J. (eds.): 243-49. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Sardan, J.-P.O. de. (1995), ‘La politique du terrain. Sur la production des données en anthropologie’, Enquête 1: 71-109. Simpson, T. (2008a), ‘The commercialization of Macau’s cafés’, Ethnography 9 (2): 197-234. — (2008b), ‘Macao, capital of the 21 st century?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 1053-1079. Smart, A., and Zhang L. (2006), ‘From the Mountains and the Fields: The Urban Transition in the Anthropology of China’, China Information 20 (3): 481-518. Smart, J., and Smart, A. (1999), ‘Personal Relations and Divergent Economies: A Case Study of Hong Kong Investment in South China’, in Theorizing the city: The New Urban Anthropology Reader, Low, S.M. (ed.), 169-200. New Brunswick, London: Rutgers University Press. Spencer, R. (2008), ‘China to legalise horse racing and betting’, The Telegraph, 12 January. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1575374/China-tolegalise-horse-racing-and-betting.html (Last accessed: 19 March 2014). Stewart, A. (1988), The Ethnographer’s Method. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage publications. Stokowski, P.A. (2004), ‘Gaming and Tourism: Issues for the New Millennium’, in A companion to Tourism, Lew, A.A., Hall, M.C., and Williams, A.A. (eds.), 399-409. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. Teixeira, P.M. (1997), Toponímia de Macau, Volume 1. Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau. Wan, P.Y.K., Pinheiro, F.V., and Korenaga, M. (2007), ‘Planning for heritage conservation in Macao’, Planning and Development 22 (1): 17-26. Wu, F. (2012), ‘How neoliberal is China’s reform? The origins of change during transition’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 51 (5): 619-631. Xin, L. (2002), ‘Urban Anthropology and the “Urban Question” in China’, Critique of Anthropology 22 (2): 109-132. Zandonai, S.S. (2014), ‘La présence portugaise à Macao: une culture d’accommodements’, Portuguese Studies Review 22 (1): 205-225. — (2015). ‘The “Gambling city”. Geometries and geographies of urban instability in Macau’, Lo Squaderno—Explorations in Space and Society 38: 19-22. — (2017), ‘Encounter and counter-narratives of heritage in Macau’, in Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-Making in Asia, Hsin-Huang M. H., Hui Y-F. and Peycam P. (eds.), 164-184. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing.

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Zandonai, S.S. and Amaro, V. (2018), ‘The Portuguese calçada in Macau: Paving residual colonialism with a new cultural history of place’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 59, No. 4, August. Zhao R (2001), ‘Increasing Income Inequality and Its Causes in China’, in China’s Retreat from Equality: Income Distribution and Economic Transition, Riskin, C., Zhao R., Li S. (eds.), 25-43. Armonk, NY-London, England: M. E. Sharpe.

Statistics, Reports, Websites City of Las Vegas (n.d.), http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/factsstatistics/census_data. htm (Last accessed: 10 September 2014). DICJa (n.d.), ‘História da indústria de jogos em Macau’, http://www.dicj.gov.mo/ web/pt/history/index.html (Last accessed: 13 October 2014). DICJb (n.d.). ‘Monthly Gross Revenue from Games of Fortune in 2017 and 2016’, http:// www.dicj.gov.mo/web/en/information/DadosEstat_mensal/2017/index.html DSCC (n.d.), ‘Land area’ http://www.dscc.gov.mo/ENG/knowledge/geo_statistic. html (Last accessed: 10 September 2014). ICOMOS 2005, ‘Advisory Body Evaluation, Macao (China) n. 1110’, 31 January. http:// whc.unesco.org/archive/advisory_body_evaluation/1110.pdf (Last accessed: 28 May 2014). Macao Heritage Net, Instituto Cultural de la R.A.E. de Macau (n.d.), http://www. macauheritage.net/en/HeritageInfo/HeritageContent.aspx?t=M&hid=50 (Last accessed: 10 November 2014). Macau SAR Cultural Affairs Bureau (2002), Macau Historic Center map. Yearbook of Statistics (2003), Statistics and Census Services (DSEC). Macau, Government of the Special Administrative Region of Macau. — (2012), Statistics and Census Services (DSEC). Macau, Government of the Special Administrative Region of Macau. — (2013), Statistics and Census Services (DSEC). Macau, Government of the Special Administrative Region of Macau. — (2017), Statistics and Census Services (DSEC). Macau, Government of the Special Administrative Region of Macau.

About the author Sheyla S. Zandonai holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France. She is currently a Research Associate at the Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (LAA), École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette (France),

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and Editor-in-Chief of the Macau News Agency (MNA). She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Macau (China), and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Trent University (Canada). Her current research examines the impact of urban renewal and the political economy of gambling and tourism on heritage practices and belonging in Macau. Email: [email protected]

Part 2 Tales of the City

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A City for All Perspectives from Colonial Calcutta Anindita Ghosh Abstract Calcutta in the nineteenth century was in the midst of fundamental change. From a constellation of three trading and farming villages, it was being transformed into the centre of the British Empire in India. Its rapid growth, stretched longitudinally along the banks of the Hooghly, also saw segregation in the residential settlement pattern, with the White Town with largely European inhabitants populating the area surrounding the fort, and the teeming Black Town peopled by Indians squeezed into the northern part of the city. The infrastructural layout too mimicked these racially distinct habitations, as metalled roads, gas and later electric lights, and updated sewage disposal mechanisms—ubiquitous within the borders of the European parts of the city—were either virtually non-existent or painfully slow to reach the northern indigenous quarters. How was this variable city represented in contemporary writings, and what does this tell us about how the urban sphere was made by its people, and not just by the material and administrative infrastructure that was part and package of the colonial city? While scholarship has largely focused on problems of urban governance in the city—strikes, riots, and epidemics—this chapter proposes to offer glimpses of alternative experiences as recorded by its residents. Gleaning material from contemporary Bengali memoirs, songs, dramas, and street literature, the chapter presents the city as a realm shaped by the everyday experiences of its people. How did residents respond to the technologisation of the city and infrastructural changes? What was their conception of the new urban space and work time regularity? In what ways were their sensibilities shaped by, and how did they in turn impact, the city’s municipal vision? In all of this, I argue, there is a distinct sense of ownership that emerges and leaves its stamp on the archives. Calcutta

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch06

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was claimed by all, albeit differently by each social constituency that I examine—British and Europeans, middle-class bhadralok, women, and workers. In that sense, this chapter is also about seeking out different archives and social spaces of the city, enabling us to write multiple histories of colonial Calcutta. Keywords: Urbanisation, Variable City, Contemporary Literature, Everyday experiences, technologisation

In the nineteenth century, Calcutta was in the midst of fundamental change. From a constellation of three trading and farming villages, it was being transformed into the centre of the British Empire in India. Its rapid growth, stretched longitudinally along the banks of the Hooghly, also saw segregation in the residential settlement pattern—with the White Town with largely European inhabitants populating the area surrounding the fort, and the teeming Black Town peopled by Indians squeezed into the northern part of the city. The infrastructural layout too mimicked the racially distinct habitations, as metaled roads, gas and later electric lights, and updated sewage disposal mechanisms—which were ubiquitous within the borders of the European parts of the city—were either virtually non-existent or painfully slow to reach the northern indigenous quarters. How was this variable city represented in contemporary writings and what does it tell us about the ways in which the urban sphere was made by its people and not just the material and administrative infrastructure that was part and package of the colonial city? Scholars have routinely used Calcutta as a backdrop for tracing historical processes, movements and events, but the city itself has rarely been the focus of their attention (Ray 1979; Sarkar S. 2011 [1973]; Banerjee 1989, 1998, 2009).1 In the historical literature the study of Calcutta floats between two dated approaches, one viewing the city as a sum of trade and population data, and the other as the product of western education, modern civic institutions, and a cultural regeneration—both uncritical assimilations from colonial records that reproduce images of European enterprise and discipline on the one hand, and Indian disorder and squalor on the other.2 1 Another recent study on Calcutta, while attempting to reinvent approaches to the city, limits itself by focussing on the educated middle-classes (Chattopadhyay 2006). 2 For instances of studies in the former category, see: Sinha 1987, 1978. For classic studies contributing to the second category, see: Kopf 1969, 1975, 1979.

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There is another distinct strand of scholarship that has focused largely on problems of urban governance in the city, such as strikes, riots, and epidemics—again, mostly drawing on official records (Ghosh 2000; Das 1991; Harrison 1994). The overriding image here is of an otherwise orderly city with a chaotic, diseased native quarter spilling over its boundaries. This chapter attempts to test such colonial representations by passing them through the lens of the city’s indigenous population, offering in the process competing ideas and self-images. How did residents respond to the growing influence of technology and infrastructural changes in the city? What was their conception of the new urban space and work-time regularity? In what ways were their sensibilities shaped by the municipal vision, and how did they in turn impact that same vision? My primary aim is to demonstrate how colonial Calcutta represented a contested site for the negotiation of various identities, both Indian and British, through an exploration of its public spaces, material infrastructure, and everyday practices. The colonial urban vision was thus firm and even self-congratulatory in its introduction of modern communication and sanitation, clean water supply and street lights, parks and leisure quarters to Calcutta in the nineteenth century as emblems of modernised, civilised urban living. But local representations of these transformations indicate otherwise. In the contemporary nationalist imagination, the city, for instance, represented exploitation, corruption, and decadence, while the ancestral rural home was a haven of peace. Parallel representations proliferating in popular culture—as a city offering sizzling night-time entertainment—further complicate the picture. Such a methodological approach that prioritises non-colonial perspective also highlights the interplay of theory and practice in the city’s representations. By grounding the rhetorical in the everyday experience of the city we can appreciate the extent and limit of the power of representation. Cities and landscapes are not simply texts. They must be examined in terms of cultural practice, and connections need to be made between rhetoric and the everyday practice and experience of space. In all of this, I argue, there is a distinct sense of ownership that emerges and leaves its stamp on the archives. Calcutta was claimed by all, but claimed differently by each social constituency that I examine—British and Europeans, middle-class bhadralok, and workers. To this end, while making use of the rather overused but important colonial archive, this essay also embraces a range of indigenous vernacular sources such as memoirs, city histories, biographies, street literature, and songs. In that sense, this paper is also about seeking out different archives and social spaces of the city, which enables us to write multiple histories of colonial Calcutta.

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Calcutta: ‘City of Palaces’ to ‘City of Dreadful Nights’

Calcutta in the eighteenth century was incessantly represented in British travel writings, letters, diaries and illustrations as a symbol and justification of their recently acquired territorial and political control. The paintings of Thomas and William Daniell and the writings of Fanny Parkes and Emily Eden fixed the colonial imagination within palpable indices of authority, rationality, and civilisation.3 For the metropolitan audience, the depictions of blank landscapes dominated by palatial European houses and administrative blocks, indolent market scenes, or crowded ‘native’ festivals presented edifying contrasts between European industry, purpose, and success on the one hand and Oriental sluggishness on the other. The aesthetic category of the ‘picturesque’ in the representation of colonial architecture and urban layout in addition heightened civilisational expectations.4 The villa-fronted boulevards and parks projected visions of what the colonised land ought to be like; over the nineteenth century these metropolitan ideas came to be more firmly implanted in the city’s civic infrastructure, urban spaces, and everyday lives. European depictions, however, were reluctant to stray beyond the material manifestations of the colonial presence. The paintings of Thomas and William Daniell from the 1780s focus on the White Town, the European quarters of Calcutta. They show grand neoclassical buildings that portray order and composure, which is contrasted with the chaotic street scenes outside (see Figure 6.1). With their colonnaded fronts, tall spires, and spacious verandas and porticoes, the courts, churches, and seats of authority hold up a promise of what is to come. Other painters and illustrators, such as James Fraser and Charles D’Oyly, followed in this tradition, and written accounts also mimicked this pattern. Not only the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century accounts of Fanny Parkes, but also works published much later, such as H.E. Busteed’s Echoes from Old Calcutta (1888) and H.E.A. Cotton’s Calcutta Old and New: Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City (1907), are good examples of this genre. The spotlight was on important colonial officials, colonial buildings, commercial and entertainment areas in the White Town, railway stations, parks, and the Strand. Representations of indigenous quarters, trades, and people only served as foils heightening 3 These were the two most celebrated women travel writers of their times who wrote about colonial India (Parkes 1850; Eden 1866). 4 Swati Chattopadhyay points to the self-conscious use of this term by artists after contemporary fashions in England, although the ideological function that it served of representing empire, she argues, cannot be ignored (2006: 33-62).

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Figure 6.1 Old Courthouse and Street, by Thomas Daniell, from Views of Calcutta, 1788, coloured aquatint with etching

© British Library, London, United Kingdom, Board P284 no. 9

the civilisational appeal of built-up areas or as ethnographic data. William Hickey, a painter who followed the Daniells to Calcutta, annotated images of the native town with scornful dismissal: ‘description of this view must be short as it represents part of the town entirely inhabited by natives’. There was no mention of which specific buildings or bazaars were featured, and the seemingly purposeless open spaces accentuated the seemingly purposeless native lives (Losty 1990: 48; cited by Chattopadhyay S. 2006: 59). By the mid nineteenth century, the city stretched as a longitudinal settlement on the eastern bank of the river Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges, stretching over seven square miles along the river.5 Expansion of the European or White Town took place east and west of the old Fort William, while the building of a new fort further south made way for further European settlements. Chowringhee and Alipore developed into elite suburbs—the line of palatial detached houses arranged on Chowringhee at right angles to the Esplanade quickly earning the city the epithet ‘A City of Palaces’ (Hornsby 5

This was the extent for 1850 (Sinha 1978: 30).

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1997: 133-150, 141). The political and administrative heart of the capital lay in the area framed by the Government House (residence of the Governor General), Supreme Court, Council Chamber, Treasury, Mint, and Town Hall, located in the centre of the city. North of Chowringhee and Bowbazar, the Black Town or indigenous quarters were spread densely across major arterial roads and bazaars, combining commercial sections with residential areas. It housed palaces for the aristocracy, humbler accommodations, crammed tenanted clusters or bustees, as well as numerous tiled huts—all built into tight-knit residential blocks bounded by narrow streets and alleys. The articulation of exclusiveness and a distinct European urbanity in the organisational layout of the mercantile, bureaucratic, and residential quarters of the White Town, remarks Pradip Sinha, ‘sharply underscored the dualism of urban space in a colonial city’ (1987: 8). Mixed populations and intermediate zones no doubt complicated the basic organisation but did not take away the underlying principle of differentiation, if not discrimination.6 A British account of Calcutta’s streets in the early 1920s continues to remain as blinkered as ever before, picturising the city as composed of its commercial quarters in Dhurumtollah with its ‘shop signs tiptoe[ing] to the sky’; Clive Street busily trading in shares, where the ‘young blood of England, Scotland and Ireland learns the effortless art of making money’; and the throbbing night life and entertainment at Chowringhee where ‘smiling women step into […] vehicles’ at the end of a show at the Empire Theatre (Minney 1922: 30, 39, 47). Then there were the sleepy European suburbs of western Alipore, where: the houses are red and new, with lawns well laid, from which issues in season the laughter of white-clad tennis players, or the bark of a playful romping dog […] Large cars roll gently by as if gliding upon cotton wool, along the red-surfaced roads that doze and stretch themselves in the fatigue of leisure beneath the heavy shade of thick mopped trees. The side walls of the houses are spotless, the edge of streets neat and drainless—the whole suburb seems as if it was unpacked out of a box from Bond Street only that morning. (Minney 1922: 60)

Over the course of the nineteenth century the native town began to feature more prominently in British writing, but only as a medical and sanitary 6 Swati Chattopadhyay’s recent questioning of the divide in architectural terms does not dilute the deeper colonial divide apparent in infrastructure, settlement patterns, and policing (2000: 154-179).

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problem. As diseases such as cholera and plague ravaged the Black Town, colonial officials went into a frenzy to map, chart, and track the spread of epidemics. Epidemiological maps were superimposed on regular street maps to delineate the contours of the diseased quarters. They marked out the northern part of the city as a veritable cesspit, as municipal reports blamed the spread of diseases like cholera on filthy water in public tanks and the unhealthy disposal of human excreta (Municipality of Calcutta 1876). Imperfect sanitation and drainage was seen as the root cause of disease, and led, in addition, to a pathologised conception of Indian habits and bodily practices.7 As a result, the native quarters became the focus of infrastructural improvements, but only insofar as disease and filth could be contained within their limits. Sewers and drains trickled in slowly. While a dense network of sewers was fully operational in the southern part of the city from the mid nineteenth century onwards, filth in the Northern Division had to be collected manually and disposed of in municipal depots.8 Drainage works commenced in the north in 1869, and by 1874 main sewers ran from Canning Street and Mirzapore Street south to the extreme northern end of Bagh Bazar (Municipality of Calcutta 1874: 3). This pattern is repeated in other aspects of introducing civic infrastructure in Calcutta. Permanent pavements, for instance, did not appear on public streets in the northern division until the time of the First World War, even though the European quarters had featured them since the 1860s (Sur 1988: 82).9 Imperatives of crime and its policing produced different but equally problematic ethnographic cartographies of the city. The topology of crime worked out by Calcutta’s municipal administration saw the city divided into neat divisions for purposes of efficient policing even before the mid nineteenth century. In 1842, the then-Chief Magistrate of Calcutta proposed splitting the city into three police divisions—the Upper, Middle, and Lower (Town of Calcutta 1842: Appendix A, 9). This arrangement was later upheld by S. Wauchope, the first Police Commissioner of the city, in 1856. Geographically, the Upper Division overlapped with the Black Town in the north of the city, the Middle Division stretched from the governmental and commercial centre to the European residential quarters in Chowringhee, while the Lower 7 For a wider discussion of this aspect for colonial India, see: Arnold 1993. For Calcutta specifically, see: Harrison 1994. 8 Earlier, this was collected in open carts and from the late 1870s onwards in closed, odourless metal tubs. 9 Curzon apparently promised to install stone pavements on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee celebration of Victoria’s rule (Tagore 1930: 38).

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Division covered the stretch from Fort William down to the Kidderpore docks. Each of these areas was identified with its own distinctive nature of prevailing crimes and criminals. The narrow lanes running behind the palatial mansions of Bengali aristocrats in the Upper Division were believed to house the biggest concentration of indigenous criminals of all kinds—a dense warren of swindlers, burglars, and cheats—and concerned the police most. The Middle Division stretching right up to the Eurasian quarters and covering the red-light district of Kalingabazar and the traditional pilgrimage centre of Kalighat needed to be kept under surveillance for the operation of pimps, thieves, and hoodlums, both Indian and non-Indian. Finally, the southernmost part was reputed to be the haunt of marauding sailors and drunken soldiers—the former associated with the Kidderpore dock area, which was notorious for its looters and robbers. Red light areas were automatically seen as dens for criminals, with prostitutes living cheek-byjowl with petty thieves. In 1878 another police commissioner, W.M. Souttar, reiterated the existence of racialised spaces in the operation of crime (Town of Calcutta 1878: 23). The native town presented itself as an enumerative category for not only diseases and sanitation, crime and policing, but also traffic and taxation. Narrow, overcrowded streets had long been a problem for both sanitation and ease of traffic on commercial routes. A highly critical report on Calcutta’s ‘streetless state’ (see Figure 6.2) was produced by E.P. Richards in 1914, commissioned by the Calcutta Improvement Trust: Calcutta, when compared with the average great city, possesses an abnormally low proportion of real streets per square mile. Instead of being served by main roads, the city is served by streets used as main roads […] the narrow streets are now Calcutta’s great traffic lines […] [being a] network made only of narrow ways; and each half-mile mesh is filled in with a tangle of wretched lanes, alleys, passages and footpaths, tortuously separating […] sanitary and insanitary property of all kinds, and, unfortunately this property is set at every possible angle

Richards goes on to add: The main questions in Calcutta are not concerned solely with traffic and increase of traffic but include general city health and housing on a great scale, the laying out of new suburbs with their sewerage, water, and lighting systems, and the provision of bridges, parks, cemeteries and all adjuncts. (Richards 1914: 19)

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Figure 6.2 Typical view of the built-up ‘streetless’ Calcutta at the start of the twentieth century, from E.P. Richards, Report by Request of the Trust on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas. Calcutta: Calcutta Improvement Trust, 1914

© British Library, London, United Kingdom, Board X775

At the end of the report, he proposed an elaborate plan of road building and housing provisions meant to reduce congestion in the streets and to improve commerce and the general health of the city. But here too the chief concern was saving the costs incurred by traffic impediments in the business quarters, particularly that affecting the jute trade. In 1910-11 alone, jute worth ten million British pounds had entered the city, four thousand tons pouring into the city each day. Vehicular traffic was rising at the extraordinary rate of 32 percent per decade to support this commerce, while the streets and roads bearing this traffic had remained unchanged since the 1880s (Richards 1914: 112). All of this compounded the congestion problems. In his suggestions, Richards had in mind city plans modelled on Paris and Budapest, with a radial network of roads leading out from the city centre with the provision of squares, parks, and arcades, and serving the riverside wharfs, railway stations, and Central Exchange—the commercial hubs of the city.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, Calcutta in British accounts had metamorphosed from a ‘City of Palaces’ to Kipling’s infamous characterisation of a ‘City of Dreadful Nights’. The miasma, the ‘indescribable’ odour of ill health, permeated the city, as Kipling described: Has anyone thoroughly investigated the Big Calcutta Stink? There is only one […] for diffused, soul-sickening expansiveness, the reek of Calcutta beats both Benares and Peshawur […] It is faint, it is sickly, and it is indescribable […] there is no escape from it. It blows across the maidan; it comes in gusts into the corridors of the Great Eastern Hotel [where Kipling was staying]; what they are pleased to call the ‘Palaces of Chouringhi’ carry it; it swirls round the Bengal Club; it pours out of the by-streets with sickening intensity, and the breeze of the morning is laden with it […] it is nearly as bad opposite Government House and in the Public Offices. (Kipling 2009 [1891]: 10-11)10

What is notable here is how the stench reached the European part of the city, not sparing the luxurious hotels and clubs and even touching the highest seat of colonial authority in British India, Government House. It signified how the Black and White Towns could interpenetrate one another in ways other than those determined by segregated living. The diseases, the putrid smells, and the pollution of the indigenous quarters had the capacity to extend in a disturbing way to the colonial quarters. Kipling’s sentiments represent the disquiet caused among white residents by this blurring of boundaries, even as municipal officials endeavoured to transfer select fruits of civic planning to the northern half of the city to limit the harmful effects of such contagion.

6.2

Calcutta: Basha (‘Dwelling’) not Bari (‘Home’)

Those inhabiting the Black Town and its edges were primarily Bengalis but also included significant migrant populations from the rest of India—the upper Gangetic plains of the north, Bihar, Orissa, Punjab, and Rajasthan. The earlier dominant social control of the Bengali banians (‘merchant princes, or compradors’) serving as intermediaries and agents for private European merchants and the East India Company had faded by the mid nineteenth 10 The chapters for Kipling’s book had originally featured in the Pioneer as serialised essays in 1888.

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century, as English educated groups took over. The latter’s leadership in social, cultural, and intellectual life marked their contributions to the city in the second half of the nineteenth century. As land ownership continued to fragment away in the countryside following the introduction of new land revenue settlements and the British collective monopoly strengthened its stranglehold on the city, the merchant aristocracy lost its sphere of influence. Residual grandeur lived on in pockets, but a mostly Hindu, upper-caste, English-educated middle-class with a background in colonial governmental and European mercantile service rather than capitalist enterprise gradually consolidated its hold on urban affairs. The members of this cast were in paid service in commercial firms rather than acting as free entrepreneurs like the merchant aristocracy before. Manning the middling levels of the colonial administrative and commercial structures as vital servicemen—doctors, lawyers, educationists, and bureaucrats—with a limited interest in land, this class demarcated its distinctive though tenuous position as the social elite through cultivated cultural snobbishness deriving from their education. They were thus variously known as the madhyabitta (‘middle-class’) and the bhadralok (‘genteel people’). Most importantly, they marked themselves off from those who made a living from manual labour. The lower rungs of the bhadralok were comprised of their aspirant but less-educated brethren who served the same establishments as clerks, petty tradesmen, and entrepreneurs. At the very bottom of the social ladder were the menial, often migrant, populations comprising servants, labourers, artisans, sweepers, etc. Nineteenth-century Calcutta had become a vital nerve centre for the Bengali bhadralok, providing access to liberal education and professions, the printing press, which became an agent of social and later political action, and the newer cultural worlds exposed by western education. They wielded their social influence and intellectual prestige by leading movements for reforms in caste Hindu society, enhancing educational opportunities, offering literary forums for debate and discussion, and using both the vernacular and English print media to affect a general moral and intellectual improvement of society. They primarily lived and worked in the city, although they also maintained important links with the mufassil (‘suburban towns’) and villages from which they originally hailed.11 Yet, it is hardly surprising that the bhadralok harboured a deep and uneasy discomfort about Calcutta—at once their source of livelihood and social prestige and a symbol of their subjugation. 11 Sumit Sarkar holds that suburban towns of mufassils were equally important in the lives of the bhadralok as places of work and ancestral origin, but this is not to diminish the importance of the city itself (Sarkar S. 1999: 170).

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One such literary response, the Kalikata Kamalalaya, recorded the changing times as indexed in contemporary popular perceptions (Bandyopadhyay 1987 [1823]). Set up as a dialogue between a city dweller and a villager—with the latter confronting the former as his alter ego—the work poses the author’s own self-doubts to a wider readership, touching on various contemporary social issues. Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay, himself a migrant to the city from a Burdwan village who strongly identified with staunch Brahmanical beliefs, can be seen obliquely reflected in the utterances of the rural person.12 As an active member of Hindu organisations like the Gaudiya Samaj and the Dharma Sabha, and as the publisher of the conservative newspaper Samachar Chandrika, Bhabanicharan harboured a lot of sympathy for the ‘old order’, where brahmins were respected and suitably honoured, religious rituals diligently observed, and the language of the sastras dominated. However, he was also the product of the colonial trade and bureaucratic framework, having served first as a clerk, and then in respectable positions variously in the Hooghly Collectorate, Bishop’s College, and the Englishman newspaper.13 As such, he could not ignore the practical need to accommodate old values within the new demands and opportunities created by the colonial situation. In Kalikata Kamalalaya, the city man puts up a tough but spirited defence of his city in response to the onslaught of the country man’s impeccable reasoning, but the response is riddled with ambiguity. On the one hand, he criticises the nouveau babus for their western manners and their neglect of Hindu traditions (ibid.: 9-10). Babus is a derogatory term for the newly English educated bhadralok in reformist and satirical literature. On the other, he praises them for their cultivated habits, patronage of education through the Hindu College and School Book Societies, and sponsoring of printed works (ibid.: 23-24, 26-27). Such divided selves were to form an endemic feature of educated writings in the times to come.14 Kalikata Kamalalaya underlined the deep anxieties of shastric-minded people living in the metropolis, ritually contaminated as it was. Shastricminded people strictly preferred to abide by the rules and rituals enshrined in ancient Hindu religious scriptures or shastras. Kalikata Kamalalaya showed how it was possible to navigate the urban world without giving up one’s dharma or traditional Hindu ways of life. Service Employment in 12 Amitava Mukherjee holds that rural migrants to the city of Calcutta in the nineteenth century regarded it as only a workplace and continued to be dominated by non-urban mentalities (1971: 9). 13 For an account of his life and career, see: Chaudhury 1982: 211-217. 14 For a useful discussion on this, see Chatterjee 1993.

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Calcutta should not prove an impediment to leading a religious life even in the ritually polluting context of the city, and one should learn to maintain a strict divide between one’s dharmic and worldly commitments. The evening as a part of the day is clearly marked out from the enslaving experience of the day at work for the city dweller. He returns home to change his outside work clothes, ritually purify himself with holy Ganges water, perform the ahnik (‘evening prayers’) and then engage in conversations with friends and neighbours in a baithak-khana (‘semiformal assembly’) (Bandyopadhyay 1987 [1823]: 117). Bhabanicharan felt that he was an integral part of Calcutta’s urban sphere and could therefore lay claim to it. While Kalikata Kamalalaya can be read as a kind of ‘How-to’ guide for educated, upper-caste Hindu professional men in the city, the work also underlined a wider role in public affairs for the Bengali social elite. Here, Calcutta’s urban sphere is as much made by the Bengalis as the colonials, the former laying a distinct claim to a public life in the city that is configured outside both work and domestic spaces. The separation of the worldly, routine service life of the day from the baithak-khana conversations of the evening symbolises the distinct roles of the bhadralok in the two domains. Bhabanicharan himself would have participated in such assemblies by way of contributing to his public roles as educator, social reformist, and litterateur, which marked him out as a leader in society: a man of public affairs. Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown how the culture of the baithak-khana was an essential pursuit for the bhadralok that was primarily rooted in sociability, but also fundamental to the building of cultural and social networks in the city. They were vital for enabling the recruitment of new members, exchanging ideas, and mutual bonding. They generated literary forums, social movements, political associations, and artistic and theatrical clubs (Chakrabarty 2000: 180-213).15 The self-perception of contemporary and later generations of bhadralok hinged on their role in the public life of the city. Partha Chatterjee has persuasively argued how the new (invariably male) ‘modern individual’ in India could not write his life story as a private being. For it to be meaningful, it had to be written into the public domain, within the narrative of the nation (Chatterjee 1993: 138-139). Autobiographies and biographies celebrating the lives of the great and the illustrious proliferated over the 15 The baithak-khana later moved out of the outer room of patrons to the narrow stoops or open verandas at street level known as ro’ak. The nature of these networks also changed from primarily patronage-based to a more egalitarian format known as adda.

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course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These works commemorated their lives in and contributions to the city, presenting these figures as foundational to the community’s identity in the modern period, and listing their achievements in the fields of social reform and education, philanthropy and religious activities, literature and the arts (Sastri 1919; 1904; Mitter 1993 [1869]; Sarkar H. 1910; Sircar 1914). While the topology of the city in writings by Europeans and in official archives celebrated its civic and economic successes and the ornamental built aspects in its southern parts, Bengali literary representations focused almost exclusively on the Black Town or northern sector of the city. British contributions find mention, but only as secondary to that of the Bengalis.16 In contemporary writings, the middle classes and aristocracy conceived of the city’s history as a panegyric to important local families, social reformers, and public intellectuals. They highlighted the rise of the Shils, Lahas, Debs, Duttas, Mitras, and Mullicks, and the pivotal role played by each family in the growth of Calcutta. The city’s social elite are recorded as having contributed to the building of schools, roads, ghats (‘riverside wharfs’), bazaars, charitable hospitals, and orphanages—even financially contributing to the colonial government’s attempts to provide the city with a civic infrastructure.17 Local histories commemorated and celebrated such munificence as those of Huzuri Chand Mal (tanks), Nubkissen Deb (streets), and Govindaram Mitra (the Navaratna or nine steepled temple, ‘the highest point of which was higher than the Ochterloney monument’ in Calcutta) (Deb 1905: 63, 67).18 As such, Calcutta was not just a place of enslavement to colonial rule, ritual pollution, and moral corruption, but also a place where the elite could lead by way of example and show how dharma—the religious and moral order—could be preserved and intellectual betterment realised. But there is also a constant dialectic of identity and alienation for the bhadralok within the colonial urban space. This anxiety persisted particularly on the upsetting of Hindu codes and ways of life. Prankrishna Dutta, born into the Hindu aristocracy of Calcutta in 1851 and the editor of Sulabh Patrika, reminisced about bygone days and practices in the 16 This acknowledgement becomes rarer as the nineteenth century progresses, and almost disappears altogether by the early decades of the next century. For mention of British contributions to the city, cf. Deb 1905: 49, 52. 17 Nubkissen Deb donated a sum of thirty thousand rupees towards the building of the St. John’s Church in Calcutta in 1787 (Deb 1905: 76). The Sikh trader Huzuri Mal gifted the St. James’ church and even built the spire of the Armenian Church (Mitra 1951: 53). 18 Also see: Dutta P. 1981 [1901-1903], especially Chapters 3-5.

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columns of a Bengali monthly at the start of the twentieth century (Dutta 1981 [1901-1903]: 96-132; Bose R. 1874).19 He talked of the bodily benefits of rising early and taking a dip in the Ganges and worshiping family deities, and the contributions of traditional games such as wrestling, sword and baton fighting, archery, and swimming to making a healthy constitution (Dutta 1981 [1901-1903]: 100-103). People had simpler diets in earlier days, but they ate wholesome food. The weak constitution of Bengalis in latter days, Dutta held, could be traced to the lack of milk in their diet and adulteration of food items like oil and ghee. The legendary appetites of yesteryears were presented with a degree of nostalgia and as a symbol of healthy lives (ibid.: 1, 3, 7). People were also failing in their service to their religion and community. Dutta’s writings lament the decrease in the number of idols publicly worshipped in the city despite the influx of population—symbolising a general lack of religious devotion. Traditions of philanthropy among the prosperous had also seen a concomitant decline. Representing the dominant nationalist patriarchal discursive formations of his times, Dutta paints a stark contrast between the women of the present and those of earlier times, praising the uncomplaining and industrious labour of women in looking after vast joint families and households in earlier days. This, he claims, made them healthier and happier compared to women of more recent times, with their ever-increasing demand for clothes and ornaments and seemingly endless suffering of hysteria and dyspepsia (ibid.: 110-111, 121-132).20 In their writings, Calcutta’s educated class repeatedly harked back to the more salubrious conditions of rural Bengal in the past. Born in Calcutta in 1851, Bepin Krishna Bose recalled a visit with his parents to a village in Burdwan as a little boy, where they stayed for several months. To one who had been brought up amidst the dirt and dust of a large and crowded town like Calcutta, the change of village life was most agreeable. Bengal villages were not then so many death-traps, as malaria had since made them. The enforced migration to Calcutta had neither improved the physique of the people nor added to their comforts; their ancestors in their unreformed village homes were on the whole better off than they were now (Bose 1923: 3-4). 19 See: Dutta 1981: 96-132, originally serialised in Navyabharat between 1901 and 1903. See also Bose R. 1874 for a similar comparison of pre-colonial and colonial times. 20 Such observations were also made by his more illustrious contemporary, the novelist and poet, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. See his satirical essay, ‘Pracina O Nabina’ [originally published in 1879] (Chattopadhyay B.C. 1986 [1879]: 249-256).

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Sumit Sarkar has demonstrated how bhadralok disenchantment with colonial promises of reform, and myths of improvement nurtured by their optimistic social activism in the first half of the nineteenth century, made them withdraw from realms of rationality, urbanity, and masculinity in the second half of that century. Instead, moods of nostalgia and introspection dominated their intellectual horizons, resulting in a turn towards the rural and natural worlds. Poetry, autobiography, and songs celebrated the pristine, feminine aspects of the countryside (Sarkar S. 1992: 1547-1548). Regretting their current location in the city, enslaved to their professional lives, and without much choice, the bhadralok desisted from calling his city residence a bari (‘home’) until well into the twentieth century. This more intimate term was reserved for the ancestral village abode, while the city accommodation came to be referred to as only a basha (‘temporary dwelling’) (Sarkar S. 1999: 176-177). The romantic celebration of the countryside was adjunct to another concern, that of the increasing technologisation of the city. While the convenience and general benefits flowing from the improvement of the city’s infrastructure from about the 1860s onwards is acknowledged in bhadralok writings, critiques are not too far behind. An examination of the accounts of those living in the northern half of Calcutta in the late nineteenth century, in fact, presents quite another scenario—of persistent insanitary conditions resulting from unwise and callous planning and implementation of municipal measures. Dutta, who we met earlier, blamed the British for the unplanned development of Calcutta. Blocking up of flowing water bodies through the whimsical construction of roads and buildings, and most disastrously through the later deliberate dumping of rubbish to stop the spread of infectious fevers and epidemics like cholera and malaria, had ruined all prospects of a healthy city. The trapped and contaminated water collected the city’s filth and eventually sank underground. The mortality rate was considerably higher in Calcutta compared to the villages along its borders. It would take the municipal authorities another one hundred and fifty years, Dutta adds ironically, to finally realise that all of the unhealthy water needed to be drained from the city with the help of sewers and the regular clearing of rubbish (Dutta 1981 [1901-1903]: 97-99). The engineering infrastructure for drainage, the disposal of garbage, and supply of safe drinking water took a long time to reach the Indian residents of the city. It was not till 1874 that the first sewers were built in the Black Town. Safe drinking water was introduced in the northern quarters in 1870. Until then, another contemporary recalls, residents had to resort to water drawn from the Ganges or the Hendua Tank and delivered by

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bhaaries (‘human water carriers’). Water drawn from wells (with considerable risk of groundwater contamination) was used for other household needs. Significantly, he notes how cholera had subsided in the city following the introduction of filtered tap water (Dutta 1975 [1929]: 5-6).21 Civic amenities did not flow with speed and ease into these parts. Kshitindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath and resident of the Jorasanko household, remembers the nuisance caused in his childhood (in the last decade of the nineteenth century) by rubbish collecting on the doorsteps of householders because of the inadequacy of the waste disposal services. Petitions were sent repeatedly to the government, he writes, but to no avail (Tagore 1930: 5). Technology was viewed as debilitating, discriminatory, and insensitive to dharmic or religious sentiments. When the floating pontoon bridge was built over the river Ganges in 1874 to link the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah, it was hailed as a technological wonder. The Howrah Bridge became the icon of the city’s technological revolution and the subject of numerous popular vernacular songs and pamphlets of the time, as we shall see below. But the educated were markedly reticent. It finds cursory mention in Kshitindranath Tagore’s otherwise quite meticulous observations on the city’s transportation networks.22 Others regarded it as both humiliating and polluting for the mighty river. A nostalgic tract written by an obscure Brahmin scholar and sharing the same critical view of the city lamented the damage being done: What shall I say about the misery of Bhagirathi [Ganges]; The railway authorities have scarred her chest with a bridge, And they run hundreds of thousands of vehicles across it; […] The mother bears the arrogance of her children in silence, And takes on their burden of sin […]; Ganga is the holiest of holy for the Hindus It is believed that touching her water rinses oneself of all sins; This purest of pure water is being polluted by the foreigner, Who by virtue of power and capital continues to throw excrement As well as industrial waste from the jute mills lining both sides of the river. (Sharma 1921: 48-49) 21 In his childhood memoirs, Rabindranath Tagore also recalls an entire ground floor room being filled up with earthenware pots containing a year’s supply of drinking water brought in from the Ganges during the less polluting winter months (Tagore 1940: 12). 22 Kshitindranath Tagore briefly mentions a new Howrah bridge being built after the First World War (in fact, it was completed during the Second World War, between 1938 and 1943) (Tagore 1930: 118).

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The same work was also quick to point out the stark differences between the neat, orderly and clean sahib tollah (‘White Town’)—with its electric lights, pavements, and sweepers on standby—on the one hand, and the stench-filled Bangali tollah (‘Native Bengali Town’) where animal carcasses rotted by the roadside (Sharma 1921: 29). Mechanised vehicles were introduced in Calcutta from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, beginning with trams in 1873. Initially proposed to carry goods and only later taking on passengers, the earliest trams were horse drawn. Electric trams were introduced in 1902, after a brief experiment with steam engines (Mitra R. 1980: 179-184). Motorised buses did not arrive until much later, in 1922 (ibid.: 187-189). The idea was to mainly serve office workers, who could travel more safely and quickly at a cheaper price. Horse-drawn omnibuses, palkis (‘palanquins’) and keranchi ghurrie (‘hackney carriage pool’) travel had been some of the earlier options available to petty servicemen, but their extortionate rates, unreliability, reckless speed, and overall nuisance had proved detrimental to passengers.23 Trams proved popular with such customers. While it would seem that the tram was introduced in Calcutta for the convenience of the increasing number of clerks and office workers, shops, and businesses, mechanised travel in general came under much criticism in educated writings. To begin with, there was a direct and inverse correlation observed between health and motorised travel in the city. Prankrishna Dutta was quick to blame the trams and other rental vehicles for the explosion of diabetes among the population. Kshitindranath Tagore also notes the injurious effects of travel by tram on the youth of his days. Both recall an earlier time when people could easily cover long distances by foot and stayed healthy as a result (Dutta 1981 [1901-1903]: 96; Tagore 1930: 80).24 The Tagores of Jorasanko were particularly irked by the digging up of roads in the vicinity of their ancestral residence: I remember vividly the nuisance caused to householders by the Company [the Calcutta Tramway Company] digging up the roads and shutting off all the entrances into the smaller streets feeding the main roads (Tagore 1930: 81-82). 23 Police reports show that accidents were common (cf. Town of Calcutta 1854-1855: 9; 1863-1864: 13; 1877: 14). The hackney carriages were notorious for the speed at which they travelled, and for their bullying of pedestrians, including abuse and even the use of whips (Ray 2001 [1886]: 274). Passengers were exposed to intimidation and extortion (Tagore 1930: 71). 24 Kshitindranath in fact believed that the first experiment in 1864 of introducing horse drawn trams did not succeed because people preferred to walk rather than pay for tram travel.

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The CTC [Calcutta Tramway Company], was a typical sahib company [white man’s company], writes Kshitindranath, and did not initially entertain the repeated complaints made by the residents in the affected streets. It was only when a prominent member of the Tagore household like Jyotirindranath Tagore threatened to file a case of inconvenience against the Company that they relented and amendments were made (Tagore 1930: 81-82). Kshitindranath’s own experience of mechanised travel, including that of trams, ranged from lukewarm to negative. While it was fun to watch the steam-powered earliest trams, riding on them proved positively unpleasant because of the noise of the locomotion, the shrill tram whistle, and all the juddering. The later electric-powered trams proved equally disappointing with their unimaginative speed and efficiency and suffocating and emotionless mechanical feel. there was no romanticism in reaching the destination so quickly—there was such little time between boarding and alighting […] it might be great for speeding up business but I do not like the electric trams of recent times—its high speed renders it with a deadening and unappealing character (Tagore 1930: 89-90).25

Bhabanicharan’s anxieties about the upsetting of the old Hindu ritual and caste order in the early decades of the nineteenth century were still alive among sections of Calcutta’s population a century later. Undoubtedly, the city had embraced a modernity wrought by both technology and liberal education by the early twentieth century, and an army of otherwise ‘modern-minded’ subjects continued to carry the modernising project forward, but the doubts persisted. The disappearance of daily domestic Hindu practices such as ritual purification of the household with Ganges water and cow dung, maintaining fasts and bratas (specialised rituals associated with certain deities and planetary movements), and ayurvedic practices were deeply mourned. Instead, dharma, it was felt, was being upset by the drinking of tea in the morning without an ablution, meat being supplied by low-caste sudras, and mehters (‘scavengers’, also low caste) visiting the movie theatres and sitting near upper-caste individuals (Sharma 1921: 75, 84-92). Such interlocutions constitute a distinct attempt by the nationalist literati to claim the city back from the clutches of technology, progress, and colonialism.

25 Kshitindranath Tagore also writes in a similar vein of the annoyance caused by motor cars (1930: 98-101).

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Another City? Municipal Repression, Hardship, Disease, and Disasters

There was yet ‘another city’ that belonged to the armies of petty servicemen, shopkeepers, tradesmen and artisans, labourers, and servants that served Calcutta in the nineteenth century. Their voices and their perceptions of the city are undoubtedly problematic to recover, but it is possible to find glimpses in contemporary popular culture—in songs and writings and illustrations doing their rounds in the city at the time. These highlight the everyday lives and quotidian concerns of the humbler inhabitants struggling to make a decent living and battling a harsh material environment. They speak of police repression, rising prices, and bodies rattled by fevers and strenuous work lives. They also represent the awe and bewilderment resulting from the technological revolution of the city—the building of bridges and drains, the operation of steamboats and railways, and the setting up of gaslights and tramways. Together, they offer a narrative of more survival than celebration, showing how the city was experienced and lived from ‘below’. Singing and songs in Calcutta in the late nineteenth century animated the urban domain with widely shared discourses on the city—on material changes, natural disasters, and sexuality—that validated the experience of a recently urbanised world seen from below. They brought lower and middling social groups into shared constituencies for the reflection, critique, and questioning of their contemporary urban experience.26 They were highly stylised and faithful to traditional formats of composition, but also very distinctly ‘urban’, as evident in the imagery deployed and themes chosen. This is not to argue that as a cultural domain the ‘popular’ remained a selfcontained discursive system. The content of such material has to be judged in terms of other dominant knowledges that were in circulation in the city, which the producers and consumers of such songs and illustrations would also have been exposed to. There is thus a grudging acceptance of women in public places, and some of the imagery dovetails with educated bhadralok representations of enslavement and colonial subjugation. In addition, texts and images alone fail to transmit a sense of their reception—particularly, in the case of songs, their actual performance in public—their audience, 26 My use of the term ‘popular’ in this essay in the context of cultural productions does not imply rigid demarcations between hierarchically organised social groups as much as their availability as non-discrete, and relatively open cultural forms. Their easy access and huge demand are self-evident markers of their ‘popularity’ in my methodology—not any deterministic, class-driven notion.

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and their wider currency in social life. What they do, however, tell us is that the street cultures in Calcutta were as much involved with the urban environment as the educated bhadralok and colonials were. Alongside the more elevated platforms of the press and literary and civic societies of the educated, they too presented an opportunity for public discussion of the contemporary urban experience and significantly shaped how various non-elite groups made sense of themselves and their new environment. In these representations, the city is the fundamental organising category, the common referential frame for writers and illustrators, performers and listeners alike. Calcutta from the mid nineteenth century onwards was the centre of production for cheap books and novels, drama and song tracts, erotica and almanacs, which emerged from numerous small presses in the northern half of the city. Cumulatively, as a genre, these works came to be referred to as Battala literature, the name deriving originally from the locality where the earliest presses were located, but later applied by vernacular purists to works of seemingly dubious or obscene content produced by Bengali presses in general in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27 Although locating the specific readership(s) for this genre is difficult, it is possible to infer from their considerable print runs, the prevalence of well-known authors of the popular press, and the evidence of wide readership of such ephemeral vernacular literature in contemporary Bengal, that they reached a substantial audience of not-very-well educated, marginally literate readers.28 From the 1860s onwards, these same presses also published songs on Calcutta. Small pamphlets of no more than fifteen to twenty pages, these songs gave shape to the emotions, anxieties, and concerns of residents during catastrophic events or spectacular occasions being translated through familiar idioms and their own lived experiences. They celebrated the construction of the Howrah Bridge and the municipal sewers in 1874, recorded the disastrous cyclones of 1864 and 1867, and worried about the scare of diseased fish (fish being a much-loved feature in the Bengali diet) in 1875. The origins of these printed songs lay in the traditional street entertainment that emerged in Calcutta in the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the form of kobi-songs (kobi meaning ‘poet’) that were adapted 27 For an account of the trade in cheap ephemeral Bengali tracts in late nineteenth Bengal, see: Ghosh 2006: Chapter 3; Sarkar S. 1992. 28 Typical print-runs were between 2000 and 3000 copies. See e.g. Quarterly Report of the Bengal Library (1874, 1879). For a detailed discussion of the readership of cheap, ephemeral Bengali tracts in late nineteenth Bengal, see: Ghosh 2006: Chapter 4.

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from older and soberer pastoral versions. Composed in rhymed couplets and triplets like the later printed city songs, kobi-songs included sharply observant and amusing accounts of everyday experiences of city life and were staged in front of vast adulatory crowds.29 Overall, however, the sensibilities were more pastoral and moral, rather than modern and urban. The standard literary tropes for talking about the times were those of rot—moral and material: the era of kali or kaliyuga. In the Hindu cosmological cycle comprised of four eras, this one was believed to be the most destructive and sinful. The most palpable feature of this apocalypse, the topical print literature on the city bemoaned, was the corrosive effect of women of easy virtue on the moral fibre of its male residents. Calcutta in the nineteenth century seemed to offer endless attractions to young men, from opium dens and shops selling alcohol to vigorous business generated by the red-light districts. The loosening moral fabric of the city could also be read in a series of sexual scandals erupting in the city in the 1870s that animated the Battala presses of the time.30 Natural calamities and diseases that hit Calcutta in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was believed, underlined the costs that residents had to pay for their sins. The spread of dengue in 1872 and an infectious fever in 1876 fanned fears of an impending doom in such literature. While the colonial archives are replete with panic about epidemics such as cholera and plague, the songsters relate tales of physical disfigurement, suffering, and death resulting from other diseases such as dengue and infectious fevers. It would appear that outbreaks of epidemics such as those that consumed the energies of the municipal administration in port cities like Bombay and Calcutta were of the least concern to local residents. In fact, the numbers in official reports confirm the truth behind such representations in popular literature. In the 1880s, the deaths resulting from influenza and other ‘fevers’ in Calcutta and its suburbs far surpassed those resulting from cholera.31 The tracts spoke of the helplessness of the population (Das (de) 1872; Dutta 1876). The high fever, dehydration, body aches, and long-term injurious effects—including paralysis of limbs—are described in some detail. Businesses are reported as shutting as household after household is afflicted. The medical profession is lambasted mercilessly for being unable 29 See Banerjee 1989: 94-102 for a discussion of kobi songs. 30 For an excellent discussion of this printed literature, see Sarkar T. 1997. 31 Cf. Municipality of Calcutta 1876: Appendix A. In that quarter, there were 1072 deaths from fevers (unspecified further as a category, however), compared to only 660 from cholera. The high incidence of deaths from fevers compared to cholera is sustained through later reports of the 1870s (e.g. Municipality of Calcutta 1879: 2-6), and 1890s (e.g. Municipality of Calcutta 1893).

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to offer any cure. The fever pamphlets appearing in 1876 also index the appearance of dengue just four years earlier, painting the affliction as a tragedy in continuum. In 1864 and 1867, Calcutta was hit by devastating cyclones resulting in the loss of valuable lives and property. Within a month of their appearance, the vernacular presses of the city were reporting the events in a series of cyclone songs. While offering some factual information that corresponded with that presented in the contemporary press and official reportage, their concerns were very different. Thus, when describing the impact of the storm on the city in 1867, authors chose to depict the damage done to crops, cattle sheds, fishes, and modest residential clusters rather than the ruin brought upon the trading and financial sectors that received extensive coverage in the newspapers. The dominant structural format of the songs was one of divine retribution for the world having lost its values, combined with graphic descriptions of the catastrophe itself. In the process, authors presented their personal views on society, morals, and politics. In fearing for the loss of their own flimsy residences and their imminent death in a ‘foreign’ land without the comforting presence of family and friends, the writers echoed the sentiments of many migrants to the city eking out a modest living amidst much adversity (Das 1867: 7).32 The city as a temporary, unfriendly, and uncertain place was further reaffirmed in allusions to the inevitable desecration of forgotten and forsaken decomposed bodies through post-mortem operations that would inevitably be carried out by the state, with one author fearing such a fate in the event of his dying from a collapsing house (Das 1867: 8). Heavy state presence is felt in at least one other cyclone song, which portrays a vivid picture of police searching for bodies amidst the ruins left behind by the storm.33 The distress of the householders left without any shelter and at the mercy of builders charging outrageous prices underscores the minimal involvement of the municipal government in the rehousing and rehabilitation of the displaced populations (Das (de) 1867: 11). In 1875, the virulent spread of disease amongst fishes in the riverine tracts of eastern Bengal and even the Hooghly affected the city’s supply of fish that year, causing untold despair for the fish-loving Bengalis.34 The 32 This personal dislocation of the poet could be real or imagined, although the linguistic style of the composition indicates that he could have originally been a resident of eastern Bengal. 33 The prostitutes, observing this, make themselves scarce during the search, fearing further misery and police oppression (Das (de) 1867: 12). 34 Trains had been banned from bringing fish from eastern Bengal (Datta 1875: 4).

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event was reported in a series of songs and dramatic tracts which moaned relentlessly about the temporary loss of fish from Bengali diets (Sarman 1875; Shil 1875a; Chattopadhyay B. 1875; Datta 1875). It breaks my heart to say this, Alas! So many people have stopped having fish, All they can have is dal (lentils/pulses) and rice. […] Even the better-off people cannot have fish; For fear of losing their lives. They cannot chew the big fish-heads anymore; Having to satisfy themselves with only boiled vegetables and pulses. […] It was hard to eat any food without fishes. (Shil 1875a: 2, 9)

As with the cyclone, where both palatial residences and tiled huts are depicted as being torn down by the storms, this calamity too had acted as a social leveller, affecting all—both those who could afford fish easily and those who were financially stretched.35 The songs also dwelt on a range of urban concerns—from high prices to sinful lives flourishing in the city—and relied on similar tropes of cosmic intervention to right a reversed world order (Chattopadhyay 1875: 9). Buried in the narrative is also a veiled dislike for the usually eastern Bengali migrant fisherfolk, who were depicted as involved in malpractices and artificially inflating the price of fish, even in the best of times (Shil 1875b: 9-11). For the Bengalis, the affordability of fish was a mark of social esteem that seems to have been under threat from the high prices. The abuses publicly hurled by the fisherwomen who sold them in the marketplace towards those who could not afford their prices hurt the self-respect of the less prosperous customers. Thus, despite the temporary misery, the tracts seemingly share a common sentiment of delight amongst readers and writers alike at the ruin brought upon the fish sellers. Ridiculing the prospective customer with derisive laughter; They would sprinkle [fish] water on them to drive them away. ‘Who will you feed this fish to [they said]? Move away; Have you never bought fish? Do you not know how much they cost?’ 35 There is also a pertinent side note on widows, who are happy that others are now forced to share their dietary deprivation—as Hindu Bengali widows were customarily barred from consuming fish—with the tone here being more sympathetic than satiric (Shil 1875a:10).

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The poor customer stares in bewilderment, speechless. […] it is hard to guard your honour in the fish market; Only those who go there to buy fish will know. (Datta 1875: 11)

But the tracts are not entirely unsympathetic to the fish sellers, and though possibly tongue-in-cheek, also outline their miseries—with no earnings, rotting stock, and mouths to feed at home—in the same pamphlets. It would not, in fact, be entirely unreasonable to argue that the songs represented equally valid but multiple registers of emotions and experiences for its different audiences. Thus, even as the building of the Howrah Bridge was proving a fundamental benefit to the mass of human traffic travelling daily to and from the city—providing safe and economical (by saving on boat fares) passage—migrant boatmen from East Bengal are depicted as suffering acutely. Having lost their chief means of livelihood—ferrying passengers across the river—they struggle to eke out an existence in a harsh city (Ray 1874a: 9; Shil 1874: 4-6). Caught between rising prices and increasing taxes, Calcutta’s population of labouring and petty service people struggled in their everyday lives. In the fictional but highly evocative words of the boatmen discussed above: It is unbearable to look upon the bridge; It burns our souls and breaks our hearts. Who could have ever imagined That this would happen on the river banks at Howrah? […] How can we afford to live in this day and age When rice costs four rupees per maund? The instinct is to take our lives by jumping into the Ganges (Ray 1874a: 9-10)36

While technology eased the lives of people, the resulting taxes on civic amenities crippled their existence. Having showered praise on the British for building the Howrah Bridge, the author of one pamphlet makes a direct plea to the colonial government not to impose any toll on it. India is being ripped apart by taxes—on roads, water, lights, and the police—he implores. The pathos is heightened by the depiction of the tragic consequences of nonpayment. Failure to pay resulted in fines double the amount payable in tax, 36 A maund was a variable unit of weight adopted across the British territories in South Asia. In British India, one maund was roughly 37.32 kilograms.

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starvation, and ultimately, bankruptcy (Dutta 1874: 10-12). Police harassment as agents of the local administration doubled the despair. The police in these tracts appear much feared and hated, their abrasive behaviour reported even in rescue and emergency operations, as in the cyclone tracts seen above.37 Unlike the bhadralok, however, there is overall a prevailing note of awe and wonder at the arrival of technology in the city. The amazement is not just visual—what the eye could see—but also material and practical—that which could not be seen, but felt. Thus, eloquent songs about the beauty of the Howrah Bridge can be placed alongside those celebrating the disappearance of troublesome mosquitoes in the city, following the construction of the necessary, but less grandiose, municipal sewers. Poets and songsters sing about the technological prowess of the British, elaborately listing their achievements: They [the British] have created amazing gas lamps Which do not require oil but light up with only a touch of fire; Then there are the taps supplying water to everyone […] The roads are tidy and clean with nothing broken And everything seems nicely in place (Das 1867: 12)

When built in 1874, the Howrah Bridge was an amazing technological feat, constructed as a massive floating structure over a series of iron ‘boats’, or pontoons, supporting the bridge deck. The middle portion of the bridge was moveable and could be lifted to allow heavier water traffic to pass. There were pavements on either side for foot traffic, and a by 1879 lights also adorned the bridge. Poets dwelt lovingly on the details: the beautiful triple-rainbow shaped arches, the purple varnished metal of the structure, the elegant lampposts (not yet lighted), and the spotless road and pavements (Ghosh 1874a: 6-9). But the practical side of these amazing spectacles were also not lost on the city’s residents. Thus, when the municipal sewers began to be dug in the northern part of the city, the same poet heaved a sigh of relief, in the knowledge he would not have to spend any more sleepless nights. The sewers would replace the drains bordering the streets in north Calcutta, which had become large open cesspools and breeding grounds for mosquitoes (Ghosh 1874b: 5). 37 In 1876 when a controlled explosion to remove the wreckage of a ship at Hooghly went wrong, resulting in the death and injury of innocent passers-by, sailors, boatmen, and ferry passengers, police acted roughly in breaking up crowds of mourners (Shil 1876: 7; Dasi 1876: 10).

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Despite anxieties about surviving in a harsh environment, Calcutta’s material munificence and technological marvels such as the steam engine and telegraph never ceased to amaze, and were repeatedly reported in popular literature and art, and even in the songs of esoteric cults in the city (Urban 2001: 1085-1114). One poet, writing on the Howrah Bridge, paused to make note of these inventions: Oh hail the brainpower [of the British]; The power of steam has changed the whole world. The steam train can work by itself, Covering a month’s distance in a day; The combined power of fire and water makes it run, Even Pavana [the Wind-God] has accepted defeat. [And] News travels on wires, I salute the person who has devised this machine; (Ray N. 1874b: 3)

The steam railway and steamship captured the imagination of poets and artists alike, appearing in the hugely popular panjikas (almanacs) or produced at Battala. Initially starting in the traditional Hindu format of handbooks for consulting auspicious moments, planetary positions, and notes on rituals and festivals, these also came to cater to the needs of the new urban and professional world that was emerging in Calcutta in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Almanacs from the 1830s onwards came to contain lists of weights and measures, postal rates, railway timetables, medical memoranda, rules and tables of fees for small case courts, and a list of public holidays, while woodcut pictures of railways appeared side-by-side those of Hindu divinities (Panjika n.d.: 300-301).38 Such objects could also form the subject matter of standalone woodcut prints, as seen below (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). Siddhartha Ghosh notes how not just woodcuts, but also painted Kalighat pats, embroidered sarees, and carved friezes from terracotta temples provide visual records of the contemporary response to technology in the city (1990: 227).

38 For pictures of railways, see: Nutan Panjika, 1868-69; Nutan Panjika 1871-72

202  Figure 6.3 Ferry Steamer, woodcut print, n.d.

Source: Paul, A., Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta, 1983

Figure 6.4 Steam, woodcut print, n.d.

Source: Paul, A., Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta, 1983

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6.4 Conclusion Calcutta in the nineteenth century was as much the product of British as of Indian imagination. Moving away from official records, an examination of alternative vernacular archives represented in contemporary Bengali memoirs, songs, dramas, and street literature shows the city as a realm shaped by the everyday experiences of its indigenous residents. The dominant colonial image of an otherwise orderly city being constantly threatened by an unruly and disease-ridden native quarter spilling over its boundaries is sufficiently compromised when placed alongside Bengali understandings and expectations of public space and property, communal living, bodily practices, and social hierarchies. The urban social space of Calcutta in the nineteenth century was also a contested terrain among its Indian inhabitants. With huge influxes of immigrants into the city, the new organisation of work schedules, the arrival of technology, the thriving sex industry, and the increased visibility of women, Calcutta seemed a disconcerting place for all. The entry of diverse social constituencies, each with different claims to social and political authority, found concomitant representation in the city’s popular culture. By the end of the century, a vibrant street presence and increasing print visibility of marginal social groups matched the growing social and economic opportunities presented by the colonial metropolis.

Bibliography Arnold, D. (1993), Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bandyopadhyay, B. (1987), Kalikata Kamalalay, reprinted in Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyayer Rasarachanasamagra, Gupta, S.K. (ed.). Calcutta: Nabapatra Prakashan [1st edition 1823]. Banerjee, S. (1989), The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta. Calcutta: Seagull Books. — (1998), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal. Calcutta: Seagull Books. — (2009), The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Bose, B.P. (1923), Stray Thoughts on Some Incidents in My Life. Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co. Bose, R. (1874), Sekal Ar Ekal. Calcutta: n.p.

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Busteed, H.E. (1888), Echoes from Old Calcutta, Being Chiefly Reminiscences of the Days of Warren Hastings, Francis, & Impey. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. [2nd edition, 1st edition 1882] Chakrabarty, D. (2000), Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chattopadhyay, B. (1875), Bishom Dhnoka, Maachhe Poka [Great Betrayal, (caused by) Worms in Fishes]. Calcutta: n.p. Chattopadhyay, B.C. (1986), ‘Pracina O Nabina’, in Bankim Racanabali: Sahitya Samagra, Basu, B. (ed.): 249-256. Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam [1st edition 1879]. Chattopadhyay, S. (2000). “Blurring boundaries: the limits of ‘White Town’ in colonial Calcutta.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59(2): 154-179. — (2006), Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Chaudhury, A.Q. (1982), Bangla Sahitye Samajik Naksha: Patabhumi O Pratistha, 1820-1848. Dacca: n.p. Cotton, H.E.A. (1907), Calcutta Old and New: Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: W. Newman & Co. Das (de), M. (1867), Eki Asambhab Kartike Jhod [What an Autumnal Storm]. Calcutta: Harihar Press. — (1872), Dengue Jvarer Pnachali [Song of the Dengue Fever]. Calcutta: Victoria Press. Das, S. (1991), Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905-1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, T. (1867), Jongule Jhod [Wild Storm]. Calcutta: Gyan Deepak Press. Dasi, N. (1876), Pulishghater Hatyakanda [The Murders at the Police Wharf]. Calcutta: n.p. Datta, A. (1875), Mechho Basante Mechhonir Darpachurna [The Shattering of the Fisherwoman’s Pride by Fish Pox]. Calcutta: Kabita Kaumudi Press. Deb, R.B.K. (1905), The Early History and Growth of Calcutta. Calcutta: n.p. Dutta, A. (1874), Howrahr Ghater Poler Kobi [The Poet of the Howrah Bridge]. Calcutta: Kabita Kaumudi Press. — (1876), Nutan Rog [New Disease]. Calcutta: Kabita Kaumudi Press. Dutta, M. (1975), Kolikatar Puratan Kahini O Pratha. Calcutta: Mahendra Publishing Committee Agency [1st edition 1929]. Dutta, P. (1981), Kolikatar Itibritta. Originally serialised in Navyabharat. Calcutta: Pustak Bipani [1st edition 1901-1903]. Eden, E. (1866), Up The Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. London: R. Bentley. Ghosh, A. (2006), Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, c.1778-1905. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Ghosh, A.C.D. (1874a), Ekei Bole Pol! Ja Bolle Tai Kolye!!! [What a Bridge This Is! They Delivered as Promised!!!]. Calcutta: Gyanollash Press. — (1874b), Drener Pnachali [The Ballad of the Drains]. Calcutta: Gyan Deepak Press. Ghosh, P. (2000), History of the Calcutta Jute Millhands. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Ghosh, S. (1990), ‘Purono Kolkatar Kolkobja: Oupanibeshik shaharer prajukti proyash’, in Kolkatar Purakatha, Basu D. (ed.). Calcutta: North Eastern States Libraries. Gupta, S.K. (ed.) (1987) Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyayer Rasarachanasamagra. Calcutta: Nabapatra Prakashan. Harrison, M. (1994), Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventative Medicine, 1859-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornsby, S.J. (1997), ‘Discovering the mercantile city in South Asia: the example of early nineteenth century Calcutta’, Journal of Historical Geography, 23 (2): 135-50. Kipling, R. (2009), The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places. Rockville: Wildside Press [1st edition 1891. London, Allahabad: A.H. Wheeler]. Kopf, D. (1969), British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Modernisation, 1773-1835. Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1975), ‘Rammohun Roy and the Bengal Renaissance: An Historiographical Essay’, in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, Joshi, V.C. (ed.), 21-45. Delhi: Vikas. — (1979), Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Losty, J. (1990), Calcutta: City of Palaces. London: British Library. Minney, R.J. (1922), Round About Calcutta. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitter, K.C. (1993), Mutty Lall Seal. Calcutta: Toolat [1st edition 1869]. Mitra, R. (1951), Gokulchandra Mitra O Sekaler Kolikata (vol. 1). Calcutta: R.K. Publishing & Co. — (1980), Kolikata Darpan. Calcutta: Subarnarekha Press. Mukherjee, A. (1971), Unish Shataker Samaj O Samskriti. Calcutta: n.a. Municipality of Calcutta (1874), Administrative Report of the Calcutta Municipality for 1874. — (1876), Report of the Calcutta Municipality for the Quarter Ending 31st March, 1876. — (1879), Report of the Calcutta Municipality for the Quarter Ending 7th January, 1879. — (1893), Quarterly Report Ending 31st March, 1893. Nutan Panjika, 1868-69 (1868). Calcutta: Kabitaratnakar Press. Nutan Panjika, 1871-72 (1871). Serampore: Chundrodoy Press. Panjika (n.d.) Calcutta: Day, Law and Company. Parkes, F. (1850), Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque During Four and Twenty Years in the East with Revelations of Life in the Zenana. London: P. Richardson.

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Paul, A. (1983), Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books. Quarterly Report of the Bengal Library (1874). Calcutta: Government Printing Press — (1879). Calcutta: Government Printing Press Ray, D. (2001), Debganer Martye Agaman. Calcutta: Allied Book Agency [1st edition 1886]. Ray, N. (1874a), Nutan Poler Toppa [Song of the New Bridge]. Calcutta: Sudharnab Press. — (1874b), Poler Pnachali [The Ballad of the Bridge]. Calcutta: Sudharnab Press. Ray, R. (1979), Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939. New Delhi: Vikas. Richards, E.P. (1914), Report by Request of the Trust on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas. Calcutta: Calcutta Improvement Trust. Sarkar, H. (1910), Life of Anandamohan Bose. Calcutta: n.p. Sarkar, S. (1992), ‘“Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti”: Ramakrishna and His Times’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July: 1547-1548. — (1999), ‘The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’, in Writing Social History, Sarkar, S. (ed.): 176-177. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. — (2011), The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. New Delhi: Permanent Black [1st edition 1973. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House]. Sarkar, T. (1997), ‘Talking about Scandals: religion, Law and Love on Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, Studies in History, 13 (1): 63-95. Sarman, D. (1875), Machher Basanta [Pox Afflicted Fish]. Calcutta: Kabita Kaumudi Press. Sastri, S. (1904), Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Banga Samaj. Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri & Co. — (1919), Men I Have Seen. Calcutta: Crescent Printing Works. Sharma, D. (1921), Sahar Chitra. Calcutta: n.p. Shil, J. (1874), Nutan Poler Pnachali [Ballad of the New Bridge]. Calcutta: Sudharnab Press. — (1875a), Machher Poka [Worms in Fishes], Calcutta: n.p. — (1875b), Machher Basante Jele Mechhonir Khed [The Lament of the Fisherwoman Following Fish Pox]. Calcutta: Sudharnab Press. — (1876), Pulish Ghater Agnikanda [The Fire at the Police Wharf]. Calcutta: n.p. Sinha, P. (1978), Calcutta in Urban History. Calcutta: Firma KLM. — (1987), The Urban Experience: Calcutta: Essays in Honour of Nisith R. Ray. Calcutta: Riddhi-India. Sircar, M.N. (1914), Life of Peary Churn Sircar. Calcutta: published by the author.

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Sur, A. (1988), Tinsho Bochhorer Kolkata: Patabhumi O Itikatha. Calcutta: Ujjval Sahitya Mandir. Tagore, K. (1930), Kolikatay Chalafera: Sekale aar Ekale. Calcutta: Adi Brahmo Samaj Press. Tagore, R. (1940), Chhelebela: My Boyhood Days, Sykes, M. (trans.). Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati. Town of Calcutta (1842), Annual Report on the State of Police of the Town of Calcutta during the year, 1842. — (1854-1855), Annual Report on the State of Police of the Town of Calcutta during the year, 1854-1855. — (1863-1864), Annual Report on the State of Police of the Town of Calcutta during the year 1863-1864. — (1877), Annual Report on the State of Police of the Town of Calcutta during the year, 1877. — (1878), Annual Report on the State of Police of the Town of Calcutta during the year, 1878. Urban, H. (2001), ‘The Marketplace and the Temple: Economic Metaphors and Religious Meanings in the Folk Songs of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Asian Studies, 60 (4): 1085-1114.

About the author Anindita Ghosh is Professor in Modern Indian History at the University of Manchester and has published widely in the f ields of print culture, women, popular music, and urban history, including Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia (Permanent Black/Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Her most recent monograph, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyses Calcutta’s material cultures and social structures in the context of colonialism, technology, changing patterns of occupation and public spaces, street protests, and popular culture. Email: [email protected]

7

A World Garden City in the New Millennium Chengdu at the Crossroads of Verbal Representation and Global Vision Kenny K.K. Ng

Abstract In Chengdu, a long-enduring imperial city in China’s Sichuan province, historical preservation has inevitably become a strategic economic project for fostering the city’s cultural capital and boosting both local and global tourism. What is the place of local memories in global urbanism? How does a city like Chengdu that is deeply indebted to the past preserve its own cultural heritage and transform itself into a ‘World Garden City’ in the eyes of its administrators? This essay examines the interplay of urban space and topographical representation by looking into the historical novels of Li Jieren (1890-1962): monumental fiction focused on turn-of-the-century Chengdu societies. Field experiences bear out the profoundly affective influence of Li’s historical texts and their literary sensibility in generating a bond between people and place—that is, an entrenched affective power of ‘topophilia’ that has been missing in the present development of global cities. This chapter examines both urban space and topographical representation through this critical lens. Keywords: Chengdu, Li Jieren, topophilia, local memory, global city

Though still part of a developing country, the city of Chengdu already has the attributes of many of the major cities of the West including its modern infrastructure, impressive skyline, economic dynamism, education system and human amenities, and with a population of 14 million, it is already one of the biggest cities in the world. But it also adds something more—a spirit and

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch07

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lifestyle embodied in the people’s mind-set of being a ‘garden city’—not found in most of the presently celebrated ‘great cities’ (Naisbitt and Naisbitt 2012: 99). In their recent book Innovation in China: The Chengdu Triangle (2012), John and Doris Naisbitt optimistically predict that Chengdu, the capital city of southwestern China’s Sichuan province and which has not yet received much attention from the Western media, is becoming one of the great cities in the world. It is moving forward toward building itself into a unique ‘World Garden City’. Whereas innovation in the West is exclusively associated with technology and business, the Naisbitts claim, innovation in China has largely to do with social transformation of the dualism of the countryside and the city into an integrated and equal society. They believe that Chengdu will provide a powerful precedent for Chinese cities by meeting the challenge of overcoming the historical division between China’s urban and rural populations and cultures. The immense potential of Chengdu’s economic development, argue the Naisbitts, arises from changes in culture and policy making. Chengdu once marked the Chinese starting point of the ‘Silk Road’ and has now become the strategic site of China’s ‘Go West’ route leading to Burma, Thailand, India, and the Middle East (Naisbitt and Naisbitt 2012: 103). Historically, Sichuan province was China’s richest agricultural area on the western frontier of the empire, famed as a ‘Kingdom of Tea and Teahouses’ for its teahouse culture and public life (Wang 2008: 1-23). Literature has often referred to Chengdu as the ‘Hibiscus City’ (Rongcheng or Furongcheng). During the Five Dynasties (907-960) period, the post-Shu emperor ordered hibiscus tree to be planted along the city walls, which is why Chengdu is nicknamed the Hibiscus City. Besides the city’s rich cultural connotations, Chengdu was the capital of the state of Shu during the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), and remained one of China’s most prosperous cities during the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) Dynasties. In the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Chengdu became a main holding of the royal family when the dynasty’s founder ordered a grand imperial palace built in the centre of the city (this imperial complex lasted for centuries until it was demolished in 1968 in the Cultural Revolution). In the mid-seventeenth century, Chengdu suffered the most devastating damage in its history from the rebellions and warfare caused by the dynastic transition, but was quickly restored in the Qing empire (1644-1911), during which it remained a provincial capital for the centralised administration as well as an important commercial site.1 1 For Chengdu’s distinctive history and geography as a premodern Chinese city and a provincial capital in imperial China, see: Stapleton 2000: 1-45.

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Compared to the cities in northern and coastal China, the development of this inland capital lagged behind since the nineteenth century due to Western cultures’ apparently negligible impact on the city, isolated as it was in the immutable grip of tradition in interior China: ‘Chengdu in the 1920s was no pluralistic seedbed for cultural innovation’, as Kristin Stapleton notes (2000: 91). In twentieth-century Chinese intellectual discourse, Chengdu was often described by writers and radical reformers as a conservative regional backwater, while Shanghai was embraced as a city of opportunities and freedom.2 However, it is precisely because this western regional city has retained much more of its traditional culture, ancient history, and local customs than have the cities of coastal China that Chengdu has captured the interest of both historians and defenders of its potential future as a world city. As the Naisbitts predict, Chengdu—one of the oldest cities in the world— has the opportunity to become one of the youngest cities in the world ‘in terms of lifestyle, social relations, economy, and innovation’ (Naisbitt and Naisbitt 2012: 126). How could Chengdu, the Naisbitts ask, where the pace of modernisation only picked up in the 1990s, transform in less than a decade from an underdeveloped inland city into a modern metropolis of world significance that showcases a unique urban-rural integration that could be beneficial for other global cities? What is more, the Naisbitts believe, Chengdu is not only developing into a world city due to its increased infrastructure, transnational businesses, and high-level technology, but also because of its green culture and leisurely lifestyle, lush parks and tree-lined roads, intimate courtyards and historic quarters, and traditional teahouses and kitchen restaurants. For the Naisbitts, Chengdu provides an example of an innovative approach to city rebuilding not only for Chinese urbanity, but also for cities in all parts of the world that are dealing with widening gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, and with the increasing alienation of individual citizens from their urban environments. The Chengdu model can be seen as one that redresses social inequality and injustice in metropolises. Does this futuristic, rosy picture of Chengdu offer any clues to solving the problems of identities and communities in global cities? The ‘global city’ has, after all, been defined as a dual city where international business elites and low-income locals and migrant workers live in great tension (Sassen 1998: xix-xxxiv). The rise of global cities is an outcome of transnational capitalism, and is highly coloured by the political 2 For a brief description of Chengdu’s changing economic and cultural status in history, see: Wang 2003: 4-6.

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economy of place construction under capitalism. Theorists and critics generally see that the mobility of capital and the diffusion of technology provide global cities with their power, but few have paid enough attention to the role of culture in place-making and the construction of cities. As David Harvey puts it, globalisation has led to the collapse of spatial barriers through time-space compression. The shifting experience of space and time generates new negotiations in cultural representations, when people invariably ask themselves: who are we and to which place do we belong—the world, the nation, or the locality (Harvey 1996: 246-247)? This chapter argues for the central role of culture and history in placemaking. Instead of defining global cities in exclusively social and economic terms, I consider historical character, local modernity, and cultural diversity as constitutive of world cities. Ulf Hannerz (1986) has defined ‘world cities’ (rather than ‘global cities’) as places of heterogeneous cultural formation with transnational relationships. He maintains that cultural globalisation undermines national understandings of a city’s culture, whereas longdistance cultural flows and boundary crossings complicate established notions of community and locality. Hannerz also argues that world cities derive much of their importance from being cultural marketplaces for tourists, and from the high-profile presence of expressive specialists who are concerned with culture and involved in a diverse range of creative activities including art, fashion, design, photography, filmmaking, writing, music, and cuisine (Hannerz 1986: 135). Picking the usual models of New York, London, and Paris as world cities, and adding the examples of Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Sophiatown (Johannesburg), Hannerz’s anthropological survey stresses the ‘cultural role of world cities’ (Hannerz 1986: 127-40). But he has yet to spell out the roles of local and transnational cultural crossings in bringing about the interplay between a strong sense of place and trans-border cultural flows in a specific city-in-the-world. In other words, how does increased interconnectedness enhance rather than threaten cultural diversity, and so contribute to the culture of world cities? This study adopts a literary-cultural approach to underscore the validity of literary and historicist sensibilities that are essential to city imagineering and building. It examines the ruptures and continuities between the novelistic and historical representations of Chengdu and the city’s ongoing reconstructions in China’s current processes of urban modernisation and economic globalisation. The chapter is an outcome of my long-time literary and fieldwork research on the historical novels of Li Jieren (1890-1962), a native Sichuan writer who, between the 1930s and 1960s, produced several works of monumental fiction concerning turn-of-the-century societies in

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Chengdu. What makes Li’s fictional panoramas still readable today has little to do with their historical vision of the revolution, but rather with their trenchant geo-poetic vision of the city. My field experiences bear out the profound influence of Li’s historical texts in generating an affective bond between people and place, that is, an entrenched power of ‘topophilia’—a sense of attachment to the city as a place of care and belonging—that has been missing in the present development of so many global cities. By all accounts, the old Chengdu city was a friendly and walkable environment of medium size. Borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘walking in the city’ (1984: 91-110) as a transgressive act of flâneurs (aimless strollers) aimed at navigating an urban world constructed by state support, I reconstruct Li Jieren’s literary tours to largely unvisited historical corners and ruminate on the current memorabilia literature of lao Chengdu (‘old Chengdu’). Aided by visual evidence that I have collected, my analysis illuminates the contrasts between the verbal reconstructions and mental images of historic Chengdu and the modern facelift that has been given to the city under global capitalism. The chapter looks into urban space and topographical representation in novelistic discourse and reflects on the changes in the city with a critical eye. What is the place of local memories in global urbanism? How does a historic city like Chengdu, which is deeply invested with the past, preserve its own cultural heritage and transform itself into a ‘World Garden City’?

7.1

The Future of Topophilia

The aggressively rapid urbanisation of Chinese cities since the 1990s has seriously violated many people’s sense of home as a place of attachment and cultural belonging. Contemporary Chinese intellectuals have lamented the disappearance of homes and hometowns in this new phase of urban modernisation. The feeling of loss is aptly summed up by Jinhua Dai and Judy T.H. Chen: From the mid 1980s to the 1990s, the process of Chinese society’s systematic progress toward modernization and commercialization has been accompanied by largescale urbanization, or urban modernization. Not only have new cities, such as Shenzhen, Haikou, Zhuhai, and Shekou, sprouted from what had been villages and small towns; large cities have also undergone extensive renovation. Along with the foundational structures of the ancient cities, a certain destructiveness of construction work

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shoulders the burden of ancient cities’ space of history and remembrance; and day after day, high-rise buildings, luxury mansions, commercial centers, shopping complexes, writing galleries, and fitness gyms replace the ripped open spaces of the new cities, the metropolises encroaching endlessly like greedy monsters toward their surrounding townships. (Dai and Chen 1997: 146)

The city of the future and the space of history and remembrance: can these contradictory ideals ever be reconciled in urban rebuilding? For intellectuals and cultural critics, the demolition of old communities and hometowns in the city has brought with it a tremendous drive to preserve the old parts—that is, a cultural need of nostalgia. The thriving culture of nostalgia has seeped into many disciplines of literary, cultural, and commercial production in Chinese cities since the 1990s. The campaign of nostalgia can be understood as the Chinese cultural response to the shock of the modern experience and the accelerating speed of the development of a market economy. In Shanghai, China’s foremost modern metropolis, cultural nostalgia aims to revive the city’s pre-1949 heyday of commercial prosperity and cosmopolitanism before they were repressed by socialism, ‘promising to deliver China from its revolutionary “deviations” to the global arena of capitalism’ (Wang 2007: 671). As such, the nostalgia for pre-1949 Shanghai participates in the forward-looking programme of the People’s Republic of China to modernise the nation by revisiting and drawing inspiration from the past (Lu 2002: 185). For others, however, Shanghai’s nostalgia craze can be understood as a discourse of resistance, rather than a submission to the political hegemony. By retrieving the past of urban Shanghai, cultural nostalgia reveals a palimpsest of collective memory and complex identity issues at the local, national, and global levels (Lu 2013: 135-160). For critics of urban experience and globalisation, nostalgia can be construed as a resistance and alternative to the homogenisation of culture in modern Chinese cities. However, I am more concerned with how literary works—as discursive articulations of human subjects residing in increasingly prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environs—negotiate the relationship between identity, memory, and place. Shanghai writer Wang Anyi’s literary rendering of ‘old Shanghai’ in her novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge, Wang 1996), which is committed to portraying the vanishing alleys and longtangs (‘courtyards’), conveys the poignant feeling of loss and disorientation experienced by those inhabiting the new global city. Critics have read Wang’s nostalgic work as a politics of memory, or as

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a counter-memory pitted against the contemporary reconfiguration of the city as a global metropolis under the national urban project.3 In a similar vein, Taiwanese writers seek to capture Taipei’s contradictory status as a global city by reworking the city’s heterogeneous pasts and memories: Zhu Tianwen’s fictional account of Taipei, Fin-de-siècle Splendor (Shiji mo de huali, Zhu 1990), ‘engages with the psycho-cultural issues of globalization’ (Wang 2007: 371), while Zhu Tianxin’s novel Ancient Capital (Gudu, Zhu 1997) entices readers to look to the past beyond the veil of metropolitan Taipei to uncover a complex web of spatial memory and hybrid identity politics (Chen 2007). In contemporary fictional representations of Chinese metropolises, the history of a place and the memory of individuals are inextricably tied together, and fictive narratives are motivated by an obsession with the varied pasts of cities. Rather than accept nostalgia as the only critical lens that is available for reflecting on the sentiment of loss and displacement, this essay deploys the notion of ‘topophilia’ and its literary expressions to ponder the intricate relationship between memory, identity, and place-making in the globalising urban reality of Chengdu. Coined by Yi-fu Tuan, ‘topophilia’ literally means the love of place (Tuan 1990 [1974]). Tuan extends this concept to explore the affective bonds between people and settings, and environmental perception, attitudes, and value based on place-based human attachments. The material environment, Tuan notes, ‘is not just a resource base to be used or natural forces to adapt to, but also sources of assurance and pleasure, objects of profound attachment and love’ (ibid.: xii). Tuan’s humanistic approach toward the subjective emotions and ideas that tie individuals to a certain place offers a refreshing paradigm to examine how urban place-making should relate to the textures of a city’s past, its history and cultural heritage, and its regional tastes and human perceptions. In short, in the frantic pace of China’s urban redevelopment, in which older neighbourhoods and living quarters are being bulldozed to make way for space for a modernizing city, how are we to feel at home in a ‘world city’ that seems so much in flux? ‘Topophilia’ here appeals to our innate emotional needs and ‘the desire to build a better place—richer countrysides, more humane neighbourhoods, and cities that can lift the spirit’ (ibid.: xiv). In what follows, I attempt to trace the ethos of topophilia that is so richly articulated in Li Jieren’s novels of Chengdu written in the 1930s. A native Sichuan writer, ethnographer, and public intellectual, Li dedicated himself 3 For a critique of Wang Anyi’s novel of Shanghai, see: Huang 2004: 119-36; Wang 2002: 669-694; Zhang 2000: 349-387.

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to writing about his native place, turning his monumental fictions into vehicles for place memories and local histories. Hailed by his contemporaries as the ‘historian of Chengdu’, Li and his literary attachment to Chengdu are reminiscent of the sense of place belonging which we find in William Faulkner (1897-1962) on the American South. My study focuses on excerpts from his panoramic fictions, Ripple on Stagnant Water (Sishui weilan, 1936), Before the Tempest (Baofeng yuqian, 1940 [1936]), and The Great Wave (Dabo, 1937-1938). His literary texts conceive localities as focal points of social memories and human consciousness that include feelings, recollections, hopes, fears, satisfactions, and aspirations. They are themselves literary sites of powerful local stories and cultural memories, and so continue to exert an imaginative hold over their contemporary readers. During my research visits, I stayed several times in a state-owned hotel situated on the flank of what was formerly the Lesser City (Shaocheng)— the Manchu neighbourhoods within a walled territory of Qing Dynasty Chengdu. The hotel is in the same location of the former Manchu general’s yamen (‘administrative office’). In 1721, the Qing Emperor Kangxi granted permission to Sichuan’s governor to build a Manchu garrison in Chengdu for the officers and soldiers of the Eight Banners, which then became the Lesser City. The Eight Banners were administrative and military units under the Qing dynasty into which all Manchu households were placed. Garrison bannermen functioned as soldiers in war, and were stationed strategically in the provincial capital of Chengdu to pacify the Southwestern frontier. Across the main road lies Chengdu’s largest public park, the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan). This park was renamed after 1949, and was previously called the Lesser City Park (Shaocheng Gongyuan). The public garden has a rich history in itself. Previously a private leisure garden exclusively serving Manchu nobility and households in the Lesser City, the park was expanded and opened to the public in the summer of 1910. The establishment of this public park came about as part of the late Qing government’s reform policy to integrate the Manchu and Han populations in the city. Civic administrators also attempted to promote business in this largest of public spaces as a means to sustain the livelihoods of the banner community. New public spaces in the park were created and rented to Han individuals for teahouses, restaurants, and theatres. With the Manchu bannermen’s decline toward the end of the Qing Dynasty, their leisure grounds became a favourite place for Chengdu residents to hang out, with new pavilions, teahouses, stores, theatres, and gardens. Further transformation of the Lesser City Park continued as the public space was gradually opened to a larger public after the 1911 Revolution (Stapleton

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Figure 7.1 The obelisk in the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park) in Chengdu; the public monument was dedicated to the victims of the Railroad Protection Movement in 1911

Photo by the author, 2013

2000: 147-148; Wang 2003: 117). An obelisk was erected inside the park in 1913 to commemorate Chengdu’s martyrs who had championed the cause of the Railroad Protection Movement leading up to the 1911 Revolution in China. I first visited the park in 2008. When I revisited the park in 2013, the memorial site had been refurbished with a small garden and pond, following the recent opening of a metro station at the entrance of the park (see Figure 7.1). This public monument, originally an emblem of local history in memory of the deceased citizens of Chengdu, has now become a cultural relic of the nation-state insofar as the Chengdu incidents of 1911 are incorporated into the revolutionary historiography and national memory of New China. Does this civic monument symbolise the city itself or its self-image, or encourage public remembrance of the city’s past? In my observation, the tall and solemn stone pillar stands quite aloof from people’s daily lives and activities in the public park—it can hardly bear living memories of local events that happened more than a century ago. As such tangible monuments and historical sites succumb to politicisation or commodification, I argue that Li Jieren’s historical fictions have become ‘portable monuments’ by

218 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.2 A historic teahouse inside the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park)

Photo by the author, 2011

providing readers the narrative contexts in which to participate in a dialogue about the past. 4 Take the example of Li Jieren’s descriptions of teahouses and the quotidian lives of commoners. His urban writing of the everyday appeals to people through affective memories of the place, recalling public experiences far more effectively than a visible, monumental relic can. Most public gardens in Chengdu had high concentrations of teahouses, and the Lesser City Park alone had a number of famous historic teahouses in the early twentieth century; these occupied the largest space among other facilities (Wang 2003: 48). Some of the teahouses in the park have remained in the same locations and have been running the business since the time when Li depicted them in his novels (see Figure 7.2). In The Great Wave, Chu Zicai (Chu Yong) likes to frequent the teahouse in the Lesser City Park and hang out with his friends even as revolutionary events are erupting in Chengdu (Li 1937-1938, vol. 2: 77). In another episode, Li narrates how the young elites enjoy a leisurely life in a teahouse in the Wuhou Temple (Wuhou ci, the shrine of Zhuge Liang, the legendary general 4

This term is of Rigney’s own coinage (Rigney 2004).

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and prime minister of the Shu Kingdom in the Three Kingdoms era). Di Wang cites Li’s fictional text as a succinct historical testimony: In this novel, Li Jieren paints a vivid picture of teahouses in parks and temples before the 1911 Revolution. His protagonist, Chu Yong (Chu Zicai), looking for a teahouse in which to kill time early one hot summer afternoon when ‘it is not a good time to see the Sichuan opera or shadow play’, went to the Wuhou Temple, which was heavily shaded by trees, where there was a teahouse run by Taoist priests. Under the huge trees, there were both square tables and ‘eight deity tables’ (baxian zhuo), a kind of large round table. Chu Yong found that all the square tables were occupied. The patrons seemed not to be visitors who would leave when they finished their tea, but mainly peddlers or craftsmen, wearing cotton shirts or smoking tobacco, who were seeking relief from the heat. Some played cards or Chinese chess, while others worked on handicrafts. (Wang 2008: 117)

This passage shows that the teahouse restaurants in fin-de-siècle (‘end-of-thecentury’) Chengdu served as places for loafing and relaxation for people from all walks of life and various social groups. Besides being a place for group meeting and entertainment (i.e. Chinese chess and card games), according to Li Jieren the teahouse provided a setting for various forms of human contact, from settling personal disputes to striking business transactions. Chengdu’s teahouse culture was ‘connected with people’s public lives’, ‘functioned as a community center’, and ‘contribut[ed] to neighborhood solidarity and community life’ (Wang 2003: 167-168). What is more, in Li Jieren’s fictional discourse, the characteristic street lives and livelihoods of Chengdu’s urbanites comprise a distinctive regional cultural environment in which the rhythm of restful life that pervades the novel is transposed into a distinct rhythm of characters’ unhurried movements between various urban locales. There is an idea of the city as a more or less coherent urban panorama, which makes walking the surest and most tangible way for city dwellers to get to different points where they can meet old friends, bump into strange faces, or make new acquaintances. In The Great Wave, Chu Zicai takes his friends and the reader to visit Chengdu’s favourite teahouses, theatres, gardens, city parks, and historical sites like the Wuhou Temple and the Caotang Temple (Caotang ci, the memorial of the Tang poet Du Fu (712-770)). Significantly, the movement of figures in the fictional text mirror the urban topography and reality, rendering the city legible and comprehensible to native Chengdu residents as well as to

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readers who are outsiders. Li’s novel recalls what Raymond Williams calls ‘knowable communities’ in fictional representation, in which individual and group relationships are recognisable, and human communities and urban experiences are mutually communicable (1973: 165-181). In this regard, Chengdu would be better compared to a smaller European city like the turn-of-the-century Dublin depicted by James Joyce in Ulysses, in which ‘there is at least a vestigial feeling of village-like community’, and ‘faceless crowds and urban anomie are also not much in evidence’ (Alter 2005: 124). The sense of Chengdu as a large, integrated—in the sense that different walks of life can easily mingle—rural-urban community is also powerfully conveyed in Ripple on Stagnant Water. Bronze Goat Palace (Qingyang Gong), one of China’s best-preserved temples dating to the Tang Dynasty, prominently figures not only as a memorable structure but also as an active social space of human activities during festival occasions. Li Jieren’s meticulous place-writing, profoundly imbued with topophilia, vividly weaves the physical historic building into the fabric of urbanity and everyday life. The fifteenth of the second month was said to be Lao Tzu’s birthday. On this day the air at Bronze Goat Palace was thick with joss smoke, and since it happened also to be the season for buying farm implements and bamboo goods, and other useful wares, a bustling market sprang up outside the temple, along this southwest corner of the city wall. Rather than just attending a temple festival, the people of the Sichuan Basin combined their religion with commerce and called it ‘rushing Bronze Goat Palace’. It would be a bustling concern from this day clear through till about the tenth of the third month. (Li 1936: 165)

Narration enacted through third-person storytelling easily conveys an intimate voice similar to an insider tour guide. The narrative presents Bronze Goat Palace as a pleasantly habitable place for individuals and communities, where villagers come from outside the city to buy manufactured goods, city folks gather to seek pleasure in consumption, urban women appear in public to exhibit themselves, and men and women find ways to flirt with each other during the temple festival. A 1911 photograph (see Figure 7.3) shows the festival atmosphere of the marketplace at the temple, echoing the descriptions of Li Jieren. Geographical proximity facilitates the city’s buzz of activity (commercial, religious, collective, individual, romantic). In present-day Chengdu, it takes a cab ride of about ten minutes to go from the People’s Park to Bronze Goat Palace (see Figure 7.4).

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Figure 7.3 Public market in Bronze Goat Palace

Photo by Luther Knight in 1911, courtesy of John E. Knight

Figure 7.4 Bronze Goat Palace

Photo by the author, 2006

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222 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.5 The Christian Church on Sishengci Street

Photo by the author, 2006

In Ripple on Stagnant Water, Bronze Goat Palace becomes the place where official families and country folks come across one another. Festival occasions serve as important temporal settings for interactions between the high and low, the rich and poor. In the novel’s geo-poetic mapping, Chengdu appears to be an integrated network of crowds and social groupings, with its urban dwellers meeting here and re-encountering each other there in an interlocking manner. Urban experience is about human mobility and connection rather than isolation and disorientation, while the narration symbolically imposes a consciousness of unity on the heterogeneity and bustling city images. Li Jieren also features Chengdu’s built environment not merely as a physical setting, but also as an important human location for social interaction or even confrontation. On the western side of the city lies the Christian church at Sishengci (Four Sages Temple) Street (see Figure 7.5). The Canadian Methodist mission, situated in a well-to-do area in northern Chengdu, symbolises foreign powers in Ripple on Stagnant Water. The famous 1895 riot in Chengdu erupted here, forming a shadowy background event in Before the Tempest (Li 1940 [1936]: 116-123). In May 1895, a riot ensued in Chengdu, caused by rumours that some mission doctors drugged and murdered Chinese children in order that they might use their hearts and

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eyes for medicine. Mobs swarmed into their compound wreaking havoc. The regional riot ignited country-wide anti-foreigner hostilities that culminated in the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The old Methodist church was seriously damaged during the 1895 riot, and again during the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The current church was built in the 1920s (Tian and Li 2010: 75-76). When I visited the church, the district still appeared to me as a remote and serene neighbourhood. By itself, the church cannot adequately function as a testimony to the past without a supplementary reading of Li’s description of the historical events on the spot. Place depends on fiction for its memory. Topophila expresses human emotive ties to the environment, even when an individual visits a place by chance. In Ripple on Stagnant Water, the countryman Gu Tiancheng, who has come to Chengdu but lost his fortune on the gambling table, is seen loitering in the Manchu neighbourhoods in the Lesser City. He is emotionally captivated by the vast gracious green space in the walled city and its picturesque charm. And indeed, what he found on the other side of that single gated wall was like a separate world. In the outer city it was all buildings, it was all storefronts and paving stones and streets full of dark eyed people and nowhere so much as a blade of grass. But you stepped into the garrison and everywhere you looked was trees—some trees that scraped the sky and others that grew so dense you couldn’t see beyond them. Front and back and left and right, everything was greenery. […] In brief, the Manchu garrison was a world apart, a world of superlative leisure untouched by vulgarity, with every corner rich in poetry and every prospect like a painting. Not that Gu Tiancheng was any poet, but he had grown up among fields, and so it was in his nature to feel happy in the face of greenery. (Li 2014 [1936]: 207)

What the character perceives is a sort of ‘suburban’ beauty and serenity of vast greenery and winding hutongs (‘lanes’), which is still located inside the wall of the Lesser City. Occupied by Manchu soldiers and military officers until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, this quarter of narrow alleys and low structures in the Lesser City was left underdeveloped and dilapidated for much of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Li Jieren set out to reminisce about these neglected lanes by having his protagonists in Ripple on Stagnant Water and The Great Wave stroll the hutongs in the Manchu garrison. The characters’ aimless wanderings take the reader to visit the leisurely corners of the old political establishment. Li described

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the Manchu neighbourhood as the most tranquil and picturesque corner of the city, emanating a dilapidated charm. The old alleyways have recently been demolished and rebuilt around 2010. Two major hutongs—Wide Lane (Kuanxiangzi) and Narrow Lane (Zhaixiangzi)—have been refurbished as new tourist attractions. Modelled on Xintiandi (‘New World’) in Shanghai, Wide Lane and Narrow Lane have been renovated into cobblestone lanes with refashioned facades of old houses, stylish restaurants, antique shops, and places of entertainment and nightlife (see Figure 7.6). Memorabilia from photo essays to personal memoirs commemorating Chengdu’s past and its oldest district are sold widely in local bookshops (Zhang 2008a; 2008b). In the words of a guidebook catering to the tastes of foreign tourists: ‘Walking in Wide Lane, one will feel like being whirled about in the river of history. Time seems to slow down’ (Zhang 2006: 253). ‘In the eyes of the natives of Chengdu’, a Chinese critic remarks, the former Manchu lanes ‘represent less a period of history than a reminiscence, a remembrance, and a spiritual anchorage’ (Shao 2006: 26). The thriving cultural tourism industry is publicising Chengdu’s historic cityscape and promoting its old lanes as a tangible epitome of traditional Chengdu life. One of the recent highlights is the restoration of Jinli (Brocade) Street, which has been opened to locals and tourists since 2004. Adjacent to the Wuhou Temple, Jinli Street is reportedly one of the oldest and most commercial streets in the history of Chengdu, dating to the Three Kingdoms period. The street is built in the style of a typical town from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, with taverns, inns, opera houses, pawnshops, and embroidery shops providing both local charm and modern appeal. Jinli, with its distinct historical appeal, appeared distinct from the overwhelmingly commercial arcades in Shanghai’s Xintiandi for at least one foreign tourist, who said, ‘At first sight Jinli may strike you as quite similar to Xintiandi, but when you take your time walking through Jinli, you will discover the deep undercurrent of the culture of the Three Kingdoms’ (Quian 2006: 30). Another critic notes, ‘Jinli Street organically combines the restoration of Chengdu’s traditional architecture and the preservation of the culture of the Three Kingdoms, representing a continuation of Shu culture and holding more intrinsic value than the seemingly magnificent steel-and-cement jungle’ (Shao 2006: 136-137). In Chengdu, most historical preservation has inevitably become a strategic economic project to foster the city’s cultural capital and hence boost both local and global heritage tourism. While many ancient structures in China’s cities did not survive the building frenzy of the 1990s, Chengdu has conserved a number of historic quarters through refurbishment projects. As China steps

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into a new phase of globalisation, the Chengdu government renovates the city’s historic structures to rebuild new urban forms. Critics have worried that historic preservation, pursued as a path of economic development, will strategically eradicate the collective memory of a place by conjuring up peculiar, selective, or even wholly imaginary pasts. For most cities around the world, places of memory serve to commemorate the winners of history, as seen in historical monuments and museums that impart a particular view of history to citizens (Cresswell 2004: 87). By promoting carefully controlled and constructed historic sites, cultural tourism exerts depoliticising effects by marketing histories of a place to foreign tourists, as well as turning local citizens into tourists in their own cities and consumers of their pasts instead of interpreters of them. In these instances, questions arise about whose sense of place memory is preserved, and which and whose pasts are valued and retrieved to commemorate a place and its people (Farar 2011: 728-729). David Lowenthal quotes L.P. Hartley’s memorable opening phrase from The Go-Between (1953)—‘The past is a foreign country’—to argue that there is a plethora of pasts that are constantly being redefined and remade to suit present intentions (Lowenthal 1985: xvii). As many ancient buildings and streets in China’s cities have been refurbished in recent decades, claiming to take visitors on a journey several hundred years in the past, one must be aware of the risk that historical sites and survivals are being converted into marketable commodities for the sake of consuming publics. The past is not dead, but its legacy has become increasingly obscure to people in the present. But recognising the foreignness of history should by no means discourage our engagement with places with rich memories of the past in critical or even creative manners. In the next section, I continue Li Jieren’s literary tours to historical corners of ‘old Chengdu’. I adopt the tactic of walking in the city, as inspired by Li’s fictional mapping, to explore the boundary between place and remembrance and the interaction between human subjects and their urban environment.

7.2

Walking Between Fiction and the City of Memory

While walking through the city, I kept taking photos of the historic sites and streets described in Li Jieren’s novels. Siegfried Kracauer remarks that historians are much in the position of ordinary tourists in a foreign place. As the historian encounters the foreign past when sifting through materials, he or she resembles a traveller shooting unseen objects with a camera in a bid to retain the sights (Kracauer 1969: 80-87). Kracauer’s figure of the

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traveller as a ‘stranger’ can perhaps also be used to describe my fieldwork experiences, which were at once intimate and disorienting. It was possible for me to finish my ‘literary trails’ within two hours by passing through the maze of old streets and modern thoroughfares. The literary journey enabled me to map out the city’s physical settings and observe its spatial plan. Many old streets in Chengdu have retained the old names that appear in Li Jieren’s novels. The identifiable street signs allowed me to orient myself in the maze of the city. Many of the street names are social-cultural markers reflecting the natural habitats, social customs, public life, or street culture of particular urban locales. Across the street from my hotel near the People’s Park is an old alley called Guihua Alley (Sweet Olive Alley), a back street in the Manchu quarter of late Qing-era Chengdu. In the mid 1930s, Li Jieren rented a small room on this street where he finished his historical trilogy: Ripple on Stagnant Water, Before the Tempest, and The Great Wave. In writing his fictional memories of Chengdu in 1911, the writer must have walked around the nearby Shaocheng Park or even drifted back to the former Manchu-quarter alleyways. In the summer of 2006, bicycle rickshaws were still allowed to commute on the streets in Chengdu (the old-fashioned vehicle fell out of use after the 2008 Beijing Olympics). Taking a rickshaw to travel between different locations, I could follow in the footsteps of Li Jieren’s fictional characters, imagining their movements in the novel and gauging the geographical distance of the city. I set out from the People’s Park, passed along Xiyu Jie (West Main Street, where the upper-middle-class neighbourhood is located in The Great Wave, and the entrance to the eastern gate of the Lesser City) and arrived at Dong Dajie (East Main Street) downtown, which remains the commercial hub of the city (see Figure 7.7). In Li’s fictional remembrance, East Main Street was a lively nexus of the comings and goings of townspeople and visitors from outside the city as a vibrant marketplace for the exchange of goods and commodities from Suzhou and Guangdong. Ripple on Stagnant Water has a detailed description of the night market: Of lanterns on the archways, East Main [Street] also had the most and best, and those lanterns had their painted silk renewed from year to year. And East Main was again foremost in quantity of firecrackers, and there was no large silk merchant nor piece goods merchant nor jeweller nor furrier nor any of the old names or purveyors of Suzhou or Guangdong goods that didn’t keep a shopfront here (Li 2014 [1936]: 121-122).

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Figure 7.6 Modernised alleyway of Wide Lane, a new tourist attraction

Photo by the author, 2013

Figure 7.7 East Main Street (Dong Dajie) in downtown; it remains the commercial hub of the city

Photo by the author, 2006

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This was where Gu Tiancheng confronts Skewmouth Luo: ‘But the liveliest night of all was the eleventh (day of the New Year Festival), when knife play broke out in the midst of the human press and nearly stained the thoroughfare with gore’ (Li 1936: 124). The marketplace functions as a public venue for the socially marginal characters to venture into the provincial capital that is otherwise occupied by powerful yamen officials and military guards. Li remembered Chengdu’s main street as both a liveable social space and a vibrant locale for street brawls. The spot that I most desired to see was the former site of the Viceroy’s yamen where the Chengdu massacre had erupted, leading to revolutionary protests in 1911. It was located only a few minutes’ walk from East Main Street, turning south through Zouma Jie (Horse Riding Street—the point where mounted officials had to dismount and walk to the yamen) to Duyuan Jie (Viceroy Court Street). In The Great Wave, the gentry character Huang Lansheng lives on West Main Street and works in the yamen at Viceroy Court Street. Huang becomes a key eyewitness of the Chengdu massacre on his way home from the yamen office. Gunshots and violence engulf the street corners.5 Li Jieren’s discourse in the novel is attached to memories of the city through this depiction of the character’s itinerary, thereby creating a linguistic cosmos of the city through street names. The former location of the provincial authority is currently occupied by the Sichuan Provincial Government as the centre of political authority (see Figure 7.8). Obviously, the power structure of social space has not changed that much in the past century. I came to the city too late to catch a glimpse of some of the old streets downtown. As a result, I was only able to take photos of their demolition and rebuilding (see Figure 7.9). As a critic warns, ‘all cities are covered with steel-and-cement structures, lacking in individuality and looking almost the same as each other’ (Shao 2006: 136) (see Figure 7.10). Thanks to the novel’s recall of streetscapes and urban images, the reader can become aware of how the street names narrativised the social environment and can therefore powerfully evoke memories of the past.6 Old street names in particular are contradictory reminders of both the permanence and 5 See excerpts from Li 2000: 146-51. 6 In the long urban history of Chengdu, streets have been indispensable to public life and urban culture. The name of a public place can symbolise the unique urban milieu in a wide range of sociality, including festivals, ceremonies, protests, entertainment, and commerce (Wang 1998: 34-72).

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Figure 7.8 Current site of the Sichuan Provincial Government on Viceroy Court Street (Duyuan Jie), the exact location of the Viceroy’s yamen in Qing Dynasty Chengdu

Photo by the author, 2011

Figure 7.9 West Main Street (Xiyu Jie) under urban renovation

Photo by the author, 2006

230 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.10 A roadside billboard in Chengdu advertising a new commercial arcade

Photo by the author, 2013

Figure 7.11 The statue of Mao erected in Tianfu Square (Tianfu Guangchang) in the heart of the city—at the former site of the Imperial Palace

Photo by the author, 2006

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transience of historical space. ‘Naming is power—the creative power to call something into being, to render the invisible visible, to impart a certain character to things’, remarks Yi-fu Tuan (1991: 688). This is precisely because the linguistic signposts that linger resiliently in entirely altered physical environs ironically point to vanished eras, people, and ways of life about which we know so little. Following Li Jieren’s fictional mapping, I headed westward from East Main Street to Tianfu Square (Tianfu Guangchang) in the heart of the city (see Figure 7.11). This was once the site of the Imperial Palace (called Huang Cheng by locals); it was where the largest demolishing of the city’s heritage took place in the history of Chengdu. The earliest building of the Imperial City can be traced to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), but it was the later and different structure that was rebuilt in the Ming Dynasty that lasted until the twentieth century. After surviving the political chaos of the 1911 Revolution and Republican China, however, the palace was completely dismantled during the Cultural Revolution in 1968. The former imperial site naturally conjures up many dramatic moments and historical memories. On 22 December 1911, the governor-general Zhao Erfeng was arrested in his court on Viceroy Court Street. A few guards escorted and dragged him along the road to the front of the Imperial Palace, where he was brutally beheaded in front of the crowd immediately after a public trial. Li Jieren notes this bloody incident in The Great Wave (Li 1937-1938, vol. 3: 316-318). The novel likewise depicts the public gatherings and festive mood of Chengdu’s citizens on November 27, 1911, when Sichuan’s new government celebrated the province’s independence. The narrator describes the crowds in the Imperial City on this occasion through the eyes of a citizen (Li 1938/1937, vol. 3: 189-198). Figure 7.12 shows photos taken by Luther Knight of the crowds in the palace on the day of independence.7 Since no other traces of the Imperial City exist today except some individual vignettes, Knight’s photos and Li’s novels have become vital cultural artefacts bearing testimony to the imperial structure and the past it symbolises (Zhang 1999: 205-211). Their visual reproduction and verbal representation essentially become the ‘place of memory’, as the physical sites of history have been destroyed. Li Jieren passed away a few years before the Imperial City was torn down. If he had been alive, would he have championed its preservation as a native 7 Knight was an American Christian missionary who lived in Chengdu as a foreign teacher from 1910 to 1913. He was probably invited by the new government officials to take pictures of the ceremonies. For a collection of Luther Knight’s photo’s in China, see Knight 2002.

232 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.12 The people of Chengdu thronged to the Imperial Palace to celebrate Sichuan’s independence on 27 November 1911

Photo by Luther Knight on the same date, courtesy of John E. Knight

Figure 7.13 People’s Road South (Renmin Nanlu), looking from Tianfu Square

Photo by the author, 2013

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environmentalist or embraced New China’s modernisation of erasing the old for the new? As the vice-mayor of the city under the new regime, Li in fact supported urban reform. In the mid-1950s, Li was responsible for reconstructing and widening the thoroughfare running through Tianfu Square. The renovation of People’s Road South (Renmin Nanlu), the main avenue extending south from the city’s central square, was reportedly modelled on the great avenue of Champs-Élysées in Paris (see Figure 7.13). It is reasonable to believe that the straight and wide modern boulevards of early twentieth-century Paris must have impressed him during his sojourn in France as a young student (Li 1999/1958). As an administrator, Li evinced a progressive mindset by renovating the old city’s narrow alleys into spacious modern avenues. During the 1950s, Li Jieren assumed multiple identities as a political reformer, a preservationist, and a historical novelist, all of which shared a common dedication to his beloved city. Other than writing fiction to contribute to the place-memory in his home city, Li participated in rebuilding some of the city’s memorable heritage sites. A few miles west of the People’s Park is the thatched cottage of the renowned poet Du Fu, rebuilt as the Du Fu Caotang Memorial (see Figure 7.14). The thatched cottage of Du Fu has long been regarded as a sacred place in the history of Chinese literature, and as an important historical site in Chengdu. The cottage was rebuilt during the Five Dynasties and underwent major renovations during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, but the current architecture is largely an achievement of the twentieth century. In his capacity as the vice-mayor of Chengdu in the 1950s, Li made great efforts to refurbish this memorial to sustain the significant historical heritage of Sichuan (Yi 2008). This was a prime instance of a local cultural figure collaborating with the state to undertake a project of historic preservation that is integral to the historical character of the place and therefore contributes to what Edward Casey means by ‘place-memory’: ‘the stabilising persistence of place as container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability’ (Casey 1987: 186). My field trips started and ended in Tianhui Town (see Figure 7.15), which I repeatedly visited between 2006 and 2013, lured by Li Jieren’s powerful depiction of the old town in Ripple on Stagnant Water. It took about half an hour’s car ride north from the city of Chengdu. According to Li’s description, Tianhui was a bustling small town in late Qing Sichuan because it was situated on a former post road to the capital Beijing, one of the few gateways connecting Chengdu to the rest of China—historically, the small town was the ‘world’ in the minds of Chengdu’s inhabitants. The name of the town has a historical origin: Tianhui literally means ‘return of the Son of Heaven’,

234 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.14 The Du Fu Caotang Memorial

Photo by the author, 2008

Figure 7.15 Tianhui Town

Photo by the author, 2008

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because it was allegedly the place to which the Tang Emperor fled in the eighth century to escape An Lushan’s revolt, and from which he eventually made his ‘imperial return’. In Ripple on Stagnant Water, Tianhui Town functions as a transitional space, a stopover, where people who are originally separated by spatial and social distance can come together and interact. The small town becomes an untamed territory of sex, violence, and crime. The novel not only presents the physical structure of the townscape, but also paints a vivid picture of local daily lives and human interrelationships. Tianhui has been undergoing never-ending reconstruction in recent years. My observation was matched by the experience of other researchers, who found that in the town ‘everything was being razed to make way for real estate development’ (Sparling and Chi 2014: 301). Tianhui appeared to me as a rundown small town in the middle of a belated renovation with new commercial activities. The two main streets were partly flanked by deserted low wooden cottages with tiled rooftops. The developing district had a mixed infrastructure of the old and the modern: I found colourful boutique shops, outlets for electronic and telecommunication gadgets, grocery stores, markets, pubs, traditional teahouses, and restaurants (see Figure 7.16). Currently, Tianhui remains a provincial town that seems to follow the larger trends of China’s economic development at a slower pace. Regardless of the vast gap between Li Jieren’s verbal configuration of the old town and the present-day reality, researchers still look for the novel’s connection to the real world. Some of the younger residents had a strong sense of the story’s relation to their town, while others insisted that all of the described establishments had been nothing but the fancy of the novelist. Recorded interviews by Bret Sparling and Yin Chi around 2010 with the last batch of residents in the old town reveal the cultivation of a collective memory of the place (Sparling and Chi 2014: 266). In my personal search, I still wished to look for some visible vestiges of the communal past and lifestyle. I looked at its old grocery stores, which reminded me of Xingshun Grocery in Ripple on Stagnant Water, one of the best groceries in town (see Figure 7.17). In the novel, the heroine Deng Yaogu is stuck in the small town, and has an affair with Skewmouth Luo in the house of Xingshun Grocery. This private place provides the lovers with an intimate domestic space in which they can transgress their social and emotional boundaries. At the far corner of the town there are a few teahouses frequented by local country people (see Figure 7.18). There is also a public market in the centre of the town. Could this have been the exact location Li had in mind when he recaptured the human voices of the boisterous market crowds of a hundred years ago?

236 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.16 A renovated street and shops in Tianhui Town

Photo by the author, 2008

Figure 7.17 An old street with grocery stores in Tianhui Town, reminiscent of Xingshun Grocery in Ripple on Stagnant Water

Photo by the author, 2008

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Figure 7.18 A traditional-style tea garden in Tianhui Town, like the one in Ripple on Stagnant Water

Photo by the author, 2006

The demolition of old structures with building a new town in Tianhui is just one of the numerous cases of urban renewal in contemporary China. In twentieth-century American urbanisation, urban sprawl had the effect of creating ‘a landscape of either wilful or accidental amnesia, where the powers of place are neutralised by ignoring them or removing them from history’ (Farar 2011: 723). I believe that a historic city like Chengdu which is deeply indebted to the past can resort to its abundant cultural resources and traditions to transform itself in the future. For instance, devotees to Li’s fiction once proposed building a film city modelled on Tianhui Town near Chengdu.8 When a Shanghai television station was close to adapting The Great Wave for the screen in 2011 (the centenary anniversary of the 1911 Revolution), there was revived interest in Li Jieren and in the Chengdu inscribed in his works. Although the plan for recreating and relocating historic Tianhui fell through, the suggestion implies the immense memorability of 8 ‘Li Jieren Dabo shoushang yingping, Chengdu zaizao Tianhui zhen’. In 2008, a television series based on The Great Wave and Before the Tempest was in production on the mainland, Huaxi dushi bao (blog), 7 Nov 2008, http://ent.sina.com.cn/v/m/2008-11-07/08002240012.shtml (Last accessed June 2015).

238 Kenny K .K . Ng Figure 7.19 A 1911 Chengdu map illustrating certain important locations in Li Jieren’s novels

Courtesy of the Sichuan Provincial Archives, map reworked by Ariel Shepherd

place and literary fiction and their potential reproduction of social memory. This kind of manufactured past or heritage should not be lamented. What is retrieved from communal memory is necessarily based on what the inheritors choose to remember, with which they can reconnect in sensible and cultural ways. Though heritage preservation dictates selectively remembering, forgetting, or even betraying certain of its aspects, it does not mean that preservation cannot fruitfully refashion the past and critically reinterpret how people once lived differently.

7.3

Reflection: Placing Home in the World City

Topophilia—the affective bonds between people and place that allow us to form a sense of social identity and of responsibility to our living environs—is

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Figure 7.20 A contemporary Chengdu map, n.d.

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd; based on map acquired in Chengdu in 2011

pronounced in Li Jieren’s fictional retelling of Chengdu, particularly in its capacity to preserve the cultural memories of Chengdu in the age of global modernity. As I followed his novelistic mapping to navigate the new urban matrix and modern high-rises of Chengdu, I rediscovered the ‘lure of the local’ articulated in his place-writings with their indelible markings of local street names, spatial landmarks, and historic locations. These readable symbols help to form what Kevin Lynch calls the ‘mental images’ of the city with which urban dwellers and spectators orient themselves in time and space (Lynch 1994 [1960]: 2). The spatial, literary, and historical prisms deployed in this chapter are intended to examine the interplay of urban space and topographical representation and to look into the changes in the city with a critical eye. Instead of emphasising how the future of the city is projected by the agents of the state, it is more important to ask how people have experienced, imagined, and envisioned the urban space as a habitable place. In China’s global vision to remake its urban centres, Chengdu—one of the oldest cities in the world—is projected at once as the city of the future

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and as the cultural repository of historical memory. Chengdu aspires to be one of the world’s great cities, comparing itself to cities like London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo. But Chengdu also wants to stand out for its innovative approach to city rebuilding, which is conceived of as more harmonious in its urban-rural relations, with more integration of people and their natural surroundings through modern, intelligent city infrastructures connecting urban and rural areas (Naisbitt and Naisbitt 2012: 126). Walking through Chengdu after 2000, one can witness the city’s rapid urbanisation amidst the contradictorily composite images of demolition, reconstruction, preservation, tradition, culture, entertainment, and commodification in contemporary urban life (see Figure 7.20). The intimate impression of the literary city as found in Li Jieren’s fiction has been dislocated by the fragmentation of the current urban façade in the course of the city’s reconstruction (see Figure 7.19). Hence, the interaction of the city image of Chengdu as a historical city and its representation in the literary text creates a strange feeling of déjà vu, a trenchant sense of place in the mind of the reader as one engages in pleasurable strolls and wayfinding in the city. It is the verbal memories of lost cultural lives and forgotten pasts that must be retrieved and reused to give new cultural dynamics to contemporary Chinese cities by reconstructing human stories of the past through the eyes of the locals. It is through a new and critical localism that one can re-imagine one’s home and a new sense of belonging to the city as a place with a diversified culture and place-memory in a world that is under the constant global threat of physical demolition and cultural homogenisation.

Bibliography Alter, R. (2005), Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Casey, E.S. (1987), Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Certeau (de), M. (1984), ‘Walking in the City’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, Rendall, S. (trans.): 91-110. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chen, L.L. (2007), ‘Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City: Intertextuality and Cultural Hybridity in Zhu Tianxin’s Ancient Capita’, in Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History, Wang, D.D., and Rojas, C. (eds.), 301-323. Durham: Duke University Press. Cresswell, T. (2004), Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dai, J., and Chen, J.T.H. (1997), ‘Imagined Nostalgia’, Boundary 2, 24(3): 143-162.

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Farar, M.E. (2011), ‘Amnesia, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place Memory’, Political Research Quarterly, 64(4): 723-735. Hannerz, U. (1986), Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hartley, L.P. (1953), The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton. Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Huang, T.-Y.M. (2004), Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Knight, L. (2002), Huimou lishi: Ershi shijichu yige Meiguo ren jingtou zhong de Chengdu [Looking back at Chengdu through lens of an American photographer in the early 20th century]. Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou chubanshe. Kracauer, S. (1969), History: The Last Things before the Last. New York: Oxford University Press. Li, J. (1937-1938), Dabo [The great wave], 3 vols. Shanghai: Zhonghua [1st edition 1937]. — (1940), Baofeng yuqian [Before the tempest]. Shanghai: Zhonghua [1st edition 1936]. — (1999), ‘Chengdu de yitiao jie’ [A street in Chengdu] in Wenhuaren shiyezhong de lao Chengdu [Old Chengdu in the eyes of cultural elites], Zeng, Z. and You, D. (eds.), 340-345. Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe [1st edition 1958]. — (2000), Li Jieren shuo Chengdu [Li Jieren on Chengdu], Zeng, Z. and You, D. (eds.). Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi. — (2014), Ripple on Stagnant Water: A Novel of Sichuan in the Age of Treaty Ports, trans. Sparling, B. and Chi, Y.. Portland: MerwinAsia [1st Chinese edition: Sishui weilan. Shanghai: Zhonghua 1936]. Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past Is a Foreign Country. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lu, H. (2002), ‘Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China’, Pacific Affairs, 75(2): 169-186. Lu, P. (2013), ‘Nostalgia as Resistance: Memory, Space, and the Contemporary Modernities in Berlin and Shanghai’, European Journal of East Asian Studies, 12(1): 135-160. Lynch, K. (1994), The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press [1st edition 1960]. Naisbitt, J., and Naisbitt, D. (2012), Innovation in China: The Chengdu Triangle. N.p.: Argo Navis Author Services. Quian, J. (2006), Chengdu: A City of Paradise. Bloomington: AuthorHouse. Rigney, A. (2004), ‘Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans’, Poetics Today, 25(2): 361-396. Sassen, S. (1998), Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: The New Press.

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Shao, J. (2006), The Images of Chengdu [Yinxiang Chengdu]. Chengdu: Chengdu shidai chubanshe. Sparling, B., and Chi, Y. (2014), ‘Mustering Sagas in Heaven’s Turn’, in Ripple on Stagnant Water: A Novel of Sichuan in the Age of Treaty Ports, Li, J. (2014/1936), 263-301. Portland: MerwinAsia. Stapleton, K. (2000), Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Tian, F., and Li, G. (2010), Xunchengji: Chengdu [In search of the city: Chengdu] (3rd ed.). Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe. Tuan, Y. (1990), Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press [1st edition 1974]. — (1991), ‘Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(4): 684-696. Wang, A, (1996), Changhen ge. Hong Kong: Cosmos Books. Wang, B. (2002), ‘Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in ‘Wang Anyi’s Song of Unending Sorrow’, Positions, 10(3): 669-694. — (2007), ‘Reenacting the Image in Global Culture: Reification and Nostalgia in Zhu Tianwen’s Fiction’, in Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History, Wang, D.D., and Rojas, C. (eds.), 370-388. Durham: Duke University Press. Wang, D. (1998), ‘Street Culture: Public Space and Urban Commoners in Late-Qing Chengdu’, Modern China, 24(1): 34-72. — (2003), Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (2008), The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Williams, R. (1973), The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press. Yi, A. (2008), ‘Li Jieren yu Du Fu Caotang Bowuguan de choujian’ [Li Jieren and the planning and establishment of the Du Fu Caotang Memorial], in Li Jieren yanjiu 2007 [Li Jieren studies 2007], Li Jieren yanjiu xuehui (ed.), 340-360. Chengdu: Bashu shushe. Zhang, F. (2008a), Shaocheng: Yizuo sanqiannian chengchi de renwen taiji [The Lesser City: A human birthmark for a city of three thousand years]. Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe. — (2008b), Zhaimen: Kuan xiangzi, Zhai xiangzi, gu Shu Chengdu de lianggen qidai [Narrow gate: Wide Lane, Narrow Lane, two umbilical cords of the ancient Shu Kingdom]. Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe. Zhang, H. (2006), Chengdu. Chengdu: UESTC Press. Zhang, X. (1999), Chengdu: Jin wushinian de siren jiyi [Chengdu: Fifty years of private memory]. Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi.

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— (2000), ‘Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s’, Positions, 8(2): 349-387. Zhu, T. (1990), Shiji mo de huali. Taibei: Yuanliu. — (1997), Gudu. Taibei: Maitian.

Website http://ent.sina.com.cn/v/m/2008-11-07/08002240012.shtml

About the author Kenny K.K. Ng is an associate professor at the Academy of Film in Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include the study of film as cultural heritage, literature and film adaptation, historical imagination, and cultural geography. His ongoing projects concern censorship and visual politics in Cold War China and Asia, the historical developments of Cantophone cinema, and Hong Kong cultural history. Email: [email protected]

8

Delhi Incognita Challenging Delhi’s Collective Memory by Writing about Illegal Settlements and Eviction Johanna Hahn Abstract How do young slum dwellers imagine Delhi, and why have their experiences been transferred from blog entries written in Hindi into a published English-language book? This chapter explores strategies of inscribing deviant vernacular ideas of the Indian capital into the mainstream memory discourses, which are dominated by Anglophone city biographies and memoirs that celebrate Delhi’s ‘glorious past’. These semi-fictional writings focus on everyday life in the informal settlement of Nangla Manchi and the experience of eviction. Nangla, formerly located on the banks of the Yamuna River in central Delhi, was bulldozed in a ‘beautification action’ in 2006. By analysing the story collections Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes and Trickster City and its Hindi original Bahurūpiyā Śahar, images of Delhi can be approached from the ‘underbelly’, non-elite, vernacular angle. These semi-fictional texts constitute a counterbalance to the dominant narratives and images that feed into the collective memory. Because these vernacular experiences are expressed and distributed in a hardcover book, they also enter a medium of high culture. Comparing the three collections reveals that the texts underwent a process of literarisation on their way from weblog entries into ‘proper’ books. This illustrates that the book format is still considered to be the most appropriate channel for inscribing alternative images into the dominant memory discourse. There are two aspects of such ‘inscribing’: a literary and a socio-geographical dimension. The texts serve as the medium for collective memory and selfimmortalisation, and revisit the dominant images of Delhi. Furthermore, they also fulfil a semi-official function as documents that lay claim to the authors’ identity as city dwellers and their right to the urban space from which they were evicted. Thus, looking at the literarisation of vernacular

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch08

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city texts unveils the complex interrelation between social activism on the ground and high cultural discourse in the South Asian megacity. Keywords: Delhi, Hindi writings, collective memory, subaltern experience, slums, eviction

Our Delhi. Our Delhi? My Delhi. My Delhi? Our city. Our city? (Sarda 2010: 298)

8.1

Introduction: Memory Boom—Images of Delhi in the Collective Memory

The Commonwealth Games in 2010 and New Delhi’s Centenary in 2011 have triggered a wave of image production staging the Indian capital in advertisements, cinema, and literature. The Indian capital has gained growing popularity in recent years, especially as a setting for films like Delhi-6 (2009), Delhi Belly (2011), or Delhi in a Day (2012).1 Similarly, the book market has been flooded with (mostly Anglophone) story collections, memoirs, illustrated books, and heritage guides. ‘City biographies’ or ‘city writings’, such as Malvika Singh’s Delhi: The First City (2011) or Khushwant Singh’s City Improbable (2001), constitute an important medium for the collective memory of certain groups and offer revealing insights into their images of and ideas about the city. The umbrella term ‘city writings’ refers to all kinds of non- and semi-fictional writings that take the city as a setting or subject. This includes collections of autobiographical essays, memoirs, or sketches of everyday urban life. The term ‘city biographies’, however, refers to monographs on the history and culture of a particular city that are written in a popular fashion with a rather personal approach.2 Thus, they constitute an ideal source for research into the cultural processes in which urban identities are formed, negotiated, and reassembled.3 1 On cinematic Delhi cf. Pāṃḍya 2011 and Schneider 2013. 2 See, e.g. Singh 2009, 2013; Liddle 2011; Soofi 2011; Sawhney 2009; Sengupta 2008. 3 Concerning the construction of collective identity through literature, see, e.g. the introduction of Erll, Gymnich, and Nünning 2003. Further, Nünning 2013: 323 offers a critical and concise overview of the central concepts of collective identity in cultural theory.

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It almost seems that the recent spate of books on Delhi is a welcome facelift, as Delhi was until recently considered a provincial pen-pushers’ nest, a ‘little world of privileged brats of bureaucrats’ (Jain 2011: 73), and has now—in popular opinion—become a ‘fat village that thinks itself a city’ (ibid.: 70). Due to its function as the political and administrative control room of the country, Delhi’s reputation could, in the last decades until very recently, hardly compete with the more glamorous and cosmopolitan cities of Bombay (Mumbai) or Calcutta (Kolkata), centres of the film industry and hotspots of political, literary, and socio-cultural reforms. Only during the last few years have signs of a change to its image emerged on the horizon, as Aparna Caur stated in her contribution to Delhi: The First City (2011). In Caur’s piece, the city’s future image is contrasted with its (present) negative image in a ‘before and after’ shot, and writing becomes an instrument for performing a facelift on the metropolis. However, most authors prefer to look at pictures of the young and beautiful New Delhi instead of undertaking a transformative operation on the old Lady. In many Delhi-based city writings, nostalgic memories of the ‘good old days’ prevail, vaguely marked as the time before New Delhi became a crowded refugee camp in the aftermath of Indian Independence in 1947, and gradually turned into the home of the ‘new rich’ and a ‘wannabe international metropolis’ (Jain 2011: 72) in the following decades. Both the Delhi represented by the ‘young’ New Delhi and the historical ‘heart of Delhi’, the former Mughal capital of Old Delhi (purānī dillī), have been repeatedly looked at in rather nostalgic colours. 4 Anjoli Menon, for example, states: ‘When I write of the Delhi that I have known […] it will inevitably end up being a “nostalgia piece”’ (Menon 2011: 15). Arpana Caur contrasts the congested and noisy megacity with the pastoral quietness of her childhood days: ‘This is not the Delhi I grew up [in]. That Delhi was quiet and innocent, with very few cars, no television, many trees, and the routine rhythm of school or work, and leisurely walks on wide carless streets’ (Caur 2011: 38). Satish Jacob remembers, ‘But in my childhood, Old Delhi was a glorious city, full of charm, vitality and vibrant culture, a city that fully lived up to a Persian poet’s description as a “paradise on earth”’ (Jacob 2011: 43). Similarily, Ajoy Bose remarks, ‘Considering how much I detest the city, my first memories of Delhi are actually quite amiable’ (Bose 2011: 60). These quotes from the collection Delhi: The First City convey the impression that 4 In light of the broad interdisciplinary readership of this volume, I have decided to restrict the use of the academic transliteration of Devanagari script (based on Wackernagel) to the minimum necessary for the benefit of greater visual accessibility.

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both New Delhi and Old Delhi are laden with layers of collective images and narratives, such as the ‘bastion of calm’ (Menon 2011: 15) in South (New) Delhi where people used to walk on broad streets in a civilised environment full of fresh air. Anupreeta Das remarks that the old Delhiites, incorporating the ‘authentic’ Delhi, have seemed to fall out of the new fast-paced commercial system. ‘Retelling’ the ‘ideal Delhi, both imagined and remembered’, Das concludes, will help to shape the future of the city (2011: 14). Who are the authors who shape the image of the city, and what kind of experiences do they draw from in order to constitute the ‘ideal Delhi’? Their social background tends to support the assumption that the collective memory of Delhi is mainly created and governed by an elite Englishspeaking circle. Anjolie Ela Menon, for example, grew up in the Cantonment as the daughter of a surgeon who worked in the military hospital (Menon 2011: 15). Ravi Dayal explains his connection with the city by means of the historic bonds between Old Delhi and the members of the high-caste Mathura Kayastha community, who ‘considered themselves Dilliwallahs par excellence’ (Dayal 2011: 32); Madhu Jain remembers the Delhi of her childhood as ‘a protected world’ that ‘did not extend beyond [her] little world of privileged brats of bureaucrats’ (2011: 73). Others, such as Renuka Narayanan (2011: 80), had access to the Golf Club which indicates that she too grew up in a milieu of middle- or upper-class citizens. In summary, most of these writers are the offspring of the privileged bureaucrats who live or have lived in the affluent parts of Delhi such as the Cantonment or Civil Lines, or have moved into Delhi from other cities. The most prominent representative of this group of influential Delhi-dwellers is the late Khushwant Singh (1915-2014), the editor of City Improbable (2001) and one of India’s best-known writers and columnists. Singh was from an influential Panjabi dynasty that had been involved in the construction of colonial and post-independence New Delhi. Many of the writings on Delhi convey certain images of the city that result in the idea that the past was ‘better’; these include Delhi: the First City (Singh M. 2011) and City Improbable (Singh K. 2001). In this context, it is worth looking at the accounts that modify or object to this dominant collective memory (Halbwachs 1992) and touch on questions of urban identity and belonging at a more existential level. The bilingual collection Galiyoṃ se/ By Lanes (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002) and the book Trickster City (Sarda 2010) and its Hindi original Bahurūpiyā Śahar (Tabassum et al. 2007) present strategies of ‘inscribing’ hidden or peripheral places into the city and its collective memory (see Figure 8.1). They provide alternative views of metropolitan life in Delhi beyond the centres of Old and New Delhi respectively,

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Figure 8.1 Cover of Trickster City

© Penguin India, Illustration by Buhsra [sic] Bano and Maithili Doshi Aphale, design by Maithili Doshi Aphale

namely Chandni Chauk and Connaught Place. Literary representations of the city as a map, body, or object exemplify how the authors perceive space as a social and everyday practice of life, configured through experience. Among other things, these writings give an impression of how those living in endangered urban zones or who have experienced forced evictions define urban identity and belonging. It is important to understand how these texts were transferred from an everyday vernacular context into a published book aimed at a national and international English-speaking market. By writing about ‘illegal’ places in the metropolis, the young authors claim their right to belonging to and imagining the city. They challenge the mainstream (rather nostalgic) memory discourse through deviant narratives about how everyday life in the capital is experienced beyond Delhi’s “places of importance”, such as the busy lanes around Chandi Chauk or the well-off residential areas in the south of Connaught Place.

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Approaching the Poetics and Politics of Space in Delhi incognita

How do texts and urban space relate to each other? According to Richard Lehan, ‘literature gave imaginative reality to the city, urban changes in turn helped transform the literary text’ (1998: xv). Based on this statement, writings about ‘alternative’ urban experiences should be seen as a way of ‘inscribing’ them into the city on both a literary and spatial level. Michel de Certeau (1984) argued along the same lines, adding a phenomenological perspective in which walking is a way of inscribing a ‘text’ into the city, which then forms a metaphorical layer upon the planned, ‘built’ city: ‘The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story […] A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city’ (ibid.: 93). In his understanding, in other words, urban space is created by the city dwellers’ everyday practices of life. Both the idea of a ‘metaphorical’ city and the social implication of de Certeau’s concept of space(-making) offer a key to the literary and spatial dimensions of inscribing urban experience into the city. Literary depictions of the urban environment display different perceptions of space—and the texts discussed here reflect how the young writers position themselves in the topography and collective memory of Delhi. Aleida Assmann illuminates the cultural meanings and techniques of script in the context of memory in her seminal study of Erinnerungsräume (‘spaces of memory’). She stresses the significance of script as an ancient medium of self-immortalisation (Assmann 2006a [1999]: 182). For the ‘city writings’ on Delhi, the key notion of ‘medium’ closes the circle of city space, memory, and literature. Each book (as a form of script) offers a certain group of people the medium for creating spaces of memory in the sense of lieux de mémoire, sites embedded with memory (Nora 1984-1992). At the same time, it enables people to inscribe themselves into the collective memory, because the book itself generates publicity for the authors. I argue that the partly documentary, partly fictitious texts in Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes (Sarai and Ankur 2002; henceforth By Lanes) and Trickster City (Sarda 2010) challenge the dominant, Anglophone discourses of memory and, at the same time, utilise their medium—the book—as one of the prominent channels through which collective memory is (re)affirmed: ‘The media of memory shaping the […] collective image of a city are at the same time the mass media of our times: books, films, the internet’ (Buchinger 2013: 265; my translation). In this dimension, these collections, including short stories, diaries, and reports, underwent a crucial transformation from web-blog entries to a

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‘classical’ book format. How did an activists’ project, which programmatically sought a new digital territory beyond the assigned and exclusive tracks of urban discourse, end up choosing to publish in the form of a book? One reason behind this phenomenon is the practical advantage of a printed book over the digital text. Copies of Bahurūpiyā Śahar, the Hindi version of Trickster City, and the bilingual collection By Lanes were distributed and circulated within the informal settlements, where computers and internet were not accessible to the households (Sarda 2010: 307). However, this does not explain the metamorphosis from the diary-like collection By Lanes to the English hardcover book Trickster City. Whereas the first collection, Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes, looks like an all-rounder’s workbook and includes all sorts of visual materials, the subsequent Bahurūpiyā Śahar and Trickster City emerge as literary ‘grown-ups’, having stripped off the teenager’s eagerness to experiment. This development can be explained to some extent with the actual growing up of the writers in the time between the two publications in 2002 and 2007.5 But paying attention to the layout, translation, and distribution of the book from a para-text perspective reveals not only the progress of the authors’ skills, but also a process of ‘literarisation’. The role of the new media (e.g. blogs) as a platform to engage in writing is to provide the possibility of crossing the boundaries of the dominant, elite memory discourses—but the distribution of these alternative ideas about Delhi is then carried out through the rather traditional medium of a book. Again, this reveals the significance of script as an important medium in the politics of collective memory. With the illegal settlement Nangla Manchi (Nāṃglā Māṁcī) as setting, the texts discussed here constitute a counterbalance to the dominant collective memory seen in recent writings such as Delhi: The First City (Singh M. 2011) and City Improbable (Singh K. 2001). The collections By Lanes and Trickster City, by depicting Delhi from its ‘underbelly’, display two dimensions of deviance: a linguistic and a socio-geographical dimension. Originally written in Hindi, they offer an alternative perspective on the city from the vernacular, local language as opposed to the global city discourses in English. It would, however, be wrong to equate the dominant (‘elite’) memory discourse with only Anglophone city writings, since a couple of memoirs on Delhi do exist in Hindi (cf. Jain N. 2009; Vaṃśī 2009). However, the texts written and published in English clearly outnumber the Hindi ones. 5 A comparison between the ‘Notes on the Contributors’ in Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: xiv-xix) and the authors of Trickster City (Sarda 2010) reveals that most of the writers carried on contributing texts for the second compilation.

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Figure 8.2 Aerial photographs of Nangla Manchi before (2004) and after (2006) the demolishment

Source: Google Earth, Digital Globe, formatting by Ariel Shepherd

Figure 8.3 The raid of Yamuna Pushta

© Uzma Mohsin, 2004

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From a socio-geographical perspective, it is relevant that the discussed texts were written by teenagers and young adults aged fifteen to twentythree, many of them Muslims, who were living in informal, illegal, and/or unauthorised settlements (colloquially, ‘slums’) at the time of writing. They were thus legally, politically, economically, and educationally disadvantaged through their circumstances of living. In short, they belong to social groups whose urban experiences did not, until recently, enter any of the city writings on Delhi. As a result, the terrae incognitae where the young writers live—or, to be more precise, lived until their homes were demolished—had not been recognised from a narrative point of view until the publication of these collections. Most of the writings discussed here focus on Nangla Manchi, an illegal settlement located on the banks of the Yamuna River, which existed from 1979 to 2006 (Sarda 2010: 137) (see Figure 8.2). This slum was situated between the ring road towards Noida and the banks of the Yamuna at approximately the level of Pragati Maidan, and formed part of a chain of illegal settlements along the banks of the Yamuna. The clearing of the most prominent cluster of slums, called Yamuna Pushta (‘Yamuna’s back’), was widely covered by the news media (cf. Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008; Bharucha 2006) (see Figure 8.3). The generic term ‘slum’ is used in official, sociological, and anthropological literature. According to the Census of India 2011 (Savda Ghevra Report 2014: vii), 4.5 millions of Delhi’s total population of 16.7 millions were living in informal settlements. Based on their morphologies, the UN classifies Indian settlements as inner-city slums, slum estates, squatter settlements (JJ [ jhuggī jhoṃpṛī] clusters), illegal settlements, and subdivisions (UN-Habitat 2003, quoted in Datta 2012: 5). Another typology has been given by the Delhi Planning Department, in which ‘the different typologies of settlements have different relationships with informality and illegality within Delhi’s Masterplan […]’ (Datta 2012: 6). Ayona Datta offers a profound and comprehensive case study of the illegal and informal conditions of living in Delhi. She states that ‘informal and illegal are not interchangeable terms—they are relational, cultural, and social and are produced for particular political ends’ (ibid.: 7). According to Datta, ‘it is in fact squatter settlements that occupy land without legal rights, which are considered illegal’ (ibid.: 5), whereas ‘informal settlements do not necessarily exist completely outside formal processes’ (ibid.: 7). Depending on the political parties in power, informal settlements like Nangla Manchi are even recognized as important votebanks due to their immense number of inhabitants. Before 2004, several NGOs as well as parties such as the Janata Dal (‘people’s party’) acted in a legal grey zone when supporting

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the development of the local infrastructure and setting-up basic education programs in Yamuna Pushta (Mehra et al. 2006: 178). This complexity in the status of informal or illegal settlements is also mirrored in the terminology found in Hindi, both in general and, more specifically, in the accounts of the Nangla Manchi writers. Equivalents for ‘informal’ and/or ‘illegal settlement’ in Hindi are bastī (‘settlement’), jhuggī-jhoṃpṛī (‘a hut built of earth or clay, and roofed with thatch, reeds’ (McGregor 1993: 397), and kaccī kalonī (‘raw, unhitched colony’). Taking the chapter avasān (‘end’) from Bahurūpiyā Śahar as a sample, it becomes quite clear that the terms are applied to illegal settlements: the neutral terms bastī (‘settlement or makeshift settlement’) and baserā (‘dwelling, night’s lodging’) prevail, whereas the equivalents for ‘slum’, kaccī kalonī and jhuggī-jhoṃpṛī, are only applied in contexts where police or government officials point to the avaidh (‘illegal’) status of a settlement. Another more formal, but strongly self-referential term, śramik vargīya baserā (‘workingclass quarter’), is applied once in the introduction of Bahurūpiyā Śahar.6 Thus, the living sphere of the authors is not perceived as illegal, unless they refer to their homes from a distanced or official point of view. Otherwise, they tend to avoid derogatory terms that correspond to the connotation of the English word ‘slum’, and directly address the settlement with its name (Nāṃglā Māṁcī) or refer to it as bastī, baserā (‘settlement’) or mohallā (‘neighbourhood, quarter’). The vernacular term śramik vargīya baserā (‘working-class settlement’) conveys a notion of these kinds of settlements that stands in sharp contrast to the universal images of slums as crowded and dirty places in the city. The self-identification of the writers as members of the working-class suggests that they consider themselves an important part of urban society. In the next part of my chapter, I discuss the following questions in reference to these vernacular accounts (including their English translation). What narrative techniques are used to create alternative lieux de mémoire? How do people who are facing or have faced evictions define urban identity and belonging? The modes of production and distribution of these alternative texts have changed rapidly within less than ten years. Where did the ‘literarisation’ process start, and how did it progress?

6 The findings of the sample study of the first thirty pages (from the chapter avasān) in detail: bastī (107, 109, 112f, 114f, 120ff, 125, 129f, 133), baserā (109f, 117, 124, 127f), kaccī kalonī and jhuggī (112, 124).

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‘Slum-Writing’ on the Move: From Cybermohalla Project to Trickster City

Cybermohalla, a neologism of the words ‘cyber’ and mohallā, should be understood as an activist’s network rather than an institution. The Cybermohalla project was initiated through the cooperation of the New Delhi-based interdisciplinary centre for urban studies ‘Sarai’ and the NGO Ankur (Society for Alternatives in Education).7 The Sarai programme, established in the year 2000, is locally and programmatically aff iliated with the ‘Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies’ (CSDS) in New Delhi. One of Sarai’s central concerns is strengthening the vernacular perspective of ‘urban public culture, new/old media practice and research and critical cultural intervention’ (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: 222). In the introduction of By Lanes, the Cybermohalla initiative is characterised as a ‘hybrid location’ challenging ‘the technological imagination and the expressive universe of the dominant media-scape’ (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: x). The youngsters, who call themselves ‘practitioners’, were encouraged to exchange ideas and write about their personal experiences with the transformations taking place in their neighbourhoods, or, to put it more simply, the demolition of their homes and their forced eviction to the outskirts of Delhi. Whereas Nangla Manchi and LNJP colony, another basti mentioned in the writings, are situated in the centre of the city, the resettlement colonies Savda Ghevra (Sāvdā Ghevrā) and Dakshinpuri (Dakṣiṇpurī) are located in the far northwest and south extremes of Delhi, respectively (see Figure 8.4). The inhabitants who could prove that they had been living in Nangla since 1998 or earlier were allotted a place in the resettlement site of Savda Ghevra (Sarda 2010: 273). However, many lost their homes and property during the eviction and were not provided any relief and compensation by the Delhi Government (Savda Gevra 2014: ix). In the epilogue of Trickster City, the translator Shveta Sarda remembers the coming together of the writers in May 2005 to discuss about the book translation into English. In the same year, the longstanding redevelopment plan to create a ‘Thames-like riverfront’, which had existed since the 1970s, was finally going to be put into practice (Sarda 2010: 198).8 The pre-demolition 7 For further information see Sarai/CSDS: http://sarai.net, http://www.csds.in, Ankur: http:// www.ankurngo.org [last accessed on 26 July 2016]. 8 cf. Delhi Development Authority 2010 and as Feruglio and Chaudhry 2011: 58-97 (Annexure I: ‘National Law/Delhi Development Act (1957)’.

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Figure 8.4 Map of Delhi indicating resettlement of inhabitants of the former Nangla Manchi to Savda Ghevra

Stepmap by Johanna Hahn

survey of the last remaining settlement on the banks of the Yamuna, Nangla Manchi, had been conducted a few months earlier (ibid.: 301). In the light of these urban ‘beautification actions’—which to these young adults meant the unpreventable loss of their home—questions of belonging arose: ‘[A] re [we] insiders or outsiders to the city and who questions the language we are writing in?’ (ibid.: 300) The members, aged between fifteen and twenty-three, considered the Cybermohalla project as ‘an experiment to engage with media technologies and software “tactically” and create multiple local media contexts emerging within the larger media network that the Internet seems to engender’ (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: X). The aim to create ‘local media contexts’ was realised through several laboratories called Compughars

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Figure 8.5 Page of Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes

http://sarai.net/galiyon-se-by-lanes/ Accessed on 23 April 2018 © CSDS/Sarai/Ankur

(‘compu[ter] house’), one of them situated in LNJP colony (see map in Figure 8.4). In the years of its activity (from 2001 until c. 2012), it offered pupils and young adults from the informal settlements of Nangla Manchi and LNJP the possibility of learning basic computer skills and engaging in editing and design. The bilingual collection Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002) documents this engagement with media and digital technologies. It is written in a rather unconventional, sketchy, and prosaic diary style (see Figure 8.5). While the diary records and interviews are marked with a header indicating the date of its origin, the authors are introduced only on the first pages of the paperback book. The single entries are not provided with author credits

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and page numbers are missing.9 The graphics, photographs, sketches, and word play framing the text passages or printed on glassine paper inserted between the pages mirror the manifold layers of artistic and technological activity at Compughar. As a result, By Lanes does not obstruct the reader’s view of its workshop character and is deliberately not conceived as a purely ‘literary’ product. The abandonment of the authors’ names in the header, for example, is part of the activists’ programme behind Cybermohalla. Writing is seen as a critical tool of expression for a marginalised group, rather than an artistic medium of the individual authors, as indicated in the self-description. The collective aim is to establish new ‘location[s]’, ‘media context[s]’, and ‘network[s]’. If ‘New Media’ is the cradle of the Cybermohalla Project and the means to create a platform and voice for unnoticed, marginalised groups in the city, the traditional ‘book’ medium becomes the favoured channel of (re-)writing this collective memory. Paradoxically, it uses the international attention that Delhi obtained as the scene for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. This appears paradoxical, because it was in preparation for this event that the settlements of the young writers were destroyed in the ‘beautification’ of the city. A glance at the text and para-text levels of By Lanes (2002) and Bahurūpiyā Śahar/Trickster City (Sarda 2010) reveals the great significance of the printed book for the creation and distribution of an alternative image of Delhi in the collective memory. In contrast to their precursor, Bahurūpiyā Śahar (literary Hindi for ‘the many-shaped city’ or ‘mimic city’) and, even more, Trickster City have a far more professional and ‘literary’ appearance in both content and form, which is partly owed to the circumstances of production. While By Lanes was entirely produced by Sarai and Ankur, the subsequent texts were published by two prominent publishing companies of Hindi (Rajkamal Prakashan) and English (Penguin India) books. The initiators and publishers grasped the opportunity of the memory boom that emerged in the early 2000s, particularly around the year 2010, to put Trickster City on the market. Interestingly, the Hindi original (Bahurūpiyā Śahar) visually differs from other vernacular books in terms of a fresh and modern layout that seems to appeal a younger (national) readership (see Figure 8.6). Trickster City, on the other hand, aims at a broader, heterogeneous readership. The presentation, including a tantalising title and praises for the book 9 Please note that Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes does not include page numbers. For the sake of traceability, I have numbered the pages consecutively. Following the introductory pages in small Roman figures (i-xx), the main part, starting with galī (1)/‘Lane’ (2), continues in Arabic numerals.

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Figure 8.6 Cover of Bahurūpiyā Śahar

© Rajkamal Prakashan, design by Mrtyunjay Chatterji, Cover Image by Monika Narula

by globally acclaimed Indian authors like Arundhati Roy, appeals to both the English-speaking local and national audience and an international readership. Apart from the sketches by one of the young authors, Rabiya Quraishy, which accompany each section heading in the English (hardcover) version, there is no illustrative material included (see Figure 8.7). Trickster City is subdivided into thematic chapters with the poetic names ‘Arrival’, ‘En Route’, ‘Repartee’, ‘Whereabouts’, ‘Eviction’, ‘Incognito’, ‘Encounter’, and ‘Frontier’. Another aspect of the ‘literarisation’ process is evident from a comparison of the English translation with the Hindi original. 10 The 10 In a few cases concerning grammar errors or strong deviations from the Hindi original, the English translation was slightly modified (marked with square brackets).

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translation, which is usually close to the original, partly restructures the texts, including rearranging the order of the stories within each chapter, shortening some of the stories, and reordering entire passages within a single text. Thus, almost half of the original of ‘dillī simaṭ rahī hai’ (‘Delhi is shrinking’, Tabassum et al. 2007: 153-155) and ‘yahāṁ, aur kahīṃ aur’ (‘Here and elsewhere’, ibid.: 156-158) were left out of the translation (Sarda 2010: 185 f. and 188 f. respectively). While the reasons for such omissions are hard to verify without further comparative research, the overall impression of the translation is that it seems to have significantly edited some of the pieces, thereby contributing to the ‘literarisation’ of the accounts. As far as the literary genre of the writings is concerned, it proves difficult to draw a sharp line between everyday observations written in a journal or diary style and a ‘classical’ short story. Fiction featuring elements of a short story, such as a prompt beginning (in media res), a contained situation which evokes a certain mood, a short period of narrated time, and an open ending appear in the first two chapters of Trickster City. One example is the story ‘He never came again’ by Sunita Nishad (Sarda 2010: 13f). In this short story, the first-person narrator remembers a fakir (mendicant) who occasionally did rounds in the neighbourhood to collect donations in the form of food and money. His visits were a welcome opportunity for the women to take a break from their household chores and have a chat with him. The women feel pity for the poor man since he always looks sad. When the fakir returns after a couple months, everyone wonders why he looks so happy. Without hesitating, he tells them the reason for his cheery mood: ‘I’ve got my daughter married. May God be praised, I could gift her many things for her married life’ (Sarda 2010: 14). Of course, the women are curious about the sorts of things he has gifted his daughter. After all, he is a fakir, a beggar. He starts counting: ‘I gifted her a car, a refrigerator, ten tolas of gold, a colour TV, a bed, and ten thousand rupees. I’ve married her into a wealthy family. She’s happy’ (ibid.: 14). Finally, the women realise that the old fakir, who came begging for money and food in their neighbourhood, was a rich man, and, as he frankly admits, earns five hundred rupees daily, or even ‘a little more’. While unfolding the further details of his ‘business’ to the women, he calmly eats up his donated lunch. It does not come as a surprise that the women of the neighbourhood would no longer donate him any food or money after this incident; that is why he never came again: ‘I [never saw] the man in the red cap […] again’ (ibid.: 14). There are other stories dealing with urban events in a comical way such as ‘The Delhi liner’ by Jaanu Nagar (ibid 2010: 4-6), in which a hawker selling eyeliner and other affordable items on a train towards Delhi rips off the

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Figure 8.7 Illustration `Eviction’ in Trickster City

© Rabiya Quraishy

passengers in such a charming and skilful way that the cheated feel guilty and ashamed of their naïve credulity in the end. Other stories, such as Lakhmi C. Kohli’s ‘It made news’ (ibid 2010: 11f) and ‘Tell me where you live’ (ibid 2010: 126-130), shed light on the dark sides of urban life, including experiences of violence and crime in the neighbourhood. Most of the stories, however, deal with everyday life in these illegal parts of the metropolis, and are often limited spatially to the living sphere of the family or neighbourhood. The setting of the house or neighbourhood thereby represents a particular perspective through which the individual city dweller perceives his or her urban environment. The scale of perception and representation of the city stretches from house, lane, street, and mohallā to the city as an entity. The extreme ends of the scale exemplify two representations of space(-making) as an everyday social activity. The ‘small-scale’ street perspective constitutes a pars pro toto representation of the city. The individual inscribes his or her name into the street or lane through his or her profession, as is the case for the painter Mohatarum, after whom the lane in which he lives and works was named (see below). Literary images of the city as a map, body, or object are based on (theoretical) concepts of space and city-making on the ‘big scale’

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and depict the city as both a spatial and an imagined entity. For instance, intense negotiations are circling around the notions of ‘city’, belonging, and urban identity that takes place on a much higher level of reflection and abstraction than in the first edition By Lanes which depicts scenes of daily life and routines such as surrounding sounds and conversations. The process of ‘literarisation’, which reaches a climax in Trickster City, thus applies to both form and content. Perceptions of space and space-making as depicted in the writings are intrinsically linked to strategies of ‘inscribing’ in a socio-geographical dimension. If a lane is named after one of its inhabitants who has gained recognition, the person is literally inscribed into the city. The transformation of vernacular experience into the medium of an English book demonstrates the literary dimension of inscribing alternative ideas of the city into the collective memory. However, what are the strategies of inscribing them into the city in a socio-geographical dimension? On what scale do the young adults think of their living sphere? What locations are central to their understanding of the city? How is this ‘inscribing’ performed spatially?

8.4

Space (Making): Inscribing into the City

8.4.1

‘Small Scale’: Lanes and Names

By Lanes gives testimony to the teenagers’ daily urban experience on a very basic level: the sounds of the neighbourhood, views from the window, and daily routines like getting water at the corporate tap are the centre of attention (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: 16f). What catches the reader’s eye is the signif icance of the lanes and streets of the writer’s mohallā (‘neighbourhood’, ‘quarter’) and their connection with certain people: ‘[L] anes are named after the well-known people who live in them. For instance, Shaukat, Kallu, Chavya, Liyakat, Dulha, etc.’ (ibid.: 2). Another diary entry headed ‘What all we passed through: a passage to our lanes’ (ibid.: 20) lists a couple of lanes and tells the story behind their name. ‘Nana’s lane’, for example, is named after the owner of a grocery who loves all children and therefore became the neighbourhood’s nānā (grandfather). Another man called Liyaqat contested elections and therefore became the ‘godfather’ of the street. Apart from lanes named after shop owners, tea vendors, vegetable sellers, and other well-known and influential people, there are also lanes named after the local temple or mosque, or simply according to a functional purpose like ‘The lane with the latrine’ (ibid.: 24). Most of the lanes, however,

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owe their name to a shop owner or bear an occupational title like ‘Barber’s lane’ (ibid.: 21). In ‘An interview with bhai (brother) Mohatarum’, one of the young writers, Azra Tabassum, inquires about a man’s connection with the street which is named after him: Azra: When did you come to this colony? Mohatarum: It’s been 16 years now. (He look[s] around.) Azra: This lane is called Mohatarum’s lane now. What was it called before you came here? […] Mohatarum: Before I came, this lane had no name [because there were only few people living here]. Yes, if someone set [up a] shop here, or sold something, then there would be that recognition. The name came after [me]. Azra: So how did you [gain recognition]? Mohatarum: When I first came, I used to paint. [At first] I had to go asking for work. But then people started approaching me with work. So, slowly, the lane became known by my name. Azra: How does it feel to hear every one say ‘Mohatarum’s lane’? Mohatarum: Initially there was the exhilaration of having become famous. But now I’m used to it. (‘An interview with bhai (brother) Mohatarum’, in: Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: 44-49)

This passage illustrates how an ordinary man like Mohatarum can gain recognition in the mohallā through reliable work. Another story that depicts people’s aspirations is worth mentioning as an example of ‘inscribing’ oneself into the city through one’s profession. ‘Rasool bhai, how come you’re in Delhi?’ (Sarda 2010: 20-30) by Shamsher Ali tells the story of a young man called Rasool, who migrates from Kolkata to Delhi to join his younger brother in the rag-picking business. The story begins with the arrival of the stranger, who wants to hide his lack of local knowledge at any cost. When he starts talking to locals on the train and in the streets, he pretends to know his way around the town (Sarda 2010: 21): Someone asked, ‘Is this your first time in Delhi? Are you travelling alone?’ ‘Yes, I’m alone. I’m going to my brother’s [place]. My younger brother lives in Delhi.’ ‘Where?’ Now how could I say I had no idea! ‘Just five minutes from the station,’ I said. ‘Oh, so he lives in Chandni Chowk?’

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The name sounded familiar. ‘Yes, yes. Chandni Chowk. He lives in Chandni Chowk,’ I said. […] The rickshaw-puller asked me for twenty rupees. I gasped, but then quickly regained my composure. I knew Delhi was an expensive city, but this rate was really quite exorbitant! ‘Hey, you think I’m not a Dilliwala? You think I’m some traveller who’s come from very far? I live here, in Delhi. Really, you should stop fooling people,’ I lectured him.

In the course of the story, the narrator’s perspective constantly shifts between Rasool, his brother and a neutral third-person narrator. Narratively embedded in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’, Rasool’s brother Ayyum reflects on his status in the city. He considers himself a self-made man: Rasool had reached the city and come amongst people he knew. I had made an entirely unknown city my own. / When I first came to this place, it was not a settlement but a godown [storage place]. Now the streets have become so narrow that only one person can pass through them at a time. (Sarda 2010: 22)

This story provides insight into the daily struggles and competition between the rag pickers of Old Delhi and points out how local knowledge guarantees advantages. In order to hold up his repute, Ayyum advises his older brother Rasool to only pick up the waste in the main roads and not to enter any of the small lanes, because people would take him for a thief and beat him up. After two frustrating months with only very small earnings, Rasool realises that his brother ‘had made [him] into his coolie’ (ibid.: 28) by concealing the abundant sources of waste from him. After seeing someone picking up ‘material’ from the ‘forbidden’ lanes by chance, he starts filling his sacks with the waste from these lanes as well: ‘Ever since I started roaming in the lanes that had homes along them, to look for material, I collected large amounts rather quickly. […] I earned a name in the godown and am respected there even today’ (ibid.: 30). Both the ‘Interview with Mohataram bhai’ and the story ‘Rasool bhai, how come you’re here?’ illustrate how streets and lanes serve as a territory in which people eke out their own places and defend their authority in a certain locality or business against newcomers. It is true that this territory is fiercely embattled: ‘business is business. We can’t remain bound to our relationships our entire life’ (ibid: 26). In both cases, the street or lane becomes an urban space where interests are adjusted and negotiated. The

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one who works reliably will be rewarded with respect and gains the power to grant his name to the place where he lives and works. Thus, lanes and streets both create an individual’s identity and establish a net of purposeful, associative relationships (Borchardt et al. 2014: I/23; Swedberg 2005). This rejects the romanticising narrative of the slum as an ideal village within the city, as discussed in detail by the sociologist and psychologist Ashish Nandy: Not merely sleepy Malgudi [a fictitious town in R.K. Narayan’s stories], but some of the more anguished metropolitan slums in literature, too, are infected or infiltrated by the village. As a result, the slum is left forever trying to re-invoke a remembered village under different guises. (Nandy 2001: 20)

‘Mohatarum’s lane’ and ‘Rasool bhai, how come you’re here’ are examples of the perception of the city on a small, local scale. People inscribe their names and therefore their own personalities into the lanes or quarters of the city through their business. How is Delhi perceived on a larger socio-geographical scale, and what literary means and narrative techniques are used to grasp the city as a spatial entity? 8.4.2

‘Big Scale’: Concepts of Space—The City as Map, Body, and Object

Images and metaphorical representations of the city as a whole give us a clue about the writer’s ideas about how they conceive of their ‘place’ within the city. Among the different practices of space and space-making reflected in Trickster City, three types prevail: the city imagined as a map, a body, and an object. These concepts display two conflicting ideas of space(-making): first, the notion of the city-space as an object created by development planners ‘from above’; and second, the idea that space is shaped by everyday practices ‘from below’ (Certeau (de) 1984).11 The City as a Map The idea of the city as a map that is constantly shaped by its inhabitants is expressed in the very first sentence of the introduction of Bahurūpiyā Śahar (which is not included in the English version Trickster City): 11 Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel also introduced theories based on the assumption that space is socially created. According to Simmel (1903), space comes into existence and becomes perceptible by organising it socially in the first place. This concept dismisses Newton’s notion of a pre-existing ‘space box’, which needs to be filled with objects (Dünne 2006: 290).

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The city dwellers keep changing the map of the city every moment. With their internal urges, skills and imaginary powers people shape the stirring lines of time while moving in their daily routines. There are thousands of such workers who live in Delhi’s informal settlements and resettlement colonies, whose urges to live and whose desires turn into experience of life and take the shape of stories which are blurring into our everyday [lives].12 (Tabassum et al. 2007: vi, my translation)

The metaphorical expression of ‘inscribing’ into the city gains a literal meaning in the representation of the city as a map, which is constantly updated. In the following passage, the ‘drawing of the lines’ of the map is graphically described as the physical intervention of ‘the law’ (municipality or state government) into the urban infrastructure, which is considered an arbitrary act: But the law draws new lines and makes new boundaries every moment— in the name of the city, in the name of those who live in the city. Those who live in cities live in these maps that are drawn every day; the lines of these maps clash with the lines of their lives, their courtyards. / It is not that people who live in cities don’t redraw and make maps themselves. Whenever difficulties are faced regarding water, electricity or sewage in settlements in the city, old and new lanes are dug up, and technicians of the city […] are called upon. (Sarda 2010: 189)

Yet again, the second part of this quote exemplifies how the map of the informal settlement Nangla Manchi is imagined as a ‘texture’ created by its inhabitants. Daily routines like moving around have an impact on the shape of the city, as described in number nine of a series of observations entitled ‘Daily Acceptances’ by Rakesh Khairalia: Different routines bring different people to this lane—every day, every month, or infrequently. Formed and dissolved through the movement of these countless people, at times slow paced and sometimes racing, this lane keeps changing, returning a fresh image of itself to the passers-by from time to time. (ibid.: 87-105, here 95) 12 The Hindi original of the acknowledgements (‘ābhār’, translation by Johanna Hahn) reads: ‘śahar meṃ rahne vāle har pal śahar ke naqśe badalte rahte haiṃ. apnī aṃdrūnī ūrjāoṃ, hunar aur kālpanik śaktiyoṃ se log apnī rozmarrā meṃ caltī samay kī rekhāoṃ ko ākār dete calte haiṃ. dillī kī kaccī kaloniyoṃ aur punarvās kaloniyoṃ meṃ rahte aise saikṛoṃ kārīgar haiṃ, jinkī jīne kī zidd aur cāhteṃ zindgī ke anubhāv bankar qissoṃ kā rūp letī huī hamāre rozānā meṃ ghultī haiṃ.’ (Tabassum et al. 2007: vi)

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The map of Nangla Manchi, abundant with textures, has been made by the inhabitants of Nangla. That map is being fractured now. Let’s see what new designs are cast on top of it. Because when one map disintegrates, another begins to be formed in its place (Sarda 2010: 166). Deleting and re-inscribing a text into a different medium relates to the ancient technique of the palimpsest. The palimpsest is a manuscript page that is re-used as a writing medium and consequently consists of several (invisible) layers of script. Assmann remarks that the palimpsest is also used as a metaphor of memory (2006a [1999]: 151). Imagining urban space as a palimpsest combines two dimensions of ‘inscribing’ into the city: literary, through ‘city writings’ (which feed into collective memory), and spatially, through practices of everyday life such as walking. According to de Certeau, the urban space is formed and recreated through the everyday practice of walking: The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. (Certeau (de) 1984: 93)

While moving, the walker follows the already existing ‘scriptures’ of the urban ‘text’. At the same time, the individual inscribes him- or herself into the urban text through walking. The net of scripts or inscriptions that comes into existence in this way thus forms a multi-layered narrative. According to de Certau, the ‘metaphorical city’ exists within the planned (‘built’) city (Certeau (de) 1984: 93). This idea reflects in the thoughts of Rakesh Khairalia who expresses his feelings of loss in the face of the destroyed place he used to call his home in ‘Like a slow f ire spreading through a dense forest’: ‘The footprints of those who passed by these lanes, who rested on the threshold of houses, will slowly fade away’ (Sarda 2010: 151f, here 152). The imagery of the city as a map or texture that is constantly (re)shaped by walking or other practices of everyday life implies a social notion of space(-making). Hence, the writers imagine urban space not merely as the creation of city planners, but also as a product of social practices. If urban space is conceived as fundamentally social, the city consequently becomes a social being endowed with life. However, the personified city cannot survive without its inhabitants.

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The City as Body Thus, the personification of the city is based on the assumption that the bhīṛ (‘crowds’) of people who are living in it enable the organism ‘city’ to exist, as the following quote from ‘Is Delhi shrinking’ by Azra Tabassum illustrates: ‘Instead of being built further, Delhi is shrinking. It is becoming as constricted inside as it seems open from the outside. / The taste of this city is its crowds, its density’ (Sarda 2010: 185f). For this reason, crowds are not depicted as a suffocating element that causes stagnation, but rather as the blood that circulates through the veins of the city and thereby ensures its survival. At the same time, the fear of a ‘lifeless’ cold city is also expressed: ‘When the number of people reduces, how will this city breathe? Will this city become a place where, rather than living in it, people merely spend their lives in it?’ (ibid.: 185f). The impression that Delhi is shrinking also relates to the idea of an exclusive city that no longer offers space to migrants or economically weak inhabitants. Alluding to the similarity between the words dillī (‘Delhi) and dil (‘heart’), Shamsher Ali rhetorically asks in ‘A place to dwell’:13 ‘When those spaces which invite and give place to people from [the] outside won’t remain in Delhi, then how will Delhi be called a city of people with hearts?’ (ibid.: 186-188, here 186). Further: ‘But this city is shrinking today and we are being cast out of it’ (ibid.: 187). The idea of a shrinking, exclusive city is not limited to a spatial perception, but also concerns the very level of linguistic expression and communication in the city, as described in ‘Having seen it from close’ by Suraj Rai: But the vibrancy of this city also comes from its language. All of us bring our different dialects into the language of the city. […] Will Delhi shrink to become a place for a few select languages? Why is our city not living in its present? (ibid.: 131-134, here 134)

Language is the key for the authors to establish their vernacular identity and narratives within the city. Hence, this quote reads like a direct answer to the dominant Anglophone memory discourse. In the translator’s note, Shveta Sarda mentions the discussions between the authors concerning the status of English and vernacular languages like Hindi or Urdu. Whereas the latter are feared to be losing weight in the debates and narratives about the city, the dominant language (English) is identified as a cultural power: 13 The narrative of the shrinking city appears to be part of a popular topos since it crops up in other non-literary sources as well (cf. Fernandes 2013: 9).

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‘What are the languages one has to acquire, in order to access benefits like getting a handicapped person an employment card?’ (ibid.: 298-311, here 302) The youngsters experience English as a border in their everyday life in Delhi. At the same time, the English translation Trickster City becomes an important medium of inscribing their metaphorical city into the dominant discourse. In another diary-like text entitled ‘Spreading in the air’, Suraj Rai states: ‘Nangla will live on through stories […]. Then Nangla will not need a place in the map in order to continue breathing’ (ibid.: 155f, here 156). The City as Object By associating the city with objects, metaphors and similes display the two contradictory perceptions of city-making ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. The following quote contrasts the two; objects of everyday life, such as the stove and the pot, testify to the idea that the ‘authentic’ city is created and ‘lived’ on the ground, whereas the ‘fragile showpiece’ serves as a metaphor to express that the city is handled like an exclusive object, which needs to be taken care of ‘from above’, as Neelofar pictures it in a diary note called ‘Showpiece’: It seems Delhi is distancing itself from the whistle of the pressure cooker, the heat of the stove, the coolness of the earthen water pot half buried in the sand, the shared clatter of glasses, plates, spoons and cups. Delhi is becoming an expensive, beautiful, fragile showpiece, which will be picked up and put away carefully somewhere. (ibid.: 184f, here 184)

Another quote highlights that city-making ‘from above’ is considered almost an arbitrary act: ‘But those who hold power look at the city from above: they are different kinds of sculptors of the city’ (Shamsher Ali: ‘A place to dwell’, in ibid.: 186-188, here 187f). The expressions ‘sculptors of the city’ and ‘from above’ imply a hierarchical opposition.14 Michel de Certeau identifies the gap between the perspective on the city from ‘above’ (carte) and from ‘below’ (parcours) as the crucial difference between place and space. The carte perspective exemplifies the downward, fixed view of the city from a tower and refers to an external classification system that allows the positioning of a certain place (lieu). In contrast to the fixation of a place (lieu) within a 14 Henri Lefebvre (1974) offers a Marxist perspective of the ‘production’ of space. He argues that the material spatial practices of the (‘proletarian’) everyday life stand in contradiction to the spatial concepts of capitalist development planners and theorists (Lefebvre 1974: 39-43, 46-53; see also Dünne 2006: 298)

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classification system, parcours requires the movement of a person walking through the city and creates a net of relative connections. As a result, the parcours constitutes a practiced space (espace). In summary, the constitutive aspect of de Certeau’s concept of space (espace) denotes the configuration of space through experience (Dünne 2006: 299f). The socio-geographical dimension of inscribing illuminates how the authors of By Lanes and Trickster City position themselves within the city. The three representations of the city as map, body, and object show that they perceive space as a social and everyday practice of life, configured through experience. In the writers’ (utopian) imagination, ‘illegal’ spaces like Nangla Manchi turn into legal settlements as they are socially constructed and experienced through writing. Thus, these texts about deviant experiences form a strategy to legitimate the authors’ right to the city. Narratives about the creation of Nangla Manchi therefore act as a counterbalance to the official redevelopment plans of the Delhi Government, as the following quote in ‘A place to dwell’ by Shamsher Ali indicates: Inside all those places termed ‘illegal’ by the government, there lies a different story. The government plants its stake with its stamp on a place: ‘This is government property.’ And in response, we put together our big bundles of stories starting from the time we came into that place till today. Still, we are shunned, because the world moves on the basis of documents. (Sarda 2010: 186-188, here 187)

A similar view is expressed by Suraj Rai in the following note in ‘Having seen it from close’: ‘The truth about how much […] life a person has given to a place is not decided by that person, but by the documents he holds.’ (ibid.: 131-134, here 133) These two quotes paradigmatically strike the heart of the conflict that lies at the bottom of Trickster City: What legitimatises those who live in illegal settlements to have a right to the city? This question particularly forms the undercoating of the last four chapters (Eviction, Incognito, Encounter, and Frontier), which deal with the experiences of demolition and forced eviction. In ‘Showpiece’, Neelofar notes: When the long duration for which someone has lived in a place is recounted, the narrator appears to be rich with experience and knowledge of the world. But this living, breathing person is made light by the weight of the demand to prove his dwelling exists and that he has spent a large part

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of his life in it with the help of lifeless pieces of paper that are supposed to be evidence. / One has to think the question anew: What is ‘living’ or ‘dwelling’? Getting ration cards, voter I-cards, identity cards, passports made? Or is it the relationships because of which not only your own home, but your entire lane calls you ‘Amma’? (Sarda 2010: 184f, here 185)

Two parties are confronting each other. One is the state or government, represented by the surveyors of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), who check the documents proving that a person has been living in Nangla Manchi since 1998 or earlier and is therefore to be allotted a plot in Ghevra, the resettlement area at the far northwestern fringe of Delhi. The other party consists of the slum dwellers or ‘squatters’, who define their place in the city through shared experiences and stories of origin.

8.5

Conclusion: ‘Nangla Delhi’—Literarisation as a Way of Inscribing ‘Alternative’ Experiences and Spaces into the City

Retelling shared experiences helps groups solidify their social memory and identity (Assmann 2006b: 2). Transforming these oral stories into written accounts marks the transition, or at least the attempt, to transform the social memory of one group into a collective memory. In this ‘literarisation’ process, the book is considered an inf luential and ‘ageless’ medium in the politics of collective memory and serves two main purposes. First, it provides the ‘illegal’ city dweller with a document of identification that proves his or her connection to a certain plot of land within the city. Thus, in the socio-geographical dimension a terra incognita like Nangla Manchi is inscribed into the city. Second, the national and international distribution of the book Trickster City (Sarda 2010) enables its authors to inscribe their deviant urban experiences into city discourses. In the literary dimension of inscribing vernacular experiences into the city, these texts challenge the dominant narratives of a purely global city discourse. The authors of Trickster City modify the elite perspectives (of the ‘dominant’ memory discourse) to claim their ‘right to the city’. Nevertheless, a rigid Subaltern and Neo-Marxist reading of this process as the emancipation of a marginalised group, which is sometimes referred to as ‘working-class’ in the discussed writings (Tabassum et al. 2007: vi; Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002: x), would miss an important point: the perceptions of space reflected

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in the publications By Lanes (Sarai-CSDS and Ankur 2002) and Trickster City testify to the young writers’ awareness of the existing global concepts and notions of space. Associated with the urban research centre Sarai, Compughar created a forum of intellectual exchange. Discussions about the notions of performance (Sarda 2010: 306), urban identity and habitus (ibid.: 302), and the relationship between language and power (ibid.: 300, 302, 308f) in Sarda’s ‘Translator’s note’ suggest that Trickster City and By Lanes also partly draw from ‘elite’ academic discourses.15 Thus, the ‘literarisation’ of the ‘slum-writings’ brings to light the ambivalent position of the authors in the struggle to revise Delhi’s collective memory and deprives the vernacular sphere of its mystique of being more ‘authentic’ than Anglophone, cosmopolitan Delhi. Nevertheless, these accounts illuminate the vernacular sphere of Delhi from an unknown spatial and literary perspective, suggesting that—in response to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question—the subaltern can speak.16 The ‘literarisation’ process offers insights into the politics and poetics behind the memory boom and the making of Delhi’s collective memory. Trickster City also projects ideas of Delhi as a place where everyone is welcome to participate. Moreover, by suspending the bureaucratic division of the city into illegal and legal spaces (and inhabitants), the young authors project a utopian Delhi into their stories and accounts. Of course, reality gives quite a different picture of the situation of ‘illegal’ city dwellers. Squatters have lost their homes due to forced evictions and have been resettled to the outskirts of Delhi, 30 to 40 kilometres away from the city centre where they used to work. Nets of social ties have also been torn. However, these ‘slum-writings’ have not missed their mark of reshaping the images and narratives of Delhi. The idea of space(-making) as an everyday practice imposes the need to rethink concepts of urban development, democratic participation, and citizenship. Writing about the city thereby constitutes a channel to take part in the memory discourse and creates the preconditions for relocating images of the city.

15 Especially the relationship between language and power, which is certainly inspired by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, cf. Müller-Funk 2010 [2006]: 197. 16 Here, I am referring to Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (1988), in which the author tackles the question of the representation of marginalised groups. In the light of the dominance of the western academy concerning the interpretation and construction of ‘the other’, she states that the subaltern cannot speak (ibid.: 104).

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum for their continuous commitment and valuable remarks on an earlier draft of this chapter. Further, I am grateful to Chelsea McGill from Amsterdam University Press for sophisticatedly editing the text at a later stage.

Bibliography Assmann, A. (2006a), Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C.H. Beck [1st edition 1999]. — (2006b), Soziales und kollektives Gedächtnis, presentation in the scope of the conference ‘Kulturelles Gedächntis. China zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft’ (BPB series of events ‘Dokumentation’), Berlin: 24-26.03.2006, online source: http://www.bpb.de/veranstaltungen/dokumentation/128666/pdfaleidaassmann (Last accessed on 13 August 2014). Bharucha, R. (2006), Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions. New Delhi: Sainathann Communications. Borchardt, K., et al. (eds.) (2014), Max Weber Studienausgabe. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Jubiläumsausgabe der MWG [Economy and Society. Student edition of the Max Weber Complete Edition], 5 vols. Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Bose, A. (2011), ‘Resident alien’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 60-68. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Buchinger, K. (2013), ‘Das Gedächtnis der Stadt’, in Stadt. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Mieg, H.A., and Heyl, C. (eds.). Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler. Caur, A. (2011), ‘The Art of Living’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 38-42. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Certeau (de), M. (1984), ‘Walking in the City’ (Chapter VII), in Practices of Everyday Life, Rendell, S. (trans.). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Das, A. (2011), ‘The First City’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 10-14. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Datta, A. (2012), The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement. Ashgate: Farnham/Burlington. Dayal, R. (2011), ‘A Kayastha’s View’, in Delhi: The First City, Sing, M. (ed.), 31-37. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Delhi Development Authority (2010), Master Plan for Delhi-2021 [approved and notified on 7 February 2007]. New Delhi: DDA, online source: https://dda.org.in/ ddanew/pdf/Planning/reprint%20mpd2021.pdf (Last accessed on 21 August 2014).

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Dünne, J. (2006), ‘Soziale Räume’ (introduction), in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, Dünne, J., and Günzel, S. (eds.), 289-303. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag (Taschenbuch Wissenschaft). Erll, A., Gymnich, M., and Nünning, A. (eds.) (2003), Literatur–Erinnerung–Identität: Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag (Studies in English Literary and Cultural History, 11). Fernandes, N. (2013), City Adrift. A Short Biography of Bombay. New Delhi: Aleph. Feruglio, F., and Chaudhry, S. (eds.) (2011), The Cruel Side of Delhi’s Beautification: Illegal Demolition in Baljeet Nagar. New Delhi: Human Rights Law Network (HRLN). Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory, Coser, L.A. (ed., trans. and intro.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jacob, S. (2011), ‘Wither, the Walled City’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 43-52. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Jain, M. (2011), ‘Tyrannies at Work’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.): 69-76. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Jain, N. (2009), Dillī Śahar dar Śahar [Delhi, City by City]. Naī Dillī: Rājkamal Prakāśan. Lefebvre, H. (1974), ‘Dessein de l’ouvrage’, in La production de l‘espace, 7-82. Paris: Anthropos. German trans. by Dünne, J. (2006), in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, Dünne, J., and Günzel, S. (eds.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag (Taschenbuch Wissenschaft). Lehan, R.D. (1998), The City in Literature: an Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liddle, S. (2011), Delhi. 14 Historic Walks. New Delhi: Westland. McGregor, R.S. (ed.) (1993), Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Mehra, D. and Batra, L. (2006), ‘Das neoliberale Delhi: Der Blick vom Trümmerfeld eines planierten Slums.’ German trans. by Margarete Schreiber-Ahuja et al., in: Mumbai Delhi Kolkata. Annäherungen an die Megastädte Indiens, Ahuja, R., Brosius, C.(eds.), 173-189. Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag. Menon, A.E. (2011), ‘The age that was’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 15-23. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Menon-Sen, K., and Bhan, G. (2008), Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. Delhi: Yoda Press. Müller-Funk, W. (2010/2006), ‘Michel Foucault: Diskurs als kulturelle Macht’ in Kulturtheorie, 187-215. Tubingen, Basel: A. Francke Verlag (UTB-series). Nandy, A. (2001), An Ambiguous Journey to the City. The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination. New Delhi, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Narayanan, R. (2011), ‘Adab Nama’, in Delhi: The First City, Singh, M. (ed.), 77-83. New Delhi: Academic Foundation.

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Nora, P. (ed.) (1984-1992), Les Lieux de mémoire (3 vols.). Paris: Gallimard. Nünning, A. (ed.) (2013), Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Pāṃḍya, M. (2011), Śahar aur Sinemā vāyā Dillī [City and Cinema via Delhi]. Naī Dillī: Vāṇī Prakāśan Sarai-CSDS and Ankur (eds.). (2002), Galiyoṃ se/By Lanes, Sarda, S. (trans.). New Delhi: Sarai Media Lab. Sarda, S. (trans.) (2010), Trickster City. Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. New Delhi, New York: Penguin/Viking. Savda Ghevra Report (2014), ‘Forced to the Fringes: Disasters of ‘Resettlement’ in: India. Report One, Savda Ghevra, Housing and Land Rights Network (ed.). New Delhi: ix, online source: http://www.hic-sarp.org/documents/Savda_Ghevra_Report_1.pdf (Last accessed on 26 July 2016). Sawhney, H. (ed.) (2009), Delhi Noir. Noida: HarperCollins. Schneider, N.-C. (2013), ‘Medialised Delhi: Youth, Protest, and an Emerging Genre of Urban Films’, in South Asia Chronicle 3, online source: http://edoc.hu-berlin. de/docviews/abstract.php?lang=ger&id=40581 (Last accessed on 26 July 2016). Sengupta, R. (2008), Delhi Metropolitan. The Making of an Unlikely City. New Delhi: Penguin. Simmel, G. (1903), ‘Die Groβstädte und das Geistesleben’ in Die Groβstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Stadtausstellung, Petermann, T. (ed.), 185-206. Dresden: Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung zur Dresden. Singh, K. (ed.) (2001), City Improbable: An Anthology of Writings on Delhi. New Delhi, Viking Books. Singh, M. (2009), New Delhi. The Making of a Capital. New Delhi: Lustre Press. — (2011, ed.), Delhi: The First City. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. — (2013), Perpetual City. A Short Biography of Delhi. New Delhi: Aleph. Soofi, M.A. (2011), The Delhi Walla. Portraits. Noida: HarperCollins. Spivak, G.C. (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, C., and Grossberg, L. (eds.), 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Swedberg, R. (with the assistance of Agevall, 0.) (2005), The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford: Stanford Social Sciences. Tabassum, A., et al. (eds.) (2007), Bahurūpiyā Śahar [shape-shifting city] Sardā, S. (trans.). Naī Dillī: Rājkamal Prakāśan. UN-Habitat (2003), Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. London: Earthscan. Vaṃśī, B. (ed.) (2009), Dillī Ṭī Haūs. Ādhī sadī kī Sāhityik Halcal Sāhityakāroṃ kī kalam se [The Delhi Tea House. Half a Century’s Literary Bustle from the Pens of the Authors]. Naī Dillī: Neśnal Pabliśiṃg Hāus.

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Website http://sarai.net/galiyon-se-by-lanes/ Accessed on 23 April 2018 © CSDS/ Sarai/Ankur.

About the author Johanna Hahn is an Assistant Professor at the Department of South Asian Studies (Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies) at Bonn University, Germany, with her academic roots in Tubingen and Heidelberg (South Asia Institute). In her forthcoming thesis she explores the images of the megacities Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata in contemporary Hindi fiction between 1970 and 2010. She is also engaged in the field of literary translation, and is currently working on a collection of Hindi short stories by Sara Rai. Email: [email protected]

Part 3 Political and Urban Discourses

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The Physical Manifestation of Political Ideologies in Ali Sadikin’s Jakarta (1966-1977) Pawda F. Tjoa

Abstract This chapter examines the physical materialisation of political ideologies in Jakarta’s urban space during the governorship of Ali Sadikin, a towering figure to whom all subsequent governors of Jakarta have been compared and have tried to measure up. Focusing on the decade of transition between the demise of Soekarno’s Guided Democracy and the establishment of the New Order, this research reveals the politics behind the planning practices in Jakarta and how they shaped and continue to influence the urban fabric of the city today. The key goal of this research is to highlight the tension between planning practices and the realities of resistance and appropriation demonstrated on the ground. Ideology continues to be used as a catalyst to create difference; though the ideology of development was presented as a tool to create order, it was also used as a powerful tool to distinguish between social groups. In fact, the successful execution of urban plans during this time has been partly attributed to the development of such categories, which cultivated a mind-set of fear that would define the rapid growth of Jakarta for the following twenty years. Keywords: political ideology, order, urban development, Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, Pancasila

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch09

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9.1 Introduction 1966 to 1977 was a critical transition period between Soekarno’s regime of Guided Democracy and Suharto’s Orde Baru (New Order). It was also a time of major reforms in the urban policies of Jakarta. Perhaps for the first time, Jakarta’s residents were asked to engage with the city’s development in a more accessible and less abstract way. The practical problems of unruliness, lack of safety, and uncleanliness came to the fore and Jakarta’s residents found that these were issues that they could relate to on a daily basis. Jakarta’s population began to have higher expectations for improvements to the public services as the city continued to change rapidly, not unlike the previous twenty years. Increasingly, residents were encouraged to be more involved by reporting practical problems they observed to the authorities. At the same time, the tide was turning, political tension between the previous regime and the new one could be discerned, although these tensions were safely camouflaged under the national ideology of Pancasila (‘Five Principles’) and anti-imperialism. This chapter will examine how this political tension and transition shaped the urban public spaces of Jakarta. To contextualise the discussion in this chapter, it is necessary to outline the political background first. By 1957, during the period known as ‘war and siege’, Soekarno realised that representative democracy was simply not working, particularly given the level of civil unrest in the country. He subsequently formulated a new political ideology under the banner of Guided Democracy that essentially returned to the 1945 Constitution, which had initially been formulated as a temporary device. As the subsequent constitutions of 1949 and 1950 had failed to appease all political parties, Soekarno chose to return to the 1945 Constitution, this time enshrining it as ‘sacred and unchallengeable’ (Vickers 2005: 144). For many, this was a cause for concern, especially given Soekarno’s authoritarian tendencies; and for the next 40 years democracy remained a thing of the past. Indeed, as outlined by Vickers (2005: 144), the military state, highly centralised government, political turmoil that culminated in the loss of a million lives, and ultimately Soekarno’s own downfall were all legacies of Guided Democracy. Under the banner of Guided Democracy, Soekarno emphasised the three elements of his political ideology: (1) nationalism; (2) religion; and (3) communism. Impressively, he was able to reconcile these three elements that seemed so opposed to one another; ‘Marxism, which was previously so violently anti-nationalist and anti-religious, has now altered its tactics, especially in Asia, so that its previous bitter opposition has turned into comradeship and support’ (ibid.: 81). As the supreme leader of the

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Revolution, Soekarno was known to be anti-imperialist and highly modern in his politics and style. Particularly popular with the crowd, Soekarno regularly utilised the open spaces of the city to assemble ‘his people’ to listen to his uplifting nationalistic speeches. Even though the rhetoric of this first post-independence regime was populist, the pursuit of a national identity through monumental building projects pushed the country into mounting debt and a widening income gap, with a large part of the population forced deeper into poverty. There were contradictions between Soekarno’s ideologies and policies, however. For instance, he often referred to traditional rural values such as gotong royong (‘mutual help’) and the agricultural economy to emphasise the importance of economic self-sufficiency—and yet, by the end of his presidency the nation was far from self-sufficient, in a state of poverty. Further, by the mid-1960s, Soekarno’s obsession with his Mercu Suar (‘Lighthouse’) policy 1 was said to have led him to neglect the basic needs of the desperate population. Towards the end of the Guided Democracy, Soekarno’s inability to translate ‘nationalistic rhetoric into common purpose’ was becoming more obvious, and was clearly detrimental to his leadership (ibid.: 141). On 30 September 1965, the anti-communist gestapu (coup d’état) led to the massacre of over half a million people thought to be linked to the Communist Party, also known as Partai Komunis Indonesia/PKI. Meanwhile, the strengthening of the army since the 1950s proved to be influential in hindering Indonesia’s path to democracy through their hard handed approach in suppressing any political opposition to the incumbent, and indeed in shaping the politics of Indonesia for the rest of the century (ibid.: 141). In the midst of great discontent, political rebellion, and civil turmoil, Soekarno was forced to step down. On 11 March 1966 Soekarno handed over power to Suharto through a declaration called Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret/Supersemar (‘Order of March the Eleventh’). The beginning of the New Order was marked by rapid economic growth under the capitalist nationalist policies advanced by Suharto. For the next decade, when Ali Sadikin was the governor of Jakarta, the government transformed Jakarta into a haven for foreign investments. The capital city took centre stage as it went through a further makeover and was turned into a welcoming and recognisable city 1 Mercu Suar (‘Lighthouse’) was a series of projects that were intended to create national pride for the newly independent nation. Symbolically acting as a beacon for the nation, the series of projects were intended to help kick-start and, more importantly, navigate the path to national growth and development.

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for international visitors. Meanwhile, the anti-communist rhetoric helped repair Indonesia’s relations with the USA and the West during the Cold War, even though Suharto generally took a neutral position.2 At home, substantial government intervention ruthlessly homogenised the city and assimilated the population into the dominant culture in many aspects of their everyday life. This assimilation was done in the name of uniting the nation through Pancasila, the sole ideology of the New Order. According to Goldblum and Wong (2000: 31), Jakarta is distinct from the other large Indonesian cities in becoming ‘a special territory covering five municipalities in an “autonomous” region of 650 square kilometres managed by a governor’ in 1974. As a special territory with its own ‘symbols of sovereignty and prestige’, Jakarta embodies the national ideology of ‘unity in diversity’. It was through this same 1974 decree (Undang-Undang 10) that Jakarta became the official capital of Indonesia (Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1966: 3). Though originally formulated by Soekarno, Pancasila was appropriated by the Suharto regime to become the absolute national ideology that must be followed by every citizen—it was even included in the national curriculum for primary school children. Consequently, the achievement of political ideals as represented by Pancasila was considered a highly aggressive and oppressive process, with a great emphasis on discipline and order. Pancasila officially comprises five principles: (1) belief in the divinity of Allah; (2) just and civilised humanity; (3) the unity of Indonesia; (4) democracy guided by the inner wisdom in the unanimity arising out of deliberations amongst representatives; (5) social justice for all of the people of Indonesia.3 Despite these five principles, the actual meaning of Pancasila and what it stood for remained vague. Arguably, this ambiguity was crucial for allowing its convenient manipulation by the New Order regime to antagonise and label dissenting groups as ‘anti-Pancasila’. Still, the first decade of the New Order pales in comparison to the next twenty years, as historian Vickers noted; even if Indonesia were ‘a nation-state within clear political boundaries, by the end of the twentieth century the state was buckling under international and internal pressures, and the nation was spilling over its borders’ (Vickers 2005: 209). In the midst of the creation of the New Order, the first election 2 According to Ricklefs, between 1976-1988, ‘Jakarta [still] would not join any military alliances and saw itself increasingly as a leader of non-aligned states. In the competitive Cold War world, this made it even more important for the West to court Indonesia’s friendship’ (2001: 385). 3 Taken in translated form from Wikipedia. In their original form, they read (1) Structuring a Free Indonesia in Faithfulness to God Almighty; (2) Consensus or Democracy; (3) Internationalism and Humanitarianism; (4) Social Prosperity; and (5) Nationalism or National Unity (Vickers 2005: 117; Soekarno 1949).

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under the new regime was held in 1971. This election marked the first of six election wins for Suharto over the next three decades. According to Ricklefs, by the beginning of 1976 the New Order had achieved a stability of government (2001: 364). The next twenty years under the New Order were generally remembered as a period of constant economic growth and political and social stability. This was in part facilitated by the centralist government under Suharto, which served to reinforce the ‘aristocratic’ values that Suharto had demonstrated thus far in his authoritarian rule. The dominance of the military was especially significant for making sure that this level of political stability was achieved ‘without any serious challenge to the unity of the nation’ (2001: 365). The ‘empire’ he made possible through his increasingly permanent position of power was akin to the very system of imperial rule rejected by his predecessor. The authoritarian approach of the New Order was evident through the neutralisation of dissent on the political stage and the ministerial decree ‘The Normalisation of Campus Life’ in 1977-1978, which was meant to tackle protesting university students and prohibit political activism on university campuses (Lim 2008: 217-218). For the general population, the imposition of order and discipline became characteristic of the New Order regime. After securing another two terms in office in the 1977 and 1982 elections, in 1983 the regime went to the extent of displaying the dead bodies of thugs in the streets of Jakarta in an effort to ‘discipline’ and ‘pacify’ the population. These mysterious killings of petrus (‘thugs’) were a tried and tested method of ‘social control’ that had previously been employed in the troubled East Timor to show the population just what the government was capable of doing for the sake of social order (Kusno 2000: 104). Camouflaged within the image of growth, order, and peace was an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. At the same time, as Abidin Kusno has highlighted in Behind the Postcolonial (2000), the urban policies of the New Order alienated the urban population from public space and discouraged interactions in public spaces, thus over time diminishing the sense of community and solidarity in the city. 4 The practice of distancing and differentiating one population group from another was most evident in the last twenty years of the New Order with the urban population that aspired to upward mobility, often at the expense of traditional living. This chapter is interested in the first ten years of the regime change as a period of major transition and adjustment when many of the policies that 4 In Behind the Postcolonial (2000), Abidin Kusno gave an account of the construction of the culture of ‘fear of the streets’ during the New Order.

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would shape the rest of the New Order era were first implemented. The decade of urban transformation in Jakarta overseen by Ali Sadikin offers a wealth of information to urban planners and researchers about working in a period of political transition and the negotiations involved in doing so. The huge task of completing the monumental projects started by the past regime was taken up alongside the contrasting implementation of the comprehensive urban plan introduced in the late 1960s to address social and practical issues that had previously been neglected. The difficulty of coordinating these multiple efforts and reconciling contrasting political ideologies was visible in the proposals made by Ali Sadikin. Public space was visibly redefined and displaced to clearly confined and dedicated spaces, although this redefinition of public space did not go completely unchallenged. During this period, public infrastructure received a comprehensive makeover, including the Kampung Improvement Programme (KIP) and clearing the main streets of various ‘undesirable’ activities and sights. Crucially, this period also marked the beginning of a high-surveillance state, and indeed triggered a development trend that many thought to be irrevocable. Throughout this period, the construction of categories was key in the accomplishment of the development goals. Street vendors, for instance, were categorised as ‘deviant’, much like the ill people in Foucault’s view: any elements that did not fit into the ideal image of the city could therefore be eradicated (Shane 2011: 14-15). Similarly, becaks (‘trishaws’) were considered an outdated form of public transportation; the authorities continuously attempted to eradicate becaks by first relocating them to dedicated regions in Jakarta away from the main avenue, and eventually banning them altogether through Operasi Becak (Trishaw [Removal] Operation) in the 1980s. Indeed, the removal of becaks was only a matter of time, seeing that the each postcolonial regime mainly focused on the development of the road networks to suit the new era of automobiles, which were to be the new ‘modern’ mode of transportation for Jakarta. However, the persistent existence of the ‘deviant’ categories of people and activities in the streets of Jakarta turned it into more than a mere urban armature: instead, the streets came to be perceived as a ‘positive’ space—a sort of site of deviance.5 Heterotopias spatially combine enclaves and armatures, 5 According to Shane, an armature is one of the key elements used by urban actors in constructing the city, often as a way of approaching a bounded space or linking two bounded spaces, also known as enclave(s). An armature is defined as a ‘linear spatial organising device, like a street […] with sequential, numbered houses or exits’. However, with the complex urban systems along the major avenue of this research, we begin to see armatures and enclaves coming together to

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in order to create spaces which are more inclusive and accommodating of diversity and differences within the city. However, the same concept is also used to fabricate what Foucault refers to as ‘heterotopias of deviance’—to relocate certain activities within the confines of an enclosed or bounded space with the aim of containing people who do not fit within the profile of the city (Shane 2011: 14-16). For Foucault, ‘heterotopias’ are like miniatures of urban ecology with interdependent components, ‘each with their own spaces and codes, all within one perimeter’ (ibid.: 37-38). In Jakarta, these ‘heterotopias of deviance’ together helped to produce the modern city by housing the ‘undesirables’, thus removing them from the streets of Jakarta so that the capital city could quickly meet the expectations of being an international city. Indeed, by doing so, they helped to reaffirm Jakarta’s status as the capital city and as a special territory and administration during this time. This chapter argues that the ideologies of development have largely emphasised and been linked to the concept of cleanliness and order in shaping the urban policies and subsequent transformation of Jakarta.

9.2 Methodology This research utilises a predominantly qualitative method of analysis. To better understand the dominant ideology that shaped the development agenda of the capital city, I have relied on archival materials, mainly the speeches and policy documents that were formulated and implemented during the 1960s and 1970s. For additional insight into various forms of resistance and appropriation in the urban landscape of Jakarta, this research superimposed information from existing maps of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a comparative tool revealing the physical transformation of the city. However, the story of the development and its physical manifestation is not complete without looking into the realities of resistance and appropriation that are often only visible through other media, including the newspaper coverage in Antara, Angkatan Bersendjata, Djakarta Times, Djakarta Post, Kompas, and Indonesia Raya. This chapter focuses on these dynamics, which are often removed from the official written records of the city’s development but are just as crucial for influencing the urban transformation within the city. It examines how political ideologies have become manifest in Jakarta along the main avenue (Figure 9.1). form specialised urban elements, complete with their ‘multiple interior subdivisions that can hold conflicting urban activities in the same place at the same time’ (Shane 2011: 14).

286 Pawda F. Tjoa Figure 9.1 The main avenue studied Areas affected by eviction due to unlawful squatting Markets under the Coordination and Management of PD Pasar Jaya Areas where housing released and sold by government in 1955 Built-up areas and buildings Kampung areas Main avenue Mercu Suar (Lighthouse) projects Barometer of Safety Slum Clearance Note: This map highlights the vicinity of the study area, drawn by the author based on maps compiled in 1959 by the Army Map Service (AM), Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington D.C..

Map by the author

9.3 Ideologies Applying Adorno’s negative dialectics (1973 [1966]), the discernible dominant ideologies in Jakarta between 1966 and 1977 were a concoction of Progressive Revolution, Pancasila, socialism, and morality and religion (in particular, Islam), all linked to the concept of cleanliness; these were all placed under the umbrella of ideologi pembangunan (‘ideology of development’).6 The 6 This paper is critical of the positivist perspective of ideologies, which holds a deterministic view of society (i.e., how a collective group could go about achieving a ‘good society’). Adorno’s negative dialectics (1973/1966) is effectively intended to turn the binary relationship between the subject and the object upside down and to give the priority, which is usually assigned to the subject, to the object. This paper forms part of a wider research project that explores the subjectivity of our human thought. In achieving our ‘political aims or ideologies’ through ‘identity and unity’, Adorno argues that our human thought has imposed these ideals upon the objects, thereby suppressing and neglecting existing differences and diversity, whether between ethnicities, genders, religions, or classes. Through negative dialectics, Adorno is therefore arguing that ‘ideology’ does not only emerge for the ‘positive’ purpose of creating social order and unity; rather, ‘ideology’ is also used as a catalyst to create difference, to set one against another, and to be contradictory to each other (see Cook 2001: 1-20; Zuidervaart 2011).

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nationalist rhetoric and ideology of development and nation building were used to mask the rapidly emerging neoliberal economy of the New Order during this time, allowing the state to freely transform the capital city.7 While the ideology of development largely continued from the Soekarno era, its emphasis during the 1960s and 1970s shifted from the Mercu Suar (lighthouse) projects to specific avenues and regions in the capital, such as the Protocol Avenue and a series of Economy Roads. The emphasis on generating income for the country and making the capital city a profitmaking machine was starting to take shape; Sadikin was famously known for approving nightclubs and other morally dubious activities—against his own principles, some would say—just so that the city could absorb the tax revenues from these lucrative activities (Lantang 1971: 4). The ideology of Progressive Revolution also carried over from the previous regime, albeit with some striking contradictions. While Soekarno persisted in his socialist and at times communist sympathies, Suharto slipped strong anti-communist undertones into his speeches and propaganda. Nevertheless, these contradictions blurred under the ideology of Pancasila, so both figures were generally viewed as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist in their rhetoric of national unity during this transitory decade. At the same time, Ali Sadikin placed strong emphasis on the improvement of public services that went hand-in-hand with many of the urban policies implemented during this time, which were driven by a highly socialist sentiment. Last but not least, the ideology of morality, while not without contradictions, was highly influential in shaping urban policies in the capital. Crucially, the notion of morality, religious education, and piety was tightly linked to the idea of cleanliness. Despite their unclear origin, mottos such as Kebersihan adalah sebagian dari iman (‘Cleanliness is a part of religious faith’) could be seen plastered on signs along the sides of the roads. This motto became the driving force behind the massive and aggressive clean-up operation of the city for at least between 1966 and 1977. Even though Jakarta cannot be said to have overcome the problems of uncleanliness and immorality today, the strategies introduced and mentality cultivated during this time certainly set a precedent for future administrations in Jakarta. Crucially, especially given the context of the aftermath of the political coup in 1965, the clean-up operation in the city was also coincidentally symbolic of the anti-communist clean-up operation across Indonesia (Kompas 1966a: 1). In this chapter, we will see how these ideologies have been manipulated in the context of Indonesian politics in the name of creating social order and unity 7

This was also highlighted by Kusno 2013: xviii.

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but have instead resulted more intensely in distancing and differentiating between social classes, ethnic groups, and religious groups.

9.4

Physical Manifestation

In this section I examine two aspects of development in Jakarta in which these political ideologies became physically manifest in the urban space. Jakarta’s new administration had to deal with two strikingly complex issues: first, the pressure and plan for the city’s expansion; and second, the simultaneous need to confront the mounting national debts and the alarming scale of social problems. One of the most important legacies of this period was the Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1965-1985 (‘City’s Master Plan 1965-1985’), which was the first comprehensive master plan for Jakarta (1966). At the same time, through the clean-up operation of the city known as Penertiban Ibukota (‘Ordering of the Capital City’), Jakarta’s residents experienced some tangible transformations in the city. 9.4.1

Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1965-1985 (‘City’s Master Plan 1965-1985’)

When Sadikin was appointed the governor of Jakarta in 1966, the ideology of pembangunan (‘development’) had been ingrained in the minds of Jakarta’s residents for at least twenty years. On the occasion of Sadikin’s inauguration as governor, Soekarno made a critical speech reminding Sadikin of the importance of the ‘physical appearance’ of Jakarta. Concerned that some people did not share his vision for the city, Soekarno went on to reiterate the necessary transformation of the Sudirman and Thamrin Avenues, as well as the importance of building the Istiqlal Mosque with grandeur and making Merdeka Square the largest field in the world, as it held the national monument in its centre. Undoubtedly, Soekarno also used this opportunity to directly address criticism of the huge expenses dedicated to two of the most ambitious Mercu Suar projects that were still undergoing construction during the time.8 Soekarno further mocked the short-sightedness of those who suggested that such funds should have instead been used for irrigation and other more immediate needs. Soekarno was clearly adamant and obsessed about building a permanent legacy, and for him this ambition had 8 The Istiqlal Mosque began construction in 1961 and was not completed until 1978; the Merdeka Square and the National Monument began construction in 1961 and were completed fourteen years later, in 1975.

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little to do with food or daily sustenance. In the speech at the inauguration of Ali Sadikin as governor, he asserted: The nation needs more than food. We do not bring food into the afterlife. We need to plan for the eternal, into the afterlife. We can depend on memories, national pride and legacy. I don’t want to be remembered in this way, ‘Oh, during the Soekarno time, we had food!’ I want the memory and legacy to be that of national pride, not food! (Soekarno 1966)

The Mercu Suar projects were the clearest manifestation of this aspiration for the capital city. However, the ideology of development was kept ambiguous—that is, it was never specifically detailed—and the projects that materialised only reinforced the irony experienced by Jakarta’s residents: worsening poverty and social problems amidst partially completed, overambitious projects (i.e., skyscrapers, monuments, etc.). An example is the skyscraper Wisma Nusantara, which was meant to be one of the tallest buildings. Like many other buildings, however, its construction had to be halted due to the lack of funds; the structure began to look like a ruin even before it was completed. Meanwhile, nearby residents of traditional kampungs (‘slums’) were facing evictions to free up land to make way for a grand avenue to be built. In the new era, Jakarta’s government was confronted with a huge challenge of continuing with the development agenda while steering it in a different direction. The first agenda was to address the enormous social problems that the city’s inhabitants were facing. This had to do with reducing crime rates and negotiating the continued existence of certain economic activities. Prostitution was demonised and eradicated, while gambling activities were regulated so that the city could absorb the substantial tax revenue. The authorisation—some may say promotion—of regulated gambling activities was nevertheless controversial, especially given the moral undertones of the many policies undertaken during the tenure of Ali Sadikin.9 To integrate various plans to address inherent social problems and economic crises, the first comprehensive plan for the next twenty years was drawn up and compiled under the name Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1965-1985. To create ‘a harmonious balance’ between socio-economic and physical wellbeing, the RIK 1965-1985 highlighted several shortcomings of Jakarta’s development, including housing shortages, the inadequate condition of the 9 Ali Sadikin’s Gita Jaya (1977) outlines in detail his plans for Jakarta based on a high moral standard.

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roads, lack of clean water, danger of flooding, and poor traffic control, as well as the inadequate telephone and communication network and poor infrastructure. The RIK 1965-1985 was also intended to provide a framework for the coordination of national, regional, and international interests. This twenty-year plan promised to be more binding than previous plans had been, because it confronted the disappointing physical realities of the city. Not only did the RIK 1965-1985 focus on modernising Jakarta, but it also focused on improving the infrastructure. The development plan covered a radius of fifteen kilometres with the National Monument as the focal point, thus symbolising the continued pursuit of the nationalist and revolutionary aims introduced by Soekarno’s Mercu Suar policy in 1960 (Angkatan Bersendjata 1966a: 3). The National Monument, familiarly known as MONAS, would be modelled after an Egyptian obelisk and carved with symbolic references, including that of lingga yoni (the male and female reproductive organs), and built to dimensions strictly based on the date of Indonesia’s independence.10 One of the key developmental goals in RIK 1965-1985 was for Indonesia’s negotiations in international politics to be channelled not only through formal diplomacy and political conferences, but also cultivated through sporting and cultural activities (Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1966: 4). The obsession with international attention was also evident in RIK 1965-1985, which listed a substantial inventory of hotels, a sporting complex, recreational facilities, commercial facilities, and conference centres with international standards or bersifat internasional (‘international in character’) (ibid.: 4). The RIK 1965-1985 further identifies several acute problems that the city needed to deal with, including flooding and traffic congestion. The main cause of traffic congestion was considered to be unruly and uncoordinated zoning; at the height of the national development project, the volume of vehicles on the roads was not seen as a problem. Especially given Sukarno’s earlier promotion of the automobile, according to his political ideologies, as a modern form of transportation, the rapidly increasing number of vehicles on the roads did not seem to raise any alarms. Instead, according to the RIK 1965-1985, mixed land use was identified as one of the primary problems causing ‘mixed traffic’. Mixed land use was seen to have led to a mixture of activities, such as trading, retail, and office work that all utilised a single 10 Lingga Yoni is a traditional concept of procreation symbolised with a tenon and pin to represent the male and female organs. Lingga Yoni is intended to represent harmony, balance and fertility. The architect, Soedarsono, who carried out the project incorporated the numbers 17, 8, and 45 into the dimensions of the MONAS to represent the date of the Proclamation of Independence.

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Figure 9.2 Comparison between the existing road network (left) and the proposed expansion (right)

Source: RIK 1965-1985: 12-13

network, and consequently overwhelmed it. Another identified problem was related to the inadequate traffic junctions that connected major and secondary roads. Inadequate planning of the traffic network was perceived to be the cause of traffic congestion. This led to a major proposal to not only expand the road networks across Jakarta, but also to revamp major intersections along the main avenue, as seen in Figure 9.2. Between 1967 and 1969, a rehabilitation programme was planned for the Jakarta Municipality under the leadership of Governor Ali Sadikin and the People’s Council. However, there was a conscious effort to distance this program from the Mercu Suar policy (1959-1965) of the previous decades. The Mercu Suar policy was considered one-sided, with plans centred solely upon Protocol Avenue and a number of monumental buildings that were symbolic of the ideology of the Progressive Revolution while neglecting the needs of the common people, whose involvement in building the city was ignored or largely trivialised. In 1961, a high ranking official in the Jakarta Municipality, Mr. Tangkilisan, even noted that the people of Jakarta ‘paid more attention to revolution than orderly living’ (Surjomiharjo 1977: 77). The RIK 1965-1985 and the 1967-1969 Rehabilitation Programme therefore operated on the philosophy that the city’s development must protect and address the daily needs and demands of the urban inhabitants. Indeed, during this time, tangible changes, with a special emphasis on order and regulation, could be seen and felt throughout Jakarta. As someone on the

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street commented during this period, ‘Jakarta changes every three months’ (Surjomiharjo 1977: 77). However, Jakarta’s existing revenue and borrowings were far from sufficient for sustaining or ensuring the successful completion of such ambitious projects and visions. Ali Sadikin was faced with the challenge of not only implementing and executing these plans effectively, but also ensuring that they remained financially realistic. Thus, it was necessary to consider new ‘unconventional’ ways to increase tax revenue to fund these large projects. As well as legalising gambling, Sadikin introduced a national lottery, known as LOTTO and NALO-DJAJA, which survived for about six years. Gedung Nalo (the Nalo Building) was built as a dedicated venue for the national lottery, under the name Yayasan Rehabilitasi Sosial (Social Rehabilitation Foundation). Even though Soekarno was firmly against the promotion of gambling, which he believed to be against Indonesian morality and social values, the mounting national debt that had been accumulated by his very own Mercu Suar projects had made legalising gambling a necessary solution. Gedung Nalo soon gained the reputation of being ‘a source of new possibilities’ that would provide relief for the financial burden of Jakarta’s population. As part of the plan to increase revenue and foreign spending in Jakarta, there was also a great drive to improve the tourism industry in the city. The renovation of heritage buildings was seen as a great way to attract foreign tourists to Jakarta. The first stage of the revitalisation involved six projects: the Angke Mosque, built in 1740; the Sawah Lio al Mansoer Mosque in Djembatan Lima, built in 1780; the Tugu Church in Cilincing, built in 1630; and next to it, the Marunda Mosque, built in 1640; the Alam Cilincing Mosque, built in 1640; and the old Kota Intan Bridge near Pasar Ikan (the Fish Market), built in 1629. Other projects included Balai Kota Tua (formerly Stadhuis in Dutch, or Town Hall), built in 1628, and the remnants of the Benteng Betawi (formerly Kasteel van Batavia ‘Castle of Batavia’ in Dutch) built in 1612-1620, which was being used as a warehouse for the Pasar Ikan (the Ikan Market). A curious connecting tunnel between the Benteng Betawi and the Balai Kota Tua would later become a major tourist attraction for those interested in colonial architecture. Unfortunately, the former Stadhuis (City Hall), which was once used as the headquarters of a District Military Command (Kodim 0503), had not been well maintained, and the foundation was gradually deteriorating due to repeated flooding, causing further structural damage to the building. In addition to this revitalisation plan, a huge emphasis was placed on building hotels to accommodate the anticipated increase in tourism. Out of the total amount of capital generated for developing these hotels, nearly

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65 percent came from foreign investment. By 1975, about 13,000 additional rooms were to be completed and ready to meet the anticipated surge in tourism that year that would follow a major campaign to boost tourism into Jakarta (Kompas, 1972b: 10). To incentivise the building of hotels, the government waived taxes on items such as carpets and air conditioners (Indonesia Raya 1970b: 2). Soon, filling hotel rooms became a performance indicator for the tourism industry and a certain preoccupation with hotel development emerged. Not only was the maintenance and revitalisation of numerous historic buildings considered important to ‘raise self-worth for the current generation’, but it would also attract tourists to visit Jakarta and ‘fill the hotel rooms’—a key strategy for increasing the inflow of foreign exchange (Indonesia Raya 1970c: 2). In addition to the new hotels and multi-storey buildings being constructed on the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues, several existing structures in the older parts of the city were undergoing renovation. The upgrading of buildings within the existing urban fabric necessarily meant substantial vertical expansion. In 1971, the old Pasar Glodok (Glodok Market) underwent construction to be turned into a multi-storey commercial building equipped with parking spaces. Levels 1, 2, and 3 were planned to accommodate the existing business owners from the Glodok and Pancoran markets. Upon completion, the business owners were expected to make a one-off payment of IDR 145,000 (US $ 370) per square metre, which could be paid in a lump sum or in instalments.11 Hayam Wuruk Indah was another commercial centre that underwent similar renovation and upgrading. Across the street from it was Komplex Jin Pin on Gajah Mada Road, which was being turned into an eleven-storey hotel, with a few flats to accommodate residents who had to be relocated from a nearby location while their houses were undergoing renovation (Indonesia Raya 1970a: 2). Despite the major expansion and upgrading of buildings across Jakarta, housing shortages remained a persistent problem. As a result, housing disputes were on the rise. According to the head of the Housing Authority the number of housing disputes in Jakarta had risen every year, with 95 percent of the disputes involving houses with Surat Izin Perumahan/SIP (Housing Permits), previously known (in Dutch) as Vergunning tot Bewoning/VB. Further, the failure to address housing shortages in Jakarta meant that these housing disputes would continue to increase with the growth of the population. In 1968, for example, the number of housing disputes increased

11 Based on the currency rate in 1971 (US$ 1 = IDR 391).

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to 278 from just 174 in the previous year. By 1971, it was expected that there would be 1000 disputes (Kompas 1972c: 5). The rise in the number of housing disputes sent the message that greater government presence and intervention would be necessary. However, according to Jellinek (1991), the minimal intrusion of the government prior to the 1970s was a form of empowerment: a blessing in disguise for the kampung population. The lack of top-down impositions during this time facilitated the operation of the existing informal structure that the majority of the population, which was largely made up of kampung dwellers, had been accustomed to. They had grown used to having to cater to their own needs, and therefore had little or no expectations of the government in the form of public amenities. With the weak economy at the end of Soekarno’s presidency, the kampung dwellers had to create jobs and build homes and social security for themselves. The government’s welfare objectives were largely ineffective, with policies that were easily bypassed. At the same time, the majority of the population still relied on their own appointed headmen to keep out any government intervention (Jellinek 1991: 177). This also meant that disputes of all kinds, especially between newcomers and long-time residents, became more and more prevalent and convoluted. One of the main aims of the major reforms, then, was to increase government intervention and control over the daily activities of the population: it was considered absolutely crucial that every contractual dealing came into the light and that the capital city’s government had full knowledge and control over these financial transactions. Several documentary films called Pelita Jaya (‘Light of Prosperity’), made by the government during this time as a tool for propaganda, reveal a great emphasis on improving public amenities, with Governor Ali Sadikin seeking to provide the best possible public service in Jakarta (Djakarta Times 1969: 1). In 1971, a new law was passed by the capital city’s government, which demanded that every rental activity be reported and a ‘donation’ of 10 percent of the rental cost be paid to the Housing Authority.12 The Authority was becoming increasingly concerned after learning that rental activities had become more of a private matter and that the involved parties simply exchanged mutual agreements between themselves without reporting to or involving the Housing Authority. By doing so, they avoided registering 12 It is not clear whether the 10 percent rental value ‘donation’ was a one-off payment or a recurring payment demanded by the government. However, given the aim of the government to generate revenue for the development project through these rental fees, it seems likely that a steady income was expected, which would make a recurring payment a more plausible scenario.

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or paying the 10 percent fee that was required by law. This was a cause for concern for the city’s government, especially considering that the profit made by the landlords was substantial; unreported renting activities meant a loss of revenue, which could have gone into supporting the development and rehabilitation programme in the capital (Kompas 1972c: 5). Meanwhile, to camouflage the political tension between the first postindependence regime and the New Order, the principle of Progressive Revolution and Pancasila became accentuated.13 For instance, on Labour Day 1966, Suharto attempted to downplay the importance of class while at the same time aligning himself with the ideals of Pancasila and Progressive Revolution which the population had been brought up to uphold (i.e., through Soekarno’s speeches and influence over the past twenty years). Suharto later added that, even though he believed that the worker’s struggle was not about class, it did not mean that the regime was not anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist. The manifestation of this anti-imperialist ideology came in the form of structures that were intended to overshadow the existing structures built during the Dutch colonial era. The new Bank Negara Indonesia/BNI, completed around 1946, stands tall and proud next to what seems to represent the fading glory of the colonial legacy, the once magnificent Stasiun Kota (Kota Station). Indeed, the modernist International Style as shown in the BNI and a few dozen other buildings commissioned during this time was seen as ‘embodying the spirit of revolution’, with no imperial connection whatsoever (Kusno 2010: 127). The lack of an association between imperialism and the International Style provided the necessary architectural language to build, in many cases, from a tabula rasa—thus symbolically offering a clean start, without the shadow or memory of colonialism. The ideology of Progressive Revolution also manifested in the shift from focusing on sophisticated retail outlets to relying on mass-produced manufacturers. In 1963, Soekarno presented the building of the Sarinah department store as ‘God’s will for the fulfilment of a “socialist” Indonesian society’, where ‘common people enjoy a proper life materially, as described in the local legends. Whatever you plant grows luxuriously, while everything is cheap. And this has been the ideal of the Indonesian people since hundreds of years’ (Soekarno 1963). Soekarno’s emphasis for the development of a socialist society was on the distribution of goods; as a department store, Sarinah would fulfil this very role. Soekarno insisted that, while the department 13 Next to the article about Soekarno’s speech on Labour Day in 1966 was an article about Suharto’s disapproval of communism and assertion that one does not need to be a communist to be a progressive revolutionary.

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store may at first seem to be a place mainly for women to obtain their daily needs, it would become a common people’s distribution apparatus and thus act as a ‘price stabiliser’ for all the goods in the nation. Drawing examples from several foreign cities, including Moscow, Ulan Bator, and Prague, Soekarno asserted: Nobody should think that a department store is a luxury project, no! A department store is a socialist apparatus. In our efforts to make money for development purposes we have likewise promoted tourism. One should not think that promoting tourism is a luxury idea, no! We promote tourism to get money for development purposes, development towards Indonesian socialism. (Soekarno 1963)

While following in the same spirit, Sadikin had a more practical motivation for continuing to develop the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues into the new governmental and commercial centres of Jakarta, respectively. This marked the beginning of a new way of life for Jakarta’s residents. Jellinek (1991: xix) points out that the forces that destroyed the central city slums and small-scale income-earning activities in Jakarta were reminiscent of what happened in London a hundred years earlier. The rise of mass production manufacturing undercut the traditional forms of petty production and trade, while at the same time changing the urban configuration so that consumer activities shifted indoors, at the huge expense of pedestrian life. There was also increasing hostility towards street activities, especially amongst the middle class. This chapter has also revealed the huge role of the Ali Sadikin administration in reinforcing this fear through the massive clean-up of the city’s streets, which inadvertently created a stigma around many of the activities that had been conducted in the streets. The clean-up operation also necessarily meant the destruction of slums along the Sudirman and Thamrin Avenues, though not without resistance from the residents. For instance, the construction of the Soviet Embassy in 1971, which necessitated the eviction of many families to free up land, sparked huge outcries and resistance (Djakarta Post 1971a: 1; Djakarta Post 1971b: 1; Kompas 1972e: 1). Other forms of negotiation took place in the process of this expansion. In the midst of the slum clearance and demolition to make way for the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues and the construction of the Sarinah department store, the Hotel Indonesia, and many other skyscrapers, a traditional kampung called Kebun Kacang was bypassed because its land was swampy and low lying, and therefore considered unsuitable for a

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construction site (Jellinek 1991: 171). Over time, however, Kebun Kacang became a refuge for those facing eviction in other places, gradually becoming an established and densely populated neighbourhood. The first inner-city housing project would later be done in Kebun Kacang to serve as model housing for the poor in Jakarta. With greater exposure to outsiders and newcomers, the residents of the inner-city kampungs faced dramatic changes in lifestyles and mind-sets. There were not only new tensions between long-time residents and newcomers, but also between the traditional values of reciprocity and modern values of monetary exchange. Given the lack of public amenities and resources, the act of sharing needed to be stretched even further, including new people from rural areas that the existing residents had not necessarily built trust with. Further, if they had lived austerely with little aspiration in the colonial period and early years of independence, their increased prosperity in the 1970s made their sense of impoverishment and discontent more evident. With an increasing consumerist culture in the kampungs, the population began to feel envious and embarrassed by their lack of modern possessions. This was only exacerbated by the increasingly visible gap between the rich and the poor (ibid.: 171). So far, we have seen the manifestation of the ideology of development disseminated through the RIK 1965-1985, in which the main aim was to address social problems by aligning them with the larger aim of the revolution. Under the banner of Progressive Revolution, the architectural style adopted since the Soekarno era had been both void of any imperial references and deliberately aimed at overshadowing the existing structures that had been built during colonial times. Along the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues, several structures were built to express this socialist ideology during the early independence years. However, by the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the New Order and Ali Sadikin manipulated the same socialist ideology to turn the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues into a true haven for foreign investment and a new commercial centre filled with hotels and department stores. In the process, residents of the old kampungs along the avenues faced evictions and slum clearances as part of the second phase of the clean-up operation in the capital city, as indicated in Figure 9.1. The systematic clearance of traditional kampungs went hand-in-hand with the clearance of all street activities, thus creating a stigma around any pedestrian activity and simultaneously triggering a retreat indoors. This retreat indoors was not only a manifestation of the campaign to create a physically clean and beautiful city, but also became an indication of the morally sound and socially safe city, as discussed in the next section.

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9.4.2 Penertiban Ibukota (Ordering of the Capital City) In spite of huge resistance, the clean-up of Jakarta was executed aggressively all across the city, especially along what were considered the ‘major’ roads, including the Protocol Avenue and a series of Economy Roads. Ultimately, it was the focus on cleaning up the city and recreating an image befitting a metropolis that truly established the extensive development along the Sudirman Avenue, as an extension from Thamrin Avenue and the Merdeka Square area (Djakarta Post 1971d: 1). With Merdeka Square area retaining its governmental function, given its high concentration of government offices, including a 17-storey Balai Kota (Town Hall) newly built in 1966, Sudirman Avenue soon became the new financial centre. While this Penertiban Ibukota (‘Ordering of the Capital City’) operation may be credited for the successful establishment of the Protocol Avenue and several Economy Roads—all crucial for the future competitiveness of Jakarta as an international city—it also placed the city’s citizens into categories of deviance and instilled a sense of fear and hostility between these constructed categories (Bunnell, Drummond, and Ho 2002: 256). Certain activities became stigmatised, triggering a retreat from the outdoors especially amongst the middle classes who wished to distance themselves from the ‘deviants’ in society. Meanwhile, the city’s government expressed concern at the exposure of its ‘good and responsible’ citizens to the ugly and obscene sights of soliciting, prostitution, loitering, and homelessness.14 It was therefore not so much the act of prostitution as the visibility of the subjects involved that was morally condemned. Their visibility was perceived as contagious, with great risk of tainting the moral groundings of Jakarta’s ordinary citizens. The slogan kebersihan adalah sebagian dari iman (‘cleanliness is a part of religious faith’), which was visibly spread across the city, seemed to encompass not only physical cleanliness, but also social orderliness and moral cleanliness, which also underpinned the policies imposed during this period. As Ali Sadikin entered his second term as governor in 1972, he asserted that the focus for the next five years would be on creating order. He believed that an orderly city would stimulate the inhabitants to work and live there. Order would cultivate a positive climate for development, and would attract investments and encourage more businesses to explore the market in the capital. While recognising that some groups would inevitably be disadvantaged and their interests sacrificed in the process of creating order, 14 This anxiety can be clearly discerned in Djakarta Post (1971c: 3) and Mohamad Ali (Raden) (1969: 123).

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Sadikin was adamant that it was all edukatif (‘educational’) and necessary in the process of heightening order in Jakarta (Kompas 1972d: 2). If one were to pass by the areas of Jalan Senen, Lautze, Pasar Boplo, Tjikini, and Djatinegara in 1966, one would be confronted with the disgusting sight of neglected piles of rubbish, which raised concerns about the spread of diseases. The government continued to struggle to maintain and supply sufficient rubbish trucks to replace the existing ones that had to be abandoned while awaiting repair (Kompas 1966c: 2). The city was clearly in desperate need of systematic cleaning, but first it required the additional funds necessary to mobilise this process. Recognising the short-term tendency of Indonesia’s governance especially given the shortage of funds, key policy-makers including the then minister of DKI Jakarta, Dr. Sumarno, emphasised that the clean-up of Jakarta must not be done only for special occasions, such as international conferences, but instead comprehensively and continually.15 Yet again in March 1966, in anticipation of the upcoming Conference of The New Emerging Forces/CONEFO, the city’s government found itself in desperate need of quickly cleaning up Jakarta in order to create a respectable image for the capital city. The sight of rubbish may be detrimental for the cause of upgrading the image of the capital city. However, the sight of sampah masyarakat (‘social rubbish’), made up of prostitutes, loiterers, and the homeless was considered to pose an even greater threat to the achievement of this goal (Mohamad Ali (Raden) 1969: 123). By 1972, homelessness was identified as a major cause for concern in the city’s anticipated booming tourism industry. Plans were executed to educate the 10,000 loiterers and homeless to prepare them for transmigration into other regions in Indonesia. Those who refused education or failed to pass would face the threat of being returned to their places of origin in the rural areas, where insufficient levels of development had triggered their migration to the capital in the first place. Increased development in other regions was therefore deemed crucial for reducing the appeal of big cities and as a deterrent from migrating to the city in search for job opportunities (Kompas 1972f). The continued eradication of loiterers, hawkers, beggars, homeless people, and prostitutes was intended to increase discipline amongst the residents of Jakarta. After some consideration of strategies, the government decided that the clean-up operation ought to be announced in advance, even though some argued that prior warning would reinforce complacency and a lack of urgency, as loiterers could delay moving away until the very last minute. 15 Quoting from Antara (1966); Angkatan Bersendjata (1966b: 2).

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Without notice, however, it was feared that there would be more victims of forced eviction on the day of the scheduled operation. The first stage of the clean-up operation would include Gunung Sahari, Gadjah Mada, Hayam Wuruk, Pintu Ketjil, Taman Fatahillah, and Pinangsia Raya. The second would include Sudirman, Bunderan Senayan, Melawai, and Sisingamangaraja, and the third would include Matraman Raya, Jatinegara Timur, Bekasi, and Suprapto. The operation would involve putting up signs warning loiterers, the homeless, and prostitutes that if they were found wandering between 6 AM and 10 PM, they would be handed over to a rehabilitation centre in Cempaka Putih. In addition, the government provided areas in Bekasi, Tjengkareng, Tjibinong, and Bogor to accommodate the increasing number of gelandangan (‘loiterers’) in the city, where they would be given education and equipped for transmigration to other areas. By calling for the help of the larger population in addressing the issue of gelandangan, whether monetarily or through providing equipment and facilities, Dr. Sumarno further heightened public awareness of the presence of the Other, thus creating a contempt for street activities and hostility towards a certain category of the population.16 The increasingly common sight of prostitutes wandering in Jakarta, especially visible in Jos Sudarso bypass and Tanjung Priok, similarly created great unease for the city’s government. By 1971, the number of prostitutes in North Jakarta had reached 1650. Their obvious presence in the streets and their regular encounters with nearby residents and passers-by was a great cause for anxiety. Thus, a dedicated space to contain Wanita P, as they were called, was considered necessary to keep them out of sight of the general public. Additionally, a rehabilitation centre called Wisma Mulja Djaja was established so that the women could be given a special religious education. Eight of the women who completed the ‘education’ were subsequently transferred to PT Muruasih, where they were then trained to become bus conductors. This collaboration was considered an effective rehabilitation strategy, especially given that the bus company, which relied on loans from the government, was in the process of expansion—meaning that it would be in need of new bus conductors (Djakarta Post 1971c: 3). Similar to prostitution and homelessness, the sight of general loitering was detrimental to the image of the metropolis; its presence in the streets of Jakarta posed a great threat to Jakarta’s ambition of becoming a friendly international city for tourists and visitors. While it was important for the capital city to give the impression of safety, the increasing number 16 Quoting from Antara (1966); Angkatan Bersendjata (1966b: 2).

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of unemployed migrants into Jakarta had been identified as a major factor in the surge in crime rates. Many migrants were unable to find stable employment, and as a result they became involved in illicit activities, such as gambling, prostitution, and drugs; areas where individuals were visibly seen wandering or loitering also became associated with increased risk of robbery and mugging. Despite periods of improved safety, particularly in the late 1960s, the continued urbanisation and rapid transformation of Jakarta both demographically and physically meant that perceived safety was largely variable. Interestingly, certain parts of the city during this period were considered to be good indicators of the overall level of safety in Jakarta. For example, based on the Operasi Budhi (‘Moral Operation’), which was undertaken to improve safety and reduce crimes, the existing commercial centre of Glodok and Harmonie were considered a ‘safety barometer’ for the whole capital city. In a matter of weeks following the Operasi Budhi, the residents and business owners in the Glodok and Pancoran area claimed that the areas seemed ‘more peaceful and less congested’ (Kompas 1966b: 2). Residents felt threatened by the presence of tax collectors on the premises; suggesting the negative correlation between the presence of tax collectors ‘in a certain green uniform’ and the level of perceived safety (Kompas 1966b: 2). This implies a tension between the tax collectors and the residents; the presence of tax collectors in the neighbourhood was clearly seen as a threat to the livelihoods of the residents. Of course, the reduction of traffic congestion and improvements in general cleanliness also helped induce a feeling of improved safety in the area. These changes improved the safety of the area so much that the storeowners felt able to extend their store opening hours, which had previously been limited to the morning hours, into the afternoon. While many of the programmes were considered successful, others faced greater resistance, for example in addressing the problem of pedagang kaki lima/PKL (‘wild merchants/hawkers’).17 The overall lack of affordable retail spaces and facilities had spurred the growth of informal markets on railway tracks and other temporary locations. The RIK 1965-1985 recognised this as indicative of the ‘rising demand’ for conveniently located markets and commercial centres, and the continued growth of these informal markets served to suggest that a persistent demand for their services was not being met by the formal amenities in the city (Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1966: 7). 17 For further information on the problems associated with PKL, see ‘Projek Senen diserbu pedagang kakilima’ (Squatters retaliated against the authority in Project Senen) (Djakarta Post 1971e: 1).

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At the end of 1966, a company called PD. Pasar Djaya was established to help oversee and monitor the development of pasar-pasar (‘markets’) in Jakarta. Several markets, such as the ones in Glodok, Pasar Pagi, Majestik, Blok A, Melawai, and Kebajoran Lama had undergone modernisation and renovation projects, which by 1972 had incurred an expense of Rp 4 billion (US $ 9.64 million) paid through PD Pasar Djaya.18 The construction of new markets was quite costly, as it involved freeing up lands that had been originally occupied by slums and traditional kampungs, in addition to the distribution of compensation for their relocation. Despite the provision of new stalls, the problem of PKL remained. PKL tended to station themselves strategically on the fringes of formal pasar-pasar, to the dismay of stall owners and renters who paid monthly rent/remuneration for the right to sell their goods there. Furthermore, it was discovered that many stalls remained empty because the rent was too costly for most merchants; instead, many existing merchants occupied free spaces outside the building in the attempt to attract customers. In areas like Bendungan Hilir, this alternative method of selling goods became disruptive as the PKL overflowed into the roads, blocking traffic and causing great distress for the daily commuters (Kompas 1972a: 5-6).

9.5 Conclusions This chapter has shown the role of the ideology of development as linked to the notion of cleanliness and order in turning the Thamrin and Sudirman Avenues into the new governmental and financial centres, respectively. The conflict between the existing urban fabric and the proposed plan for the city resulted in clashes between the authorities and the existing residents. Land disputes, the freeing of land, and criminality necessitated constant negotiation throughout the process of expansion. The government and residents of Jakarta may at the time have been nervous about their exposure to the illicit activities taking place in the metropolis, but the desperate need to generate income to fund development and rehabilitation projects in the capital became the top priority. So, while the ideology of religious morality—often linked to physical and moral cleanliness—was continuously emphasised, compromises had to be made for the overall fulfilment of the development agenda of the capital city. The rapid emergence of a neoliberal economy during this ten-year period was therefore strongly linked to the 18 Based on the currency rate in 1972 (US$1=IDR415).

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urgency of generating revenue for development projects in the capital city. Arguably, the retreat from public urban spaces perpetuated by the relatively recent trend of the shopping mall could therefore be said to be a legacy of Ali Sadikin’s governance of Jakarta. Importantly, this chapter has highlighted that even though between 1966 and 1977 the ideology of development was presented as a tool to create order, it also became a powerful tool for distancing and differentiating groups from each other, such as newcomers and long-time residents, and the Wanita P and Jakarta’s ‘good’ citizens. Thus, ideology continued to be used as a catalyst to create difference. Indeed, the execution of Penertiban Ibukota which was largely considered successful during this time was in part attributed to the consequent development of categories and ‘heterotopias’ of deviance, which in the longer term cultivated a mind-set of fear—which, in turn, would define the continued growth of Jakarta for at least the next twenty years.

Bibliography Adorno, T.W. (1973), Negative Dialectics, Ashton, E.B. (trans.). New York: Seabury Press [1st edition 1966]. Angkatan Bersendjata (1966a), ‘Rentjana Induk Kota Djakarta: Tetapkan Rentjana Perkembangan jang Sedjadjar untuk Periode 20 Tahun j.a.d.’, 5 March: 3. — (1966b), ‘Pembersihan Ibukota harus setjara kontinu.’ 11 March: 2. Antara (1966), 10 March. Bunnell, T., Drummond, L.B.W., and Ho, K.C. (eds.) (2002), Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Cook, D. (2001), ‘Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique’, Philosophy and Social Criticism. 27(1): 1-20. Djakarta Post (1971a), ‘Wild slums in the Soviet Embassy on Jl Thamrin’, 11 January: 1. — (1971b), ‘Lima Keluarga Tantang Perintah Gubernur DCI’, 13 January: 1. — (1971c), ‘Wanita2 P jang berkeliaran akan ditertibkan’, 19 January: 3. — (1971d), ‘Projek Senen diserbu pedagang kakilima’, 27 January: 1. Djakarta Times (1969), ‘Ali Sadikin: Djakarta to Give Best Possible Public Service.’, 5 December: 1. Goldblum, C., and Wong, T.C. (2000), ‘Growth, Crisis and Spatial Change: A Study of Haphazard Urbanisation in Jakarta, Indonesia’, Land Use Policy, 17(1): 29-37. Indonesia Raya (1970a), ‘Pimpinan DPRD-GR/DCI Djakarta Tindjau Daerah2 Peremadjaan’, 9 January: 2. — (1970b), ‘Djakarta Masih Perlu 3 Ribu Kamar Hotel’, 3 February: 2.

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— (1970c), ‘Pemerintah DCI Mulai Dengan Pemugaran Gedung-gedung Bersedjarah’, 3 March: 2 Jellinek, L. (1991), The Wheel of Fortune: The History of a Poor Community in Jakarta. Sydney, London: Allen and Unwin. Kompas (1966a), ‘Untuk menjadi Progresif Revolusioner tidah perlu Komunis’, 2 May: 1. — (1966b), ‘Glodok barometer keamanan ibukota?’ 18 May: 2. — (1966c), ‘Demi Kesehatan, Sampah Perlu Ditertibkan’, 28 July: 2. — (1972a), ‘Djakarta Perlukan Rp 2 Miljar Setahun Untuk Bangun Pasar2’, 24 January: 5-6. — (1972b), ‘185.000.194 Dollar Untuk Investasi Hotel’, 29 January: 10. — (1972c), ‘Baru 62 Kontrak-Mengontrak Rumah Jang Dilaporkan Dinas Perumahan DCI Djaja’, 31 January: 5. — (1972d), ‘Langkah DCI untuk Lima Tahun Mendatang lebih diarahkan pada penertiban’, 23 February: 2. — (1972e), ‘Penertiban bangunan-bangunan liar segera dilaksanakan’, 24 February: 1. — (1972f), ‘Penertiban Ibukota’, 17 March. Kusno, A. (2000), Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space, and political Cultures in Indonesia. New York: Routledge. — (2010), The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia. Durham, London: Duke University Press. — (2013), After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lantang, A.J. (1971), ‘Night club di Indonesia masih kampungan’, Djakarta Post, 17 February: 4. Lim, M. (2011), ‘Transient civic spaces in Jakarta demopolis’, in Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia, Douglass, M., Ho, K.C., and Giok, L.O. (eds.), 211-230. London: Routledge [1st edition 2007]. Mohamad Ali (Raden) (1969). Djakarta Djaya Sepandjang Masa. Jakarta: Pemerintah Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta. Rencana Induk Kota/RIK 1965-1985 (1966), Jakarta: Pemerintah Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta. Ricklefs, M.C. (2001), A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sadikin, A. (1977), Gita Jaya: catatan H. Ali Sadikin, Gubernur Kepala Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, 1966-1977. Jakarta: Pemerintah Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta. Shane, D.G. (2011), Urban Design since 1945: A Global Perspective. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Soekarno (1949), Lahirnya Pantja-Sila: Bung Karno Menggembleng Dasar-Dasar Negara, 2nd ed. Jogjakarta: Goentoer.

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— (1963), President Soekarno’s Speech when planting the first pile of the ‘Sarinah’ Department Store at Jalan Thamrin, Djakarta. — (1966), President Soekarno’s Speech on the appointment of Major General KKO Ali Sadikin as the Governor of DKI Jakarta Raya, Istana Negara, Djakarta. Surjomihardjo, A. (1977), Pemekaran Kota Jakarta (The Growth of Jakarta). Jakarta: Djambatan. Vickers, A. (2005), A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuidervaart, L. (2011), ‘Theodor W. Adorno’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zalta, E.N. (ed.). Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2011/entries/adorno/

About the author Pawda Tjoa is a senior researcher at the London-based think tank New Local Government Network (NLGN). She received her training in architecture from Pennsylvania State University and practiced briefly in Washington D.C. before subsequently completing an MPhil and PhD in architecture and urban studies at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis explored the relationship between public space and political ideology in post-independence Jakarta. Email: [email protected]

10 Religious Gentrification: Islam and the Remaking of Urban Place in Jakarta Hew Wai Weng

Abstract In recent years, religious terms such as ‘Islamic’, ‘halal’, and ‘Sharia’ have been deployed across cities in Malaysia and Indonesia to describe various places such as hotels, gated communities, and beauty salons. This chapter aims to explore the complex relations between Islam and the remaking of urban places in contemporary Muslim-majority cities. Using Depok in Indonesia as the main case study and Bangi in Malaysia as a secondary example, I examine how and under what conditions middle-class Muslim identities and aspirations are materialised in urban settings through the processes of place-making. By proposing the term ‘religious gentrification’, I argue that urban renewal and religious revival are a co-articulated process—on one hand, urban places are redefined to accomplish Islamic principles; on the other, Islamic practices are appropriated for facing urban conditions. Keywords: Religious Gentrification, Islam, urban place, middle-class

10.1 Introduction In recent years, religious terms such as ‘Islamic’, ‘halal’, and ‘Sharia’ have been deployed across cities in Malaysia and Indonesia to describe various places such as hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, gated communities, massage parlours, and beauty salons. Such spatial Islamisation appears at a greater scale in the periurban regions of Kuala Lumpur (e.g. Bangi) and Jakarta (e.g. Depok). Islam is playing an increasingly visible role as a source of the ideas, practices, and representations behind such changing urban landscapes. Who are involved in the production and deployment

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch10

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of these places? What makes such places ‘Islamic’? What do they tell us about Muslim aspirations and their desirable urban lives? How do religious movements transform urban development and, vice versa, how does urban space trigger religious innovations? Generally speaking, pious urban middle-class Muslims are the main producers and consumers of these places. Many of these Muslims are young (30-40 years old), highly educated, working as professionals or businesspersons, have a good income, and are active in various Muslim organisations.1 Instead of rejecting modernity and globalisation, they seek to make sense of them in increasingly Islamic terms. Using the university town of Depok in Indonesia as the main case study and Bangi in Malaysia as a secondary example, this chapter aims to examine how and under what conditions middle-class Muslim identities and aspirations are materialised in urban settings through the processes of place-making. It analyses the spatial dynamics of contemporary Islamisation from three interrelated perspectives: scale (e.g. from Islamic state to Islamic housing), space (e.g. from city centre to urban margin) and place (e.g. from mosques to malls, informal settlements to gated communities). Based on interviews, informal discussions, and ethnographic fieldwork in various islamisically-marked places, this chapter explores how and under what conditions the intersection between middle-class aspirations and religious motivation happens in urban and suburban settings. Depok, located about an hour drive from Jakarta’s city centre, is a stronghold for the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera/PKS), an Islamist party in Indonesia. Its former mayor was from PKS, and the recent one is also endorsed by the party. Bangi, located about a 30-minute drive from Kuala Lumpur, is a stronghold for the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia/PAS), an Islamist party in Malaysia. PAS won the Bangi state constituency for a few terms, yet its splinter party, Amanah (the National Trust Party) took over the seat (renamed to Sungai Ramal) from PAS at the 2019 Malaysian election. For many pious middle-class Muslims, a ‘good’ and ‘liveable’ city should uphold certain religious values. They view urban life in the city centre as ‘too secular’, ‘morally corrupted’, and ‘dominated by non-Muslims and non-religious Muslims’. By inserting religious values into urban places and lives, they therefore attempt to claim their rights to 1 It is important to note that ‘middle-class Muslims’ is not a homogenous entity with a single aspiration. There are contestations of values and practices among them (Hasan 2011; Simone and Fauzan 2013). This chapter focuses on only one segment of the growing middle classes who take Islam seriously in the process of attaining and sustaining their middle-class status and lifestyle.

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reimagine the city and make their cities ‘Islamic’. Realising it is rather difficult to change the political system and establish an ‘Islamic state’, some pious Muslims have shifted the focus of their struggle from the nation to the city. By promoting places such as Muslim gated communities, Muslimah beauty salons, and Sharia-compliant hotels, they see the city as an important site for the realisation of their religious visions. Such places are not only a public expression of Islamic piety, but also sites where Islamic politics, religious businesses, and pious lifestyles interconnect. Focusing only in establishing an Islamic state, some of them extend their influence by appropriating urban places to both meet their religious needs and pursue a middle-class lifestyle, as a way of promoting the ‘Islamic way of modern living’. Recently, a growing literature shows that there is no contradiction between urban development and religious sensibility (Casanova 2013; Becker, Klingan, Lanz, and Wildner 2014; MetroZones 2012; Knott 2010; Schmidt 2012; Sinha 2014; Veer (van der) 2015). Instead of leading to secularisation, sociologist José Casanova suggests, contemporary processes of urbanisation are accompanied by the competitive appropriation of religious resources for group differentiation and congregational associations, as well as by religious innovation and cosmopolitanism from below (2013). Will the intertwining configurations of religiosity and urbanity lead to the ‘making of urban religion’ or the ‘production of religious urbanity’, or both (MetroZones 2012: 7)? Using Depok as an example, I propose the term ‘religious gentrification’ to indicate that urban renewal and religious revival are co-articulated processes: on one hand, urban places are redefined to accomplish Islamic principles; and on the other, Islamic practices are appropriated to face urban conditions.

10.2

From Islamic State to Islamic Housing

Most Indonesians are Muslims, but not many of them live their life according to Islamic principles. Indonesian government is also secular minded and does not implement Sharia laws […] It is difficult to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia. However, we can enforce Islamic values by living together in a Muslim-only compound… We cannot build an Islamic state, but we can build Muslim housing estates. (Field note, 8 January 2013)2 2 This paper is based on formal interviews, informal discussions, and ethnographic fieldwork in various Islamically-marked urban places, especially in the Muslim gated communities in

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In the last few years, there are increasing numbers of gated communities surrounding Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia (see Figure 10.1). Instead of informal neighbourhoods (kampungs: popular settlements with village-like houses on informally registered land, with a rather heterogeneous population), formal housing complexes (perumahan: modern housing units in often gated housing complexes built by property developers on registered land, with a rather homogenous population) are becoming more popular among middle-class Indonesians. On the streets, there are many banners advertising new housing projects. Some of these gated communities promote themselves as Perumahan Muslim (‘Muslim housing complexes’), specifically catering to pious middle-class Muslim families.3 Mostly situated at the edge of city, some of these Muslim-only housing complexes claim to offer a ‘modern, green and Islamic’ living atmosphere to young middle-class Muslim families. They offer facilities such as a mosque, clubhouse, jogging track, Muslim swimming pool, Islamic learning centre, and one-gate security system. While these Muslim clusters share similar ideas with other gated communities—i.e., providing a modern, safe, and comfortable housing environment—Islam is also a defining feature for them, as reflected by their residents (only for Muslims), transactions (Sharia banking), features (mosques in the centre of housing areas), activities (religious classes), and regulations (veiling for female residents). Depok has the highest concentration of Muslim gated communities of all Indonesian cities. Located in the West Java province of Indonesia, on the southern border of Jakarta, Depok is part of the fast-growing greater Jakarta area, best known as the Jabodetabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi) metropolitan region. Depok is a desirable place for many housing developers due to its proximity to the Jakarta city centre, relatively affordable land for housing construction, and a less polluted living environment. In addition, the University of Indonesia in Depok has been a stronghold of the Islamic movement since 1980. Some of these Muslim activists have Depok. As a non-Muslim, I gained access to the developers by contacting their off ices and met residents by joining mosque activities inside the gated housing complexes. In this paper, I quote my informants in two ways. First, if the quotation is based on a formal interview and the informant agrees to use his or her real name, I mention ‘Interview’ followed by the name of the informant and the interview date. Second, if the quotation is based on informal discussion, chitchatting, or/and the informant prefers not to reveal his or her name, I mention ‘Field note’ followed by the date. 3 As one property developer emphasised, most of the gated communities in Indonesia are not religiously themed; those that label themselves ‘Muslim gated communities’ constitute less than 5 percent of the total housing development in Indonesia (Interview, Nur Andi Wijayanto, 17 March 2014).

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Figure 10.1 Muslim Gated Communities in Peri-Urban Jakarta. This map includes both completed housing projects and those that were under construction in 2016. It does not cover all existing Muslim gated communities, only those the author is aware of

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd

continued to work and stay in Depok after their graduation and left an imprint on the urban landscapes. This explains why Depok has become a popular neighbourhood for many pious middle-class Muslims. Let me briefly describe a few Muslim housing complexes in Depok. First, established around 2006, Orchid Realty (Organization of Cyber Housing and Islamic Development) claims to be ‘Indonesian’s first Islamic property developer’, which sees its business as a form of ‘economic jihad’ of providing ‘Sharia-compliant’ housing to pious Muslims. Today, it has more than ten Muslim-only clusters in Depok. Most of these clusters are rather small in

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Figure 10.2 Advertisement for Muslim housing complexes: ‘Living in Modern, Green and Islamic Atmosphere’. This advertisement of the Orchid Village in Depok claims it to be an ‘interesting investment’. It states that that the Orchid Green Village is free from the risk of floods and equipped with facilities such as a mosque, club house, jogging track, Muslim swimming pool, Qur’anic learning centre, one-gate security system, and Biopori environmental system.

Courtesy of Orchid Reality Group

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Figure 10.3 ‘Pilihan Tepat Keluarga Muslim (Right Choice for Muslim Families)’— advertisement of the Pesona Darussalam in Bogor, claiming that Pesona Darusslama is situated in a strategic location (close to Bojong Gede train station) and has facilities such as a one-gate system, praying facilities, sport facilities, and mini markets

Courtesy of Bumi Darussalam

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size (ranging from fifty to a few hundred units), adopt modern minimalist design, and use English names (such as Orchid Residence, Cyber Orchid Park, The Orchid Town House, and The Orchid Green Village) (see Figure 10.2). 4 Second, Bumi Darussalam, established around 2005, promotes its housing as the ‘right choice for Muslim families’ (see Figure 10.3). Its developer told me why he named the housing company ‘Bumi Darussalam’: ‘In Indonesian language, Bumi means earth, meanwhile Darussalam refers to heaven, we aim to create heaven on the earth’ (Interview, Yon Haryono, 9 January 2013). Today, it has about 10 housing complexes in Depok and its adjacent city, Bogor. Similar to Orchid Realty, most of these housing complexes are rather small in size (ranging from fifty to a few hundred units) and adopt modern minimalist exterior design—but they all have Indonesian names (such as Mutiara Darussalam, Pondok Darussalam, Permata Darussalam, and Pesona Darussalam). Another recent Muslim-only housing project in Depok is Pondok Nurul Fikri. Promoting the idea of ‘Islamic Green Living’ (previously ‘Islamic Smart Living’), Pondok Nuril Fikri combines both an Integrated Islamic School and Muslim gated communities with a giant mosque in the same area (see Figure 10.4). While using the English tagline, the developers name the housing types according to Andalusian cities (such as Seville and Cordoba), referring to the historical Islamic civilisation in Europe. A few of these Muslim gated communities have close connections with PKS, a major Islamist party in Indonesia. Some of the housing complexes have even been perceived as Perumahan PKS (‘PKS housing complexes’). Both the developers of Orchid Realty and Bumi Darussalam are PKS sympathisers. As revealed by a joint-developer of one of these housing complexes, during a cadre meeting of PKS back in 2005 a few PKS activists who studied at the University of Indonesia raised the idea of establishing Muslim-only housing complexes (Field note, 3 April 2014). Through different housing projects, the activists-turned-developers brought the idea into realisation as a way to both make profit and promote Islamist ideology. During the campaign period of the 2014 Indonesian parliamentary elections, many flags and banners of PKS were hanging at various spots right outside of the Muslim gated communities in Depok. One of the PKS candidates in the election, Hendra, even lives in one of these gated 4 ‘Minimalist’ has been a major trend in current housing developments in Jakarta and its surroundings. Such design appeals to both small-scale developers and middle-class consumers for its affordable cost, simple features, and modern outlooks. For an example of minimalist housing units, please see figures in this chapter.

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Figure 10.4 ‘Islamic Green Living’—advertisement of the Pondok Nurul Fikri in Depok, stating that most of the units at Pondok Nurul Fikri have sold out, with the exception of the Samarra and Cardova types. It lists the facilities inside the housing complexes, including 24-hour security, a sports hall, mosque, and access to toll ways and a school

Courtesy of Pondok Nurul Fikri

communities, Orchid Residence. He told me frankly, ‘Through Muslim gated communities, we would like to develop an ideal way of Islamic living, a possible blueprint for the Islamic state if Indonesia becomes one’ (Interview, Hendra, 5 April 2014). While there is no open election campaigning within the housing complex, there is a poster inside its mosque stating that Muslims should vote for a political party that upholds Islamic values. The imam and most of the speakers in the mosque of Orchid Residence are also PKS activists. During Friday prayers and Ramadan events, the mosque is open to the public. Perhaps this is an informal way for PKS to expand their influence in the neighbourhood through the mosque’s activities. While not self-identified as a Muslim housing complex, the Tugu Asri housing complex, also located in Depok, has been perceived by many as ‘Perumahan PKS’; in 2014, many key leaders of PKS, such as the former mayor of Depok, Nur Mahmudi, and the former party president, Titaful Sembiring,

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lived there. Situated not far from an Integrated Islamic school, there is a big mosque and swimming pool inside the housing complex. According to voting results, there is high electoral support towards the Islamist party during elections from the residents in and around these Muslim-only and PKS-related housing complexes (Saiful 2014). Given that the demand for such housing estates is expanding, however, some developers are now constructing Muslim gated communities mainly for marketing reasons rather than for a religious commitment or political agenda. Similarly, increasing numbers of middle-class Muslims who are not Islamist-minded and not PKS supporters also reside at such gated communities—a trend that deserves further attention, but is not the focus of this paper. Generally speaking, PKS did not perform well in the national elections (Fealy and White 2008; Tomsa 2012). The presidential candidate endorsed by the Islamist party, Prabowo Subianto, lost in the presidential election in 2014. Aware of the limited support for the Islamist party and its effort to establish an ‘Islamic state’ or the ‘full implementation of Sharia’, some PKS sympathisers have rescaled their Islamisation struggle, not only at the state level and in the political arena, but also at local places and in economic fields. In addition to parliament, they seek to expand their ideologies at various urban sites, such as housing complexes, schools, and leisure places. In addition to the law enforcement provided by the state authorities, they also self-regulate, for example by implementing guidelines for those living in gated communities. By living in a Muslim-only housing complex, some pious middle-class Muslims think that they can live their life according to their understandings of Islam and distance themselves from activities they deem to be ‘un-Islamic’.

10.3

From City Centre to the Peri-urban

‘There are growing cases of illicit sex and immoral behaviours among Muslim youth in Jakarta. Urban life is too secular and morally corrupted […] By living in Muslim housing complexes away from Jakarta city centre, which has a mosque that close to our home, we would like provide our kids with safe and Islamic environment’. (Field note, 8 January 2013) For some pious middle-class Muslims, peri-urban housing complexes are a safe haven for upholding a moral lifestyle and religious values. As the urbanist Abidin Kusno suggests, after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 various Islamic groups have begun ‘claiming their right to reimagine the city and to offer their own versions of utopia’ (Kusno 2013: xxvii). Such

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an Islamisation process takes on a greater scale in the peri-urban areas of Jakarta, such as Depok and Bogor, as I describe in more detail later. Kusno proposes that PKS ‘has for a long time been aiming to turn Jakarta into the governing venter for the implementation of Sharia. How and when is a matter of timing’. For PKS, Sharia ‘will decrease the crime’ and ‘create a better society where harmony and peace prevail’ (ibid.: xxvii). In 2007, the Islamist party supported a retired police general, Adang Dadadjatun, as the governor for Jakarta—‘had he won, Sharia law could have been gradually and systematically implemented in the capital city’—a step that [was] needed for PKS to dominate the 2009 general election’ (ibid.: xxvii). PKS’s attempt to capture Jakarta was not successful. Nevertheless, PKS successfully made inroads in the peri-urban areas, and by 2010 it had taken over Bekasi and Depok and was gaining increasing influence in Tangerang and other parts of greater Jakarta. Some secular-minded activists worried that Jakarta was surrounded by a peri-urban population that was increasingly pro-Sharia (ibid.). Bogor, the city next to Depok, branded itself in 2008 as Indonesia’s first ‘halal city’, after securing a deal with the MUI’s (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, Indonesian Ulama Council) Assessment Institute for Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics (LPPOM-MUI) to make it a pilot ‘halal city’. Diani Budiarto, the Bogor Mayor at that time was the initiator of the city’s halal program; as he said, Bogor should live up to its tagline ‘Beriman’, which means to have faith. ‘Beriman’ is also an abbreviation of ‘bersih, indah dan nyaman’, which means clean, beautiful, and comfortable. LPPOM-MUI claimed that establishing Bogor as a halal city was a move to protect Muslim consumers, in the hope of encouraging restaurants to obtain a halal certificate and to serve halal food that truly adheres to Islamic standards of food preparation. It also advised restaurants that serve pork or have non-halal ingredients in their dishes to display signs alerting customers. Mayor Budiarto moved one step further, planning to ban pigs from Bogor’s slaughterhouses and to limit the selling of pork in Bogor. Such moves have drawn criticism for being discriminatory against religions other than Islam (Halal Media 2011). After Budiarto stepped down in 2013, the ‘halal city’ initiative was dropped as the city’s main agenda. In reality, instead of a top-down political approach or through the implementation of laws, the Islamisation of cities often materialises in diffused ways, through different forms of place-making by various actors. For many pious Muslims, Sharia is not only about the implementation of laws, but also the production and deployment of various places where Islamic values can be upheld, as reflected by the Integrated Islamic Schools (Sekolah Islam

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Terpadu), Muslimah beauty salons, and Muslim gated communities. While not entirely linked to PKS, such places have close relations to the Islamist party and its supporters. In 2014, there are at least 30 Muslim clusters surrounding Jakarta, most of situated in Depok. As I have illustrated, these generally use minimalist design and have a ‘one-gate system’. As mentioned by many developers, the implementation of Islamic values and activities play a more important role in making such housing complexes ‘Islamic’ than the architectural design. Indeed, Islamic principles, as understood by the Islamist-oriented developers, have guided the spatial arrangements of Muslim gated communities as well as the activities available within such compounds. Almost all of these housing complexes have a mosque (which is always in the centre). The mosque is an important site that bonds residents together, as well as acting as a bridge between residents and outsiders. Most of the gated communities open their mosques to the public, so that outsiders can perform prayers there and join other activities. For this reason, the mosque was also the main place where I could gain access to the gated communities and contact with the residents. Some of these housing estates also have other Islamically-marked facilities, such as a Muslim swimming pool (different swimming times for male and female residents), Islamic kindergarten, and Islamic school. Most of the houses inside the clusters have no fence to promote greater interaction among its residents—and to ensure that residents’ activities are constantly under surveillance by their neighbours, so they do not involve themselves in ‘un-Islamic’ activities. Islamic features are also part of the housing arrangement; for example, toilets do not face the kiblat (the praying direction). Inside the houses, there are no lack of Islamic-themed decorations, such as Islamic calligraphies, Islamic calendars, Qur’anic verses, and photos of mosques on the wall. Moreover, the residents in Muslim clusters are expected to observe religious duties such as veiling for female Muslims, and attending prayers and religious classes, as well as following certain regulations, such as not drinking alcohol, smoking, or having dogs. It is important to note that the increasing number of Muslim housing in the peri-urban areas reflects not only the shift of spatial Islamisation from the city centre to the urban margins, but also the shift of housing development from inner Jakarta to its outskirts. As there is not much land left in the centre of Jakarta—except for high-end apartment projects—many new housing developments are coming up in the satellite towns such as Depok, Tangerang, and Bogor. Most of these housing complexes, including Muslim gated communities, are situated amongst informal settlements (kampung).

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It was quite a challenging task for me to find these housing areas, as I had to pass by many small alleys and informal settlements to reach them. While these gated communities are located in areas that are somewhat remote from the city centre, the lifestyles they harbour are not marginal, but are instead becoming more popular. In the next section, I further discuss the shift from kampung to perumahan as a preferable living environment among middle-class Muslims in contemporary Indonesian cities.

10.4

From Kampung to Perumahan

There are security guards at the front gate of our housing complex. Outsiders are not allowed to come in without permission… Unlike in village houses (kampung), crime case is low here. Even we put shoes and motorbikes outside of our houses, they will be safe, no one will steal them… Kampung is also less clean and less organised. Perumahan is more modern, tidy and organised. It is safer for our kids. (Field note, 5 April 2014)

A young Muslim male professional explained how safety, tidiness, and security are the reasons he prefers to stay in a modern housing estate, perumahan, instead of in an informal settlement, kampung. Such notions of security are not much different from the phenomenon of middle-class families living in gated communities in other parts of this world (Low 2001). In many cases, security is not only about acquiring personal and property safety, but also about securing the prestige of being middle-class. Many middle-class Muslim urbanites see modern housing complexes as a more desirable living environment than the kampung, which they perceive as backward and untidy. Moreover, the residents of Muslim gated communities share similar demographic backgrounds and lifestyle choices, which contributes to a sense of community and togetherness. Not only do they share the same religious aspirations and class status, but they are also of a similar age group (early 30s-40s), family size (1-3 kids), educational background (university graduate), and religious values (Islamist-minded). Many of them were born in smaller cities and rural areas in Indonesia, came to Jakarta first to study or to work, and then continued to stay and establish their families in the metropolis. As a few informants mentioned, ‘We share similar educational and occupational background. We are all busy with work and have small kids. There are a lot of things we can discuss in common. There are many activities we can organise together’ (Field note, 5 April 2014).

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Besides their residents sharing a middle-class status and lifestyle, gated communities in Indonesia are often closely related to the notions of ethnicity and morality. Generally speaking, in the past, urban gated communities have been associated with Chinese Indonesians with a middle or upper-class background (Leisch 2002; Hogan and Houston 2002). Chinese Indonesians form an ethnic minority, most of whom are not Muslim, and have been perceived as dominating Indonesian economics. Chinese Indonesians have also been targeted as scapegoats during crises in Indonesia, the most recent being the 1998 riots.5 For these reasons, and although they would not necessarily give them protection from riots, some Chinese Indonesians feel more secure living in an enclosed gated community. However, following the growth of the middle-class among non-Chinese Indonesians, since 2010 gated communities are no longer only associated with Chinese Indonesians. Enclosed housing complexes have gained popularity among middle-class Indonesians (ranging from the lower to upper middle-classes) regardless of their religious and ethnic background. Given that most Indonesians are Muslims, to attract Muslim buyers many recent housing developers have provided a mosque or musholla (‘prayer room’) as facilities in their housing compounds, especially those in Depok and other peri-urban regions of Jakarta. As discussed earlier, some of these gated communities have even positioned themselves as Muslim-only housing complexes, in which nonMuslim are not allowed to buy property or reside. Cultivating piety and upholding morality are among the reasons for the increasing popularity of Muslim gated communities among pious middleclass Muslims. In other words, the intersections of personal safety, class distinctions, and religious assertion contribute to the growth of Muslim-only gated communities. Some residents of Muslim gated communities see themselves as being more religious than other Indonesians. As one of them told me, ‘most Indonesians are Muslims, but not many of them live their life according to Islamic principles. In Muslim clusters, the residents are mainly Muslim berkualitas (Muslim with higher quality). We want to practice Islam in a comprehensive way’ (Field note, 5 April 2014). Some of them also think that by living in an enclosed housing compound with other like-minded Muslims they can distance themselves from participating in some of the local syncretised rituals, commonly practiced in many kampungs, which 5 Over the 13-15 May 1998, at the climax of the Reformasi movement to bring down Suharto’s regime that was spurred by the economic crisis, Jakarta exploded in a fury of looting, burning and rape, directed mostly at the business and residential areas where ethnic Chinese were concentrated. For more details, see Purdey (2006).

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they deem to be ‘un-Islamic and backward’ (Field note, 5 April 2014). In the past, most anthropological works on Indonesian Muslims have been focused on kampungs or rural areas (Beatty 1999; Guinness 2009). Given that more and more Muslim reside in modern housing complexes today, more attention is needed for the study Muslim religiosity in perumahan, in both urban and peri-urban settings. What are the differences between working-class and middle-class religiosity? How do different spatial settings influence religious discourses and practices? In future, I plan to conduct more fieldwork in the gated communities (both Muslim-only and mixed) to further examine the formation, negotiation, and contestation of urban middle-class Muslim religiosities.

10.5

From Mosques to Malls

We should bring mosque activities out into the wider society. There are many Islamic activities inside the mosques, yet most of the targets of our dakwah movement are not mosque-goers. We need a balance between programmes inside and outside of the mosques, so we can spread our messages to people from all walks of life. We should bring Islam to various social media, to the streets, to the malls, and so. (Interview, Firdaus Wong, 27 January 2014)

A Chinese Muslim preacher in Malaysia, Firdaus Wong, suggested that Muslims should preach Islam in various urban places because ‘Islam should not be only confined to the mosques. Islam should be present at every corner in the city’ (Interview, Firdaus Wong, 27 January 2014). As I illustrate in the next section, some bookshops, restaurants, boutiques, and even hospitals in Kuala Lumpur have been Islamically-marked to meet the demand of pious middle-class Muslims. The sacralisation of supposedly nonreligious places (Knott 2010) is also fast paced in Jakarta and its surroundings. Concurrent with Muslim gated communities, there are growing numbers of Integrated Islamic Schools, which mix secular subjects with religious curriculums. Like the Muslim gated communities, many of these schools have close links to PKS and are very popular among middle-class Muslim urbanites. Unsurprisingly, Depok has the highest concentration of Integrated Islamic schools of all cities in Indonesia. I visited one of these schools, in front of which there were billboards stating that the school compound was a smoke-free zone, and that all teachers and students must wear Islamic clothing.

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In this section, I briefly discuss how Islam has been articulated by various actors to appropriate other urban places, such as malls, salons, and restaurants, in Depok. In 2010, the mayor of Depok promoted a big shopping complex, Great Saladin Square, with an Islamic feature. Considered ‘the largest Islamic business complex’ in Indonesia, this complex consists of a series of shophouses with Islamic motifs constructed on 1.5 hectares of land (Kusno 2013: 45). Although the developer of the complex is a non-Muslim Chinese Indonesian (Field note, 6 January 2013), the square features 48 golden domes and 47 minarets, each 25 metres high, to reflect the religion of the majority in Depok. The complex includes enterprises like a ‘showroom bank, mini-market, fast food restaurant, beauty salon, and bakery’ and, while a Chinese restaurant is allowed, only halal food can be served (ibid.: 45). To make the complex more ‘Islamic’, Arifin Ilham, a religious preacher who was invited to promote the square, suggested that a mosque and swimming pool for Muslim people be provided and shopkeepers should wear jilbab (‘female Islamic headscarf’) so that the square becomes ‘a model for doing business following the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad’ (ibid.: 46). The statue of Saladin, the arches, the geometry of the design, and the domes give the square a distinctive Islamic look, yet how much Islamic values are actually reflected in its shops and activities has yet to be explored. Islamisation does not only happen at shopping malls, but also in beauty salons and spas. In recent years, there are growing numbers of Muslimah salons in cities in Malaysia and Indonesia, with taglines such as ‘Shariacompliant beauty’ and ‘where stylish Muslimah are created’. There are many Muslimah salons along Depok’s main street, Margoda Raya Street, where the Saladin Square is located. One of them is Salon Muslimah Sari Soekresno, situated next to a halal restaurant and a Muslim fashion boutique, and opposite to the marketing office of Orchid Realty (one of the property developers of Muslim gated communities described above). The owner of the Sari Soekresno Salon claims that the salon is a site for dakwah (‘religious preaching’). She views working as a form of ibadah (‘worship’), and considers her business to be an avenue for spreading the Islamic message. As a single parent who runs the Muslimah salon independently, she suggests that women’s empowerment, religious preaching, and profit making can coexist. What makes Muslimah salons different from conventional salons? Sari Soekresno says that all treatments at her salon are conducted according to Islamic principles, such as ensuring gender segregation and using halal products. In addition, she also organises religious and Qur’anic classes for her staff.

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Despite being a non-Muslim male researcher, I tried to visit the salon one afternoon. As I expected, after I knocked the door, the female staff member who opened the door was hesitant to talk to me. I asked her whether a non-Muslim female could visit the salon. She politely replied that the salon prefers to serve only female Muslims (Field note, 4 April 2014). After being rejected from entering the Muslimah salon, I decided to have lunch at a halal restaurant next to it, Bebek Goreng Haji Slamet (Haji Slamet Fried Duck). There is a musholla (‘prayer room’) inside the restaurant, as is quite common in many restaurants in Jakarta. Rather uncommon, though, was the ‘halal’ logo on the restaurant menu: most restaurants run by Muslims in Indonesia are assumed to be ‘halal’ (permissible according to Islamic principles). Remarkably, on each table there were two small signs, stating ‘Jalan lupa do’a sebelum makan’ (‘Do not forget to pray before eat’) and ‘Bersyukurlah atas rezeki-Nya’ (‘Thank God for His giving’) (Field note, 4 April 2014). What makes this restaurant more religious than other restaurants is not that it serves halal food, but its commitment to running religious activities both inside and outside of the restaurant. Together with Waroeng Steak and Shake, Bebaqaran, and other eating outlets, the Depok branch of Bebek Goreng Haji Slamet is part of the Spiritual Company Waroeng Group. Proposed by its owner Jodi Brotosuseno and endorsed by a popular preacher Yusuf Mansur, since 2010 Spiritual Company has aimed to transform the conventional business model into one that upholds morality and spirituality, in which, they claim, they develop their business by following the teachings of the Islam. All staff working for the restaurants of Spiritual Company are encouraged to follow Islamic teachings, perform prayers, and recite religious texts at work every day. Moreover, the company judges the staff not only based on their work performance, but also on their religious observance (Zuhri 2011). I had visited another restaurant owned by the Spiritual Company in Yogyakarta, the capital city of Yogyakarta Special Region in Java, Indonesia. All female members of staff in the restaurant donned a veil and nasyid songs (religious-themed pop songs) were played continually when I had my lunch. A member of the staff also told me that there was a monthly religious class held at the restaurant (Field note, 18 March 2014).

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From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur

The spatial dynamics of Islamisation I described above are not peculiar to Jakarta, but also happen in other Muslim-majority cities, such as Kuala Lumpur and Istanbul. Bangi, a university town in the state of Selangor (where the National University of Malaysia is situated), about half an hour drive south of Kuala Lumpur, is a stronghold for PAS, an Islamist party in Malaysia. Bandar Baru Bangi (New Town of Bangi) is a new suburban town that was developed by the Malaysian government in 1970 to host newly middle-class Malay Muslims, who were mostly originally from rural areas. Today, more than 90 percent of the residents of Bangi New Town are Malay Muslims, mainly from middle-class backgrounds. It is also a popular residential town for the government servants who work in nearby Putrajaya, the federal administrative centre of Malaysia. Bangi is a stronghold of Islamic activism and hosts many offices of Islamic organisations, such as ISMA (Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia, Malaysian Muslim Solidarity, a right-wing Muslim NGO) and Islamic Relief (a Muslim charity organisation), as well as Islamic government agencies, such as ILIM (Institut Latihan Islam Malaysia, Malaysian Institute of Islamic Training). Although the shop houses in Bangi rarely use any Islamic architectural idiom, Islam plays an important role in its urban place-making. Places such as Islamicthemed bookstores, Islamic kindergartens, Islamic schools, Sharia-compliant hospitals, Muslimah fashion boutiques, Muslimah beauty salons, and halal restaurants characterise the urban landscape of Bangi. Cinemas and karaoke places are not allowed, as some Islamist-minded politicians think such places might lead to immoral activities. There were various plans to build a cinema in Bangi, but all of the proposals were rejected by the city’s municipal government. In 2002, according to the Bangi state assemblyman at the time, Shafie Abu Bakar from PAS, such rejections were intended to uphold Islamic values. He claimed that most residents in Bangi were against having a cinema in their neighbourhoods, ‘the majority of the people in Bangi, about 97% are Muslims. Bangi folks are religious and prefer going to religious and educational classes.’6 He stated further: ‘having a cinema will lead to vice activities and there will be films not in line with Islamic and Eastern values… we do not want that there to corrupt the minds of our young’. He added, ‘besides, there are cinemas not 6 See The Star Online. (2012, February 15). PAS f irm on Bangi Cinema Ban. The Star Online. Retrieved March 15, 2015 from http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2012/02/15/ PAS-firm-on-Bangi-cinema-ban.

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far from Bangi. We want our place clean, free from such elements’ (Oh 2011). The last statement reflects a contradiction or limitation of the Islamisation of places—while it is easier to make a place (Bangi) clean from ‘un-Islamic’ elements, it is difficult to control a person’s mind and behaviour, because it is still possible to travel to visit a cinema nearby. I would like to mention briefly a couple of places that are currently mushrooming in Bangi that point to two other important matters that intersect with class and religion: first, gender; and second, ethnicity. First, there are growing numbers of places catering specifically to the need of pious female middle-class Muslims, such as a Muslimah gym, Muslimah beauty salons, and Muslimah fashion boutiques. Bangi has the highest concentration of concept stores for various brands of trendy Islamic fashion among all Malaysian cities. One such example is a conceptual boutique café, called Wander Café, that has the tagline ‘Cake, Coffee, Tudung People’. Tudung is a Malay word referring to Muslim headscarves, while ‘Tudung People’ is a brand of these headscarves for women. The café is divided into two parts; one is a ‘Western’ cafe selling coffee (such as cappuccino, lattes, and so on) and cakes (such as cheesecake, carrot cake, and so on); the other is a chic boutique selling headscarves and accessories for female Muslims. There are also rapidly increasing numbers of halal eating outlets in Bangi. Among them, Chinese halal restaurants, such as Mohammad Chan Restaurant, Sharin Low Seafood Restaurant, Homst Recipe Restaurant, and Authentic Heritage Pulled Noodle Restaurant are extremely popular among many middle-class Malay Muslims. Such a trend reflects Malay Muslims’ aspiration of seeking both cultural diversity and religious faithfulness, as their multicultural food practice must be regulated according to Islamic principles. Being halal in food production is not only about the prohibition of alcohol and pork, but also the fulfilment of halal requirements set by the religious authority in Malaysia. From mosques to Islamic kindergartens, from fashion boutiques to restaurants, from beauty salons to hospitals, the omnipresence of Islamic labelling in Bangi’s urban landscape reflects the growing numbers of pious middle-class Muslims who are seeking to redefine their urban lifestyle through Islamic idioms.

10.7

Notes on Religious Gentrification

In this chapter, I have examined the spatial dynamic of contemporary Islamisation in urban settings from three interrelated perspectives: scale, space, and place. In terms of scale, Islamist-minded Muslims do not only

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focus on establishing an Islamic state, but also uphold the idea of an ‘Islamic city’ and Islamic housing. In term of space, Islamisation takes on greater force in the peri-urban regions, rather than the city centre of Jakarta. In relation to place, Islam is not only associated with mosques and religious schools, but also with supposedly ‘religiously neutral’ places such as housing complexes, hotels, beauty salons, restaurants, and malls. How are we to make sense of this ‘Islamic turn’ of urban place-making processes? How are we to understand the intersection between urban renewal and religious revival processes? I would like to propose ‘religious gentrification’ as an analytical concept for investigating the complex relations between Islam and the remaking of contemporary urban places. There are intensive debates on what constitutes gentrification in urban and suburban settings (Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2010). Here I use this term in a very broad sense, referring to the renovation and improvement of an urban district or place so that it conforms to middle-class tastes (Slater 2011). Redfern (2003) has suggested that identity plays an important role in gentrification; gentrifiers are members of certain groups, who use housing as a status symbol for defining and claiming membership in those groups. Muslim gated communities, for example, are spatial manifestations of the aspirations and identities of pious middle-class Muslims (Hew 2018). Although most of the development of these Muslim-only gated communities in the peri-urban regions of Jakarta does not involve direct eviction, it does to a certain extent force some of their surrounding kampung residents to move further into the hinterland because of the rise in housing prices and the loss of agricultural land. Instead of formulating a housing policy for the poor, Islamist-minded developers build houses for middle-class pious Muslims. While the making of various Islamically-marked places, such as Muslimah beauty salons and Muslim-only gated communities, give pious Muslims opportunities to pursue an urban lifestyle according to their Islamic understanding, such places might also accelerate religious exclusion and class inequalities. Recently, environmental discourses and green idioms have been used by developers to promote many contemporary urban renewal and place-making projects. Some studies have critically analysed such developments. In New York, Melissa Checker has coined the term ‘environmental gentrification’ to examine how property developers use environmental discourses to justify high-end development (2011). In Jakarta, Kusno has used the term ‘green governmentality’ to examine how middle-class citizens deploy green idioms to reclaim urban space in the city centre (2013). Both works show that ‘green’ is less an ideological commitment to environmental issues, and more a

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pragmatic device for different actors to claim urban space. Arguing along the same line, I propose ‘religious gentrification’ as a way to understand how pious developers and middle-class Muslims appropriate Islamic discourses to serve various forms of urban place-making, as well as to justify their spatial segregation based on religion and class. However, for many of these individuals, Islam is not merely a marketing label or developmental tool; rather, the religion has been articulated as a framework for the moral order of society through the appropriation of urban places. Instead of focusing on issues like poverty and social injustice, many pious middle-class Muslims focus their spiritual attention on issues of morality and use moral differences to segregate themselves from the poor and the immoral. More in-depth ethnographic studies on specific places, as well as broader comparisons between cities, are needed to better understand the intersection between urban renewal and religious revival. By juxtaposing similar developments of growing pious neighbourhoods, halal restaurants, and Islamic fashion boutiques in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, and other Muslim-majority cities, we could further analyse and conceptualise the role of Islam in the contemporary urban life of middle-class Muslims. In short, I propose the term ‘religious gentrification’ to describe these urban processes, not only to offer lenses to explore the interconnection between religious attitudes and class relations in urban settings, but also to understand how pious Muslims deploy a religious idiom to claim urban space and pursue a middle-class lifestyle.

Bibliography Beatty, A. (1999), Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, J., Klingan, K., Lanz, S., and Wildner, K. (eds.) (2014), Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City. Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers. Casanova, J. (2013), ‘Religious Associations, Religious Innovations and Denominational Identities in Contemporary Global Cities’, in Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces, Becci, I., Burchardt, M., and Casanova, J. (eds.), 113-127. Leiden: Brill. Checker, M. (2011), ‘Wiped Out by the “Greenwave”: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability’, City & Society, 23(2): 210-229. Fealy, G., and White, S. (2008), ‘Introduction’, in Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia, Fealy, G. and White, S. (eds.), 1-12. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS).

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Guinness, P. (2009), Kampung, Islam and State in Urban Java. Singapore: NUS Press. Halal Media (2011), ‘Bogor Hosts Fair to Increase Halal Awareness’. Halal Media, June 28. Hasan, N. (2011), ‘Islam in Provincial Indonesia: Middle Class, Lifestyle, and Democracy’, Al-Jami’ah: Journal of Islamic Studies, 49(1): 119-157. Hew. W.W. 2018, ‘Islamic Way of Urban Living’: Middle Class Muslims Aspirations and Gated Communities in Periurban Jakarta’, in Shaping Jakarta: Claiming Spaces and Rights in the City, Hellman, J., Thynell,M., and van Voorst, R. (eds.), 195-213. London and New York: Routledge. Hogan, T., and Houston, C. (2002), ‘Corporate Cities—Urban Gateways or Gated Communities against the City? The Case of Lippo, Jakarta’, in Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia, Bunnell, T. Drummond, L.B.W., and Ho, K.C. (eds.), 243-264. Singapore: Times Academic Press. Knott, K. (2010), ‘Cutting through the Postsecular City: A Spatial Interrogation’, in Exploring the Postsecular: the Religious, the Political and the Urban, Molendijk, A.L., Beaumont, J., and Jedan, C. (eds.), 19-38. Leiden: Brill. Kusno, A. (2013), After the New Order: Space, Politics and Jakarta. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press. Lees, L., Slater, T., and Wyly, E. (eds.) (2010), The Gentrification Reader. London: Routledge. Leisch, H. (2002), ‘Gated Communities in Indonesia’, Cities, 19(5): 341-350. Low, S.M. (2001), ‘The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear’, American Anthropologist, 103(1): 45-58. MetroZones (ed.) (2012), Faith is The Place: the Urban Cultures of Global Prayers. Berlin: B_books. Oh, I.Y. (2011), ‘Cinema still a no-no in Bangi’, The Star, 19 October. Available: http:// www.thestar.com.my/story/?file=%2F2011%2F10%2F19%2Fcentral%2F9693227. (Last accessed on 15 March 2015). Purdey, J. (2006), Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996-1999. Singapore: NUS Press. Redfern, P.A. (2003), ‘What Makes Gentrification ‘Gentrification’?’, Urban Studies, 40: 2351-2366. Saiful, B. (2014), ‘PKS Menang TPS Wali Kota Depok’ (PKS won in the voting station of Depok’s Mayor). Dakwatuna, April 10. Schmidt, L. (2012), ‘Urban Islamic Spectacles: Transforming the Space of the Shopping Mall during Ramadan in Indonesia’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13(3): 384-407. Simone, A.M., and Fauzan, A.U. (2013), ‘On the Way to Being Middle Class: The Practices of Emergence in Jakarta’. City: Analysis of Urban trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 17(3): 279-298.

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Sinha, V. (2014), ‘Housing Hindu Deities in Urban Landscapes: Insights from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur’, in The Other Kuala Lumpur, Living in the Shadows of a Globalising Southeast Asian City, Yeoh, S.G. (ed.), 122-146. London, New York: Routledge. Slater, T. (2011), ‘Gentrification of the City’, in The New Blackwell Companion to the City, Bridge, G., and Watson, S. (eds.), 571-585. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The Star Online (2012), ‘PAS firm on Bangi Cinema ban’. The Star Online, ­February 15. http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2012/02/15/PAS-f irm-on-Bangi​ -cinema-ban. Accessed on 15 March 2015. Tomsa, D. (2012), ‘Moderating Islamism in Indonesia: Tracing Patterns of Party Change in the Prosperous Justice Party’, Political Research Quarterly, 65(3): 486-498. Veer (van der), P. (ed.) (2015), Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zuhri, D. (2011), ‘Menuju Perusahaaan Berspiritual (Towards Spiritual Enterprise)’, Republika, 2 October: B2.

Websites https://www.dakwatuna.com/2014/04/10/49321/pks-menang-di​-tps-wali​ -kota-depok/#axzz5OPo42RMc http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2012/02/15/ PAS-fijirm-on-Bangi​ -cinema-ban http://halalmedia.net/ bogor-hosts-fair-increase-halal-awareness-indonesia

About the author Hew Wai Weng is a fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, the National University of Malaysia (IKMAS, UKM). He has published on Chinese Muslim identities, Hui migration patterns, and urban middle-class Muslim aspirations in Malaysia and Indonesia. He is the author of Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in Indonesia (NIAS Press, 2018). Email: [email protected]

11

Invisible Technologies and Loud Narratives A Critical Deconstruction of the Songdo ‘Smart City’ Project in Korea Chamee Yang

Abstract Taking a close look at the case of the ‘Smart City’ project in New Songdo City in South Korea, this chapter elucidates the political economy of this contemporary urban redevelopment and the discursive practices strategically employed to justify certain (dis)investments. First, a discursive analysis of local media sources has been conducted in order to deconstruct the dominant discourse of the smart city. There are three prominent themes: a) the ‘growth’ of the city as the imperative urban initiative in the age of global competition; b) the necessity to build an ‘international’ and ‘multicultural’ city; and c) a utopian vision that believes in technological innovation as the solution to modern problems. These futuristic narratives of the city are then discussed in relation to the actual urban policy issues accompanying the project and the discourse. Keywords: smart city, urban development, technological innovation, South Korea

11.1 Introduction The ‘Smart City’ project, also known as the New Songdo City project, was initiated in the early 2000s in Incheon, South Korea. It is one of the country’s most ambitious urban construction projects, born out of efforts to revitalise the city’s role as an international business hub of East Asia (see Figure 11.1). In 2002, Incheon, a city 64 kilometres southwest of the capital city Seoul,

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch11

332  Figure 11.1 Map of Songdo, Incheon

Map drawn by Ariel Shepherd Legend 1. Yonsei University International Campus 2. State University of New York Songdo Campus 3. Samsung Biologics 4. Songdo Convensia 5. Gale International Korea 6. Chadwick International School 7. Central Park 8. Compact Smart City 9. Tri-bowl Gallery 10. Cisco Korea 11. Jack Nicklaus Golf Club 12. Incheon University Songdo Campus

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was officially granted the national government’s permission to build the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ). IFEZ is a special zone within which certain exemptions of taxes and other legal duties are awarded to companies that are willing to invest and set up business there. The yet-to-be-reclaimed land of Songdo district, which is built on sand-filled artificial ground over the Yellow Sea, was designated as the special jurisdiction site where the whole city was going to be made literally from scratch. From the beginning of the project, a number of journalistic commentaries in Incheon have reproduced the popular imaginings of the new city as a harbinger of a global, techno-savvy future that will stimulate the economic growth of the region. The enthusiastic tone of such projections often revisited the ‘newness’ of the idea of Songdo, where everything is automatically monitored and managed, and therefore meets the standard of being an ecologically sustainable urban model. Efforts to brand ‘New Songdo City’ therefore strived to achieve a semantic rupture from the old and decrepit image of Incheon, of which it is legally part. Technically, making a ‘smart’ city entails the application of the so-called new ubiquitous technology, such as open Wi-Fi networks, automatically monitored close circuit TV systems, and radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology. These utilities are used to track all movements and activities of buildings, objects, and individuals; to recognise collective patterns; and to therefore achieve the most optimised and efficient management of the city.1 These high-end technologies, built into the urban infrastructure, are said to mediate smooth and seamless flows of movements and transactions. From the user’s end, these technologies are said to generate various benefits in terms of time efficiency, security, and convenience—such as when one tries to locate the nearest parking spots while driving, monitor his/her children’s whereabouts after school, make a transit from one bus stop or subway station to another with the shortest possible walking distance, and so on. Amidst the grand hype of ‘creative cities’ and the ascendance of the global knowledge economy, the timely proposal of a smart city garnered highly enthusiastic responses from the circles of urban planners and government officials in Incheon. Before long, the publicity of the discussion further excited diverse interest groups—including local politicians, business 1 For example, by inserting ‘smart’ RFID sensors into facilities and channelling fibre optic cables throughout the city, the administrators can actively locate every bit and part of the city so that multiple functions and services are seamlessly and efficiently connected through networks. This whole process enables real-time interactions between objects, humans, and computers, during which all sorts of information are gathered to provide customised public services.

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entrepreneurs, investors, and real estate agencies who pinned on it their hopes of bringing a ‘smarter, cleaner and better world for all’ and encouraged the citizens to ‘catch up with the global standard’ (Webb, Buscher, Giles, and Mulligan 2011: 23). Beneath such preoccupations of the planners and officials of Incheon lies a general assumption that regards urban planning as a solution to the array of challenges that Incheon faces—outdated urban infrastructure, low employment rate, financial debt, and hence, the degenerated reputation of the city. Moreover, there is also an influential learned trope of the rapidly advancing ‘reality’ of globalisation that supposedly situates the city in direct competition with cities around the world. Such global tropes are often cited as the background for the challenges that compel city officials to become entrepreneurial agents that actively promote the city and to compete for wealth, power, and its recognition on the world stage. Considered more closely, the process of making the ‘smart city’ and its legitimation also demonstrates the taken-for-granted assumption that science and technology are the key momentum that will induce economic growth in the city. Here, we witness the internal logic of ‘growth machine’ politics, which not only utilises the latest technology to increase the commodity value of the place, but also the technocratic vision of viewing urban space as the hardware and urban services as the software that ties all the micro bits and pieces of everyday life into a unitary platform. While the broader facts reflective of South Korea’s popular beliefs and its technocratic aspirations for the future are embodied in the project of New Songdo City, rather than generalising this tendency to the level of the state or the South Korean population as a whole, this chapter aims to examine several distinct ideas of the city that are deployed in this specific project and see what socio-political circumstances prompted and reinforced them. The chapter especially focuses on delineating various strategies of governance that play crucial roles in the processes of city-making and of formulating a discourse that re-imagines Songdo as a global, smart, and futuristic city. ‘City’ here is not necessarily conceptualised as a fixed and bounded geographical location, but instead and more importantly as ‘a powerful discursive field and a mobilising project of will formation’ (McCarthy 2011: 87) where new iconographies and technologies are exchanged and appropriated to advocate the contradictory reality of neoliberal globalisation. That administrative elites and entrepreneurs often reify new technology as a ‘rational’ and autonomous entity existing outside of any political debate is a politically charged rhetoric that tends to evade the possible controversies and contestations surrounding their practices. Within the mainstream circle

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of urban planners and city officials, the successes and failures of technology are often evaluated based on the direct social outcome that is generated— often in terms of administrative efficiency and potential economic profit. However, the fuzzy relationship between the initiatives implementing the technological transformation of the city and the institutional arrangements that surround such futuristic narratives has to be more critically examined. While these technological transformations often entail major consequences for the form of governance, the political economy, and the geographical inequalities that affect the actual lives of people on the ground, efforts to seriously interrogate their underlying suppositions are often stifled by the arguments that support the betterment of the city as a whole. Thus, it is the objective of this chapter to investigate how certain ideas about the future of the city have been strategically installed throughout the execution of this project and what series of choices have constituted the way in which technology has been adopted in the urban infrastructure of Songdo, in its current form.

11.2

The Loud Narratives of the City-Go-Global Project

I want to create a high-class city where everybody wants to come to live in. In order for Incheon to become one of the top ten major cities in the world, we have to provide a certain quality of space and the infrastructure. While preserving our cultural heritage, we have to publicise such cultural values to the outer world. […] Incheonians should not reserve from opening themselves up to the world and from directly competing with foreign countries. It requires our citizen’s willingness and active attitude. (Ahn, Sang-Soo, mayor of Incheon, quoted in Yoon 2009)

Ahn, Sang-Soo, the mayor of Incheon from 2002 to 2010, was one of the central figures who was especially keen to push forward the Songdo project, devoting his every effort to drawing foreign investment funds into the area. In the above remark, Ahn is addressing the residents of Incheon, strategically envisioning individualised entrepreneurial subjects who do not ‘reserve from opening themselves up to the outer world’ with a certain ‘willingness and active attitude’. The highly determined tone of his speech manifests his firm commitment to the neoliberal ethos, based on a particular understanding of the competitive nature of the relationship between today’s city and the ‘outer world’. Ahn’s fixation on making a globally competitive city is rendered through his repeated use of expressions such as ‘high-class city’,

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‘top ten major cities in the world’, and ‘willingness to directly compete with foreigners’. Cognisant of the financial success of Shanghai and Singapore as business centres and tourist hotspots, he made it his personal ambition to emulate them and improve the ‘quality of space and infrastructure’ by drawing direct foreign investment to the city. Given the specific national and international context within which the project is embedded, it is also important to demonstrate the multiple interest groups that are involved in the process, both directly and indirectly. From the onset of the project, the central government under president Roh, Moo-Hyun’s administration (from 2003 to 2008) made large commitments to establish a new centre of global and economic prominence: Our government has strong commitment in making IFEZ a successful case. New Incheon Bridge, which will triangularly connect Incheon International Airport, Songdo global city, and Chung-ra district, will accelerate our steps forward making the centre of trade and business of Northeast Asia. […] In the year 2009 when this project is all complete, our vision for the Northeast Asian economic centre will also be materially realised and Incheon will become the gateway of global prosperity that will lead the developed Korea. […] Songdo, among others, will become a place that is true to its name of the ‘global city’, where any foreigners will manage to live by, without so much inconvenience. (President Roh, celebratory remark for the ground-breaking ceremony of the Incheon Bridge, 16 June 2005, quoted in Yonhap News 2005)

President Roh’s speech clearly subscribes to the idea of the city as a strategic centre of international business and politics, in a quite similar manner to Mayor Ahn’s. This idea embodies the political elites’ aspirations to assert the competitiveness of the city vis-à-vis powerful neighbouring global cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. Thus, both the metropolitan and the national government substantiated their claims that the city would be a global powerhouse by providing legal and financial support to facilitate the project. The city would use its ascending status as leverage to complementarily and opportunistically appropriate the national government’s politico-economic resources. Therefore, especially considering the dominant presence and guidance of the central government in the South Korean domestic political hierarchy, the relational dynamic between the urban and the national has to be understood in terms of how it is (re)articulated in this localised context. Also coming in to play an indirect role in this project is the advancing competition between cities across national borders, each of which aims to

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attract multinational capital investments. Since its designation as a Free Economic Zone, the policymaking process of Songdo has taken advantage of this special legal status. For example, companies in the FEZ are exempted from paying income and corporate tax for the first three years and pay 50 percent of the regular amount for the following two years. Employment and labour management is also highly deregulated, allowing unpaid holidays and lifting any obligation to employ veterans, the disabled, and the elderly. The FEZ also provides an exception that allows foreign investors to establish schools, hospitals, and pharmacies in the area that domestic residents can use or attend. The cable network of foreign channels is expanded from 10 to 20 percent, and English is allowed to be used for the processing of public documents (Park 2005). This special zoning strategy, which selectively grants authority to multinational capital investors and entrepreneurs, reveals a form of governance that differentiates certain segments of the population, imposing different disciplines and privileges based on their profitability and their affinity to the global financial market. These sets of policies also reflect what can be called an ‘extrospective’ vision of the city (McCann 2013). Extrospective projection of the city, as opposed to self-reflexive projection, refers to a position that assesses its success by winning approval from elsewhere—most prominently from authorised institutions in the US and Europe. For instance, developers and local administrators in Songdo have repeatedly propagated the ‘cleanliness’ of its smart technology, flaunting the cutting-edge smart grid system that is said to reduce the excessive production of energy. As much as 30 percent of the area is also devoted to ‘green’ spaces, and the wide perpendicular streets are equipped with bicycle lanes along the path. In 2010, ‘Songdo Convensia’ (designed by Kohn Pederson Fox Associates), the monumental convention centre in the city, was awarded a LEED NC 2.2 ‘certified’ rating by the US Green Building Council, making it the first LEED-certified facility in Asia. Stanley Gale from Gale International, the US-based real estate development agency that has been focally involved with the Songdo project since the early stage, did not miss the opportunity to extol their commitment to making an ‘eco-friendly’ environment: The fact that the Songdo Convensia has achieved the distinction of being the f irst LEED-certif ied convention facility in Asia is a testament to the commitment the developer, architecture firm, City of Incheon and IFEZ have to foster environmental awareness. It engenders a real sense of eco-responsibility within the larger Songdo IBD community. (Stanley Gale, CEO of Gale International, quoted in Yoneda 2010)

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The stress on the ‘environmental friendliness’ of the Songdo development plan even led the city to host the headquarters of the Green Climate Fund, a UN-affiliated funding framework that assists developing countries in counteracting the challenges of climate change. Notably, the bidding process to host the headquarters of the international organisation was narrativised as one of the city’s heroic success stories that rewarded the local elites’ intense struggles and hopes to set an example to the other cities in the world and eventually, to booster the city’s clean new image: Such a big effort is underway to meet our goal of ‘Compact and Smart City’, where people can live in a low-carbon and eco-friendly environment […] If Songdo is selected as the host of the GCF headquarters, it will greatly boost the international profile of the city as well as of Korea in the global environmental field. (Han, Tae-il, Director General of Environment and Forestry Bureau, Incheon City, quoted in Yi 2012)

While the statement from Stan Gale (CEO of Gale International) stresses the shared interests and co-responsibilities between the developer himself, architectural firms, the city of Incheon, and the IFEZ, this statement by Incheon city government official Han Tae Il, explicitly indicates the extrospective and boostering agenda underpinning the central motive of the project that is commonly held by local administrative elites. In this process, multinational corporations and local administrative elites run after a shared goal of earning publicity within the global capitalist network in the form of an established mutual relationship called a ‘public-private partnership’. With such relational and ‘extrospective’ urbanism prominent in the administrative rhetoric, it is important to notice that the city, rather than the national government, is called upon as the major subject that has to interact with the global financial market and facilitate its own economic growth. Former Mayor Ahn, for instance—readily internalising the neoliberal ethos—supplements this process by normalising a certain attitude and conduct for his citizens, such as ‘publicising our cultural values’ and ‘opening ourselves to the world’. At this stage of experiencing ‘neo-liberalisation from within’, the new global reality and the shift of governance in the city is no longer perceived as an external threat, but instead is considered an already existing social reality that does not have to prove its legitimacy (Keil 2009: 242). These ideas are certainly leaning on the city’s perceived dependence on the process of globalisation and the subsequent competition among cities around the world. As much as the new ‘reality’ of globalisation has

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engendered material consequences around the world (e.g. the intervention of global regulatory entities such as the IMF and the World Bank, outsourcing manufacturing labour to third world countries, free trade agreements, etc.), there is also the projected reality of globalisation, deployed as a powerful rhetorical device, that has helped produce a new kind of governance and a new tool for legitimising the drive to transform cities (Wilson 2007). The rhetoric of this global trope supposedly helps mobilise one particular vision of city growth that emphasises the production of affluent spaces of leisure, conspicuous consumption, and gentrified residences. The ideological function of these global tropes that provide legitimacy and cover for the extension of asymmetrical power and wealth has been explicated in a number of previous literatures (see Wilson 2007; Fairclough 2006; Harvey 2000). This strategy constitutes part of what David Harvey explains as the recent shift in the form of urban governance that reflects the advancement of global capitalism on the macroeconomic level (Harvey 1989a). According to him, the typical managerial stance of urban governance in the 1960s, which confined the role of the city to the provision of basic infrastructure and services, shifted to more active and entrepreneurial forms in the 1970s and 1980s which have put city governments in the direct position of supporting enterprises and inducing local growth. Clearly, the shift in the form of governance has been accompanied by the changing dynamics of socio-economic factors on a number of different levels: the transition from Fordist-Keynesian capitalist accumulation to neoliberal flexible accumulation; the state government’s shrinking role in local politics; and the formation of ‘coalition politics’ among local administrative elites, high-tech corporations, and real estate investors which coalesce the city into a ‘growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch 2007 [1987]). With the growing prominence of global competition and the rolling back of the welfare state, the city has therefore become a crucial ground on and through which neoliberal hegemony makes its presence known, both literally and discursively. That is, ‘neoliberalism is an urbanised phenomenon. Cities are fundamental to its realization’ (Rubin 2010: 144). What then are the consequences of the marriage between the public and the private in terms of urban governance? Not unlike other forms of such relationships, this partnership carries the hazard of ending up being unfair, leaving the public to hold the responsibility of absorbing the risks while the private takes away the profits (Harvey 2000). All the legal and financial incentives concentrated in the IFEZ are predicated on a systematic imbalance between the new capitalist entrepreneurs and the taxpayers from the old city centre. While companies like Gale and Cisco (the San

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Francisco-based network infrastructure production company that was hired for the project) enjoy the benefit of governmental subsidies and relief from local taxes, residents of Songdo have to pay the increased real estate prices and the monthly utility bill charged by the IFEZ.

11.3

Technologies of Landscape in New Songdo City

In New Songdo City, economic revitalisation is one of the primary motivations driving the institutional arrangements surrounding the technologisation of the city. It is also often uncritically assumed that the integration of high-end technology into urban infrastructure and enhanced administrative efficiency also improves the efficiency of daily tasks and secures the ecological and physical wellbeing of residents. However, technology, defined in a broad sense, denotes not only a politically value-neutral object that develops according to its own internal logic, but also social, institutional, and thus ‘technical arrangements’ that give rise to certain forms and practices (Winner 1980). This expanded definition of technology includes immaterial practices surrounding technology as material objects and infrastructure, such as strategies of forming a discursive environment where certain social protocols are taken for granted and the technological landscape of the city privileges the movement of some over the others. The following section takes a slight detour to further analyse how the exclusive and extrospective vision of the city is reflected in actual arrangements of architecture and urban design. The global aspirations of the administrative elites mentioned above can be detected in the new set of metaphors and iconographies that have been appropriated on the level of architectural and urban design in Songdo. For example, the initial design proposal for New Songdo City was explicitly modelled after the prototypes of popular Western cities, such as New York City, San Francisco, Venice, and Sydney. The intentional referencing of images that resemble ‘the Western’ implies a set of socio-cultural assumptions that inform the operations of the architects and urban planners involved in the project. It is therefore crucial to ask what sort of aesthetic style is prescribed through this partial capture and reproduction of the idealised ‘Western’, and what this eventually means for the actual residents who inhabit the space. One can even further ask whether this reflects the general trend of postmodern architecture that conceives the urban fabric as a palimpsest of past forms juxtaposed against each other, making a collage of fragments borrowed from different traditions and local histories (Harvey 1989b: 66).

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There are ways of decoding the urban landscape as a text that allow the examination of the landscape as a cultural production that is integral to both the reproduction and contestation of political power. For instance, one of the facts that constitute the ‘myth’ of Songdo is that the city was built on land initially reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. The fact that the city was literally constructed from scratch enhances the visibility of a utopian vision deployed in its operation. We have a performing arts centre that is situated on the water out on the point, just like Sydney’s Opera House. The idea was to have something iconic like that. We have a central park, with high-rise buildings surrounding the central park. Just like New York Central Park. And lastly, we have a grand canal within the central park that is so much similar to Venice’s canal. Even with the water taxi, so that you can take a boat right on down through our canal. (Jonathan Thorpe, CIO, Gale International, quoted in Williamson 2013)

First, some of the major design elements of the city imitate and transplant fragments from other cities in the world, more precisely cities from the West—as confirmed by the explanation of Jonathan Thorpe, a CIO from Gale International, concerning the urban design of Songdo, which intentionally makes connections to these cities (Sydney, NYC, Venice). This design concept partly explains why on the surface Songdo looks quite detached from its neighbouring areas and unlike any other city in South Korea. In fact, the overall landscape of Songdo is a combination of designs borrowed from either the suburban US or Europe, such as wide perpendicular streets, high-rise residential condos, a golf course named after a celebrity (Jack Nicklaus), canals with water taxis, and iconic architecture for museums and convention centres. This odd collage of spatial elements represents an elitist fetishism of cultural difference, used as a cover for its delusional sense of inclusivity. More specifically, the ensemble of spatial elements including streets, canals, the central park (see Figure 11.2), and postmodern architectures constitutes an eclectic microcosm of the world within the city, denoting a desire to possess these iconic cultural objects at a distance. Here again appears the aspiration for the global, concretised in architectural simulations. The mediation of each locational reference, however, implies only arbitrary relations—meaning that there is no organic logic that sutures them together into one place and no relation that ties the view of the landscape with the socio-cultural context and historical legacies of the region.

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Figure 11.2 Central Park, Songdo

Photo by the author

This appropriation of signs of multiculturalism is often part of ‘a strategy of negotiating the powerful contradictions of the city’s globalising economies’ (McCarthy 2011: 87). In other words, while the design of Songdo accentuates the international character of a city that invites ‘culturally diverse’ elements from around the world, ironically, it also closes off its entrances from the relatively unprivileged neighbouring districts of Incheon. Not only are there physical boundaries, such as the distance from the old city centres and the CCTV-mounted bridges that heavily monitor the entrance, but there are also explicit efforts to protect the cultural exclusivity of the space—by negating its connection with other physically close spaces while affirming its relation to culturally close ‘elsewheres’. Moreover, behind this design logic resides an ahistorical perspective that views the city as an immaculate, copy-and-paste-able template. Within this positivist and technocratic way of viewing space, the space of capitalist flows replaces the local context and the history of the place, filling the whole city instead with a pastiche of artificially recreated spatial fragments. As such, Stan Gale, the CEO of Gale International, announced

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his plan to roll out 20 different cities in China and India following Songdo’s model: In the spirit of Moore’s Law, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year. […] It’s going to be a cool city, a smart city. We start from here and then we are going to build twenty new cities like this one, using this blueprint. Green! Growth! Export! […] China alone needs 500 cities the size of New Songdo. (Stan Gale, CEO of Gale International, quoted in Lindsay 2010)

Gale’s announced plan to replicate the model of Songdo in the cities of China reflects the developer’s motive of carving up and transplanting the ideal model city in a ‘faster, better, cheaper’ way, notwithstanding the peculiar characteristics of each region. As investors and developers find it easier and more economical to create a modelled pattern of urban redevelopment that assembles market, government, and construction forces, what emerges is a ‘portable urbanity’ that eventually forges cities into special segments in the global economy (Schlichtman 2009). It is also important to note that the application of standardised models of urban development has to presuppose the precarious condition of the landscape, which can be easily demolished and replaced. This is the point at which the very notion of ‘sustainability’ promoted by the city contradicts the manner of fast and mobile city-making, which is driven to facilitate the quick turnover of capital investment. On the other hand, recurrent allusions to futuristic ideas of utopianism are also deployed in the discourse and design of the city. Buildings denominated as ‘Tomorrow City Plaza’ (see Figure 11.3), ‘Tri-bowl Gallery’ (see Figure 11.4), and ‘Compact Smart City’ (see Figure 11.5) are often advertised as the city’s representative, iconic buildings. The main purpose of these buildings lies in exhibition rather than residence—occupying the central area of Songdo district, these buildings redundantly provide spaces for display: demonstrating various cases of applying ubiquitous technology in interior and commercial spaces (Tomorrow City Plaza), showing models of urban planning and history in Incheon (Compact Smart City), and hosting media art exhibitions and music performances (Tri-bowl Gallery). These buildings surrounding the Central Park of Songdo served as the main venues for the Incheon Global Fair and Festival held in 2009. The main slogan of the event read ‘Lightening Tomorrow’ and ‘Come and See the Future City’, denoting the planners’ ambition to propagate the idea

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Figure 11.3 Tomorrow City Plaza, Songdo; architects: SPACE Group

Photo by the author

Figure 11.4 Tri-bowl Gallery, Songdo; architects: iArc Architects

Photo by the author

of the city as emblematic of a techno-utopian future. Working in tandem with the unconventional design of the buildings, the contents displayed inside these venues provided a deluge of futuristic narratives, pastoring their apparent answer to the question of what it is like to live in the city of tomorrow. New urban services like u-shopping, u-learning, u-parking, and u-healthcare were said to make daily tasks easier, more secure, and more sustainable—if one would blindly believe in the potential of the new technology. Using such benefits of the technological infrastructure as the main brush stroke painting an immaculate and bright portrait of the future city, the new idea of the urban future presented a way of life that was distinct and different from the present.

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Figure 11.5 Entrance to the ‘Compact Smart City’, a promotional venue of the city

Photo by the author

As of 2013, many of the buildings in Songdo were still under construction, and the wide spaces and streets along these venues were nearly empty. City officials and real estate agents are eager to accommodate more residents in the area, but how the rest of the population from Incheon and Seoul will respond to this call remains to be seen. On the upside, one of the features of Songdo that is most often promoted is the quality education provided in the area. Songdo has strategically invited and established Chadwick International School (a kindergarten to twelfth grade-level private school, with its main branch in Palos Verdes, California, US) in 2010 and also has a number of plans to host global campuses of major universities from the US—the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Utah, and George Mason University, among others, are already on the way—and from Europe—Ghent University from Belgium—a fact that has supposedly appealed to young parents and students from Seoul and the rest of the country. While the array of foreign institutions and the technologically enhanced urban infrastructure are certainly expected to bring in flows of population and capital into Songdo, the critical issue that has to be pointed out in this process is how the opportunities to enjoy the fruit of such developments are distributed. With the increasing real estate prices and the full tuition for the private elementary school (Chadwick International) being as much as $30,000 a year, Songdo is directed toward becoming a ‘gated community’ for the urban bourgeoisie. In fact, Songdo is often compared with the country’s most affluent district of Gangnam, Seoul, in terms of its focus on education and well-equipped urban facilities. Therefore, the ostensibly inclusive idea of the global and futuristic city is predicated on the systematic working of a capitalist economy that

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endorses uneven geographical development. While the smart, green, and utopian vision of the city serves its purpose of making a space of prosperity and retreat for the urban bourgeoisie, for those who cannot take part it can also be viewed as an enclosed space of ‘degenerate utopia’ (Harvey 2000, citing Marin 1977). It is degenerate in the sense that it cultivates indifference to the ‘actually existing’ conditions of everyday life and merely perpetuates ‘the fetish of commodity culture and technological wizardry in a pure, sanitised, and ahistorical form’ (Harvey 2000: 167). It is also essential to point out that any utopia as a spatial form and a rhetoric requires a presence of a dystopia to def ine itself against—a fact easily proven by a glimpse at the spatial boundary of Songdo, which is immediately encircled by relatively impoverished neighbourhoods.

11.4

Invisible Technology and its Developmental Aspirations

World class IT leaders have profound interest in our creative economy. I am going to establish online and seventeen offline creative economy innovation centres, which will become the pivot of our regional developments and the cradle for our future leaders. I ask that we all put our effort to innovate our way to achieve the miracle of creative economy […] Science, technology, ICT and the cultural contents, the vitamins of creative economy, are our strengths. We should apply these contents with the manufacture sector to build the newly converged industrial sectors such as ‘internet-of-everything (IoE)’, cloud computing, and big data. […] I will shift all the systems of regulation to encourage investment and to overcome economic hurdles in our nation. (President Park, Geun-Hye, annual presidential public statement of ‘The Three-year-plan for the Economic Innovation in Korea’, 25 February 2014)

President Park, Geun-Hye, who has taken the Blue House (the presidential office of South Korea) as of 2013, has announced her motto of Changjogyeongje (‘creative economy’) to be the new anchor for the overall economic policy of South Korea. It addresses her commitment to supporting small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and new start-up companies run by young and innovative entrepreneurs (National Information Society Agency 2014). After establishing the new Mirae-changjo-gwahak-bu (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning) as the head office to assist with realising her vision of the ‘creative economy’, the central government has been preparing

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to launch various sector-based applied science projects such as mobile telecommunication technology, information science, intelligent chips and smart devices, neuro- and medical science, security and disaster prevention systems, outer-space technology, and hybrid energy (National Information Society Agency 2014). Its commitment to invest in research and design (R&D) has been realised in the form of providing legal and financial assistance to private industry sectors as well as facilitating university-industry research partnerships. Such dependence on science and technology as the driver of productivity and economic growth of the country is not a totally new strategy. The rapid growth of a resource-poor country like South Korea has been often attributed to concentrated investment in labour-intensive manufacturing sectors such as steel, electronics, automobiles, and textiles and in high-tech sectors such as information and telecommunication technology—all largely overseen by South Korea’s authoritarian central government since the 1960s. Since the 1960s, the strong commitment to technology as the reliable solution for tackling the pressing problem of economic development has been prevalent in the country. This tendency was further reinforced through the course of experiencing a deindustrialisation process in recent decades, followed by the intervention of global financial authorities such as the IMF in 1997, which eventually rerouted the government’s economic strategy toward the service and technology industry. As such, it has to be understood that the public nostalgia for progress and economic development in today’s South Korea has a unique association with the narrative of harnessing technology toward the end of generating economic growth. In other words, strategies of maximising rationalities coupled with the collective desire of ‘wellbeing’ buttress the powerful rhetoric of technological innovation. This rhetoric plays the indispensable role of legitimising the government’s policy, even when it is reproduced on the level of urban governance. While the central government still reigns as the dominant authority for distributing general resources, city governments today take the responsibility of playing the mutually reciprocal role of becoming the central platforms of innovation and the spaces of technological consumption. Taking a closer look at the items of the ‘smart urban policy’, the proposal mainly consists of suggestions for making a business-friendly environment, especially for foreigners and professionals in a science- and technology-related occupation. For example, the construction of the ‘Smart Valley’ within the Songdo district, which was explicitly modelled on the Silicon Valley of California, was based on the idea of erecting a domestic high-tech consortium of corporate

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R&D centres. As evidenced by the Master Plan, the business district occupies the dense area (serving four times as many users as in residential spaces) at the heart of the city; the true focus of Songdo is business (Keeton 2011: 318). Owing to the special zoning policy of IFEZ, the Smart Valley of Songdo was able to host several major headquarters and R&D centres, many of them branch offices of South Korean chae-bol companies (family-owned large conglomerates). As of 2013, these included Samsung Biologics, Celtrion, Donga Pharmaceutical, Amko Solara Korean branch office (alternative energy & lighting systems), Cisco’s Korean branch office (network infrastructure productions), Daewoo International (international trade business), and Posco Engineering (civil engineering, construction). Besides enjoying the exemption from corporate taxes, governmental subsidies, and estate supports within the district, these major companies also get to own and manage privatised retail spaces such as the NC-cube shopping centre, the Lotte complex shopping mall, and the Hyundai department store (Financial News 2014). As much as the urban policy of Songdo leans heavily toward privileging the large corporate sectors, the urban network and infrastructure is also conceptualised as an active space for the experimenting and adaptation of new digital technologies. According to the ‘U-City project in IFEZ’, an official policy report published by IFEZ, the concept of a ‘smart city’ includes the following three key elements: a. Utilisation of high-end telecommunication technology, such as inserting radiofrequency identification (RFID) sensors to urban space architectures and facilities and connecting them through networks. b. Interactions between objects, humans and computers to be available anytime, anywhere. c. Real time provision of information and services regarding transportation, security, environment and health. (Department of U-City 2011) Throughout the policy report, stress is placed on the ‘real-time connectedness’ of all the ‘smart’ functions and objects of the city. Utilisation of ‘high-end telecommunication technology’ is said to enable 24/7 automatic maintenance of the overall city infrastructure (see Figure 11.6). Provisions in the smart city policy enumerate a number of services that were going to use the ubiquitous technology for the efficient management of the city. By extensively using the fast broadband network service and high-end IT technology such as wireless internet, ubiquitous sensor networks (USN), and radiofrequency identification (RFID), the project of making a city ‘smart’

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Figure 11.6 Central Control Tower, Songdo

Source: Incheon Free Economic Zone 2013: 16

strives to connect multiple functions of the city into a unified platform. The demonstrative services now include the automatic lighting and security service, the carbon dioxide-minimising trash disposal system, real-time traffic control, and the parking service. In the user’s perspective, this notion of the smart city seems to embody what Mark Weiser claimed to be the ideal technology: one that is so finely integrated into everyday life that the interface ultimately becomes invisible to its actual users (Weiser 1991). It also aims at realising the cyberpunk vision of a futuristic city where all the bits and parts of the city are organically connected like the neurons and synapses in the human brain. The ultimate mechanisation of everyday life, through the newest technology of smartphones, interactive interfaces, and intelligent architectures, working toward the goal of making the whole city instantly responsive and ‘intelligent’, indeed seems to be the basis of the idea envisioned by these proponents. The idea of seamlessly integrating computerised functions into the urban infrastructure evidences the latest phase of humanity’s obsession and dependence on technology in the process of making the city. It should be noted that the city, even in its earliest form, has always been a manmade artefact that deploys the newest technology available at the time: aqueducts, sewage, cement, roads, gas, electricity, automobiles, and so on. Once the technology lives through its phase of novelty and becomes naturalised within the domain of everyday lives, the ‘newness’ of it also disappears from human consciousness. In other words, ‘newness’ is not necessarily a

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quality inherent in the production of technology, but rather a value evoked by the discursive practices of the society in which it is embedded. Similarly, Weiser states, ‘such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it’ (Weiser 1991). However, the suspension of awareness does not at all diminish the presence of the actual consequences such technology has for human lives and the system of control that governs it. The technology deployed in the smart city infrastructure and its futuristic vision in the present moment enables a level of control and surveillance unforeseen in previous times. The Big Brother-like Central Control Tower located in the landmark building of the Northeast Trade Center (see Figure 11.6), for example, monitors and manages the maintenance of every building and household in the city for 24 hours every day. When one looks closely at the sorts of services provided by the Control Tower, it is obvious that much attention has been concentrated on ensuring the utmost security of the region, by mounting surveillance cameras in every corner and tracking the license plates of all the vehicles running in the city (Shim 2012). There are also several measures dedicated to the ‘sustainability’ of the city, such as the smart grid—the system that estimates the exact amount of electricity demanded by each household and uses this information to minimise any redundant production or circulation of electricity. No matter what the ostensible goal of these services is, since most of them require constant ‘ubiquitous’ monitoring and tracking of minor activities such as one’s geographical location, medical history, trash disposal, and shopping records, severe technological intrusions into private domains are certainly inevitable. In fact, security and efficiency of management appear to be the most emphasised points in the marketing presentations of New Songdo City in a number of local real estate advertisements and newspaper commentaries. It thus clearly seeks to invite a certain group of tech-savvy citizens who prioritise such values of security and efficiency over the protection of their privacy, or rather are simply indifferent to it. It goes without question that this process of calling for such a specific profile of citizens necessarily entails the invention and projection of security-conscious and entrepreneurial subjects. This then simultaneously results in an active rejection of access to outsiders and those who cannot afford to move into Songdo’s residential condos and consumerist spaces.

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Conclusion: Future of the City

If we think of urban planning as the signifier of a certain historical juncture, we can get a glimpse of how the city’s relations with its past and its drive towards the future are envisioned in the public’s imagination. While looking at the key assumptions and ideas about the future deployed in the ‘smart city’ project of Songdo, it became clear that its goal was geared towards achieving a symbolic rupture from the old city centre of Incheon, in terms of both geography and history. That is, by proposing to establish Songdo as the centre of global exchange and technological innovation, the city was simultaneously severed and differentiated from its geographical surroundings—part of which is owed to its special zoning policy, security measures, and the peculiar design principles opted in the planning—and from the historical context of its past and the present. This exclusivist view of the future, which tends to perceive the vision of the future as separate and independent from the city’s past and present, is articulated through the developmental expectations and technological optimisms that drive the whole operation of the smart city project. Looking more closely, however, it is evident that the alleged newness of the project actually stands on the institutional arrangements that have intimate relations with the continuities of the socio-economic structure and political context of South Korea. On the one hand, the project is situated in a tight horizontal relationship between Incheon and the authoritative Korean government, the sovereignty of which is now gradually being subjected to the wider network of global financial markets. On the other hand, the local agents who have confronted the ‘reality’ of globalisation and internalised the imperatives to actively participate in the intensified interurban competition project place their hopes in their aspirations for the development of new technology and its integration into urban infrastructures. This biased investment in the science and technology sector denotes the local elites’ desire not only to increase the market value of the city, but to assert its position vis-à-vis other rising cities in the world and, ultimately, to upgrade the ‘quality of life’ it can provide. Therefore, the Master Plan of the smart city can be interpreted as the city’s manifesto for its future, in which it reclaims its politico-economic power and resolves its anxiety of ‘falling behind in the race’. To summarise, this paper attempts to deconstruct the subcategories that constitute the idea of ‘smartness’ in the smart city project of Songdo. With a dual analytical focus on the politico-economic context of globalisation and the integration of technology into the urban infrastructure, the research

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demonstrated how the discursive practices spread throughout the execution of the project propose, motivate, and legitimate its idea of the city. Close linguistic and visual analysis of the texts, images, and spaces produced in this megaproject demonstrate hidden assumptions and aspirations that buttressed its legitimation and operation. It is questionable, however, whether the technological development and the renewal of the city actually accomplishes what it initially proposed. Whereas the idea of the city articulated throughout this discourse often subscribes to the harmonious vision of total connectivity, multiculturalism, and a utopian future, the agents in the actual space of everyday life seem to continue their futile struggles to fill the gap between reality and its overhyped vision.

Acknowledgments The author’s multiple visits to Songdo were made mostly during May and June of 2013. On-site and telephone interviews were conducted with a number of informants, including a former construction site worker at Songdo, an academic faculty at one of the universities located in Songdo, a real estate agent in Songdo, a government official from the Incheon Free Economic Zone, and visitors at galleries and museums in Songdo. Korean newspapers and journal articles analysed for this chapter were retrieved from the archives at the Korean Integrated News Database System (KINDS). All the quotes from local resources that appear in this text have been translated by the author.

Bibliography Department of U-City (2011), The First Class Brand Name City Incheon: U-city Project in IFEZ, Incheon Free Economic Zone, December. Fairclough, N. (2006), Language and Globalization. New York: Routledge. Financial News (2014), ‘Benefits for companies moving into Smart Valley in New Songdo City’, 9 May. Available: http://www.fnnews.com/view?ra=Sent0501m_Vi ew&corp=fnnews&arcid=140515154436&cDateYear=2014&cDateMonth=05&cD ateDay=16 (Last accessed: 10 August 2014). Harvey, D. (1989a), ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 71(1): 3-17. — (1989b), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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— (2000), Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Incheon Free Economic Zone (2013), ‘IFEZ, A Ubiquitous City Realized by the High-end Technology’, IFEZ Journal, 51: 16-17. Incheon, South Korea. Keeton, R. (2011), Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia. Amsterdam: SUN architecture. Keil, R. (2009), ‘The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization’, City, 13(2-3): 230-245. Lindsay, G. (2010), ‘Cisco’s Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities from Scratch’. Fast Company. Available: http://www.fastcompany.com/1514547/ciscos-big-betnew-songdo-creating-cities-scratch (Last accessed: 6 August 2014). Logan, J.R., and Molotch, H.L. (2007), ‘The City as a Growth Machine’, in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, Logan, J.R., and Molotch, H.L. (eds.), 50-98. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press [1st publication 1987]. Marin, L. (1977), ‘Disneyland, a Degenerate Utopia’, Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 1: 50-66. McCann, E. (2013). ‘Policy Boosterism, Policy Mobilities, and the Extrospective City’, Urban Geography, 34(1): 5-29. McCarthy, C. (2011), ‘Reconstructing Race and Education in the Class Conquest of the City and the University in the Era of Neoliberalism and Globalization’ in New Times: Making Sense of Critical/Cultural Theory in a Digital Age, McCarthy, C., Greenhalgh-Spender, H., and Mejia, R. (eds.), 86-103. New York: Peter Lang. National Information Society Agency (2014), Changjo-Gyeongje Brief (‘Creative Economy Brief’). The First Issue. Available: http://www.msip.go.kr/www/ brd/m_156/view.do?seq=31 (Last accessed: 16 Aug 2014). Park, B.G. (2005), ‘Spatially selective liberalization and graduated sovereignty: Politics of neo-liberalism and “special economic zones” in South Korea’, Political Geography, 24: 850-873. Rubin, J. (2010), ‘San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism’, in Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow, Desfor, G., Laidley, J., Stevens, Q., and Schubert D. (eds.), 143-165. London: Routledge. Schlichtman, J.J. (2009), ‘The Niche City Idea: How a Declining Manufacturing Center Exploited the Opportunities of Globalization’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1): 105-125. Shim, H. (2012), ‘International city Incheon born again to Song-do U-city’, Digital Times, 23 December. Webb, M., Buscher, V., Giles, S., and Mulligan, C. (2011), Information Marketplaces: The New Economics of Cities. University of Nottingham: The Climate Group, ARUP, Accenture, & Horizon. Weiser, M. (1991), ‘The Computer for the 21st Century’, Scientific American, September: 94-104.

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Williamson, L. (2013), ‘Tomorrow’s cities: Just how smart is Songdo?’ BBC News, 2 September. Wilson, D. (2007), ‘City Transformation and the Global Trope: Indianapolis and Cleveland’, Globalizations, 4(1): 29-44. Winner, L. (1980). ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus, 109(1): 121-136. Yi, W. (2012), ‘Songdo striving to showcase “Green City”’, The Korea Times, 15 October. Retrieved from: http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/10/113_122326. html. Accessed on 24 August 2016. Yoneda, Y. (2010), ‘Songdo Convensia is First LEED-Certified Convention Center in Asia’, Inhabitat, 13 April. Retrieved from: http://inhabitat.com/songdo-convensiais-first-leed-certified-convention-center-in-asia/songdo-convensia-5/. Accessed on 24 August 2016. Yonhap News (2005), President Roh, ‘Strong commitment for the success of IFEZ’, 16 June. Retrieved on 16 August 2014 from: http://www.chosun.com/politics/ news/200506/200506160091.html. Yoon, Y. (2009), ‘Incheon, a city with the future—an interview with mayor Ahn, Sang-soo’, Naeil News, 17 July.

About the author Chamee Yang is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a dissertation project tentatively entitled, ‘Networked Urbanization and the Birth of Creative Subjects: Ethno-historiography of the New Songdo City in South Korea’, in which she critically examines the discourses and technologies of urban governance and the histories and politics of urban technological development in South Korea. Email: [email protected]

12 Changing ideas of Hanoi State, citizens, markets Hans Schenk Abstract The core of this chapter is devoted to the outburst of private small-scale construction activities that started in the 1980s in Hanoi and continues, to some extent, until now. However, the discussion starts earlier, with the advent of social housing in the city from the 1960s to the mid 1980s, when it was embedded in the setting of Soviet Union-inspired socialist involvement in housing and ‘modern’ urban development, and the accompanying societal ideals. The outcome of this social housing policy was huge subsidised housing complexes with collective facilities. However, further implementation of socialist ideals was put aside in the 1980s, when the economy had to be restructured and the role of the state in welfare programmes such as subsidised housing was minimised. This resulted in semi-legal—locally branded as ‘popular’—private building activities of all kinds, involving all categories and classes of the local population while planners and public authorities seemed to be paralyzed. From the 1990s onwards, the state developed new options with regard to urban development and housing. Market-oriented ideas have since come to the fore, leading to the design and implementation of large-scale housing estates, mainly catering to the urban middle and upper classes, by development corporations and policymakers. As during the period of social housing, the desire to build a ‘modern’ city is again being expressed by professionals and policymakers. Meanwhile, private housing has continued, mainly in the fringes of the city, ignoring land use and construction regulations and the desire of policymakers and development corporations to transform Hanoi into a modern city. Keywords: Housing, Modernity, Popular housing

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch12

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Introduction, Hanoi moves towards a modern socialist city and beyond

From the 1980s onwards, there has been a massive outburst of private small-scale housing construction activities in the Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi. The major modalities of this construction boom will be discussed here.They form a fascinating epoch in the history of the city. One underlying question stands central: which ideas (concepts, visions, ideologies perhaps) have shaped the socio-spatial character of Hanoi—with particular reference to housing—before and since the early or mid-1980s. This question is, of course, part of a much broader field of realities and thoughts: the political economy in which cities manifest themselves; ideas of what a city should look like, how it should be structured, how it can be optimally adjusted to the needs of its inhabitants—and which inhabitants? Which criteria are used to measure a ‘good’ city? And then: whose ideas are voiced: those of policymakers, professionals, or concerned citizens? While this broader field is not discussed here at length—this chapter is mainly limited to the societal and temporal context of Hanoi—a few links will be made that transcend the visions and ideas that pertain to Hanoi specifically and touch upon wider concepts. Section 12.2 gives with an overview of the housing activities in Hanoi prior to the rapid increase of privately built houses in the 1980s. Social housing is briefly introduced, embedded in a clear setting of the Soviet Union-inspired socialist involvement in housing provision. Subsequently, the underlying ideas of Hanoi as a modern socialist city are discussed—both those from citizens, or rather the inhabitants of social housing complexes, and from planners and policymakers. Section 12.3 starts with the observation that the implementation of socialist ideals had to be put aside in the 1980s because the state was bankrupt and could not pursue expensive welfare policies such as heavily subsidised housing. On the contrary, private citizens were allowed, and later even encouraged, to solve their needs for shelter themselves. The modalities and main characteristics of private housing—usually referred to as ‘popular housing’—in Hanoi are outlined in this section, as well as the ideas accompanying these forms of housing, notably the new aspirations of many citizens. It seems that planners and public authorities kept silent. They returned to an outspoken position in a major segment of the housing market from the 1990s onwards. In section 12.4 attention is paid to the new public ambitions with regard to Hanoi’s development, which are framed through market-oriented policymakers and development corporations. The continuing, but less dominant, role of private citizens in regard to their

Changing ideas of Hanoi

Figure 12.1 Sketch map of Hanoi, indicating locations mentioned in the text

Map drawn by Arriel Shepherd, based on sketch by the author Key: C: Urban core X: Major KTT 1: KTT Quynh Mai 2: KTT Kim Lien 3: KTT Giang Vo 4: KTT Nguyen Cong Tru 5: Giap Bat 6: Linh Dam 7: Ciputra project 8: Dich Vong 9: Lang Cot 10: Yen Hoa 11: Hoa Muc

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housing needs is briefly discussed, while in finally the focus is on the revived desire among planners and policymakers to build a modern city—no longer socialist, but instead based on and inspired by the rules of the market.

12.2

Building a socialist city

12.2.1 Collective living The private housing construction in Hanoi since the 1980s can to some extent be seen as a reaction to the Socialist regime in which housing and urban development were rather strictly organised through master plans that were embedded with a vision of Hanoi as a socialist city in the making. For this reason, a rough picture of that socialist city is required to frame a proper understanding of the subsequent happenings.1 The turbulent history of North Vietnam after its victory over the French colonial regime in 1954 brought the state into close contact with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. In addition to economic aid and cooperation, intellectual and ideological support was also given, e.g. by training Vietnamese architects, urban planners, etc., and by providing technical aid in the field of housing and urban development, which became a matter of exclusively public decision-making and finance.2 Apart from a number of Soviet-style monumental buildings3 and plans for never-realised grandiose boulevards, the imprint of socialism was primarily visible at the levels of neighbourhoods and individual housing units. Foreign socialist support was certainly welcomed, as in the 1950s Hanoi was suffering from an enormous shortage of housing, which the new regime was unable to cope with due to a lack of both funds and experience among the few local architects who would have to design and build on a sizeable scale. Through master plans, the socialist countries offered the idea of constructing new residential neighbourhood units, consisting of medium-rise

1 For a more detailed narrative of this period of the history of Hanoi, see Logan 2000, particularly Chapter 7. 2 In 1961, The Central Committee issued a resolution that stated that ‘land and housing in the cities and towns concern everyone and are part of the socialist revolution’ and that ‘the state must satisfy the people’s demand for housing’ (quoted in Labbé 2014: 102). 3 Many government offices, Friendship, Youth palaces, and memorial buildings are built with ‘architectural models established previously in the Soviet Union’, according to Logan (2000: 196). Attempts to harmonise such buildings with the surrounding townscape are not visible.

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apartment complexes4 and some service buildings, around the old historic core of the city. These units have become known as mikroraion in the literature of Soviet urban planning and have been widely applied in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries since the late 1950s.5 These neighbourhood units 6 contain services for daily needs, such as basic shops, schools, daycare centres, medical facilities, and recreational spaces, all meant for a population of about 5000 to 15,000. Some 60 larger and smaller mikroraion were built in Hanoi during the period of ‘state subsidy’ between 1960 and 1985 in ‘une ceinture rouge’ (Pédelahore de Loddis 2001: 302)—a red ribbon around the pre-colonial and colonial central parts of the city. The mikroraion have become known as Khu Tap The (‘collective living quarters’, KTT for short). Initially, a few one- and two-storey units were constructed, but later apartment blocks contain three to f ive storeys.7 Each storey normally consists of ten to twenty apartments (see Figure 12.2). In the early KTTs, an apartment would measure some 16 to 20 square metres. It had to accommodate a family of about f ive persons, while water and sanitary facilities were shared with a few neighbours. Cooking facilities were sometimes non-existent, as the inhabitants were supposed to eat in the canteens of factories or schools. Smaller families might share an apartment with others, and sometimes a wall was constructed to partition the apartment. In later KTT blocks—from the 1970s onwards—the apartments were larger, up to 40 or even 65 square metres, and had private water and sanitary provisions and a kitchen. Overcrowding was a serious problem: KTT Kim Lien, for example, which was designed to accommodate 11,000 inhabitants in the 1960s, housed 20,000 in 2000. 8 Pressure on the 4 In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, high-rise apartment blocks were more common. In Hanoi, however, the technology needed to build high-rise buildings was not initially available. The first apartment blocks (built around 1960) were constructed in a traditional manner, while at a later stage (from about 1970 onwards) prefab units (‘Plattenbau’) were applied. 5 However, it took no less than ten years—in 1969—for the mikroraion to be officially accepted by the USSR Academy of Construction and Architecture as a basic element of town planning. 6 The concept of the mikroraion may be inspired by the idea of the neighbourhood unit, designed by the American urban planner Clarence Perry in 1929 (see Reiner 1963). 7 The KTT of Hanoi are well-documented in studies in European languages. Apart from the overview in Logan (2000), many details are given by Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001), Pédelahore de Loddis (2001), Koh (2006), and Geertman (2007); see also Schenk (2013). Tran Hoai Anh (1999) gives an interesting ‘modernist’ interpretation of the socialist housing projects. Fine drawings of some KTT have been made by Ros (2001: 270-278). 8 Sometimes KTT apartments were split into two. In 2004 in KTT Than Xuan Bac, built in the 1980s, I saw two-room apartments of 40 sq. metres transformed into two, with literally halved kitchens, toilets, and bathrooms.

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Figure 12.2 KTT Quynh Mai

Photo by the author, 1998

available infrastructure was obviously heavy. The apartments-buildings were often poorly constructed as well. Leaking joints between walls and window frames, leaking roofs, deteriorating concrete in staircases, choked drains, pilfering of cement, etc., were common. Moreover, maintenance was inadequate as rents were low and not suff icient for proper maintenance: about 1-2 percent of monthly salaries, withdrawn automatically from payrolls—hence the feeling that living in a KTT apartment was ‘for free’. 12.2.2 Ideas for the modern socialist city The neighbourhood unit is the basic tool of socialist planners (Fisher 1962) and, indeed, this also applies to Hanoi’s Khu Tap The. The collective living quarters provide a shop window for the ideas of how the city could (and should) turn into a socialist city. Uniformity was a catchword and an outcome of an egalitarian ideology, resulting in the desire for standardisation in the layout and size of apartment buildings, square metres of living space per inhabitant, building techniques, etc.9 The prevalence of the ‘common 9 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to point at the universal aims of socialist urban planning: planning for socialist men (see Fisher 1962). This broad ideal seems similar to the CIAM-inspired ‘modern’ style in West European and North American architecture, and to that of Le Corbusier, who planned for the universal man: l’homme-type. See Choay (1965) for an excellent analysis of universalist and other approaches towards urban planning. Choay, however, used the term ‘progressiste’ instead of modern. And, when making the step from planning to implementation,

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good’ over individual benef its was certainly another catchword. 10 The idea of collective living took shape in the shared infrastructural facilities, but also in the idea of eating in factory or school canteens. ‘Individualism was considered equal to egoistic’, remarks the architect Tran Hoai Anh, reflecting on living in the KTT apartments (Tran 1999: 110). Modernity was a central rallying concept: the ideology of a new socialist way of urban living considered it to be closely related to a modern way of living based on its superior economic virtues and rationality. In other words, modernity was expressed through the idea and realisation of self-contained neighbourhoods where shelter was combined with easy access to basic services and daily needs. One may argue that aspiring modernity and progress as expressed in new apartment buildings was seen in cities in many developing—and often recently independent—countries during this time, and was certainly not unique to North Vietnam and Hanoi.11 However, Hanoi did succeed in building a sizeable number of subsidised dwelling units for a sizeable share of the urban population, where similar efforts elsewhere have mostly failed.12 In this way, the ideals and will to house the inhabitants of the city have been more deeply embedded into the local and national societal structure of Vietnam than in the cities of many other developing countries, where such most attempts proved to be superf icial and not sustainable.

‘the postwar “socialist” city’, writes Wagenaar ‘appears to be the most eloquent expression of the principles formulated around 1930 by the […] CIAM’ (2004: 8). 10 The architect who headed the first Vietnamese mission to the Soviet Union (to the Leningrad Institute of Urban Research and Planning) to get training in the architecture and construction of apartment blocks stated (in a discussion with me in 2004) that North Vietnam at that time fully and easily accepted the foreign ideas, especially those pertaining to ‘collective’ and socialist living. Not surprisingly, when I toured this architect through some post-war planned districts in Amsterdam in 1997 (notably the clearest translations from CIAM ideals into practice, the ‘Bijlmermeer’), he expressed his admiration for the architecture and town planning of this district which he knew from the literature. Likewise, he voiced his disgust in seeing more recent, postmodern areas. 11 A lengthy quotation of a report by a Study Group on the future of Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s illustrates this: ‘What is of vital importance in the building up of a Welfare State is to ensure the provision of living accommodation of modern standards with the recognised essential amenities for the people in the country. We therefore recommend that the minimum accommodation should provide at least two living rooms and a separate kitchen with sanitary and other essential modern conveniences.’ (Government of Bombay 1959: 12) 12 See, e.g. the comparison of housing policies and performances between Madras (now Chennai) and Hanoi in Schenk (2013).

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While the ideas of urban planners and policymakers about the future of Hanoi were clear enough in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, those of its residents, and notably those housed in KTT units, were mixed, at least in retrospect. Tran Hoai Anh is outspoken: ‘The apartment buildings were imported and disseminated images of a modern socialist life’ and ‘the result of the top-down enforcement of the ideals of a modern socialist society’ (Tran 1999: 112).13 She adds, however, that housing in the form of the KTT ‘reflected a concern about mass housing for the people, an issue totally ignored during the previous period’ (Tran 1999: 117). It seems that many inhabitants of KTT complexes shared this concern. Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh wrote in 2001 that ‘Ten or fifteen years ago a flat on the second floor in a clean and quiet area would have been ideal for any Hanoian’ (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 63), and Koh adds that the allotment of an apartment was considered good fortune during the 1960s and 1970s (Koh 2006: 210). A small survey of the aged inhabitants of KTT apartments in 2003 confirmed these positive remarks.14 The respondents voiced their happiness and good luck to receive the assignment of an apartment at that time, sometimes after a long period of waiting.15 The shortage of housing was indeed enormous during the whole period of ‘subsidised housing’ between about 1960 and the mid 1980s: the available per capita living space was only 3.04 square metres in 1984, even less than the 3.89 square metres per capita in 1960 (ibid.: 212, 216). The absolute lack of residential space and hence the ‘luck’ of getting an even very modest shelter seems to have been the overruling factor in satisfaction scores and perceived qualities of a socialist housing and urban development policy: ‘the fight for a place to live was a tedious one’ (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 26). Unavoidably, there was also frustration about the lack of sufficient public means to implement public ideals. However, the endeavour to house a substantial part of the population of Hanoi in social housing estates remains, and deserves to be judged respectfully.

13 A complementary opinion is naturally that ‘backward habits and customs need to be renovated or eliminated’ (Ngo Van Ha, quoted in Tran 1999: 109). 14 I held semi-structured interviews and open discussions with 27 randomly chosen elderly residents in seven KTT complexes, with the help of an interpreter. The interviews/discussions focused partly on residential histories and satisfaction, etc. The results are of course not representative of the entire KTT-dwelling population. 15 Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001: 52) mention an average waiting list period of 27 months. My data indicate a broad range of wait times, from an immediate assignment to six years.

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Transitions: housing by empowered citizens

The year 1986 is usually taken as a watershed in Vietnamese politics. In that year, a new economic policy (Doi Moi) was announced and agreed upon during the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party. Among other things, this economic policy abolished state subsidies for collective housing programmes and more or less allowed private parties to take the initiative to provide shelter. The major reason for this withdrawal of state involvement was that the government was no longer able to finance the welfare measures associated with its socialist ideals. During the approximately half-decade prior to this decision, the severe demand for shelter had led to illegal, though tolerated, construction activities (straw and bamboo structures, according to Koh 2006: 223), built on open grounds in KTT complexes and elsewhere. Labbé describes the early 1980s as an extremely murky period, during which policy changes were frequent and unclear (2014: 96). However, from the mid-1980s onwards, private construction rapidly became the most important mode of provisioning new shelters or improving existing dwellings. From 1987, with the introduction of the so-called ‘State and People Work Together’ programme, private parties were formally invited to meet their own demands for shelter—and to meet its costs. This does not mean, however, that housing became regularised. ‘Housing construction without permits [was] rampant’ in 1992-1994; during this period ‘only 2,741 permits for construction were granted while over 13,000 houses were built without permits and put into use after administrative fines were paid’ (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 68). An overview of the main modes of private housing and the specif ic contexts under which each occurred is given in this section, while the societal meaning and impact on the ideas of how Hanoi should be will be discussed subsequently. The visual dimensions of private housing—or ‘popular housing’ as the sociologist Trinh Duy Luan probably termed it (Evertsz 2000: 23)—are manifold.16 They include newly built individual houses in the central parts of the city, houses on the outskirts, repaired and enlarged apartments, and old houses. They also include huge concentrations 16 The term ‘popular housing’ should not be confused with the discussion from the 1970s onwards in developing countries about the merits of ‘housing by the people’, as coined by the architect John Turner. ‘Housing by the people’ was meant to cater to the urban poor, allowing them to improve huts and similar dwellings. ‘Popular housing’, on the other hand, encompasses the (potential) activities of the whole urban population. In this chapter I use the term ‘popular’ instead of ‘private’, as it has become associated with the specific situation of the housing scene in Hanoi.

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of, for instance, hardware shops in various parts of the city, or the large market for electrical appliances in KTT Nguyen Cong Tru that started in the late 1980s. Newly built individual houses and enlarged apartments in KTT blocks are certainly the most spectacular appearances of popular housing, and have also attracted the most attention from Vietnamese and foreign professionals.17 These two innovations in the townscape of Hanoi will be discussed.18 12.3.1 Popular housing: an overview Scattered throughout the city are newly built houses, often constructed after taking down old dilapidated ones.19 Tran Hoai Anh names these ‘private street houses’ (Tran 1999: 122). These houses normally have 4 to 5 storeys, with narrow fronts that are usually up 5 metres wide, and plots 10-15 metres deep. She describes 24 street houses in various parts of the urban districts of Hanoi in detail, most of which were designed by professional architects and inhabited by upper middle-class professionals (ibid.: 145ff). Often, however, these newly built houses are more modest.20 According to Geertman’s interviews with the owners of privately built houses, 18 out of 20 of the homes were designed by the owners themselves. Most of them were also built by the owners, with the help of family members and friends together with hired labour (Geertman 2007: 264). A related type of newly built house is the dwellings built in open places in the many (former) villages 17 It should be added that attention has also been given to the repair and renovation of worn-out housing units, e.g. by Trinh Duc Nhan (2001: 52), and Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001: 84-115) in their respective overviews of the pluriform appearances of popular housing, while Hoang Huu Phe (2001: 53-79) focuses entirely on the improvement of existing old houses in central Hanoi. 18 Innovations could also take place on a micro scale. Private cooking places emerged in the KTT blocks in which no cooking facilities were available. Outside corridors were partly transformed into makeshift open-air kitchens. With a clear sense of understatement, Pédelahore de Loddis has termed these cooking places ‘cuisine ventilée’, ventilated kitchen (Pédelahore de Loddis 2001: 306). 19 Trinh Duy Luan writes about a ‘“sea” of single houses built by households everywhere in the city. Being diversified, of various styles and scopes, they have sprung up as mushrooms after rains’ (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 18). 20 Trinh Duy Luan notes that at the low end of the house construction scene small houses costing US $ 1000 to 2000 could be found, while at the high end houses could cost US $ 30,000 to 40,000 or more (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 20-21). The years for these mentioned prices are not given, but probably pertain to the late 1990s. The differences are more important than the absolute figures. Nguyen Xuan Mai also writes about the ‘Growing social inequality in Hanoi’s housing’ (2001: 133).

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surrounding the old core of the city, which are sometimes incorporated into the municipal apparatus of the city and sometimes in the suburbs.21 The residents of such areas who own a small plot next to their house may sell it to buyers, who then have a house built on that small piece of land.22 The resulting densification of the village23 is accompanied by a gross neglect of infrastructural requirements, and more generally by the unplanned development of a former village area: roads are crooked and have not been broadened, drainage systems have not been adapted to the growing needs, etc. This densification of the existing built environment has been analysed by a range of authors, who discuss examples of such densification within or beyond the municipal borders. For example, Evertsz (2000) studied densification in a village in the south of Hanoi, Pandolfi (2001: 99-114) describes another hamlet in the south, Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001: 90-98) a hamlet in the north-western suburbs, Labbé (2014) a similar hamlet southwest of the municipality, and Tran Mai Anh (2013) another former village in the northwest (see Figure 12.3). Land may also be allocated to government offices, which then divide it into parcels for sale to their employees, who in turn build a house with private funds. There are many varieties of this type. The one that has been studied by Pandolfi in the southernmost part of the city fell under the ‘State and People Work Together’ programme, in which residents were encouraged to help themselves in providing shelter (Pandolfi 2001). Also under conditions of government allocations of land for residential purposes there is in the best possible situation there is some infrastructure planning at the neighbourhood level, but often there is none. The private housing activities described above pertain (often) to augmentation of the housing stock. The enlargement of existing apartments does not augment to this stock, but is undertaken to add to the quality of dwellings. Two main types of quality improvement can be distinguished. Prior to the construction of the KTT complexes from 1960 onwards, a few small housing projects were 21 This distinction formally mattered until 2006, when the system of hu khau (‘urban registration’) was abolished. In this system, the procedures for land transactions and settlement of immigrants were different. The rural system was often more informal, while rural immigration into the city was formally banned in the urban system. It should be noted that the registration system was more and more evaded since the economic renovation from the mid 1980s onwards, though it pertains even now as authorities are occasionally still reluctant to provide rural in-migrants with the same rights (access to education, health, etc.) as urban co-residents. 22 Since all land belongs to the state, land use rights are actually sold. 23 Plot sizes in Lang Cot, a village studied by Tran Mai Anh, varied from less than 30 square metres to over 1000 square metres. Average plot sizes were between 70 and 100 square metres (Tran 2013: 158).

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Figure 12.3 Private housing in a former village

Photo by the author, 1998

carried out in the form of single-storey attached houses. Evertsz describes a project of temporary houses built in 1959-1960in a southern district of the city. The houses are single-room apartments of 24 square metres with small courtyards, a communal kitchen,24 and six bathrooms for a row of 12 housing units. At the time of research (1997) ‘all possible varieties of expansions and rebuilding have occurred in the neighbourhood and in all cases, public land has been occupied. […] Practically all inhabitants have expanded their houses and […] have used the pieces of land in front of and behind their original apartments. […] An increasing number of apartments is being rebuilt completely […] and a new, two or three storey house is constructed on the spot’ (Evertsz 2000: 100-101). Most inhabitants in the regular KTT complexes do not have the opportunity to as thoroughly renovate their apartments; since the KTT units are much more visible than the neighbourhood Evertsz studied—which is in a remote area of the city—the changes there have drawn more attention from scholars studying the Hanoi housing scene. What they have observed is classified under the general term ‘enlarged apartments’, but the label ‘deformed’ apartment buildings is at least as suitable. Suspended or ‘hanging balconies’ or ‘tiger cages’ (Koh 2006: 227) have become infamous in Hanoi’s KTT: lightweight extensions of up to two or three metres outward from a second, third, or 24 In a later stage—but, Evertsz suggests, before the era of ‘popular housing’—communal kitchens were divided by the residents into private kitchens (Evertsz 2000: 80-81). They also undertook other relatively minor improvements at that time.

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Figure 12.4 KTT block deformed by ‘hanging balconies’, KTT Quynh Mai

Photo by author, 2013

fourth-floor apartment, hanging more or less from a few bamboos or at best iron poles and with plywood or other cheap materials for floors, walls, and roofs. Sometimes vertical neighbours have joined hands and erected a pillar from a ground floor upwards, thus sharing the costs and improving the quality of the construction. Sometimes only a ground floor extension has been built25 (see Figure 12.4). These apartment block deformations have been described and skilfully illustrated in a number of studies, such those by Khawatmi (2001: 285-297), Pédelahore de Loddis (2001: 297-311), Cerise (2001: 311-321), and Shin Yong-Hak (2001: 323-334) in the reader edited by Clément and Lancret (2001), and by Geertman (2007). 12.3.2 Popular housing: land, finances, and security A useful analytical tool to arrive at a proper understanding of these varieties of popular housing, going beyond a mere description, has been suggested by Evertsz (2000) in her monograph on two examples of popular housing. She argues that efforts regarding popular housing require two assets—land and finances—and sufficient security to not be frustrated in these efforts (ibid.: 34). Building or improving a house requires financial means and—not surprisingly—the shift to a market economy is characterised by a gradually 25 Koh mentions a survey in two KTT complexes in 1983 in which it was found that 26 percent of the residents had made illegal constructions in that year (2006: 227).

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increasing gap between the more and less well to do. The abundant houses of the upper middle-class described by Tran Hoai Anh (1999) contrast with the makeshift hanging extensions of KTT apartments. Indeed, the KTT neighbourhoods tend to become ‘occupied by a majority of households with low or very low incomes’ and ‘most do not have extra resources to undertake […] self-built additions such as balconies that have been converted into a room by quite rudimentary means and methods’ (Tam 1997: 62-63). However, for both the well-to-do and the less well-off, getting access to finance for housing is difficult. Formal financial institutions that issued mortgage loans were hardly available, and hence the finance of a popularly built house or improved shelter depends on private means, augmented by loans from moneylenders, relatives, and friends, against a high interest.26 Next to financial means, access to land is obviously a vital matter for many popular builders. In some cases, it is clear that public land has been occupied, as in the ground-floor enlargements of KTT apartments. In other cases, land-use rights and how to transfer them to others are less clear. In the many former villages within the Hanoi municipality, vacant land has often never been claimed by the government and is regarded as private property by the villagers. Land transfers took place and could at least till 1995 take place in a simple manner: ‘in simple hand-written contracts, signed by both parties’(Evertsz, 2000: 96). From 1995 a start has been made with the registration of all land in Hanoi, and hence with a more formal backing of proper certificates. In the suburban areas of Hanoi beyond the municipal boundaries, a distinction was made after 1968 between agricultural land and non-agricultural/residential land. The latter category became subject to the ‘State and People Work Together’ programme launched in 1987, in which the conversion of non-agricultural plots near existing houses into land for housing was facilitated and encouraged. This led to an enormous amount of small-scale construction activities in the suburbs of Hanoi (Labbé 2014). Building a new house or improving an existing one requires at least enough confidence that the endeavour will not be frustrated or even destroyed by the authorities. Though this confidence was not enhanced by the different government agencies, it was in practice also not hindered as rules and regulations were treated as rather irrelevant. Trinh Duy Luan and 26 Percentages between 1.5 and 2.5 per month are mentioned for the late 1990s. Evertsz writes that the burden of the loan is high and created new debts among the home improvers in her study. ‘As a result, they rely on small loans from family, friends, neighbours and shop owners to buy food and are no longer able to send their children to school’ (Evertsz 2000: 142). However, a large majority of prospective builders had to rely on such informal loans; 89 percent, according to an estimate based on a survey in 1997 by Tran Tho Dat and Tran Quang Chun (2001).

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Nguyen Quang Vinh write in a rather cynical manner about the role of public authorities: ‘many state, private organisations, and urban dwellers all “joined the game” of trading, transferring, exchanging, occupying, and speculating land without paying attention to legal implications’ (2001: 223). Regardless of a range of decrees, regulations, and similar measures, the overwhelming picture is that the authorities in charge of urban housing and land activities were not at all prepared for an outbreak of illegal building activities.27 In fact, just the contrary: there is no evidence that these authorities wanted to curtail this outbreak. Lengthy and complicated procedures for following the ‘high road’ to decision-making by all parties involved in housing construction were abandoned, and the concerned officials were confronted with private solutions made by prospective builders of their private houses. The officials had a weapon—a fine for obstructing the rules—but this weapon was not effective. It is important to note that in the late 1980s decision-making and maintenance of housing, etc. was decentralized, from the city and the—then—four districts to the lowest level of urban administration: the phuong (‘ward’). The four districts are divided into 84 wards, each counting between 7000 and 20,000 inhabitants (Hoang and Orn 1995: 5; figures are for 1994. The resulting closer contact between residents and authorities regarding decisions on housing construction or maintenance resulted in what Koh calls an increased ‘mediation space’: discretionary powers exercised by local authorities ‘to decide whether to apply rules, although residents may well suggest the idea [ whether the rula applies, HS] to them’ (Koh 2006: 15). These closer contacts had both negative and positive effects. Koh mentions the increased vulnerability to corruption, as well as the possibility of more easily ‘sheltering’ offenders28 (ibid.: 223-235). Labbé draws the 27 In the 1990s there was an abundant bureaucracy in charge of land and housing. Evertsz counts a national ministry for land registration, a municipal department for land and housing, nine similar departments at the district level, and numerous at the ward level. Competencies were often unclear and overlapping (Evertsz 2000: 59). Leaf points at the friction between the various territorial and the vertical agencies involved in housing and planning: the Ministry of Construction, which governs the municipal Department of Construction, which in turn oversees the Bureau of Construction, etc. (1999: 301). 28 Rumours about corruption and patronage are naturally not easily backed by proper evidence. Regarding ‘sheltering offenders’, stories were told about ward officials who pitied, for example, the old, poor widow of a war veteran, by allowing her to build a ground extension on a KTT block to start a petty shop—a favour that was denied to an ‘outsider’ coming to the ward with a plan to start a business attached to the block. Such empathy and compassion, as recorded by spokesmen I met, was sometimes explained by the fact that ward officials often lived in the same KTT blocks under the same difficult housing conditions and therefore perfectly understood the needs of their co-residents.

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reader’s attention to the scale of these discretionary powers under different conditions. She writes about the longstanding patronage practices in the village she studied, which was traditionally characterised by an informal and loose power structure. When, in 1997, this village was incorporated into the municipal administrative structure of Hanoi, relations between villagers and powerholders became less personal; she noted complaints about the number and size of the ‘envelopes’ of grease money that had to be given to the new class of business elites and/or local bureaucrats (Labbé 2014: 139-141). 12.3.3 Whose ideas? An absent state and residents’ aspirations for a home Opinions about the new housing townscape following Doi Moi are often voiced by scholars dealing with housing in Hanoi as counterpoints of the erstwhile housing programme that aimed at creating a socialist city. This is clear, write Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh, as ‘Household[s] acting as popular housing producers have a single-minded objective’ (2001: 235). Dismissing the straightjacket of the socialist housing ideology seems a suitable (though perhaps opportunistic) label for describing one component of this objective, but satisfaction with the new freedom to build was another. Freedom to build has been described in terms of spontaneity, diversification, and irregularity, in short, the new availability of ‘a wide range of quality and sizes in housing models’ (ibid: 87-88), and heralded in colourful terms by Nguyen Xuan Mai: ‘the grey colour of the past has been replaced by brighter present day colours’ (ibid.: 133). Tran Hoai Anh quotes an architect who observed already in 1985 that ‘collective housing’ was the result of a: ‘misunderstanding of apartment building type in other (European) countries, and ignorance about the quality of housing’ (1999: 113). What is striking in the interviews presented by Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh of a variety of homeowners and tenants from several dwelling types is that, though accounts are given of past house improvements, etc., their expectations and hopes for (further) improvements are also voiced. A new horizon of dwelling satisfaction, often the aspiration for an individual house, which was not manifest in the past, seems to have come in sight for some, or perhaps many, but not for others—causing frustration. A past horizon—that of a socialist future—no longer comes to the fore, and these authors observe that the ‘dynamism of housing production during the Doi Moi has proved the vitality of the new concepts and approaches that have been adopted’ (Trinh and Nguyen 2001: 232).

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However, the actions of the layers of government institutions show less vitality. Vietnam’s weak and inactive public sector is probably related to a shortage of public means, but it is also perhaps associated with a lack of ideas following the de facto breakdown of the socialist ideal. Above, I mentioned the increased ‘mediation space’ as a result of the administrative decentralisation of the management of housing and related fields. In terms of ideas of the city, this also means the lack of a sufficiently shared philosophy about its condition and future. This allowed the pursuit of immediate, private interests by citizens and local authorities alike, at the cost of the common good (e.g. infrastructure29). It took ten years or so before the government reinvented itself and released—since 1994—a set of proposals, acts, and ideas about the future of Hanoi.

12.4

Hanoi: towards a global city with a local history

The early 1990s saw the processes of a re-activated state in the fields of housing, land, and urban development. The proclaimed Land Law in 1993 (and its amendments in 1998), in a series of decrees in 1994, and in a Master Plan in 1998, the foundation was laid for a more active and powerful role of the state.30 Notably, the necessity of a renewed public involvement in housing has motivated this attitude. ‘The need for a suitable legal and institutional framework to ensure better and sustainable housing conditions has never been so pressing’, conclude Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001: 221), while Pandolfi (2001) asks attention for the threatened environment as a result of unbridled urban development in fringe villages where filled-in village ponds are used for housing. This government engagement was, however, defined within the newly established rules of a market-oriented system of dealing with land, houses, and the development of the city in general. 12.4.1 Modern market orientations An early example of the state’s new role is a project described by Pandolfi (2001: 109-114) in Giap Bat, undertaken by a corporation—not subsidised, and therefore supposed to make a profit—established in 1989. This corporation 29 Evertsz mentions that in her research area houses were built on top of drained ditches with the consent of the local phuong committee (Evertsz 2000: 158). 30 Details are given in Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh (2001: 223-225).

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is the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUD), a subsidiary of the Ministry of Construction, which worked together with Japanese investors. This illustrates the changed climate since the early 1990s.31 Among the first major showpieces of HUD was the Linh Dam residential project, which started in the late 1990s and catered to Hanoi’s better-off population. Likewise, in subsequent projects by HUD and other ‘State Owned Enterprises’ (SOEs), foreign investment capital was sought and occasionally found.32 A prime example is the so-called Ciputra-project to build a gated community in the north of the city.33 This project was originally meant to house 50,000 inhabitants, but due to the Southeast Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, the project came to a standstill before it really started. It was completed later, though in a more modest way, and—as is the case for Linh Dam and so many other projects—catering to well-to-do Hanoians. Similarly a beginning has been made with the demolition of some of the KTT complexes. In KTT Kim Lien, for example, modern high-rise apartments have replaced a few of the old blocks and tower high above the skyline34 (see Figure 12.5). In addition to residential projects, industrial estates were planned and built in the peripheral areas of the city, while in the urban centre fourteen four-star foreign-funded35 hotels were to be built between 1996 and 1998, adding 4515 luxury beds to the existing stock (Schenk 2005: 67). Finally, an example of the focus on the international development community is given. The Korean Daewoo Corporation, the US consultants Bechtel, and 31 Also illustrative is HUD’s glossy brochure, which shows their achievements and plans. Its activities are: ‘Planning and implementing the housing, new urban development projects and industrial parks; main contracting the infrastructure systems, housing, commercial buildings and industrial projects; providing consultancy services on development, residential area planning, building design; real estate management; entertainment and recreation services.’ It promises customers that: ‘HUD is now providing land with infrastructure, housing, commercial building on turn-key basis’ (HUD, n.d.). 32 Labbé compares these SOEs with the Korean chaebol model, in which state corporations fall under the responsibility of the government (2014: 114). 33 Ciputra is an Indonesian development company; this project has been implemented by its Singapore subsidiary. See Leaf (1999) for details. The site of the Ciputra project was on land of a rural district of the city that was added to the municipality in 1995 to form the new urban district of Tay Ho. 34 Residents of the old blocks could rent apartments in a new building. The arrangement was that they had to pay the old low concessional rents up to the amount of the square metres in the original apartment; for the surplus square metres, market rate had to be paid. 35 All but two investors came from Asia: four from Singapore, two from Japan, and one each from South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan. Data for one hotel were not available.

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Figure 12.5 New high-rise apartments replacing KTT blocks, KTT Kim Lien

Photo by author, 2004

the Dutch town planning and architectural firm OMA, in collaboration with Hanoi’s Chief Architect, drew a Master Plan for 2020 including a ‘Hanoi New Town’36 in 1998 (see, e.g. Ministry of Construction 1999: 46; Lancret 2001: 71; and Geertman 2007: 182, for the much-publicised outline map).37 These examples illustrate the market orientation of Hanoi’s development, at least among the authorities, foreign and domestic private and semi-public enterprises (State Owned Enterprises), and foreign investors. Another major characteristic of the market orientation of the development of Hanoi is the lack of public means and thus the impotence of the city’s public authorities to implement the Master Plan in the way it was originally envisaged. As a result, most of the interested private and semi-public ‘developers are motivated to change the original plan or subdivide it into smaller projects for resale to maximise profits’, as Tran Mai Anh observes after interviews 36 See Ha Van Que and Pandolfi (2002: 169-174). 37 The map of the Master Plan for 2020 has gained an almost iconic status in the literature of the early twenty-first century. It appears in many publications, often without a proper explanation. The map could even be found as wall decorations in cafes in Hanoi around the year 2000, where it was skilfully redrawn by local artists. The story goes that some artists experimented slightly with the functional colours of the map indicating types of land use or handled the original colours a bit carelessly, and hence several varieties gradually came into existence. One is unavoidably reminded of the iconic photograph taken in 1934 at the CIAM conference on the functional city, in which a group of architects was colouring the maps of Amsterdam by hand. Each member of the group was ‘obliged to colour for two-and-a-half hours’ (Jolles and Polak 2003: 63-66).

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with a range of planners (2013: 171). The major component parts of the Master Plan beyond the urban centre have consequently crystallised into a new concept for the planned urban future: the largely privately financed New Urban Areas (Khu Do Thi Moi/KDTM). These areas were to become ‘a new model of periurban space production’ (Labbé 2014: 101) that was more and more luxurious and would only meet the demand of a small higher income group (Tran 2013: 165). These form the core of what could be named ‘New Hanoi’, a vast urban belt of residential, commercial, and infrastructural land usages, mainly south, west, and north of the existing city. Labbé adds that projects in this belt were supposed to be devoid of a ‘variety of traditional configurations and practices [prevalent] in the urban core’ (Labbé 2014: 108), such as the mixed usage of residential buildings, commercial activities on sidewalks, street vendors, etc. Many New Urban Areas—such as Dich Vong, Yen Hoa, and others, with areas of 200 to 400 hectares and the capacity to house between 10,000 and 15,000 inhabitants—are situated in the newly formed urban district Cau Giay, which has a planned capacity of 230,000 inhabitants and is planned to be the future administrative centre of the city.38 Two regulations made these New Urban Areas possible. First, under the regime of a variety of new land laws and decrees passed in the 1990s, a renewed centralisation of decision-making for planning larger projects became possible again after the years of public paralysis at the central city and district level following the breakdown of socialist-empowered ideals and practices. Second, a powerful instrument was added to the toolbox of planners and decision-makers: the expropriation of agricultural land for urban development projects under the rules of profit-making enterprises. Though such expropriation had been possible in the past, it was invariably seen as a sacrifice for the common good; now private gains were also introduced in the shape of residential estates on agricultural land.39

38 This contribution does not focus on the many details of the current institutional and other aspects of district development planning, as is the case of Cau Giay. A useful overview, including the plans of some of the not less than 44 New Urban Areas, mainly in Cau Giay (some partly realised) is given by Geertman (2007: 315-323). See also Tran Mai Anh (2013). 39 ‘Land could be sold’ noticed the villagers of Hoa Muc, who were studied by Labbé (2014: 131). And she added that this realisation changed the life in the village completely. Making a living from agriculture was irrevocably exchanged for an (often) enormous amount of cash. A majority of the farmers built a new house or a motorbike, while only 3 percent used it for a vocational training (ibid.: 134).

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12.4.2 Counterpoints The New Urban Areas are part of a rim of peripheral urban development running from the south to the northwest of the municipality. In the numerous villages in this rim, considerable semi-informal housing developments have also been undertaken since the 1980s, some under the loose umbrella of the ‘People and State Work Together’ programme. The contrast between these projects and the New Urban Areas is enormous; because of their physical appearance, these villages have been termed ‘New Urban Villages’ by Tran Mai Anh (2013: 141) (see Figure 12.6). Though the ‘People and State Work Together’ programme has faded away from the limelight since the 1980s and 1990s, its activities are still ongoing and it is still seeing results. Semi-informal land subdivisions in the many villages around Hanoi have resulted in a pattern of densely built New Urban Villages. Tran Mai Anh studied one such a village, Lang Cot in the urban district (since 1997) of Cau Giay, which had 10,500 inhabitants in the late 2000s. According to her survey, 42 percent of the inhabitants of Lang Cot had subdivided land and sold it for the construction of houses, and 61 percent of these sales were done without the required papers. Most of the sold plots are small—on average 70 to 100 square metres 40 —and the resulting land-use map shows dense settlement. This density is enforced by minimal and inadequate infrastructure. The road network has been spontaneously developed over the centuries, and is mainly narrow (3.5 to 5 metres or less) and crooked with many dead ends (see Figure 12.7). Pavement is scarce, piped sewage non-existent. The new four-to-five-storey private houses border dark alleys where cars find it difficult to manoeuvre (Tran 2013: 141-167; maps and figures 242-255). Though these New Urban Villages contrast widely with the New Urban Areas, they reflect two sides of the same coin of market-driven housing and urban development. 41 Since they are often located next to each other, Tran Mai Anh pleads for some sort of integration with regard to infrastructure, etc. She and Geertman (2007: 302) are of the opinion that both of these answers to housing Hanoi’s growing population will survive for the time 40 Tran Mai Anh (2013: 158) adds that larger plots (over 500 square metres) were often bought by speculators. 41 One may argue, however, that the scale of market orientation matters. Residents of a New Urban Village sell small plots next to their house to individuals who settle in the village, and sometimes to speculators. However, they are more or less forced to sell larger pieces of agricultural land in a process of expropriation to prof it-making development corporations, against an arbitrary price.

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Figure 12.6 Housing in New Urban Village Lang Cot, Cau Giay District

Photo by Tran Mai Anh, probably late 2000s

being. The opinions of other architects and planning authorities are, however, particularly negative concerning the New Urban Villages, even though they heralded the one or two decades ago popular approaches towards housing needs, they have changed their minds in the beginning of the 21 st century. Labbé writes that: ‘Vietnamese built-environment professionals also criticised the haphazard and chaotic physical outcomes that resulted from privately initiated residential production’ (2014: 106). Interesting is then that she remarks that these professionals emphasize: ‘how such a built environment blemished the face of the capital city of a nation that wished to project an image of modern and orderly development’ (ibid.).

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Figure 12.7 Road pattern of Lang Cot

Source: Tran 2013: 244 Key: black lines: major roads, 7-11 m wide other lines: minor roads, mainly 3.5 m wide

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12.4.3 Ideas of Hanoi: modernity again Ideas of Hanoi in the period followed the transition from a socialist inspired city to a partial return of public command over urban development via an urban nursery—the ‘Self-Organizing City’ that Geertman saw—in which individuals sought and were given considerable freedom to create their own home. But, as Labbé comments: ‘The new model of urban development also attempted to renew the image of state sponsored housing production by distancing itself from the failing collective housing buildings built in previous decades’, while Hanoi was to be reshaped into a place showing a global image of order, modernity and rapid economic development’ (Labbé 2014: 108). The New Urban Areas are therefore presented as the new, dreamt-for market equivalent of the socialist KTT. Tran Mai Anh is cynical about this changed course of Hanoi’s development which serves to ‘maximizing interests of developers’ and concludes that also ‘The capitalhungry government [ …] hares common interest […] with developer[s] in hunting for profits’ (2013: 171). Trinh Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh conclude that: ‘The market economy serves mainly the well-off, while a large part of the poor fail[s] to find adequate shelter’ (2001: 234). Anyway, Politicians are still striving to reshape Hanoi into a modern city, as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party explicitly instructed the city authorities in the 1990s. In a similar way instructed the then Minister of Construction in a speech at the 5th Congress of the Architects Association in 1997 architects ‘to join the world community, to obtain the […] standards of the modern world’ (quoted in Tran 1999: 125). Though the concept of ‘modernity’ may be ill defined at the level of urban development, the current meaning is clear: Hanoi has to follow a path of market-oriented development, though with an active role for the government, perhaps like South Korea or Singapore. A comparison between this expression of modernity and that of the decades of planned socialist urban development is tempting, even though it might be superficial and misleading. The role of the state in housing and urban development until the mid 1980s has returned, even though the state and its corporate allies of the twenty-f irst century cater to the better-off of the local society, while the socialist powerholders of the past focused primarily on the ‘common good’ for the ‘common man’. 42 In both situations, a ‘modern’ course of development was sought, even though its meaning was quite 42 Notably the ‘common’ men and women who worked in the public sector: ministries and state-owned factories, for example, got access to state-owned housing.

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different. Modernity as a socialist aim was inspired by the Soviet Union, while present-day modernity is inspired by the examples of Western market economies. Current observers such as Labbé and Tran Mai Anh do not fail to see the overwhelming power of (foreign) investors in the modern development of Hanoi. Government plans are changed according to the wishes of developers, ‘to meet the demand of the market’ (Tran 2013: 133). In terms of ‘visions of Hanoi’, it is therefore important to emphasise the visions of developers and investors, at least those regarding the new and most glamorous parts of the city. Modernity seems to have again pervaded the minds of many citizens of Hanoi. Tran Hoai Anh’s account of the visions of 24 owner-occupants of popularly built houses in the upper-middle-class segment of urban society testifies to their wish to be ‘modern’ (Tran H.A. 1999)43. And being modern also accentuates—and this is perhaps more meaningful—a break from the past, and the idea of future progress. ‘Modernity’ is therefore a broad catchword denoting the ideas and perhaps ‘life styles’ of some of Hanoi’s inhabitants, and the market now offers a way to ‘become modern’ by consuming. Of course, there are limits to this modernity, which are, for instance, expressed in the co-existence of self-built New Urban Villages and pretentious New Urban Areas. 44 Taking it all together and looking at the city’s New Urban Areas, it seems that Hanoi tends to become just another major Southeast Asian city, guided since the early 1990s by marketoriented modernity. However, the co-existence with the New Urban Villages contributes to the special character of the city.

43 Tran Hoai Anh refers to the ‘International School’ of architecture that was developed between the World Wars and was labelled both ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’. Style should certainly not be used as a yardstick to measure ‘modernism’ according to observers. Hoang Huu Phe states that: ‘The seemingly chaotic character of the new residential construction […] brought home an eclectic mixture of different fashions and tastes: the postmodern, the neoclassical, the pseudo-classical and simply bizarre experiments of newly graduated architects’ (Hoang 2001: 54). Trinh Duy Luan (2001: 28) needs less words and speaks of a ‘topsy-turvy architecture’. 44 One major limitation is beyond the scope of this contribution: the movement to preserve the historic core of Hanoi, consisting of a pre-colonial, bazaar-like trading town and the French colonial quarter, separated from each other by a lake that has been attributed to have mythical qualities: Hoan Kiem. Attempts to disrupt this UNESCO World Heritage Site by the building of two high-rise hotels caused an unprecedented but successful ‘uproar’ among many local preservationists. See Logan (2000: 237-266) and Ministry of Construction (1999) for details.

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Bibliography Choay, F. (1965), L’urbanisme, utopies et réalités, une anthologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.) (2001), Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus. Cerise, E. (2001), ‘La densification des quartiers de logements collectifs’, in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 311-321. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus. Evertsz, H. (2000), Popular Housing in Hanoi, Vol. 3 of Shelter and Living in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.). Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Fisher, J.C. (1962), ‘Planning the City of Socialist Man’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 28: 251-265. Geertman, S. (2007), The Self-organizing City in Vietnam. Processes of Change and Transformation in Housing in Hanoi. Eindhoven: Dissertation, Eindhoven University of Technology. Government of Bombay (1959), Housing and housing finance panel, report of the panels appointed by the Study group for Greater Bombay. Bombay: Government Press. Ha, V.Q., and Pandolfi, L. (2002), ‘Les grandes lignes de la Ville nouvelle de Hanoi’, in Regards croisés sur Hanoi, transitions, spécificité urbaine et choix de développement, 169-174. Hanoi: Institut des Métiers de la Ville (Seminar Proceedings). Hoang, H.P. (2001), ‘Housing and Urban Form in Vietnam: Home improvement among owner-occupiers in central Hanoi’, in Housing and Land in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.), Vol. 2: 53-79. Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Hoang, H.P., and Orn, H. (eds.) (1995), The Phuongs of Hanoi. Hanoi: Vietnam Urban Transport Assistance Project. HUD (n.d.), Housing and Urban Development Corporation, Hanoi: Information brochure [probably late 1990s]. Jolles, A., and Polak, B. (eds.) (2003), Stadsplan Amsterdam, toekomstvisies op de ruimtelijke ontwikkeling van de stad. Rotterdam: NAI; Amsterdam: Gemeente Amsterdam, Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening. Khawatmi, A. (2001), ‘Le compartiment à Hanoï: structure/usage/temporalité’, in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 285-297. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus Koh, D.W.H. (2006), Wards of Hanoi. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Labbé, D. (2014), Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, 1920-2010. Vancouver: UBC Press. Lancret, N. (2001), ‘Album des cartes et des plans’ [réunis par Lancret, N, HS], in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 57-72. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus.

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Leaf, M. (1999), ‘Vietnam’s urban edge, the administration of urban development in Hanoi’, Third World Planning Review 21(3): 297-315. Logan, W.S. (2000), Hanoi, Biography of a City. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Ministry of Construction, Research Institute on Architecture (1999), Preserving Hanoi’s Architectural and Landscape Heritage. Hanoi: Construction Publishing House. Nguyen, X.M. (2001), ‘Housing problem in Hanoi: Status quo and future requirements’, in Housing and Land in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.), Vol. 2: 129-146. Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Pandolfi, L. (2001), ‘The Transformation of the built environment on the urban fringes of Hanoi: the example of Giap Bat phuong,’ in Housing and Land in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.), Vol. 2: 99-114. Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Pédelahore de Loddis, C. (2001), ‘L’habitat collectif à Hanoï’, in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 297-311. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus. Reiner, T.A. (1963), The Place of the Ideal Community in Urban Planning. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Ros, L. (2001), ‘Typologies de l’habitat dans leur rapport à l’espace urbain et périurbain. Cahiers de relevés (d’après les travaux de CEAA Métropoles d’AsiePacif ique)’, in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 243-278. Paris: Editions Recherches/ Ipraus. Schenk, H. (2005), ‘Hanoi: between the imperfect past and the conditional future’, in Directors of Urban Change in Asia, Nas, P.J.M. (ed.), 56-77. London and New York, Routledge. — (2013), ‘Towards a sustainable View on Social Housing in Hanoi’, Vietnam Hoc, Ky Yeu Hoi Thao Quoc Te Lan Thu Tu, Tap V, Hanoi. (International Conference on Vietnamese Studies, Hanoi, November 2012). Hanoi: Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences 5: 535-54. Shin, Y.-H. (2001), ‘Les KTT à Hanoï. Pratique d’un système urbain hybride et prémisses d’une modernité endogène’, in Hanoï, le cycle des métamorphoses; formes architecturales et urbaines, Clément, P., and Lancret, N. (eds.), 323-34. Paris: Editions Recherches/Ipraus. Tam, P. (1997), Shelter and Environmental Improvement for the Urban Poor. Hanoi: Draft report Project CT 92-1303 to International Development Research Centre and Hanoi Architectural University. Tran, H.A. (1999), Another Modernism? Form, Content and Meaning of the New Housing Architecture of Hanoi. Dissertation, Department of Architecture and Development Studies, Lund University.

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Tran, M.A. (2013), Transformation of Urban Structure and its Impacts on Reconstitution of Detailed Planning System in Vietnam, Case Study in Hanoi City. Dissertation, Department of Urban Engineering, University of Tokyo. Tran, T.D., and Tran, Q.C. (2001), ‘Borrowing behaviour of urban households’, Vietnam’s Socio-economic Development 28: 56-72. Trinh, D.N. (2001), ‘The Production of Private Urban Housing in Hanoi’, in Housing and Land in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.), Vol. 2: 29-53. Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Trinh, D.L. (2001), ‘Socio-economic aspects of the booming of private housing construction in Hanoi in the 1990s’, in Housing and Land in Hanoi, Schenk, H., and Trinh, D.L. (eds.), Vol. 2: 13-28. Hanoi: Cultural Publishing House. Trinh, D.L., and Nguyen, Q.V. (2001), Socio-economic Impacts of ‘Doi Moi’ on Urban Housing in Vietnam. Hanoi: Social Sciences Publishing House. Wagenaar, C. (2004), ‘Ode to the European City: the example of Central and Eastern Europe’, in Ideals in Concrete, Exploring Central and Eastern Europe, Wagenaar, C., and Dings, M. (eds.), 7-10. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers.

About the author Hans Schenk has been attached to the University of Amsterdam as a socioscientific specialist in Asian urban issues. He did ample research in Hanoi and in a range of small and large cities in India and has published regularly on urban problems and developments in Asian countries. He was also involved as a consultant in urban and rural development projects in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Email: [email protected]

13 Conclusion Adèle Esposito, Henco Bekkering and Charles Goldblum Abstract In the pages that follow, we identify certain analytical threads that run through the book as a whole. In identifying these themes, our purpose is to ground our reflection in the scientific field of urban studies and current debates about Asian cities. More specifically, we aim to reflect upon a series of ‘dialectical tensions’ that emerge from the eleven chapters that compose this book: f irst, the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial city, and the emergence of endogenous and exogenous ideas of the ‘Asian city’; second, the interplay between planning and the imagination of urban modernity; third, the politics of memories, heritage, and identities; and finally, the conflicting relationship between the State, the public sphere, and civil society. Keywords: Urban studies, Colonial, Post-colonial, Modernity, Memory

13.1

The Colonial, the Postcolonial, and the Asian City

Since the sixteenth century Asian countries have experienced various forms of dependence on Western powers. In many cases, this took the form of explicit subordination to Western tutorship and colonisation; other countries, such as Thailand and China, that were never formally colonised by European countries experienced indirect cultural, economic, and political influences from Western world.1 Postcolonial literature has 1 Following the Bowring Treaty (1855), the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Siam liberalised foreign trade in Thailand. However, Siam was not in a position to negotiate this treaty, as Britain had demonstrated during the First Opium War that its army might cause damage to the Kingdom. In China, the Qing dynasty was compelled to sign a series of ‘unequal treaties’ with Western powers. Under these agreements and as a consequence of the Opium Wars, China had to pay severe reparations, open five of its ports to foreign trade, and allow foreign missionaries to reside

Bekkering, H., A. Esposito & C. Goldblum (eds.), Ideas of the City in Asian Settings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462985612/ch13

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thoroughly analysed the diversity of historical colonisation in Asia generated by specific pre-colonial conditions and resulting in ‘urbanisms that are finely inflected and nuanced’ (Goh and Yeoh 2003: 3). It has engaged critically with ‘colonialism’s aftereffects and its constructions of knowledge’ (Radcliffe 1997: 1331). In particular, the postcolonial research on cities has explored this heterogeneity by looking at how architecture and urban environments have been shaped by colonial powers (Rabinow 1995) and then reshaped in postcolonial times (Peleggi 2005). The chapters of this volume provide fresh perspectives from which to look at the dialectics of and transitions from colonial to postcolonial cities. Ian Morley, for example, argues that the American colonisation of the Philippines (1898-1946) founded a ‘new city’ in Manila using the principles of the American-based City Beautiful Movement. Moving beyond the interpretation of foreign planning as the imposition of an exogenous order onto the colonised, he has questioned the ‘local meaning’ of this foreign architectural language and, by doing so, has opened the way to questioning the phenomena of local resistances, appropriations, and re-contextualisations of colonial legacies into new regimes of meanings. Similarly, colonial Yangoon, as Donald Seekins explains, was too full of the signs of the British rulers to serve in the construction of a postcolonial national identity. The foundation of Naypyidaw as a new capital for the Burmese state aptly demonstrates the strategy of emancipation of the young nation-state. Seekins has shown how the built form of Naypyidaw, and in particular of its spiritual centre, the Upattasanti Pagoda, embodies both religious traditionalism and the idea of a cohesive ethnic and national community. A similar strategy was followed in the displacement of the political capital of Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur to the new city of Putrajaya, whose monumental urban planning celebrates Islamic values as a major federating factor in Malaysian society (King R. 2008; Moser 2010). These chapters have given accounts of the inevitable link established between former colonies and their colonial history, and of the ‘current geopolitical and economic dependencies’ (Bishop, Philips, and Yeo 2003: 9) that have motivated, for instance, the displacement of the Burmese and Malaysian capitals. However, it is uncertain whether the expression ‘post-colonialism’ has a strong explanatory power because it tends to exclusively consider Asia as a former outpost of the West, thereby leaving within China. Herzfeld (2002) suggested the notion of ‘crypto colonialism’ to address the lack of awareness of the internalisation of colonial influences in local and national knowledge, legal, and political systems, especially in countries that have never been ‘officially’ colonised.

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Asian societies undetermined. A closer look at local contexts has shown how different reference universes have generated a great diversity of Asian urbanisms. Also, the existence of ‘the colonial’ and ‘the postcolonial city’ as essentially distinct from others has been called into question (King A.D. 1985). If one commonality should be recognised among such a great variety of cities, it is that colonial planning introduced the idea of urban ‘modernity’ (Bracken 2015: 17-21). In colonial times, ‘Modernity’ was understood as rational planning that introduces the spatial classification of urban functions and ethnicities, as well as a functionalistic organisation of urban services and infrastructures. This was underpinned by principles of order, control, and hygiene, in line with contemporary urban models and experimentation undertaken in Western cities. The case of Manila is emblematic in this respect, with its ventilated open spaces and orderly, planned spaces and civic districts. Although foreign principles were implemented in the colonial city by Western architects, local processes of adaptation allow Morley to ask what local meaning was attributed to the form of the new city and how this imported urbanism facilitated the creation of a ‘democratic cityscape’ that helped in the emergence of Filipino nationalism. Following similar lines of thought, Seekins examines a strategy through which the Burmese political power challenged previous paradigms of dependence. This approach reflects broader trends in the postcolonial literature, which has investigated the cultivation of identities and pride that emerged in colonial settings and fostered movements of national independence (Edwards 2007). This strategy has had visible impacts on urban landscapes. Cities have been considered ‘crucibles of nationhood’, and have therefore been ‘overwhelmed with the onslaught of representational spaces in attempts to produce the ideal of the post-colonial citizen’ (Yeoh 2001: 458). Brenda Yeoh has explained that the production of postcolonial cities has been torn between ‘two strains which are perpetually contradictory and yet indissolubly intertwined’ (ibid.: 951): the overcoming of Western influences, on the one hand; and the perpetuation of various forms and expressions of coloniality, on the other. This ‘schizophrenia’ has been the source of diverging attitudes towards the urban space that reveal the diversity of present ideas of the past—and of their political implications. The contemporary production of Asian cities establishes a dialogue with the colonial past that can take a variety of forms from celebration to denial, including the reproduction of colonial architectural styles (Kusno 1998). In the race towards the economic and social development of Asian cities after the Second World War, the reconfiguration of urban landscapes has considered many historic icons to be ‘imprints of an exogenous authority, a factor that heavily discounted their preservation

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value’ (Jones and Shaw 2006: 123). For instance, the Japanese colonial heritage in Taiwan and South Korea has been a source of discomfort, denial, or even destruction (Chiang 2012). In contrast, the colonial built heritage of Vietnam and Cambodia has been in many cases disregarded, abandoned, and replaced by new buildings as soon as development opportunities arose, or, conversely, reconverted for tourism and commercial functions that please the nostalgic Western gaze (Esposito 2011). In a similar vein, Peggy Teo and T. C. Chang (2009) have given an account of the ludic appropriation of Singapore’s colonial shophouses through their reconversion into luxurious boutique hotels. In the case of Luang Prabang, where cultural ties with the former colonial powers have remained strong thanks to a bilateral cooperation agreement with the French city of Chinon, a rigorous heritage conservation system has been put in place that celebrates colonial nostalgia in the historic city, which was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 (Berliner 2010). Worden (2001) has shown how strategies of emancipation from colonial powers can take very different shapes in the urban environment. The Federal Malaysian Government and the State Government of Melaka reconverted the majority of the administrative buildings built by the Dutch and the British into museums celebrating the history of the Malay Sultanate. The buildings are treated as beautiful shells whose architectural history and qualities are part of a heritage narrative. The political implications of these buildings are evacuated, allowing a re-interpretation of the meaning of the urban environment that stresses Malay and Islamic values. The question that begs to be asked is whether this process through which inherited buildings are emptied of the meanings injected by colonial powers and re-imbued with new significations facilitates a cathartic eviction of foreign ascendancies and the self-determination of Asian societies. This question is emblematically introduced by the case of Calcutta’s Octherlony Monument as examined by Sayandeb Chowdhury. Renamed and re-inaugurated in 1969 as a monument to the Indian martyrs of the independence movement, the former colonial monument is involved in the revision of the ‘topography of power’ and memory. The same question could be asked in the case of postcolonial Macao, which has commodified its colonial fabric for international tourism, as explained by Sheyla Zandonai. While the city’s historic core has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the gambling specialisation of the city triggers a consumerist reinterpretation of the urban heritage that reduces the political and historical significance of the architectural fabric. The dialectics between ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’, ‘dependence’ and ‘emancipation’—and the multiple inflections of each—question whether cultural ties with former Western powers have been weakened to the

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advantage of new forms of urbanism that reflect local, national, or regional identities. The scientific literature (e.g. Dutt, Costa, Aggerwal, and Noble 1994; Logan 2002) and professional knowledge have been permeated by the idea of a ‘Asian city’ with specific characteristics, and which would therefore share certain cultural elements or development paths. This reflection echoes another, which has tried to define Asian ethnic and national identities by drawing on residential types. The case of the ‘basic’ or ‘traditional Malay house’ is emblematic of these attempts (Hilton 1956; Lim 1987). Similar attempts in the field of anthropology have contemplated the existence of ‘basic personalities’ (Kardiner 1939; 1945) as the common denominator of individuals that fully embodies the culture of a given society. However, ‘Asia’ is both a discursive structure and a cultural construct that, throughout history, has come to incorporate the eastern part of the Eurasian landmass and has been infused with the European fears, attraction to the unknown, and sense of exoticism that were aroused through European contact with societies and places they perceived as fundamentally distant (Rujivacharkul, Hahn, Oshima, and Christensen 2013). The concept of a ‘basic’ Asian city is therefore worth questioning in regards to the constructed nature of the very idea of Asia. Rather than asking whether an Asian city could exist as a ‘real object’, we prefer to question who conceives of it, and which representations, layouts, models, and narratives are attached to it. First, the fascinated and ‘orientalising’ gaze of Western colonisers, planners, and tourists have developed ideas of the Asian city. Colonial travelogues and tour guides give the account of beholders who simultaneously admired crowded markets, tropical environments, idyllic villages, and the legacies of glorious ancient civilisations while feel repulsion when faced with unplanned neighbourhoods with bad hygienic conditions. These colonial narratives have become stratified through time as a reservoir of images, stereotypes, and ideals that is still widely used by the international heritage and tourism industry (Winter, Teo, and Chang 2009). Members of Asian societies have now internalised these quests for an Asian urban ideal-type. These processes of appropriation take place in the context of emerging claims of shared regional and sub-regional identities and debates on alternative form of ‘Asian modernities’ (Gaonkar, Chakrabarty, Niranjana, and Wachtel 2001). Another line of thought identifies the local urban features that have shaped visions of Asian cities ‘from the inside’ of urban societies. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1974) gave an account of the individual significance of cities for a human life ‘and for the experiences of memory, desire, and narrative coherence in which that life might be articulated’ (Emden, Keen, and Midgley 2006: 12). Adopting a similarly particularistic approach to the understanding

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of urban environments, in this volume Johanna Hahn and Anindita Ghosh have shown how ‘common people’ have formalised multiple imaginations of Indian cities through literary texts and daily urban practices that negotiate notions of locality, memory, and the rights to the city. Taken together, the chapters that compose this edited volume illustrate that the main commonality between cities is precisely their diversity, reflected not only in urban historical trajectories and built shapes, but also in contemporary conceptualisations of what makes the ‘Asian city’.

13.2

Imagining and Planning the Modern City

Morley has shown that foreign architects imported the exogenous language of the City Beautiful Movement into Manila under American colonisation. Urban modernity was introduced as ‘a new way of perceiving space and time […] in the cultural imagining of the East and Southeast Asian world’ (Kusno 2010: 17). Modern urban environments in Asia have been shaped by railways, public clocks, new urban lifestyles, zoning applied to urban planning, and popular culture and media. Diverse imaginations and future projections underpin the planning of the ‘modern city’ in Asia, reflecting the plural meanings that have been attributed to the concepts of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’—and, more precisely, ‘urban modernity’—in different spatial and temporal contexts. Modernity originated in the Western world. The ‘modern condition’, theorised Walter Benjamin in ‘The Arcades’ (1999), primarily refers to the industrial transformation of society by technology as part of the Enlightenment project of applying reason on nature and human societies (Robinson 2004). Gaonkar conceived of modernity as the consciousness ‘of an age that imagines itself as having made the transition from the old to the new’ (2001: 6). The transformations driven by industrialisation were indeed so radical that European societies perceived a sharp distinction between the ‘past’ and the ‘present’, between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ (Appadurai 1996). Modernity promoted the superiority of science and reason over antiquity, promising potentially limitless progress in the moral and material life of people and societies. While recognising the general improvement of the material conditions of life, however, Max Weber’s (1958) account of modernity criticised the bureaucratic control imposed by the modern state and the fragmentation of cultural meaning. From the West, modernity travelled to the rest of the world as a political, economic, social, and urban model, as well as a discursive construct entangled with multi-layered narratives originating in the Western world.

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Now, it is a ‘pervasive condition’ (Appadurai 1996). Its global dissemination ‘has arrived not suddenly but slowly, bit by bit, over the longue durée— awakened by contact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capital’ (Gaonkar 2001: 1). Even if they were facilitated in colonial environments, the exchanges that led to the emergence of the ideas of urban modernity were not exclusive to such environments. Rather, colonised subjects used modernity as a tool of emancipation from the colonial rules to encourage the emergence of an ‘anticolonial modernity’ and a feeling of national belonging. The path towards modernisation continued in postcolonial times. Pawda Tjoa has shown how urban planning under the New Order affirmed modernity as the program of the postcolonial Indonesian State. Modernity was realised through control of the social occupation of the urban space and the disruptive reshuffling of a main urban artery. In this specific context, planning became a ‘perfect’ transposition of a political ideology. In a similar vein, Hans Schenk argues that after independence from France in 1945, Vietnam chose the Soviet socialist ideology to inspire top-down ideas of urban modernity that gave higher priority to the common good than to individual benefits. This ideology found material realisation at the scale of the neighbourhood and individual housing units, whose built form expressed an egalitarian desire for the standardisation of living conditions. Considered together, the contributions by Tjoa and Schenk reveal that modernity is not a homogenous path based on a Western model that would be followed by other countries according to different temporalities and at different rates. Non-Western cities have long been considered through the prism of Western urban theories. Developmentalist programs have attempted to imagine their urban futures in line with the paths covered by Western countries. However, images of ideal modern cities have circulated at the global level. In Asia, they have emerged through multidirectional international exchanges between architects and planners since the beginning of the twentieth century. Critiques of the idea that there would be a domineering model of Western modernity disseminating through the rest of the world has recently emerged in academic literature. Gaonkar, Chakrabarty, Niranjana, and Wachtel (2001) suggest the notion of ‘alternative modernities’—a concept that privileges a particular angle of interrogation on modernity across the world, based on site-based and culture-specific investigations. Non-Western countries ‘reticulate’ elements of the Western model of modernity into unique and contingent formations that respond to local cultures and politics. The notion of ‘alternative modernities’ has been developed in relation to

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specific Asian contexts (Sachsenmaier, Eisenstadt, and Riedel 2002; Raud 2007), but has not been exempt from critique (Mitchell 2000; Gluck 2011). The main line of this criticism argues that different regions of the world, under specific conditions, achieve an incomplete version (or form) of the modernity project. According to this theoretical position, there are no radically different ways of being modern, but the global modernity project would be negotiated and partially adapted to local politics while remaining a major international reference. Urban studies should then undertake comparative and transnational research that would critically engage with the notion of modernity. They should deconstruct the inherited paradigms of knowledge and look more closely at how cities develop according to specific trajectories. This would allow urban modernity to be theorised based on different contexts (Robinson 2004; 2006). Since the twentieth century, cities in Asia have strived to find a balance between ‘cultural self-determination’ and ‘international modernity’ (Vale 1992). Ideas of modernity coming from political elites and urban administrations have often realised this assemblage through a combination of authoritarian evictions of low income segments of the urban societies from the urban spaces that were supposed to embody ideas of modernity and offering attractive environments for tourists and developers (Askew 2002; Herzfeld 2006; 2016). With the expansion of liberal economies and the greater penetration of foreign investments into the continent, Asian urban modernity has been enriched with meanings related to collective aspirations for material comfort, personal security, celebration of social status, and improved national standards of progress. Flagship projects, ‘megaprojects’, and gated communities show, spatially and physically, the discursive aspirations of engaging with the global discourse, imaginations, and forms of modernity. In many different contexts, urban transformations have generated tabula rasa. These newly manufactured urban spaces have then been associated with urban images that allude to the supposed image of globalised cities, echoing Rem Koolhaas’ ‘generic city’ (1995: 1247-1264). Under these renewed circumstances, modernity appears as more of a lure than a threat (Gaonkar 2001) to the majority of the population of emerging Asian countries that have recently overcome authoritarian regimes, planned economies, or war. According to Schenk, the very concept of modernity becomes a ‘broad catchword’ that has become the object of different and even contradictory regimes of meanings in the context of the economic liberalisation of Vietnam, where the socialist ideal of urban modernity has given way to market-driven imaginations of future progress. Gated communities such as ‘Ciputra Hanoi International City’ emblematically express the drastic transition from the

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focus on the ‘common good’ to aspirations of individual wellbeing achieved through material enrichment. In a similar line of thought, Hew Wai Weng provides an insightful analysis of the collective ambitions of a segment of the Muslim Indonesian middle class. In his analysis, a specific part of the middle class appears to be receptive to privately sponsored new residential estates located in the outskirts of Jakarta that celebrate an ‘Islamic lifestyle’. Here, religious traditionalism goes hand in hand with the search for a high level of personal security in gated communities. Thus, modernity does not compulsorily ‘come with’ secularisation: since the 1970s, religious fundamentalisms have been active and successful in Asian countries ‘not only in voicing dissent against the “Westernised” form of modernisation but also in offering alternatives conceptualised and based upon non-Western notions and practices’ (Shamsul 2000: 86). A negotiated vision of modernity also shapes the planning for Naypyidaw as analysed by Donald Seekins. An ideology of religious traditionalism has resuscitated cosmogonic planning and combined it with constitutional order to become the two main pillars of the national identity. The foundation of new urban sites such as the Burmese capital is part of a broader ‘symbolic intervention to leave a mark on global urban imaginative geographies and predicate cultural infecting meta-narratives about progressive “Asian values” and the production of “intelligent citizens”’ (Yeoh 2005: 951). Taken together, the Indonesian and Burmese cases show how modernity is characterised by a ‘condition of bifocality’ that allows the simultaneous experience of the local and the global and the possession of both ‘near-sight’ and ‘far-sight’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 9, drawing on Peters 1997: 75-92). This assemblage may result in new urban utopias that have different objectives: in the Jakarta suburbs, Muslim gated communities ‘touch the sensitive chords’ of collective fears and a sense of belonging; in Burma, they aim to construct a cohesive national community. The case of Songdo, examined in this volume by Chamee Yang, gives an account of another kind of modern urban utopia shaped by an economic and hyper-technological ideology. Urban shapes in these utopias reflect a narrative of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and technological efficiency, or attempt to do so. References to famous buildings from other cities of the world, such as the Sydney Opera House, strive to realise an idea of urban modernity that refuses any reference to the ‘near sight’ while extending the ‘far sight’ in many different directions. The ideal city embodies a dialectics that conceives it as the microcosm containing the entire world while being a ‘heterotopia’ separated from its geographical and cultural surroundings. Taken together, these case studies contribute to argue for the multiple manifestations of ideas of modernity in the planning of Asian cities.

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Urban Heritage, Memories, and Identities

Modernity has also created the conditions for the emergence of a collective interest in heritage and cultural expression (Choay 2007) while simultaneously setting the ground for the crystallisation of a static vision of ‘tradition’ and so-called primitive societies (Robinson 2006). Heritage concerns went along with a transformation of the concept and vision of the city. The latter was enmeshed with a sense of loss that Charles Baudelaire (1964 [1863]) expressed through the figure of the flâneur (‘the aimless stroller’). The metropolis of the nineteenth century became the catalyst for these changes, and cities stand as emblems in the allegory of modernity to realise utopia (Patke 2003). As Benjamin insightfully showed in the case of Paris, the transformation of the city was both the vehicle for and the metaphor of the cultural changes affecting modern societies. It marked the birth of the ambiguous modern condition, which has progressively affected the Weltanschauung (vision of the world), while at the same time feeling the irreversible loss of material and immaterial cultural expressions (the ‘paradise lost’) that fell by the wayside while searching for a new world (the ‘esprit nouveau’). Heritage and modernity can then be considered as the two faces of the process that has led to a new idea of the city, as conveyed by the avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the late nineteenth century, institutional heritage conservation that was initiated under the direct or indirect influence of Western powers primarily focused on monuments. The remains of ancient civilisations and kingdoms were the core concerns of colonial intellectual institutions (Peycam 2010). However, exogenous doctrinal and legal frameworks were not simply ‘implemented’ in Asian countries, but underwent processes of adaptation to national political agendas and cultural specificities (Peleggi 2002). Although with different degrees of self-determination depending on the imposing will of the colonial regimes and on the capacities of the colonised to act and react, heritage conservation in Asia was shaped as a field of dialogue. Accordingly, ‘a modern preservationist paradigm emerged in Asia via an encounter between an imported set of discipline specific knowledges and methodologies, and localised, indigenous approaches and frameworks’ (Winter and Daly 2012: 11). More recently, governmental institutions seem to see historical monuments and settings primarily as economic assets in the tourism industry. These encounters have not only contributed to the formation of a ‘heritage culture’, but have also aroused senses of national belonging that strengthened anticolonial claims. Sayandeb Chowdhury has teased out the

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changing meaning of the Octherlony Monument in Calcutta, which was involved in a ‘symbolic purging of meanings’. The chapter metaphorically illustrates the ‘cultural semiology of architectural heritage’. ‘A building can trigger memory and political action, but it cannot be relied upon to deliver an intended consciousness’ (Kusno 2010: 11), as its meaning might change throughout time. The heritage that was at the heart of colonial concerns can be appropriated as a symbol of the—newly independent—nation and encapsulated into new narratives of self-determination (Bloembergen and Eickhof 2015). As Chowdhury has shown in the case of Calcutta, the introduction of new regimes of meanings is particularly intense during the transition from the status of a colony to one of an independent nation. This transition has brought into view the politics of the ‘re-semantisation’ of built heritage. In linguistics, the word ‘semantisation’ means the disclosure of the sense and meaning of a word or the interpretation of elements of a text. In understanding the city as a text (Goh and Yeoh 2003), we use this word to define the process through which architectural space is repeatedly filled up, emptied, and then recharged with political, cultural, and identity meanings. The material space interacts with an imaginary space of memories and projections that have undergone several reshufflings triggered by changing political regimes and economic forces. Anxieties of loss (Kusno 2010) have grown stronger in Asia during the last 50 years, when economic development has started to change the urban landscapes dramatically. They have intensified since the 1970s, with Asian cities like Hong Kong and Singapore experiencing similar trends as Western cities did in the nineteenth century: namely, the dialectical relationship between tabula rasa urban renewal or redevelopment, and the concomitant emergence of the idea of urban conservation. Heritage conservation, which was previously almost exclusively focused on monuments and archaeological remains, progressively expanded to integrate ‘sites’ and ‘urban heritage’. Institutional heritage policies started to take into consideration the economic value of heritage for tourism. In those years, the vanishing of Asian cities began to arouse worldwide scholarly interest, with the first collection on the old cities of Asia published by Oxford University Press within its ‘Images of Asia Series’, starting with Old Bangkok (Smithies 1987). Several authors have documented the destruction of the built heritage of Asian cities under the effects of modernisation (Logan 2002). In contrast, others have focused on the emerging ‘heritage consciousness’ in Asian countries (Askew and Logan 1994). They have framed the analysis of the politics of heritage conservation through the process of nation building, which has implied

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phenomena of inclusion and exclusion and has often associated heritage conservation with the competing objectives of modernisation and economic growth (Roberts 2016), as revealed by the conflicting meanings attached to cultural-oriented urban regeneration projects: ‘creative destruction’ versus ‘amnesia of history’—to borrow Liling Huang’s expression (2014). Starting from the 1980s, Asian countries have developed measures for the conservation of built heritage. However, while for some ‘the contemporary arena of heritage’ truly serves to protect buildings, spaces, and landscapes, for many others, including local governments, nation states, and civil society associations, it is used as ‘an effective language for achieving goals quite unrelated to conservation’ that instead are related to ‘both business and government’ (Winter and Daly 2012: 12). In this volume Sheyla Zandonai has provided a precious understanding of the economic role of heritage and of the complex connections established between urban conservation and development. Coupling the two industries of heritage and gambling, Macao emblematically shows how heritage can be commodified for tourism and commerce (Ashworth and Larkham 1994). Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005, the historic core of Macao has indeed been remodelled to become a ‘fantasy city’ to please the tourists. The case of Macao has also shown how urban heritage conservation can be funnelled into programs of urban modernisation that use UNESCO labels in order to increase the international visibility of cities and to create new urban images that attract investors, tourists, and international experts. This is especially true in the case of cities that have long been in the margins of global economic exchanges and cooperation networks and that use heritage to improve their status in international scenarios. In this context of fast urban growth, heritage conservation cannot be considered separate from the politics of urban development. Kenny Ng examines the case of Chengdu, where heritage is strategically used for economic purposes. Its designation as a ‘world garden city’ and as the starting point of the Silk Road fosters a ‘verbal reconstruction’ of the city’s meaning aimed at increasing its international visibility. The transformative power of heritage policies commodifies built heritage to fit national narratives, international standards, and the tourism industry’s projections of what visitors may desire (Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010). On a more positive note, their intertwinements show signs of intense dynamism in contexts where ‘the Metropolis […] are described as the symbiosis of tradition and modernity’ (Korff 2006: 100). Thus, heritage and development can be considered two ‘indicators for the uniqueness of the respective societies and showcases of modernism’ (Evers and Korff 2000: 5). Chengdu’s urban

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identity is therefore constructed at two interconnected levels: the national and international discourse that celebrates urban heritage as the crucial witness of international urban planning movements (i.e., the Silk Road and the Garden City Movement), and the local level of ‘collective memory’, the complexity and hybridity of which is captured by local writers. Ng designates the loving and nostalgic sense of belonging that literary texts bring to the surface as ‘topophilia’. Behaving as a contemporary flâneur, he browses through these memories as he moves through the urban space of Chengdu. The city awakens individual affects, collective remembrances, and spiritual anchorage. Urban heritage can thus be seen as an embodied and habitual practice ‘that interweaves with the world to form identities and a range of social, cultural and political meanings’.2 As the most recent trends in the field of ‘critical heritage studies’ reveal, processes of heritage making are embedded in the politics of affect and emotional geographies. The chapters by Johanna Hahn and Anindita Ghosh provide fascinating perspectives into these innovative research avenues, as they each look at how ‘common people’ engage with the values of the city both through daily practices and through literary writings. Literature serves as a political tool negotiating the right of subaltern groups to ‘exist’ in the urban space, but also as an emotionally charged attempt to inscribe counter-narratives into the ‘urban map of memory’. From a complementary perspective, Hew Wai Weng has shown how identities are constructed through the material production of the city for a middle class that endorses a conservative vision of Muslim religion. Giving an account of the interactions between urban ‘producers’ (real estate companies) and ‘users’ (the purchasers), Wai Weng reveals how social aspirations and identities are shaped in close relationships with capitalist profits. Conversely, private companies are sensitive enough to capture the fears and aspirations of an emerging social class that seeks self-confidence in relative isolation. Framed against the backdrop of the themes and approaches of contemporary heritage studies, these contributions help understand identities as ‘meeting points’ and ‘points of suture or temporary identification’ that form the subject and enable him or her to act (Gupta and Ferguson 1997), and heritage as a flexible construct whose meanings are reconfigured across time and embedded with political and economic strategies, as well as with individual and collective affects. 2 Excerpt from Steve Watson’s and Emma Waterton’s presentation of the conference panel ‘New Sources of Heritage Theory: Affect and the non-representational paradigm’ (Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, 2016). Available: http://www.gu.se/digitalAssets/1367/1367449_p502watson-new-sources-of-heritage-theory.pdf. Last accessed 1 October 2016.

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The Power of the State, the Public Sphere, and the Civil Society

The State is not the only force in the process of heritage recognition. Nongovernmental actors and, in particular, the ‘common people’ also find ways to give visibility to their memories and sense of identity. This observation can be extended to the production of the city in Asia. Questioning the tensions between the State and the people helps reframe the production of contemporary cities in the context of the political and economic transitions of Asian countries while questioning how the people perceive—and react to—the ‘spatialisation’ of the state in the city’s environment (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). The chapters that compose this edited volume have given insights into the domineering role of the national state in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam. Without directly focusing on the attempts of citizens to increase their power to act in the urban space, they have looked at centralised planning from the state and pointed out the difficulties and obstacles that prevent the increase of the power of the citizens. In colonial and postcolonial situations, states have largely seen planning as a tool for controlling the urban environment and projecting ideas onto urban space. In particular, Pawda Tjoa’s chapter has illustrated how the repression of opponents in New Order Indonesia went hand-in-hand with a political ideology of control, order, and ethnic segmentation. This ideology was projected by Jakarta’s powerful Mayor Ali Sadikin into the planning of the city’s main artery that links the ‘Kota Tua’ (the ‘old city’) with the satellite city of ‘Kebayoran Baru’ (‘New Kebayoran’). The ‘spatial cleansing’ (Herzfeld 2006) of this strategic axis of the city by removing street vendors and other low-income urban dwellers who were declared undesirable is a metaphor for the superior role of the state in refusing the involvement of these people in the production of the city. The planning of Jakarta under the New Order is therefore an emblematic illustration of the state as the ‘site of symbolic and cultural production’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 981) and of the implicit contract signed between the developmental state and the citizens of Asian countries, which prioritised economic growth and material benefits in exchange for curtailed democratic rights (Douglass, Ho, and Ooi 2008: 39). As industrialisation gained ground and new ‘class fragments’ have become more expressive (e.g. the growing middle-class, trade unions, associations of citizens, workers, and professionals from various backgrounds). Nevertheless the rise of emerging social strata has opened up an expanded political space (ibid.: 40) that led to the emergence of the public sphere and, in several contexts across the continent, to the institution of democratic systems of governance.

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The notion of the public sphere, as theorised by Jürgen Habermas (1989 [1962]), was alternatively used in non-Western contexts and submitted to critiques that have questioned the relevance of its arguments. Drawing Jon late seventeenth-century Great Britain and early eighteenth-century France, Habermas (ibid.: 1-26) retraced the emergence of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ as a space where private individuals came together in the city to discuss issues of public concern. The emergence of the public sphere presupposes that individuals have an emancipated commodity exchange. Scholars have tried to apply this model to Asian societies, but in many cases they have realised that doing so required some adaptations for local politics, or even that Habermas’ theories could not describe Asian social and political systems. P. C. Huang (1993), for example, argued that, in the context of Republican, Imperial, and contemporary China, a ‘third space’ should be considered where the state and the society, rather than opposing each other, would both participate in cooperation. Kurfürst (2012: 11) explained that ‘Habermas’ concept of public space as a sphere of political reasoning and will formation is difficult to apply to Vietnam, where the three sectors of state, economy, and civil society frequently overlap’. Johanna Hahn and Anindita Ghosh have shown how difficult it is for subaltern groups to gain a position of visibility in the public sphere in India. The remedy is then found in the production of virtual spaces of expression through literature. The nature of such spaces echoes the ‘civic spaces’ as defined by Douglass, Ho, and Ooi: ‘spaces of social inclusion in which state and private economy are kept at arm’s distance from dominating the production and reproduction of culture’ (2008: 46). People of different origins and background can meet in a civic space outside the overt control of the government. Civic spaces are believed to be fundamental for the reproduction of communities and the establishment of an active civil society3 that complements the state while at the same time inculcating ‘in the citizens a sense of stakeholdership in the nation-state that goes beyond ownership of material assets and the citizen as consumer’ (ibid.: 49). In contexts like Delhi and Calcutta, arenas of this kind are established by writers, who have obtained forms of alternative power through their writing. This power does not consist of the ability to transform physical space, but rather of the capacity to disseminate, and therefore affirm, new mnemonic topographies of the city. 3 The idea of civil society has been constructed on the basis of belief in its strong opposition to the state, the latter sitting somehow above the grassroots level of the former. The concept itself has Western origins. However, it has been made operationally universal ‘as part of the standard package of institutional and ideological forms that have come to be as widely distributed as the modern state itself’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 997).

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From another complementary perspective, Hew Wai Weng has shown how community organisations can impose their specific interests and values onto the urban environment, making their voice dominant in the national public sphere. While the emergence of Muslim communities potentially fosters social segmentation within secluded urban spaces, their economic power also allows these communities to obtain land and support from the state. The positivity of the notion of ‘civil society’ is therefore demystified: civil society organisations might also foster intolerance, exclusion, social and ethnic segmentation, or uncivil behaviours (Douglass, Ho, and Ooi 2008). The close connection between civil society and capital is brought to the surface in the Indonesian and Malaysian cases, where the affirmation of a religious community depends on the promotion of real estate development and the availability of Muslim citizens to buy properties within these enclaves. For this reason, it is not only the category of civil society in Asia that should be questioned, but also, more broadly, the ‘imaginary topography through which the state and society are visualised in relation to each other’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 997). Just as in Western societies, civil society associations sometimes act as negotiating powers with the purpose of softening the authoritarian power of the state, while at the same time depending on the state for their survival and coordination (Keane 1988). They might also exist in connection with the economy for their subsistence and national and international outreach. These associations introduce new forms of transnational governmentality (Cesari 2010)—especially in the field of heritage, where they connect with regional and international organisations to obtain funds, expertise, and support (Blackburn 2015). The investigation of these ‘imaginary topographies’ leads to questioning how the visualisation of the relationship between state and society changes across time and space, what kind of social and interactional spaces they produce, and how different actors contribute to giving shape to them and to strategically use the evocative categories of ‘public sphere’ and ‘civil society’ to claim their role and place in the urban space. The aforementioned Hahn’s, Gosh’s and Wai Weng’s chapters reveal that, while Habermas’ concept of public space forecasted the institutionalisation of democratic debates towards a rational communicative orientation (Vibert 2015), it now appears to be stretched and weakened by economic flows that specialise in communication on consumerist terms. The concomitant search for alternative spaces of expression for the public sphere in virtual realms reveal its shortcomings in achieving representation for the urban society. Taking account of the representations of the city, of the ideas they reveal, figures here as a passage obligé (‘compulsory path’) to any holistic reflection

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on contemporary society. The current global trend of generalised urbanisation in a context of transactional revolution opens the way to a post-city paradigm—the ‘urban’ (Choay, 2006: 165-198; Lefebvre, 1991 [1974])—and seems to give a new legitimacy to the intertwining between urban modern thought and its forerunning utopias. At the extreme its of this conceptual as well as physical evolution of the urban realm—the Asian pattern of which has somehow been announced by McGee (1991) under the notion of desakota (neologism that associates two Indonesian words: desa—village—and kota— city)—is it still the city that is an issue in this current trend? If so, should the perspective of the fragmented views on Asian cities and the ways to conceive and represent them be considered an ultimate symbolic operation aiming at restaging the city as a concept, or at least sustaining its memory? In any event, considering the chapters of our book transversally, beyond the diversity of their concepts, approaches, and tools, leads less to a confirmation of the everlasting reality of the city in its material dimension than to the observation of the still-active nature of the linkage between urbs and civitas—between thinking of the city and thinking of policy. We assume that the fictional reality of the city (in the double meaning of an object of fiction and of a fictive or virtual object) operates in this in-between state, even as a feeder of projects—new towns as well as heritage programs—that contribute to produce ‘the urban’. Taken as a whole, the chapters that compose this book sketch a typology of the urban actors who contribute to city-making in Asian settings. Here, their contributions are less analysed from the perspective of how they transform the urban space than from how they express their ideas of the city through a range of concrete and imaginative actions that include policies, planning, architectural and urban design, spatial transformations, and iconographic representations and writing. Italo Calvino (1974: 40) reminds us that cities are also made of dreams: stories embedded in places and concepts, symbols, and metaphors. Each city evokes the dream of/for another one, which is also the ideal of another world, of a better society—be it in reference to iconic modern cities, or to their own reinterpreted past. For instance, the myth of rurality has for a long time nourished the imaginary of garden city in urban projects, even in wholly urban Singapore (Goldblum 1988; Reisz 2003); similarly, the dream of the Western metropolis has for a long time been haunting Far Eastern cities like Hanoi (Malherbe, Herbelin, Asseline 2010). In this respect, approaching the ideas of the city from the perspective of Asia’s urban history and development also sheds a specific light on the hybridity of the city as a fact of culture and gives a particular significance to comparative urban (and urban planning) cultures (Sanyal 2005).

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About the authors Adèle Esposito is an architect and researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research at AUSSER/IPRAUS Research Laboratory. Her research deals with the uses of cultural heritage in the contemporary development of Southeast Asian cities. Combining the examination of spatial transformations with the analysis of social behaviours, political strategies, and collective meanings, her research considers cities and human settlements as complex cultural phenomena that give an account of the evolution and legacies of Southeast Asian cities. She has published the book Urban Development in the Margins of a World Heritage Site. In the Shadows of Angkor, Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

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Henco Bekkering is an Emeritus Professor of Urban Design, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He has been the Netherlands Professor at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, USA, and a Visiting Scholar at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, PR China. He has co-edited Mapping Detroit. Land, Community, and Shaping a City, Wayne State University Press, 2015. He is currently involved in the publication of the historical morphological analysis of the metropolitan area of Wuhan, PR China. He is a member of the board of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. Charles Goldblum is an emeritus professor in urban planning at the University of Paris 8 and is the former director of the French Institute of Planning. He is currently an associated researcher at AUSSER/IPRAUS Research Laboratory (CNRS/ENSAPB). He is a specialist in Southeast Asian urban studies, and his ongoing research is focused on heritage policies, attitudes, and issues in the changing context of Southeast Asian metropolitan development. He is the author of several papers on urban policies in cities like Bangkok, Phnom Penh, and Singapore, and has been the co-editor of several books dealing with urban planning and development in Southeast Asia, namely: Territoires de l’urbain en Asie du Sud-Est. Métropolisations en mode mineur (CNRS, 2012); Vientiane, architecture d’une capitale. Traces, formes, structures, projets (Recherches, 2010); Spatial Planning for a Sustainable Singapore (Springer, 2008). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of IIAS Publications’ ‘Asian Cities Series’.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to maps and images. Abrams, Charles 22 Adelson, Sheldon 145 aerial photography 67 aesthetics 23, 53-57, 67, 69, 76, 110, 117, 131, 135, 155, 178, 340 afterlife 53, 289 Ahn, Sang-Soo 335 alienation 85, 188, 211 America(n)(s) 22, 28, 33, 37, 41, 46, 61, 91, 93, 107-18, 121-22, 125, 127, 129-39, 145, 147-48, 150-51, 216, 231, 237, 359n5, 360n9, 384, 388 Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 212, 361n10, 373n37 Anderson, Pierce 114, 116, 118, 119-22, 121n16, 124-25, 129, 133 Anthropological/anthropology 24, 55-57, 144n3, 212, 321, 387 anti-imperialism/anti-imperialist 280-81, 287, 295 apartments 91, 318, 359-68, 370, 372, 372n34, 373 appropriation 49, 57, 159, 166, 279, 285, 309, 327, 342, 384, 386-87 archaeology/archaeological 393 architects/architectural/architecture 17-19, 21-23, 26-27, 34, 45-66, 89, 91, 107-35, 140-67, 178, 180n6, 224, 233, 290n10, 292, 295, 297, 318, 324, 331-52, 358, 359n6, 360n9, 361n10, 363n16, 364, 373, 376, 378, 379n43, 384-86, 388-89, 393, 399 archives/archival 26, 49, 54-55, 65, 95n8, 155n20, 175-77, 188, 196, 203, 285, 352 ASEAN/Association of Southeast Asian Nations 84, 91 Atlantic City (USA) 147 Baguio (Philippines) 25, 114, 129-35, 131 Bangi (Malaysia) 36, 307-08, 324-25 Barcelona (Spain) 119-20 bari (home) (India) 75, 184, 190 Barthes, Roland 26-28, 34, 63, 67-68 basha (temporary dwelling) (India) 184, 190 Batavia (Indonesia) 292 Beard, Richard 65 Beaux Arts 111 Bengali(s) (India) 31, 75, 175-203 Bennett, Edward 111, 113, 131n26, 135 Berlin (Germany) 60, 65 Berliner, D. 386 Black Town (Calcutta, India) 31, 175-90 Bogor (Indonesia) 300, 310-19 Bombay (India) 50-51, 57, 61, 196, 247, 361n11; see also Mumbay Bourne, Samuel 51, 58-59, 61, 62, 65 Bourne and Shepherd 51, 61, 65

Brahmin(s)/Brahminical (India) 186, 191 branding 20, 28, 30, 161 bridges 73, 150, 182, 191, 194-95, 199-201, 292, 336, 342 Britain/Great Britain 52, 88, 383n1, 397; see also England British see Britain British Empire 27, 31, 48, 55-56, 59, 66, 175-76, 178n4, 180 Budapest (Hungary) 183 Buddha(s) 85, 95-96, 98-103 Buddhism/Buddhification/Buddhists 81, 84-87, 94-105, 141 Buenos Aires (Argentina) 60 Burma 19, 81, 83n2, 84, 89, 97, 101-02, 210, 391; see also Myanmar Burmese 29, 82, 84-88, 95-97, 100n11, 101n13, 384-85, 391; see also Myanmar Burnham, Daniel 22, 28, 107-35, 118, 123-24, 133 Cairo (Egypt) 59-60 Calcutta (India) 25-32, 45-77, 62-63, 70-72, 175-203, 179, 183, 247, 366, 393, 397; see also Kolkata California (USA) 93, 345, 347 calotype 50-51, 64 Cambodia 20, 81, 147, 386 capitalism/capitalist(s)/capitalistic 25, 60, 98, 141, 143, 149, 159, 185, 211, 213-14, 269n14, 281, 287, 295, 338-39, 342, 345, 395 casino-hotels see 141-67, 146, 155 caste (India) 185, 187, 193, 248, 398 Cawnpur (India) 60 CCTV/Closed Circuit Television 342 Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies/ CSDS (New Delhi, India) 255 Chandigarh (India) 19 Chengdu (PR China) 25, 32, 209-40, 217-18, 222, 229-30, 232, 237, 394-95 map of 238-39 Chicago (USA) 111, 120, 129, 131-35, 133 China 16, 25, 46, 82, 86, 93, 98, 100, 102-03, 123, 141-67, 165, 209-40, 343, 383, 384n1, 397 Chinese 88, 89n6, 99, 120, 143, 147-49, 154, 157, 159, 161, 167, 219-40, 320-22, 325 cholera 181, 190-91, 196 Christian 53, 97, 104, 108, 120, 154, 222, 231n7 Christianise 108, 120 CIAM/Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne 360-61nn9-10, 373n37 Cisco (South Korea) 339, 348 citizenship 111, 113, 127, 272 City Beautiful (Movement) (USA) 22, 28, 107-35, 384, 388

408  City Beautifulites see City Beautiful (Movement) (USA) city design 107, 110, 119, 130; see also urban design city(-)making 141-67, 261, 269, 334, 343, 399 city plan 120, 129n25, 131-32 city planners 267; see also urban planners city planning 28, 111, 113, 128, 132, 134-35; see also urban planning cityscape 123, 128-29, 141, 166, 224, 385 civic 28, 111-12, 119, 128-29, 132-35, 152, 163, 176, 178, 181, 184, 188, 191, 195, 199, 216-17, 385, 397 Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau/IACM (Macau) 163-64 civic societies 195, 385, 397 civic spaces 397 clearance 286, 296-97 Cleveland (USA) 113, 132 climate change 338, 372 collective 23-24, 32, 35-36, 96, 102, 122, 125, 134, 185, 214, 220, 225, 245-73, 286, 333, 347, 355-63, 370, 378, 390-92, 395 collective living quarters/Khu Tap The/KTT (Vietnam) 355-79 collective memory see memory/-ies collodion 50, 57-59, 64-66 collotypes 51 colonial 17-19, 25, 27-28, 31-32, 35, 45-77, 81-104, 107-35, 141-67, 175-203, 248, 284, 292, 295, 297, 358-59, 379n44, 383-99 anticolonial 389, 392 colonial authorities 97, 109, 115n6, 125, 130, 134, 184 colonial governance 107, 109-10, 114-15, 120, 127, 135 coloniality 45-77, 385 colonies 54, 60, 255, 266, 384 colonised 17, 178, 383-84, 389, 392 colonisers 107, 110, 387 pre(-)colonial 85-86, 189n19, 359, 379n44, 384 communal memory see memory/-ies communism 280, 295n13 communist 74, 98, 147, 149, 281-82, 287, 295n13, 363, 378 Communist Party (PR China; Vietnam) 74, 147, 281, 363, 378 Communist Party of Indonesia/Partai Komunis Indonesia/PKI 281 communities 17, 25, 33, 35, 63, 85-86, 96-97, 100, 111-12, 120, 134, 188-89, 211-20, 248, 283, 307-27, 337, 345, 372, 378, 384, 390-91, 397-98 congestion 120, 143, 161, 183, 290-91, 301 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne/CIAM 360-61nn9-10, 373n37 conservatism 28 corruption 177, 188, 369 cosmological 19, 28 cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism 23, 214, 247, 272, 309

Ideas of the Cit y in Asian Set tings

creative cities 333 creative economy 346 CSDS/Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (New Delhi, India) 255 Cultural Revolution (PR China) 210, 231 cybermohalla (India) 255-58 Daguerre/Daguerrean 50-65 Daguerreotypes/-ist 50-51, 57, 64-65 Delhi (India) see New Delhi Delhiites (India) 248; see also Dilliwallahs democracy 35, 82, 84, 104, 109n3, 121, 279-82; see also Guided Democracy demolition 161, 214, 228, 237, 240, 255, 270, 296, 372 dengue 196-97 department stores 66, 295-97, 348 Depok (Indonesia) 36, 307-28 map of 311 desakota (Indonesia) 399 dharma/dharmic (India) 186-88, 193 Dilliwallahs (India) 248; see also Delhiites diseases 108, 114, 116, 118, 129, 177, 181-84, 194-95, 197, 203, 299; see also dengue; epidemics; influenza; malaria; plague disfranchisement 15, 17 DOCOMOMO/International Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement 155 Doi Moi (Vietnam) 363, 370 drains/drainage/drainless 180-81, 190, 194, 200, 360, 365, 371n29 drinking water 190-93 drugs 301, 317 dynasties (PR China) 85, 148, 210, 216, 220, 223-24, 229, 231, 233, 248, 383 dystopia 346 eclectic 341, 379n43 economic(al)/economy/-ies 15-23, 30-37, 52, 82, 86, 100, 110, 114-20, 133, 135, 142-67, 188, 199, 203, 208-14, 224-25, 235, 253, 268, 281, 283, 287, 289, 294, 298, 302, 311, 316, 320, 331-52, 355-79, 383-98 Eden, Emily 178 elites 22, 27-28, 61, 66, 86, 102, 104, 116n11, 121, 130, 179, 185, 188, 195, 211, 218, 245, 248, 251, 271-72, 334-40, 351, 370, 390 emancipation 271, 384-89 emblematic 19, 22, 27-29, 116, 134, 344, 385-96 empire 27, 31, 45, 48, 55-60, 65n4, 66-67, 76, 94, 108, 112, 124, 149n9, 175-77, 178n4, 179-80, 210, 283, 389 England 65, 97, 178n4, 180; see also Britain English 22, 30, 48, 50, 61, 110, 131, 185-86, 245, 248-72, 314, 337 English language 61, 110, 131, 245, 268 Englishman 50, 58, 186

Index

epidemics 175, 177, 181, 190, 196 epistemic 17 ethnic 17, 35, 57, 82-88, 108, 120, 130, 143, 161n26, 288, 320, 325, 384, 387, 396, 398 ethnicities 57, 286n6, 320, 325, 385 ethnographic(al)/enthnographer/-y 26, 67, 143, 144n3, 179, 181, 215, 308, 309n2, 327 Europe/European(s) 17-19, 21, 31, 48-49, 59-60, 69, 88, 107, 119-20, 147, 149n9, 151, 158-59, 175-88, 220, 314, 337, 341, 345, 359nn4-6, 360n9, 370, 383, 387-88 everyday experiences 31, 175-77, 196, 203 everyday life/lives 23, 32, 34, 178, 194, 199, 218, 240, 245-46, 249-50, 261, 266-70, 282, 334, 346, 349, 352 evictions 32, 245-73, 279-303, 326, 386, 390 exoticism 387 expropriation 374-75 extrospective 337-40 façadism 159 FEZ/Free Economic Zone see IFEZ Fiebig, Frederick 51, 62, 64 Filipino(s) 28, 107-35, 161, 385; see also Philippines Filipinism 125, 127 Five Dynasties (PR China) 210, 233 Five Principles see Pancasila floods/flooding 152, 246, 290, 292 foreign (capital) investments/investors 16, 82, 144, 149-50, 281, 293, 297, 335-37, 372-73, 379, 390 fragmentation 20, 240, 388 France 67, 112, 114, 119, 233, 389, 397 Free Economic Zone/FEZ (South Korea) 331-52 French 65, 67, 129, 358, 379n44, 386 Frenchman 58 Frith, Francis 58-59, 63, 65 fundamentalism 391 futuristic 36, 211, 331, 334-35, 343-45, 349-50 Gale International 337-43 Gale, Stanley 337-43 gambling 29, 141-67, 223, 289, 292, 301, 386, 394 Ganges (India) 175-203 garden cities/Garden City Movement 22, 33, 93, 209-40, 394-95, 399 gated communities/gated housing 307-27, 345, 372, 390-91 Geddes, Patrick 22 gelandangan (loiterers) (Indonesia) 300; see also loitering gender 129, 286, 322, 325 generic city 166, 390 gentrification 307-27 geographic(al) 17, 19, 148, 163n27, 220, 226, 245, 251, 253, 262, 265, 270-71, 334-35, 346, 350-51, 391 geopolitical 149, 384

409 Ghevra/Savda Ghevra (India) 253, 255-56, 271 global cities 209, 211-15, 251, 271, 335-36, 345, 371 globalis(z)ation/globalis(z)ing 16, 86, 212, 214-15, 225, 308, 334, 338-39, 342, 351 governance 48, 56, 73, 107, 109-10, 114-15, 120, 127, 130, 133, 135, 175, 177, 299, 303, 334-39, 347, 396 governing 63, 68, 75, 317 governmentality 37, 326, 398 Great Britain see Britain Guided Democracy (Indonesia) 35, 279-81 halal 307, 317, 322-27 Han (PR China) 216, 231 hanging balconies/tiger cases (Vietnam) 366-68 Hanoi (Vietnam) 25, 34, 355-79, 390, 399 map of 357 hawkers (Indonesia) 260, 299, 301-02; see also pedagang kaki lima/PKL health(y) 28, 82, 108, 110, 116n11, 131, 182-84, 189-90, 192, 344, 348, 365n21 heritage 17, 21, 23-24, 27, 29-30, 69, 127n21, 141-44, 154-67, 209, 213, 215, 224, 231, 233, 238, 246, 292, 325, 335, 379n44, 383, 386-87, 392-99 heterotopias 35, 284-85, 303, 391 Hindi 32, 245-68 Ho Hung-sun, Stanley 144 homeless(ness) 85, 298-300 Hong Kong 22, 145-53, 336, 393 Hooghly (Calcutta, India) 31, 175-203; see also Hugli housing 34-35, 89, 91, 98, 116, 151-52, 182-83, 197, 285-86, 289, 293-94, 297, 307-27, 355-78, 389 housing estates 35, 309, 316, 318-19, 355, 362 housing shortage 289, 293, 362 Howard, Ebenezer 22 Howrah (Calcutta, India) 73, 191, 195, 199-201 hu khau (Vietnam) 365 Hugli (Calcutta, India) 48-49, 64; see also Hooghly IACM/Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (Macau) 163-64 iArc Architects 344 ICOMOS/International Council on Monuments and Sites 154, 157 iconographic/-ies 21, 23, 26, 28-29, 334, 340, 399 ICT/information and communication technology 346 IFEZ/Incheon Free Economic Zone (South Korea) 331-52 Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia/ISMA/Malaysian Muslim Solidarity 324 illegal settlements 245-73 ILIM/Institut Latihan Islam Malaysia/Malaysian Institute of Islamic Training 324 image(s) of the city 21, 27, 29, 222, 246, 248, 261, 265, 267, 272, 284, 299

410  imaginary 25, 27, 45, 53, 57, 60, 225, 266, 393, 398-99 imaginary topographies 398 immigrants 48, 203, 365n21 imperialism 115n9, 280, 295 Incheon (South Korea) 331-52 Incheon Free Economic Zone/IFEZ (South Korea) 331-52 India(n) 19, 25, 27, 31-32, 45-77, 82, 88, 93-94, 97, 123, 175-203, 210, 245-72, 343, 386, 388, 396-97 indigenous 31, 175-203, 392 Indochina 16 Indonesia(n)(s) 25, 35-36, 147, 279-303, 307-27, 372nn33-35, 389, 391, 396, 398-99 industrial 35, 55, 65, 88, 149-50, 191, 346, 372, 388 industrialisation 347, 388, 396 industries 48, 69, 141, 143, 147, 149-50n12, 178, 203, 224, 247, 292-93, 299, 347, 387, 392, 394 influenza 196 informal neighbourhoods 310 informal settlements 32, 245-72, 308, 310, 318-19, 365n21 information technology/IT 346 information and communication technology/ICT 346 infrastructural/infrastructures 31, 88, 110, 131, 134, 149-52, 165, 175-203, 209, 211, 235, 240, 254, 266, 284, 290, 331-52, 360-61, 365, 371-75, 385 innovation 23, 36, 60, 210-11, 308-09, 331, 346-47, 351, 364, 391 injustice see justice Institut Latihan Islam Malaysia/ILIM/Malaysian Institute of Islamic Training 324 institutional(isation)/institutionalised 47, 148, 161, 163, 335, 340, 351, 374n38, 392-93, 397n3, 398 inter-ocularity 76 intervisuality 76 International Council on Monuments and Sites/ICOMOS 154, 157 International Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of The International Style/DOCOMOMO 155 International Style 295 Ireland 180 Islam(ic)(ist)/Islamisation 36, 52, 286, 307-27, 384, 386, 391 ISMA/Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia/Malaysian Muslim Solidarity 324 Istanbul (Turkey) 60, 324, 327 IT/information technology 346 Jabodetabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi) (Indonesia) 310 Jakarta (Indonesia) 25, 35, 279-303, 307-27, 391, 396 map of 286, 291, 311

Ideas of the Cit y in Asian Set tings

Java/West Java (Indonesia) 310, 323 Jewish 97 Johannesburg (South Africa) 212 Joyce, James 220 justice 16-17, 23, 65, 119n14, 211, 282, 308, 327 Kahn, Louis 22 kampungs (Indonesia) 279-303, 310, 318-27 KDTM/Khu Doi Thi Moi/New Urban Areas (Vietnam) 374-75, 378-79 Khmer Kingdom (Cambodia) 19 Khu Doi Thi Moi/KDTM/New Urban Areas (Vietnam) 374-75, 378-79 Khu Tap The/KTT/collective living quarters (Vietnam) 355-79 Kipling, Rudyard 184 Kissling, Richard 126 Knight, Luther 221, 231, 332 Kohn Pederson Fox Associates 337 Kolkata (India) 25, 45-77, 247, 263; see also Calcutta Korea see South Korea KTT/Khu Tap The/collective living quarters (Vietnam) 355-79 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) 91, 307-08, 321-27, 384 L’Enfant, Pierre 112 landmarks 45-77, 93, 95, 161, 239, 350 Lang Cot (Hanoi, Vietnam) 365n23, 375, 376 map of 357, 377 Laos 81, 147 Le Corbusier 20, 22, 360n9 LEED/Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design 337 LEED-certified 337 Lefebvre, Henri 24, 67, 269n14, 399 Li, Jieren 33, 209-40 lieu(x) de mémoire see memory/-ies Lighthouse policy/Mercu Suar (Indonesia) 281; see also Mercu Suar linguistics 393 lithograph(er)(-ic) 51, 62, 64, 76 Llewelyn, Dillwyn 57-58 local memories see memory/-ies loiterers/gelandangan/loitering 223, 298-99, 300-01 London (Great Britain) 51-2, 60, 66, 212, 240, 296 Luang Prabang (Indonesia) 386 Lucknow (India) 56-57, 60 Lynch, Kevin 24, 27, 34, 239 Lyon, Edmund 59 Macau 141-67 map of 146, 156 Madras (India) 51, 57, 64, 361n12 Maidan (Calcutta, India) 45-77, 184, 253 malaria 189-90 Malay/Malaysia(n) 19, 36, 307-08, 321-22, 324-25, 372n35, 384, 386-87, 398

411

Index

Malaysian Institute of Islamic Training/ Institut Latihan Islam Malaysia/ILIM 324 Malaysian Muslim Solidarity/Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia/ISMA 324 Malitte, Oscar 58, 63, 65-66 Manchu (PR China) 216, 223-24, 226 Manila (Philippines) 25, 28-29, 107-35, 384-85, 388 map of 118 maps/mapped 49, 83, 89, 90, 95, 146, 159n24, 181, 226, 238-39, 249, 256-57, 261, 265-70, 285, 286, 311, 332, 357, 373, 375, 395 mapping 58, 60, 222, 225, 231, 239-40 market(s)/marketplaces 17, 35, 91, 144-50, 159, 178, 198-99, 212, 214, 220, 221, 226, 228, 235, 246, 249, 258, 286, 292-93, 298, 301-02, 313, 322, 337-38, 343, 355-79, 387, 390; see also pasar marketable 225 marketing 161, 225, 316, 322, 327, 350-51 marxism 280 marxist 74, 269n14, 271 master plans 165, 253, 273, 288, 348, 351, 358, 371, 373-74 McKim, Charles 111, 114 McMillan Plan (Washington DC, USA) 111, 112, 114, 132 memorials 27, 45, 47, 51-3n3, 66, 74, 76, 127, 132, 217, 219, 233, 234, 358n3 memory/-ies 32, 45, 49, 54, 209, 214, 223, 225, 231, 233, 235, 238, 240, 245-73, 395 memory discourses 32, 245-73 memory-making 32, 49, 272 Mercu Suar/Lighthouse policy (Indonesia) 281-92 metaphors/metaphorical 55, 250, 265-67, 269, 340, 392-93, 396, 399 middle(-)class 17, 20, 35-36, 147, 159, 167, 176-77, 185, 188, 226, 248, 296, 298, 307-27, 355, 364, 368, 379, 391, 395-96 migrants/migrates 152, 184-86, 197-99, 211, 268, 301, 365n21; see also immigrants migrating see migration migration(al) 189, 250, 299-300, 389 mikroraion (Vietnam) 359 Mitra, Aloke 74 Mitra, Govindaram 188 Mitra, Radharaman 192 Mitra, Santanu 72 mixed land use 290 mnemonic 52n3, 53, 397 Modern Movement 155; see also DOCOMOMO modernisation 116, 121n17, 122, 129-30, 135, 149, 211-13, 233, 302, 388-89, 391, 393-94 modernist 60, 295, 359n7 modernity 22, 25, 28, 35, 45, 47-49, 60-61, 67, 69, 84-85, 89, 116, 193, 212, 239, 308, 355-79, 383-94

Montreal (Canada) 32 morality 286-87, 292, 302, 320, 323, 327 morphology/-ies 28, 143, 253 mosques 262, 288, 307-27 multicultural(ism) 36, 325, 331, 342, 352 multinationals 337-38 Mumbai 247, 361n11; see also Bombay Murray, John 59, 61 Muslim(s) 36, 97, 104, 253, 307-27, 391, 395, 398; see also Islam Muslimah 307-26; see also Islam Myanmar 19, 25, 28, 81-104, 396; see also Burma Nangla Manchi (New Delhi, India) 32, 245-73 nationalism 112, 280, 282n3, 385, 389 nationalist(ic) 97, 177, 189, 193, 280-81, 287, 290 Nay Pyi Taw see Naypyidaw Naypyidaw (Myanmar) 19, 25, 28-29, 81-104, 384, 391 map of 83, 90 neighbourhood units 358-61 neighbourhoods 32, 34, 150, 155, 161, 215-16, 223-24, 226, 254-55, 260-62, 297, 301, 310-11, 315, 324, 327, 346, 355-79, 387, 389 neoclassical 178, 379n43 neoliberal(ism) 36, 287, 302, 334, 336, 338-39 New Delhi (India) 25, 60, 65n4, 245-72, 397 map of 256 New Order (Indonesia) see Orde Baru New Songdo City (South Korea) 25, 36, 331-52, 391 map of 332 New Urban Areas/Khu Do Thi Moi/KDTM (Vietnam) 374-75, 378-79 New Urban Villages (Vietnam) 375-79 New York (City) (USA) 60, 147, 212, 240, 326, 332, 340-41, 345 NGO/Non-governmental Organisations 253, 255, 324 North America see America North Vietnam 358, 361 nostalgia/nostalgic 21, 189-91, 214-15, 247, 249, 347, 386, 395 Ochterlony (Monument) (Kolkata, India) 27, 45-76 Office for Metropolitan Architecture/OMA 373 Old Delhi (India) 247-48, 264 Olmsted, Frederick Law (Jr) 114 OMA/Office for Metropolitan Architecture 373 Orde Baru (New Order) (Indonesia) 35, 280, 396 orient(al) 54, 110, 119, 125, 178, 387 orientalist 54 pagoda 28-29, 46, 81-104, 123, 384 palimpsest 214, 267, 340 Pan-Malayan Islamic Party/Parti Islam Se-Malaysia/PAS 308

412  Pancasila (Five Principles) (Indonesia) 279-303 panoramas 47, 51, 58, 62, 64, 66, 112, 123, 213, 219 panoramic 50, 58, 62, 63, 65-66, 69, 73, 124, 216 paradigmatic 26, 116, 121n17, 129, 270 paradigms 165, 215, 385, 390, 392, 395n2, 399 Paris (France) 57, 60, 112, 114, 119, 132, 183, 212, 233, 240, 392 Park, Geun-Hye 346 Parks, Fanny 178 Parker, J.P. 52 Partai Keadilan Sejahtera/PKS/Prosperous Justice Party (Indonesia) 308, 314-18, 321 Partai Komunis Indonesia/PKI/Communist Party of Indonesia 281 Parti Islam Se-Malaysia/PAS/Pan-Malayan Islamic Party 308 PAS/Parti Islam Se-Malaysia/Pan-Malayan Islamic Party 308 pasar (Indonesia) 286, 292-93, 299, 302 pavement(s) 158, 181, 192, 200, 375 Pearl River Delta/PRD (PR China) 147, 149, 153 pedagang kaki lima/PKL/wild merchants/ hawkers (Indonesia) 301-02 periurban 307, 374 perumahan (housing complexes, often gated) (Indonesia) 293, 310, 314-15, 319, 321 Philippine Archipelago see Philippines Philippine Islands see Philippines Philippine see Philippines Philippines 25, 28, 107-35 photographs/photographers/photographic/ photographing/photography 21, 27, 29, 33, 45-77, 93, 117, 131, 212, 220, 252, 258, 373n37 picturesque 118, 178, 223-24 PKI/Partai Komunis Indonesia/Communist Party of Indonesia 281 PKL/pedagang kaki lima (wild merchants/ hawkers) (Indonesia) 301-02 PKS/Partai Keadilan Sejahtera/PKS/Prosperous Justice Party (Indonesia) 308, 314-18, 321 place(-)making 24, 36, 212, 215, 307-27 place(-)memory see memory/-ies places of memory see memory/-ies plague 181, 196 planners 22, 35, 112, 265, 267, 269n14, 284, 333-35, 340, 343, 355-56, 358, 360, 362, 374, 387, 389; see also urban planners policy 96-97, 109n3, 121n18, 166, 210, 216, 281, 285, 290-91, 326, 331, 346-48, 351, 355, 362-63, 399 policy(-)makers/-ing 35, 41, 166, 299, 337, 355-56, 358, 362 pollution 15, 167, 184, 188 popular housing (Vietnam) 35, 355-76 Portugal/Potugese 141-67 post(-)colonial 18-19, 25, 27-28, 31-32, 45, 47-49, 54, 56-57, 60, 67, 69-77, 96-97, 104, 283-84, 383-89, 396 post-coloniality 27, 45-77

Ideas of the Cit y in Asian Set tings

post(-)modern(ity) 340-41, 361n10, 379n43 poverty 17, 81, 108, 149, 281, 289, 327 PR China/People’s Republic of China see China Prague (Chechia) 296 pre(-)colonial 85-86, 189n19, 359, 379n44, 384 preservation(ist)/preserve 33, 45, 51, 141, 156-57, 163-64, 166, 209, 224-25, 231, 233, 238, 240, 379n44, 385, 392 privacy 37, 350 private housing 355-79 Progressive Revolution (Indonesia) 286-87, 291, 295, 297 propaganda 115, 287, 294 PRD/Pearl River Delta (PR China) 147, 149, 153 Prosperous Justice Party/Partai Keadilan Sejahtera PKS (Indonesia) 308, 314-18, 321 prostitutes 182, 197n33, 299 prostitution 289, 298, 300-01; see also prostitutes; red-light districts psychological/psychologist(s)/psychology 85, 265, 350 public domain 187 public good 108, 134 public life/lives 187, 210, 219, 226, 228n6 public places 194, 228 public space(s) 52, 91, 97, 124, 129-30, 132, 152, 164, 166, 177, 203, 216, 280, 283-84, 303, 397-98 public sphere 383, 396-98 public spirit 128 public transport(ation) 91, 131, 146, 152, 163, 284 public-private partnership 338 Putrajaya (Malaysia) 19, 324, 384 Qing dynasty (PR China) 210, 216, 223, 229, 383n1 radio-frequency identification/RFID 333, 348 railways 48, 93, 129, 153, 178, 183, 191, 194, 201, 301, 388 Rangoon (Myanmar) 81, 88, 91, 97; see also Yango(u)n rebuilding 211, 214, 233, 240, 366 reconstruction(s) 158, 212-13, 235, 240, 394 red-light districts 182, 196 RFID/radio-frequency identification 333, 348 refurbish(ed)/refurbishment 217, 224-25, 233 rehabilitation 163, 197, 291-92, 295, 300, 302 religions 81-104, 108, 134, 189, 220, 280, 286, 309, 317, 322, 325, 327, 395 religiosity/-ies 309, 321 religious 17, 19, 21-22, 25, 28, 34, 36, 84, 97, 101, 104, 135, 186-91, 220, 280, 287-88, 298, 300, 302, 307-27, 384, 391, 398 religious gentrification 307-27 religious innovations 308 religious revival 21, 36, 307, 309, 327 relocation 81-104, 119, 165, 302

Index

remembrances 21, 69, 127, 214, 217, 224-26, 395 Rencana Induk Kota/RIK/City’s Master Plan (Jakarta, Indonesia) 282, 288-91, 297, 301 renovation 213, 229, 233, 235, 292-93, 302, 326, 364n17, 365n21 representation(s)(-al) 16, 20-21, 23, 25-26, 31, 33-35, 45-77, 155, 175-203, 209-40, 245-72, 307, 385, 387, 395n2, 398-99 resistances 24, 97, 104, 214, 279, 285, 296, 298, 301, 384 restoration 82, 158, 163, 224 revitalisation 292-93, 340 revolution(ary) 82, 97, 104, 191, 194, 210-19, 228, 231, 237, 281, 286-87, 290-91, 295, 297, 358n2, 399 rhetoric(al) 56, 143, 177, 268, 281-82, 287, 334, 338-39, 346-47 right(s) to the city 249, 270-71 RIK/Rencana Induk Kota/City’s Master Plan (Jakarta, Indonesia) 282, 288-91, 297, 301 Rizal, José 121-35 Robinson, Charles Knowles 52 Roh, Moo-Hyun 336 Rowe, Josiah 51, 58-66 rubbish (collecting) 190-91, 299; see also waste disposal Sache, John Edward 51, 59 Sadikin, Ali 35, 279-303, 396 Saint-Gaudins, Augustus 111 San Francisco (USA) 131-32, 340 sanitation 108, 116, 177, 181-82 SAR/Special Administrative Region(s) (PR China) 141, 149 scopic 58-59, 64 Scotland 180 secular(isation) 48, 85, 122, 308-09, 316-17, 321, 391 segmentation 396, 398 segregation 31-32, 175-76, 322, 327 semiology 24, 26, 45, 393 sense of place 212, 216, 225, 240 sewerage/sewers 181-82, 190, 195, 200 SEZ/Special Economic Zone(s) (PR China) 149-50 Shanghai (PR China) 60, 211, 214, 215n3, 224, 237, 336 Sharia 307-27 Shepherd, Charles 51, 61 Shepherd, Colin 65; see also Bourne and Shepherd Shwedagon (Pagoda) (Myanmar) 93-104 Silicon Valley (USA) 347 Singapore 15, 25, 51, 66, 88, 147, 336, 372n33, 378, 386, 393, 399 site(s) de mémoire see memory(-ies) SJM/Sociedade de Jujos de Macau 145, 158, 163 SLORC/State Law and Restoration Council (Myanmar) 82, 85, 104n15

413 slums 17, 245-72, 289, 296, 302 smart city 36-37, 331-352 social housing 34 socialism/socialist 17, 35, 82, 85-86, 97, 101, 150, 214, 286-87, 295-97, 355, 358-63, 370-71, 374, 378-79, 389-90 socialist city 34, 356, 358, 360, 361n10, 370 socialist housing 34, 355-79 Sociedade de Jujos de Macau/SJM 145, 158, 163 Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau/ STDM 144-45, 154 socio-cultural 116n12, 247, 340-41 socio-economic 20n2, 166, 289, 339, 351 socio-geographical 245, 251, 253, 262, 265, 270-71 socio-political 334 sociological/sociologist(s)/sociology 67, 253, 265, 309, 363 SOE/State Owned Enterprise(s) (PR China, Vietnam) 392-93 Soekarno (Indonesia) 35, 279-303 Song dynasty (PR China) 210 Songdo (City) (South Korea) see New Songdo City Sophiatown (Johannesburg, South Africa) 212 South Africa 22 South Korea(n) 25, 36, 85n3, 331-52, 372n35, 378, 386 Soviet 34, 296, 303, 355-56, 358-59, 361n10, 379, 389 Soviet Union 355-56, 358-59, 361n10, 379 SPACE Group 344 space(-)making 250, 261-62, 265, 267, 272, 346 Spanish 28, 108-10, 115n10, 116, 118, 121-25, 127n21, 128, 130, 133-35 Spanish-American War 107-08, 122 SPDC/State Peace and Development Council (Myanmar) 81-85, 96-98, 102n14 Special Administrative Region(s)/SAR (PR China) 141, 149 Special Economic Zone(s)/SEZ (PR China) 149-50 spiritual 25, 28-29, 96, 100, 102, 112, 224, 323, 327, 384, 395 squatters 253, 271-72, 301n17 St Petersburg (Soviet Union) 60 stakeholders 167, 397 State Law and Restoration Council/SLORC (Myanmar) 82, 85, 104n15 State Owned Enterprise(s)/SOE (PR China, Vietnam) 392-93 State Peace and Development Council/SPDC (Myanmar) 81-85, 96-98, 102n14 STDM/Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau 144-45, 154 stereotypes 387 Stockholm (Sweden) 212 street vendors 284, 374, 396 stadiums 67-68

414  stupas 81-104 suburbs/suburban 36, 91, 93, 116, 119, 129, 179-80, 182, 185, 196, 223, 308, 324, 326, 341, 365, 368, 391 Suharto 35, 280-83, 287, 295, 316, 320n5 sustainability 343, 350 Sydney (Australia) 340-41, 391 Taipei (Taiwan) 215 Taiwan(ese) 148, 215, 372n35, 386 Tang dynasty (PR China) 210, 220 Tange, Kenzo 22 Taut, Bruno 22 technocratic 48, 334, 342 technological innovation 36, 60, 331-52, 391 technologisation 31, 36, 175-76, 190 technology 56-57, 59, 69, 149, 177, 191, 193, 199-201, 203, 210-12, 331-52, 388 telecommunication 48, 235, 347-48 Than Shwe 29, 81-104 Theravada Buddhism 81, 86; see also Buddhism Three Kingdoms era/period (PR China) 210, 219, 224 Tianhui Town (Chengdu, PR China) 233, 234, 235, 236-37 tiger cages/hanguing balconies (Vietnam) 366-68 Tokyo (Japan) 240 topography(-ical) 19n1, 23, 48-49, 58, 69, 71, 98, 209, 213, 219, 239, 250, 386, 397-98 topology 181, 188 topophilia 33, 209, 213, 215, 220, 238, 395 tourism 26, 29-30, 33, 141-67, 209, 224-25, 292-93, 296, 299, 386-87, 392-94; see also tourist(s) tourist(s) 27, 29-30, 47, 74, 141-67, 212, 224-25, 227, 292-93, 300, 336, 387, 390, 394 touristed spaces 141-67 Town Planning Movement 22 tradition(s) 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 47-48, 84, 89n6, 99n10, 114, 125, 148, 157, 178, 186, 189, 211, 237, 240, 340, 388, 394 traditional(ly) 18-19, 22, 26, 86, 91, 92, 97-98, 102, 104, 150, 167, 182, 186, 189, 194-95, 201, 211, 224, 235, 251, 258, 281, 283, 289, 290n10, 296-97, 302, 359n4, 370, 374, 387 traditionalism/traditionalist 81, 84-86, 91, 104, 384, 391 trams/tramways 89n6, 192-94 transformation 20, 27, 31, 33, 49, 54, 56, 60, 86, 112, 114, 116n11, 143, 149, 151, 157, 177, 210, 216, 250, 255, 262, 284-85, 288, 301, 335, 388, 390, 392, 399 transformative 247, 394 transportation 48, 91, 116n11, 191, 284, 290, 348; see also public transportation Tripe, Linnaeus 59

Ideas of the Cit y in Asian Se t tings

Ulan Bator (Mongolia) 296 UN see United Nations unhealthy 181, 190; see also health(y) United Nations 16, 129n25 UN-Habitat 253 UNESCO/United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation 29, 141-42, 154-57, 162-63, 167, 379n44, 386, 394 UNESCO World Heritage 29, 141-42, 154, 162-63, 386, 394 United States (of America)/USA 86, 100, 107-35, 147, 151, 166 universalist 360 Upattasanti Pagoda (Naypyidaw, Myanmar) 81-103, 94, 99, 103 urban design 20-22, 28, 36, 88, 107-35, 340-41, 399; see also city design urban designers 22 urban development 16-18, 22, 32, 35, 163-64, 272, 279, 308-09, 331, 343, 355, 358, 362, 371-72, 374-75, 378, 394 urban environments 16, 18, 20, 24, 31, 36-37, 107, 114, 117, 120, 132, 134, 211, 225, 250, 261, 384, 386, 388, 396, 398 urban experience 161, 194-95, 214, 220, 222, 250, 253, 262, 271 urban fabric 20, 23, 25, 143, 151, 166, 279, 293, 302, 340 urban form(s) 34, 114, 130, 132-33, 135, 225 urban landscapes 16, 23, 29, 285, 307, 311, 324-25, 385, 393 urban places 36, 132, 215, 307-27 urban planners 22, 284, 333, 335, 340, 358, 359n6, 362; see also city planners urban planning 17, 19-22, 28, 33, 35, 107, 109-10, 114-15, 129, 132-33, 135, 141, 163-66, 334, 343, 359, 360n9, 384, 389, 395, 399; see also city planning urban redevelopment 36, 215, 331, 343, 393 urban renewal 36, 150, 237, 307, 309, 326-27, 393 urban spaces 19, 21, 23-25, 27-28, 31-37, 47, 57, 93, 95, 116, 120, 127-34, 154n19, 175, 177-78, 180, 188, 209, 213, 239, 245, 250, 264, 267, 279-80, 288, 303, 326-27, 334, 348, 374, 385, 389-90, 395-96, 398-99 urban sprawl 16, 237 urban studies 24-25, 255, 383, 390 urbanism 18, 20-26, 33, 107, 115-16, 127, 134-35, 141, 166, 209, 213, 338, 384, 387 urbanity 23, 49, 60, 180, 190, 211, 220, 309, 343 urbanis(z)ation 16, 161, 166, 176, 213, 237, 240, 301, 309 urbs and civitas 399 US(A) see United States (of America) USSR see Soviet Union utopia(n)(s) 15, 20, 36, 270, 272, 316, 331, 341, 343-44, 346, 352, 391-92, 399

415

Index

variable city 175-76 Venice (Italy) 117, 159, 340-41 vernacular 22, 32, 73, 177, 185, 191, 195, 197, 203, 245, 249, 251, 254-55, 258, 262, 268, 271-72 Victorian 55 Vietnam 20, 25, 355-79, 386, 389-90, 396-97 villages 31, 175-76, 185, 189-90, 213, 364, 368, 375-76, 379, 387 visuality 45, 54-55, 69, 76 Washington DC (USA) 111-14, 119-22 map of 112 waste disposal 191; see also rubbish welfare 35, 121n18, 294, 355-56 welfare state 339, 361n11

White Town (Calcutta, India) 31, 49, 58, 175-76, 178-92 wild merchants (Indonesia) see pedagang kaki lima World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, USA) 111 World Heritage see UNESCO World Heritage Wren, Christopher 52 Xintiandi (Shanghai, PR China) 224 Yango(u)n (Myanmar) 81-104; see also Rangoon Zedidaw (Royal Pagoda) (Myanmar) 93-97 zoning 149, 290, 337, 348, 351, 388

Publications / Asian Cities

Norman Vasu, Yeap Su Yin and Chan Wen Ling (eds): Immigration in Singapore 2014, ISBN 978 90 8964 665 1 Gregory Bracken (ed.): Asian Cities. Colonial to Global 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 931 7 Lena Scheen: Shanghai Literary Imaginings. A City in Transformation 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 587 6 Anila Naeem: Urban Traditions and Historic Environments in Sindh. A Fading Legacy of Shikarpoor, Historic City 2017, ISBN 978 94 6298 159 1 Siddhartha Sen: Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata. From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City 2017, ISBN 978 94 6298 111 9 Adele Esposito: Urban Development in the Margins of a World Heritage Site. In the Shadows of Angkor 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 368 7 Yves Cabannes, Mike Douglass and Rita Padawangi (eds): Cities in Asia by and for the People 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 522 3 Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang (eds): Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China. Urbanized Interface 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 223 9 Gregory Bracken (ed.): Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West. Care of the Self 2019, ISBN 978 94 6298 694 7