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Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia
Abstract
In the West, the design of new towns has always been based on an ideal model in accordance with the ideas of that moment. In the case of the latest generation of new towns in Asia, however, only quantitative and marketing principles seem to play a role: the number of square metres, dwellings or people, or the greenest, most beautiful or most technologically advanced town. Rising in the East shows which design principles these premises are based on.
... In response both to real environmental priorities and competitive pressure to match policy innovations and trends worldwide (McCann, 2017), a number of new city projects, like Zenata, are more specifically branded as models of "sustainable" urban development. While the conceptual roots of the "eco-city" are in the Global North (Rapoport, 2014), ambitious "eco-city" models increasingly originate from non-Western contexts (Keeton, 2011). For instance, South Korea has invested in the export of a new "ubiquitous-eco-city" model based on Songdo and other urban mega-developments (Park et al., 2020), while in the UAE, the new city of Masdar was ambitiously heralded as a "model of sustainability and the blueprint for the city of the future" (Cugurullo, 2013, p. 28). ...
... A number of these new eco-city projects are also being developed as prototypes with ambitions of mass-replication if the original development is successful. The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City project was envisioned as a template for the hundreds of planned new towns in China (Keeton, 2011), while Lavasa, a failed private master-planned "eco-city" in India was also initially intended to become a "replicable model" for urban development in India and beyond (Parikh, 2015). ...
This paper explores Morocco's ambitions to become a city-building "expert" in Africa through Zenata Eco-City, a project being built near Casablanca as part of Morocco's national new city-building strategy. Despite being in early stages of construction, Zenata's builders enthusiastically promote the future city as an urban model for Africa and have begun to export it long before the project's completion. Building on urban policy mobilities literature and research on emergent new city models, we examine Zenata as an example of "fast model-making", and analyze how authority is constructed for a model based on ideas rather than on a completed city. We explore the process of policy research and "learning" used to create and legitimize the model and investigate how promotional strategies to export it produce narratives about the city's success and the expertise of its developers. We raise concerns about Zenata's fast model and the circulation of expertise without content.
... Over the past decade, there has been a global proliferation of new cities and urban megadevelopments built from scratch that have heavy private sector involvement, and are intended as privately built and privately governed entities, politically and geographically separate from existing settlements. Such urban mega-developments can be characterised as entrepreneurial (Harvey, 1989), highly speculative (Goldman, 2011) and 'fast' (Datta and Shaban, 2017), and they are proliferating in Asia (Keeton, 2011;Moser, 2020), the Middle East (Cugurullo, 2018;Jeffrey, 2021;Moser et al., 2015) and Africa (Coˆte´-Roy and Moser, 2019; Keeton and Provoost, 2019), with several failed or fledgeling projects in North America (Haggart and Spicer, 2022;Rebentisch et al., 2020). Private cities have features in common with gated communities, particularly in who can buy and access the space, the homogeneity of residents, social exclusions produced and how city builders tailor their projects for a wealthy clientele. ...
A growing body of scholarship examines new cities being built from scratch that are developed and governed by the private sector. While this scholarship explores discourse and rhetoric, economic objectives, and some social and environmental impacts of new private cities, scholars to date have not taken a social or environmental justice approach to analysing new city projects. In this article we examine Forest City, a private city project being built on artificial islands off the coast of Malaysia by one of China's largest property development companies, and its unique gov-ernance and claims to being 'eco', despite the significant environmental damage it has caused. Intended as a lush and exclusive gated enclave for Chinese nationals, Forest City is a productive case study through which to consider the consequences of a private city using the frameworks of social and environmental justice. We suggest more critical research that engages with social and environmental justice is needed on the many emerging projects branded as eco-cities of the future, a troubling claim that signals a growing normalisation of mega-scale privatisation and loose or absent regulations regarding social inclusivity and environmental protection.
... The city seems to be increasingly oriented towards self-sufficiency, having promoted and begun to develop a construction industry that encompasses the entire supply chain. On the other hand, the recent urban expansion, like every new urban area, lacks the charm of the patina of history (Keeton 2011) and the variety that comes from stratification. Concurrently, many city inhabitants still reside in a khrushchyovka; the old Tselinograd is still the city's core. ...
... 8 Pojęcie oznacza miasto wszechobecne, typowe. W tej koncepcji kontekst lokalny, tożsamościowy i topograficzny danego miasta zostają zmarginalizowane na rzecz kształtowania miasta na zasadzie "gotowości" do powielania w dowolnej lokalizacji(Keeton, 2011). ...
Artykuł dotyczy problematyki formy urbanistycznej oraz idei smart city – ich wzajemnej relacji oraz urbanistycznych sposobów kreowania smart city. Głównym celem jest analiza charakterystycznych tendencji smart city oraz poszukiwanie potencjalnych szans w zakresie kształtowania i rozwoju formy urbanistycznej w duchu smart.
... Despite the rapidly expanding subfield of literature on new cities following the sudden spike in the number of new city projects launched in the past 2 decades (see for example, Avery & Moser, 2022;Caprotti & Gong, 2017;Chitti & Moser, 2019;Datta & Shaban, 2017;Keeton, 2011;Keeton & Provoost, 2019;Moser, 2019;Moser & Côté-Roy, 2021;Rizzo, 2020;Van Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018), scholars have not explicitly examined the methodological challenges of researching them. 2 Furthermore, because a large proportion of new cities globally are at early stages of construction or exist only as "PowerPoint cities" (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2021), a large proportion of investigations of the global city-building trend are discursive analyses of new master-planned city projects that examine "representations of the imagined city" (Lynch, 2019(Lynch, , p. 1152, with comparatively less field-based exploration involving site visits. Publications on new cities have tended to examine project visions and ambitions through their policies, accompanying rhetoric, or through company websites, masterplans, or seductive 3D models and digital visualizations (see for example, Watson, 2014Watson, , 2020. ...
Over the past decade, new master-planned cities have been increasingly adopted worldwide as a strategy for economic growth. This paper reflects on new cities built from scratch as a field of study, and the particular methodo-logical considerations associated with conducting research in and on new cities, structured around four key themes. First, we discuss the inherently global and transnational character of new cities as a specific challenge that shapes our approach to studying them. Second, we examine challenges of accessing people and information in rapidly developing private and high-profile ventures. Third, we address power dynamics and positionality in new city projects that are globally concentrated in "closed," non-democratic contexts. Fourth, we draw attention to the unique logistical constraints and challenges of doing field research in new cities under construction and outline the disparate experiences of site visits, where varying degrees of control and surveillance impact research activities.
... Section 1: Micro-governance of commercially built residential projects in East and Southeast Asia While the private sector's involvement in urban space production has a long history in East and Southeast Asia (Hogan et al., 2012;Philips and Yeh, 1987), the 1990s marked a turning point. As in the rest of the world, this period saw accelerated private sector-led urban space production and, at the periphery of cities, the diffusion of new, more or less enclosed urban configurations such as gated communities, new towns, and satellite cities (see Keeton, 2011;Shatkin, 2017). ...
The rise and spread of commercially built residential projects in East and Southeast Asia has attracted growing scholarly attention since the 1990s. This scholarship has notably explored how the private production of new residential developments has altered urban governance across the region. However, few studies have analyzed how private corporate actors’ new roles in city-making processes shape governance logics at the neighborhood scale. This paper begins to fill the gap by exploring the governance dynamic of three new urban areas (NUAs) built on the edge of Hanoi in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our analysis builds on a conceptualization of local state-linked organizations in East and Southeast Asia as “straddlers” Relying on interviews with local community leaders and homeowners, we find that the privatization of urban space production has not sidelined residents and government from micro-local politics in Hanoi. Instead, conflicts between homeowners and developers over land uses, property rights, and management practices and responsibilities have led to a repositioning of the old socialist neighborhood administrative apparatus to accommodate the governance of NUAs. The self-protection response of NUA homeowners during these conflicts played a key role in this process. By deploying what we call institutional straddling, these people forged a new mode of neighborhood governance that weaves together the neighborhood administration apparatus inherited from socialism and new residential property self-management bodies.
... The above experiences in Europe, Asia, and North America have influenced the large number of new-town projects initiated in the 21st century, especially in developing/emerging economies (see Keeton & Nijhuis, 2019;Keeton, 2011). A simple categorization of new towns has been offered to include those built as new capital cities, those associated with economic activities, and those constructed as responses to rapid population growth and urbanization (Merlin, 2005). ...
This paper advances the concept of mutual path dependence by investigating the new-town and low-income housing initiatives in Iran. Seventeen new towns have been established in the country. Many of them have additionally become major sites for Iran’s low-income housing scheme. The study employs a flexible approach to policy research to assess the two related programs. According to its findings, the initiatives have been able to offer less expensive means to homeownership on a large scale, with the more successful new-town cases acting as dormitory communities next to large cities. Yet, the new towns and their housing projects exhibit various infrastructure and service shortcomings as well as a failure to link to regional or national plans concerned with territorial balance, industrial development, and employment. More importantly, as the main source of finance in the new towns is opaque land sales, it has given impetus to property speculation and corruption. Despite these major issues, the current policy is to continue both initiatives. The paper thus suggests that Iran’s new towns and housing schemes exhibit related path dependencies. The continuation and progression of each program depend on its previous path as well as that of the other initiative, rather than sound policy responses to the prevailing circumstances and their challenges.
The review addresses the diversity of approaches to the development of the idea of an “eco-city” which emerged at the end of the 20th century and represents a revival of the “garden city” concept. An ecocity (eco-city, ecological city, green city, sustainable city, smart city) is a forced response of urban planners, designers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and governments to the demands of civilization’s transition to the sixth technological mode in the conditions of the accelerated scientific and technological revolution at the beginning of the 21st century. This is a response to the obvious trend of increasing ecological threats, risks, and challenges. The review presents contemporary examples of the creation of ecocities and ecovillages in countries and regions with varying levels of socio-economic development.
The review addresses the diversity of approaches to the development of the idea of an «eco-city» which emerged at the end of the 20th century and represents a revival of the «garden city» concept. An ecocity (eco-city, ecological city, green city, sustainable city, smart city) is a forced response of urban planners, designers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and governments to the demands of civilization’s transition to the sixth technological mode in the conditions of the accelerated scientific and technological revolution at the beginning of the 21st century. This is a response to the obvious trend of increasing ecological threats, risks, and challenges, when all urban settlements will inevitably become «eco-logical» to maintain competitiveness due to accelerated climate change, environmental pollution, division of labor, intensified competition for natural resources and human capital. The review presents contemporary examples of the creation of ecocities and ecovillages in countries and regions with varying levels of socio-economic development
The new town movement is an integral part of post-World War II reconstruction that has gradually been adopted worldwide. As one of the most significant fields of urban development practitioners, new towns generated both high enthusiasm and considerable criticism as consequences fell short of ideals over time. Along with the renewed interest in the new town concept, particularly in Asia and Africa, a new round of research has evaluated such initiatives. With increasing urbanisation and diminishing quality of urban life, many developing countries have introduced this policy for decongesting metropolises and stimulating economic growth. Accordingly, new town development has recently attracted urban planners, developers and politicians in emerging economies and appeared as a critical research area in urban studies. Through leading national policies to cope with housing needs and unplanned settlements in Iran, the first generation of new towns returned after the revolution in 1979. Since then, 17 new towns have been developed, which face various challenges, such as a strong dependency on metropolises and a lack of required infrastructure and facilities. Hence, as a new problem instead of a solution, Iranian new town development has been criticised from different aspects, which are systematically analysed in this paper. Analysing the first generation of new towns in Iran and conceptualising the second ones indicate an inevitable necessity for a review and substantial change regarding this policy. Therefore, key recommendations have been formulated and proposed for evolving the first and planning the second generation of new towns in Iran.
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