445880

UARXXX10.1177/10780874124

45880Book ReviewUrban Affairs Review

The Author(s) 2011
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Book Review

Urban Affairs Review

XX(X) 13
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
http://uar.sagepub.com

The New Asian City:Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form,

by Jini Kim Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), 311 pp., $25.00 (paper).
Reviewed by: Francis L. Collins, School of Environment, University of
Auckland, New Zealand
DOI: 10.1177/1078087412445880

The rapid rise of Asias tiger economies of Singapore, South Korea, and
Taiwan is well known, enshrined as they are in the contemporary histories of
globalization and the developmental state. The established narratives of these
three postcolonial states are, however, commonly locked into an economistic
register that eschews critical readings of space and time and rejects all but the
most teleological accounts that highlight the (dis)connect with EuroAmerican experiences of development. Jini Kim Watsons The New Asian
City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form crafts an alternative vision, reexamining the urban form and experience of the turbulent
times and spaces of twentieth-century East Asia through an inspiring integration of scholarly and fictional genres, urban and postcolonial thought.
Kim Watsons object of analysis, The New Asian City manifest in Seoul,
Singapore, and Taipei, presents the reader with an alternative starting point
for considering the ways in which postcolonial desires for development intersect with colonial legacies and evolving modes of modernity in the making of
urban futures. Cultural texts in the form of novels, poetry, and film are the
tools employed by Kim Watson to achieve these mammoth goals but this is
not only an account of the fiction of the time but rather a creative and critical
interrogation of recent history through these texts. In this regard, Kim Watson
uses theory and cinematic [and literary] texts not for their privileged access
to any cultural or subjective truths, but as a historical palimpsest that register
the most profound contradictions of postcolonial development (p. 8).
Through a near seamless integration of fictional and theoretical genres, this
volume illustrates the power and insight possible from an approach that is all
too often disregarded in mainstream urban studies. It is in this way that this
volume makes its very important contribution to current developments in

Urban Affairs Review XX(X)

urban studies and our understanding of the different possibilities for postcolonial urban theory not tied to the conceptualization of the Euro-American
city.
The New Asian City is organized chronologically into three sections that
trace the form and experiences of Colonial Cities, Postwar Urbanism,
and Industrializing Landscapes. Two transitions provide the historical
and conceptual linkages between these different narratives. The first two sections are written in a largely comparative fashion, where the different colonial and postwar experiences of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore are understood
together and postcolonial theorizations are offered up as tools to work through
the literary texts that are examined. Chapter one provides an overview of
the colonial city through postcolonial theorizations and the histories of
Japanese and British colonialism in the region. This then leads into a second
chapter that utilizes Saids notion of the discrepant to interrogate the
ambivalence of material urban developmentstransportation, consumption,
built environmentunder colonial rule. In the second section, chapters three
and four look at the experiences of laboring and gendered (female) bodies
respectively, shifting our focus from the whole of city transformed to particular accounts of the micro spaces of factory and apartment, new modes of
public and private that incorporate somewhat problematic interconnections
between urban growth and human growth.
In section three, comparison and integration give way to diverging narratives as Kim Watson focuses respectively on the Singaporean poetry of Edwin
Thumboo and Arthur Yap, Taiwanese New Cinema and Korean Minjung literature (a proletarian genre based on anti-establishment nationalism that
arose under dictatorship and the process of industrialization [p. 236]).
Structured less through explicit postcolonial theorizations and more through
the histories of these three cities/nations, these chapters provide a valuable
antidote to the sneaking isomorphism of the first two sections. Indeed, before
section three there is a sense that, firstly, Seoul/Korea served as the analytical
blueprint for examining the other two cases and, secondly, that there was an
all too strong asymmetry emphasized between the New Asian City and its
counterpoint in western urbanity, a contrast that sometimes seemed to problematically mirror the very developmental readings that Kim Watson seeks to
dislodge. By contrast, the chapters in section three illustrate how we might
begin to theorize from the recent pasts and aspirations for the future in these
remarkable cities to construct coherent challenges to the heavy imprint of
Euro-American conceptualizations of the city.
Jini Kim Watsons The New Asian City is a very important contribution to
the field of urban studies and our understanding of rapidly changing urban

Book Review

form. In a manner that is replicated by few others, this volume answers the
call made by scholars like Jennifer Robinson, AbdouMaliq Simone, and
Ananya Roy for a more cosmopolitan urban theory, one that emerges from
the vicissitudes of urban spaces examined on their own terms. As Kim Watson
notes in the conclusion, this volume also clearly opens up new analytic paths
in which to examine the most recent of Asian miracles; the rising megastates
of China and India (p. 256). Married with its exciting ideas, innovative
approach, coherent structure and elegant prose, this volume will be of interest
to urban scholars and graduate students seeking new ways of examining the
urban question in ways limited neither by the weight of theoretical tradition
or the arbitrary distinction between the genres of fiction and scholarship.