NOTE: AAM VERSION OF A CHAPTER FORTHCOMING IN DOUCETTE J AND PARK BG 2019 DEVELOPMENTALIST CITIES? INTERROGATING URBAN DEVELOPMENTALISM IN EAST ASIA. LEIDEN: BRILL

Introduction: Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia

Jamie DoucetteUniversity of Manchester, UK

Bae-Gyoon ParkSeoul National University, South Korea

Introduction

This book builds upon a broad, interdisciplinary effort that has sought to intervene in the

study of the spatial forms, political economic processes, politics of representation, and

planning policies that have animated East Asian urbanization.1 This research – which

includes contributions from geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, architects, cultural

studies scholars and area specialists – has done so based on a shared feeling that urban

studies would benefit from greater attention to the geopolitical economic context of East

Asian developmentalism. For it is difficult to examine East Asian urbanization without

taking the legacy of developmentalism into account, much less to study

developmentalism without considering the role of the urban: as form, process and

imaginary. And yet, to date, urban scholarship has neglected, or underappreciated, the

spatial contours and processes behind what might be provisionally called

developmentalist cities: urban spaces that have been inflected by a politics of

developmentalism within Cold War and post-Cold War contexts. In contrast, the chapters

in this volume all share an attention to the Cold War influence on urbanization in Asia,

1 The authors benefitted from support from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066514) for the writing of this chapter.

1

the ongoing transformation of its associated forms of development, and/or new forms

developed in its aftermath. While many of these processes extend in geographical scope

beyond the region per se, a critical focus upon them is particularly germane for

understanding the historical roots of and contemporary challenges raised by urbanization

in East Asia.

And yet, much of the classic literature on East Asian developmental states, for

instance, has neglected the role of the urban in favor of national-level, state-centric

examination of nodal planning ministries, strategic industrial policy, and state-business

coalitions. The role played by urban space in materializing the planning ambitions of

developmental state planners and their geopolitical partners, much less in providing a

space of representation and contestation for various state building projects and patterns of

capital accumulation has long been neglected in this literature (Hwang, 2016a; Hsu et al.,

2016). However, East Asian states actively promoted the development of national urban

networks to enhance the territorial integrity of the nation, and prioritized urban

infrastructure to support mass production and economic growth, and to display political

prowess. Under big push industrialization efforts across East Asia, urban processes took

place very rapidly in strategically selected areas of political and economic importance.

Iconic urban public spaces were built to accord praise on developmental politicians and

various post-colonial nation-building projects. State-subsidized apartment and housing

construction was used to create a new middle class and bolster the infrastructural

capacities of select firms (Kwak 2015; Yang 2018). At the same time, social movements

used urban space as a site of contestation against developmentalist regimes and urban

inequalities (Mobrand 2016; Shin 2018). Urban protest has also shaped the design of

2

public space as well as the form and patterning of residential and industrial growth in

East Asian cities.

Likewise, many existing studies on East Asian cities have not been able to

properly address the influences of national developmentalism, Cold War and post-Cold

War geo-political economies on urbanization because they have often favored a localist

approach that regards the city as a territorially contained and institutionally coherent

object (Park, 2013). Their focus is too often concerned with describing cities in the

abstract rather than on situating them in history, society and space. Alternately, while

global and world cities scholars have paid attention to the globally networked character

of East Asian cities, they too have neglected the dense entanglements of East Asian cities

with national and regional dynamics of urbanization, especially the influence of Cold

War developmentalism on the urban. There has been in many ways a missed encounter

here between global cities research and East Asian regional context (see Hill and Kim

2001 and Sassen 2001 for notes on what ‘could have been’ an interesting debate);

however, the recent advocacy of a geopolitical perspective on city regions might help

further develop these topics in the future (Jonas and Moisio, 2016). This is a problem that

also haunts the recent work on planetary urbanization in as much as its critics have noted

a tendency to neglect forms of lived difference, including forms of urban difference that

have been articulated within regional dynamics of urbanization (Buckley and Strauss,

2016). Meanwhile, postcolonial and ordinary cities literatures have recently called for

greater attention to urban difference, but they too risk privileging a disjointed urban scale

as their primary unit of analysis by downplaying important geopolitical economic forces

and enduring national and regional contexts. The compressed temporality of urbanization

3

(Kim, 2010; Wu, 2015) and intense cycles of creative destruction witnessed in many

Asian locales; the spatial selectivity (Park et al., 2012) of Asian urbanism in the sense of

the vast number of ‘spaces of exception’ such as enclaves, zones, and special regions that

have shaped urban strategy (Ong, 2006; Bach, 2011; Neveling, 2015; Sidaway, 2007);

and enrolment of migrants and Cold War expertise into patterns of urban development

are just a few commonalities that might be considered germane for urban and regional

research in East Asia.

In summary, there is a missing urban story to work on East Asian

developmentalism as well as a missing developmentalist story in research on East Asian

urbanization that this volume hopes to help rectify by laying the basis for further

research. To do so, it promotes active research into the subject of urban

developmentalism: a term that we find useful for highlighting the particular nature of the

urban as a site of and for developmentalist intervention in various forms. We find this

term useful for a variety of reasons. The term is useful in that it signifies that the urban

process within the region does not easily fit into existing models of urban governance –

such as the classic work on urban managerialism and urban entrepreneurialism – in as

much as the inter-scalar and geopolitical dynamics of development and, by extension, the

state-market nexus remain institutionally distinct in many East Asian contexts (cf. Lim

2016; Chattopadhyay 2017 for similar remarks in the context of South Asia). It is also a

term that is able to capture East Asian urban development as not simply confined to the

rapid physical development of urban infrastructures but also as a process that includes the

production of space in multiple dimensions, including both physical spaces, but also

space in the form of abstract imaginaries (in the sense of planning and ideology),

4

everyday perceptions, and lived experience, as something imbued with memory and

emotion (see Hwang, 2016b, Ji, 2016, Park and Jang, 2016, Watson, 2011 for a

discussion).

Such an expansive understanding of space enables us to highlight the many actors

involved in shaping urban developmentalism. For instance, the chapters in this volume

foreground the roles played not only by the state and business in developing urban space

but also by transnational networks of capital, migrants, and expertise. They focus on how

interactions among these actors across scale, territory, networks and place have helped

shape the form and content of East Asian cities as well as other scales of urban

governance. In addition to cities per se, many of the chapters in this volume also pay

careful attention to unique zoning policies such as special economic zones (SEZs) and

other selective forms of urban districting that can be contrasted to traditional forms of

urban governance in other parts of the world. One of this volume’s signal contributions to

the literature is to highlight the fact that in many cases of urban developmentalism the

target of urban intervention is not the ‘city’, as conventionally understood, but other

spatial units, such as special districts, export processing zones, science parks and Casino

complexes. Provocatively speaking, developmentalist cities are not necessarily cities per

se, in the sense of conventionally understood units of municipal or communal

governance, but are often composed of spatial units existing above, below, alongside,

and/or within received units of urban governance. Finally, though much work is needed

to flesh out the many varieties and articulations of urban developmentalism in East Asia,

the term as it is used here is broad sense to describe forms of mass urbanization during

the Cold War period as well as more neoliberal, speculative, and spatially-selective

5

experiments with urban policy that have followed in its wake. The authors in this volume

thus draw attention to enduring legacies of urban development under the Cold War and/or

new institutions and networks that have transformed these in order to address new

geopolitical and economic circumstances and to prefigure new imaginaries of the city and

the urban in a post Cold War world.

While the inter-disciplinary research program that surrounds the idea of urban

developmentalism is still being developed and, indeed, has much further room for

expansion, this volume makes contributions to three key themes that we feel are essential

to it and the more expansive approach to urban space advocated above: geopolitical

economies, spaces of exception and networks of expertise. These are interconnected areas

that, we feel, demonstrate some, but not all, of sorts of topics that should be included in

its study. Furthermore, as the chapters come from an interdisciplinary group of scholars –

most of whom were first brought together through the Social Science Research Council

InterAsia Program’s InterAsian Connections V Conference in Seoul, South Korea in

April 2016 – they also suggest several potential methodologies for the study of urban

developmentalism across disciplines. Each chapter below makes its own distinct

contribution to the topic: some provide a critique of existing paradigms of East Asian

urban research, while others focus on thickening existing approaches to urban

development by putting urban theory into dialogue with the techniques of their respective

disciplinary field. While the chapters are certainly worth reading in depth to identify the

full range of their contributions to academic debate and connections to existing urban

research, we offer a provisional introduction to their contributions here. To do so, in what

follows we situate each in relation to the key themes identified above and discuss how

6

they link up to one another across the various locales of their research and respective

disciplines.

Geopolitical Economies

The predominant theme that runs through all of the chapters in this volume is the need to

situate East Asian urban development within extended geopolitical and economic

networks of capital, people, and expertise. There is a common view that the networks,

territorial interactions, and inter-scalar relations that have shaped urbanization in East

Asia have been profoundly influenced by Cold War and post-Cold War transformations

that extend well beyond single cities and national territories. While the literature on

geopolitical economy is still being developed, in our reading, the term is useful for three

reasons: 1) it situates political economy as a geographic process; 2) it resists a clear

separation between geopolitics (international relations) and (geo) economic forces (cf.

Cowen and Smith 2009) and 3) it signifies that political economic processes are

geographically expansive, that processes even at the urban scale are often shaped by

relations that extend beyond it (Glassman 2018; Jessop and Sum 2018). The chapters in

this volume develop upon this framework in a variety of ways. First, there is a clear

strand of research that explicitly foregrounds the geo-political economic context of East

Asian urban development. For example, Young-jin Choi and Jim Glassman’s chapter

Heavy Industries and Second Tier City Growth in South Korea: A Geopolitical Economic

Analysis of the ‘Four Core Plants Plan’ examines how second-tier city growth in Korea

was driven by the enrollment of Korean firms such as Hyundai into transnational class

alliances spurred by US military projects in Asia, rather than simply being a case of

7

successfully planning by a national state. These findings, which build on recent work by

Hsu et al. (2016) on industrial zones in Korea and Taiwan, directly contest the

overemphasis by neo-Weberian scholars on the planning successes of the developmental

state by highlighting the role of geopolitically embedded firms in realizing their own

plans for sub-national urban growth. In a similar fashion, Heidi Gottfried’s chapter

Eclipse of the Rising Sun? The Once and Future Tokyo charts the rise of Tokyo as a

global city under the influence of imperial decline and subsequent articulation of

Japanese capitalist development within American geo-political networks. Gottfried

identifies critical political conjunctures for class recomposition where new geometries of

power emerged and where the balance of forces, and thus the form of urbanization, might

have turned out otherwise. Looking at the contemporary, post Cold War context of China

and Hong Kong, Ip Iam Chong’s The Fall of the Hong Kong Dream: New Paths of

Urban Gentrification in Hong Kong examines how Hong Kong’s increasing politico-

economic integration into China has produced a new form of state-led gentrification

whereby the local city-state has used its new relations with the mainland to tap into

global circuits of capital and develop the local property market. These chapters bring

into focus the integral role of transnational class relations and their effects on

urbanization. By extension, they also contribute to recent work in geography and urban

studies (Walker, 2016; Schoenberger and Walker, 2016) that is critical of attempts to

prioritize stylized forces of agglomeration (Storper and Scott, 2016) to the neglect of

complex class processes and power relations.

But geopolitical economy is not confined simply to the study of formal class

alliances in this volume. Three chapters in particular extend it down to the level of the

8

built form as well as to the embodied level of family, memory, labor and emotion.

Christina Kim Chilcote’s Waiting and Remembering: Economy of Anticipation and

Materiality of Aspiration in Dandong, China provides an ethnographic take on how urban

development in Dandong has been fuelled by an ‘economy of anticipation’ that yearns for

North Korea’s eventual economic integration within the regional economy. To do so,

older geopolitical memories of international solidarity and new special economic zones

are materialized in the built form in order to reimagine North Korea as a capitalist

frontier and help propel speculative investment. Jamie Doucette and Seung-Ook Lee’s

chapter Volatile territorialities: North Korea’s special economic zones and the

geopolitical economy of urban developmentalism complements Kim Chilcote’s take on

Dandong by noting how economic concerns and geopolitical imaginaries about the labor

of North Korean workers in its special economic zones have helped configure them as

experimental but volatile forms of territoriality of an uncertain duration. Likewise,

Christina Moon’s Fashioning the City: Trans-Pacific and Inter-Asian Connections in the

Global Garment Industry also highlights the temporal aspects of SEZs and industrial

districts by examining how migrants have negotiate a linked inter-Asian and trans-Pacific

geography of family networks, production chains, and sites of labor and design. Similar

to the chapters discussed above, Moon argues that the development of New York and Los

Angeles as global fashion centers would not be possible without networks and skills first

forged during the Cold War and transformed again in the years since. Furthermore, Kim

Chilcolte, Moon, and Gottfried’s chapters contribute to more than simply the study of

geopolitical economic networks and their attendant yearnings and imaginaries. Their

insights also extend down to the built form itself in their discussion of the role of

9

spectacular architecture and infrastructure in materializing global city and modernist

ambitions, and thus contribute to contemporary discussions on the role of iconic

architecture within transnational class formation (Kaika, 2011; Sklair and Gherardi,

2012).

Spaces of Exception

The second theme to which the chapters in this volume make a significant contribution is

the topic of spaces of exception, as mentioned above. This term include spaces such as

special economic zones and other selective forms of urban development in East Asia.

Over the last decade, there has been a growing literature (see, for instance, Arnold, 2012;

Doucette and Lee, 2015; Easterling, 2014; Murray, 2017; Park, 2017; Ong, 2006) on East

Asian states’ efforts to develop zones (e.g. export processing zones, industrial complexes,

apartment zones) through special and exceptional treatment and privileges, the spatial

selectivity of which have often been politically justified by appealing to developmentalist

rationality. Several chapters in this volume deepen and extend this literature. Doucette

and Lee reveal how a ‘topological’ and geopolitical economic reading of such zones can

reveal not only their deeply contextual configuration (which should not simply be

reduced to neoliberal governmentality) and volatility (susceptibility to rapid change) in

the context of the context of the Korean peninsula. Carolyn Cartier’s From ‘Special

Zones’ to Cities and City-regions in China is perhaps the most ambitious of the chapters

in really extending the debate on zones forward. Cartier critiques how the concept of

zone has become code word for autonomous, neoliberal strategies in much of this

literature, leading authors to decontextualize variegated forms of planning and

10

governance. She argues that much of the literature on zones in China and Southeast Asia

in particular assumes autonomy and ignores enduring structures of state authority and

practices of territorial governance, for which the terminology of ‘zones’ is often used as

an ill-suited analogy. In the process, Cartier revisits older debates in the philosophy of

science and the production of geographic thought to question how the idea ‘zone,’ like

other geographic concepts before it, has been circulated and reproduced as an ‘analog’,

an exemplar that has been detached from its pre-existing model or paradigm. Jana M.

Kleibert’s New spaces of exception: special economic zones and luxury condominiums in

Metro Manila complements Cartier’s contribution by examining how Filipino elites have

amalgamated residential and production zones to create ‘exclusive developments’.

Kleibert shows how rather than simply being examples of mobile neoliberal technology,

such zones are conditioned by local class strategies in an elite-captured, ‘anti-

developmental’ state that aims to create spaces of exclusion for luxury living. Jinn-yuh

Hsu’s Zoning Urbanization: the Hsinchu Technopolis as an Enclave of Modernity in

Taiwan thickens the research on special economic zones even further in this volume. His

chapter shows how zones themselves become objects of desire for the populations that

are excluded from them. He does so by examining political contestation surrounding

Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science City, a project where local farmers-cum-landowners affected

by previous zonal policies, rather than large domestic and transnational capitalists, have

made demands for new zones from which they might benefit through retrofitting, real

estate activities and/or speculative forms of urbanization (cf. Shin and Kim, 2016). Hsu’s

emphasis on the pressure for zoning from below provides a novel departure from top-

down readings of zonal development.

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Special economic zones are not the only spaces of exception dealt with in this

volume. Eli Friedman’s The Biopolitics of Urbanization in China: Managing Migration

and Access to Education examines how the pursuit of rapid economic growth in China

has created contradictory imperatives for Chinese cities to both draw in and expel

workers by using a form of technocratic biopolitics that Friedman refers to as ‘just-in-

time urbanization’. Here it is the rural migrant worker laboring in the city that becomes a

site of exception in as much as under this system, migrants can be granted access to urban

citizenship and social reproduction if they fulfill a specific labor market need, or face

exclusion and deepening educational inequality if they do not. Friedman’s study

resonates with Moon’s chapter discussed above in as much as it foregrounds how

migration has shaped rapid urbanization in East Asia. While Friedman reveals a process

of pulling in and pushing out based on imperatives of capitalist accumulation, Moon, on

the other hand, reveals how migrants’ experience of working in enclave spaces, special

economic zones, and industrial districts across cities has equipped some with the

capability to shape capitalist globalization by negotiating diasporic networks and

applying skills learned at various sites of the production and design chain in their favor.

Finally, Park and Jang’s chapter, The Gangnam-ization of Korean Urban Ideology,

further complicates our understanding of spaces of exception by examining Gangnam’s

apartment complexes and the urban developments modeled after them. Park and Jang

show how residents have themselves adopted forms of distinction and capital

accumulation in these spaces that helped mold Gangnam as the primary ideological

representation of the urban adopted by the Korean middle class. Gangnam is an

exceptional space here in both the sense of how has been targeted by the state to

12

materialize developmentalist ambitions, but also in the manner in which middle classes

have performed their own identity within the large and ‘segmented’ complexes (danji) of

apartments that comprise it. In summary, the chapters in this volume provide both a new

take on the literature of spaces of exception in Asia as well as suggest several novel

entry-points into their further study.

Networks of Expertise

The third major theme of research into urban developmentalism that this volume

contributes to involves the role of geographically extensive networks of knowledge and

expertise forged during the Cold War in shaping urban developmentalism. As discussed

above, Moon tackles this issue by looking at the embodied expertise of fashion workers

who negotiate inter-Asian and trans-pacific production chains and industrial districts,

while other chapters explore the topic in a different register. For instance, Choi and

Glassman look at how Hyundai’s successful evolution into large, global firm was in large

part due to its participation in US military offshore procurement, an experience that

allowed it to accumulate both capital and expertise, as well as the ability to shape the

pathway of urban growth in Ulsan, South Korea. Likewise, Gottfried discusses how US

foreign policy networks and procurement policies shaped the institutional architecture

and trajectory of Japan’s developmental capitalism, giving prominence to Tokyo. In a

different register, Hsu’s chapter also describes how Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science-based

Industrial Park was designed to pull in highly-educated, returned migrants from US

universities in order to build new industries and help transfer state-of-the-art technology

from the US to Taiwan.

13

While this volume helps to document the role of geopolitical economic networks

in shaping urban developmentalism during the Cold War, it also charts the influence of

more recent flows of policy knowledge and expertise that have been transmitted across

the Pacific. Kah-Wee Lee’s chapter Planning as Institutionalized Informality: State,

casino capitalists and the production of space in Macau charts how a network of

planners, architects, and casino operators have created a planning regime that serves both

China’s geopolitical interests and the economic interests of competing fractions of local

and international capitalists. This has been done through strategically ambivalent

planning practices that embrace informality as a response to a political environment

deemed unruly and through a particular politics of representation that depicts the past as

chaotic in order to implement new planning regimes. In a complementary fashion, Hyun

Bang Shin and Soo-Hyun Kim’s The developmental state, speculative urbanization and

the politics of displacement in gentrifying Seoul examines how various planning

ordinances and redevelopment schemes have been assembled by property investors, state

agencies, urban planners, and strategic business partners to displace poor urban residents

and fuel property-led urban growth. In short, they provide a forensic exploration of the

institutional expertise and planning practices that have allowed the urban ideologies

explored by Park and Jang to materialize, and that shape current geographies of

gentrification and resistance in South Korea.

Laam Hae’s Translating a Fast Policy: Place Marketing and the Neoliberal Turn

of Critical Urban Studies in South Korea further enriches our understanding of the

contested terrain of Korean urban development by taking up the interesting case of how

progressive urban planners and urban studies researchers in Seoul, South Korea played a

14

role in importing pro-gentrification policies from North America and Europe. Hae

documents how critical urbanists saw reformist potential from place-marketing strategies

that gave priority to local culture and identity. They argued that such policies could help

address the problems of authoritarian urban developmentalism inherited from previous

decades of urban growth. However, the culture-based strategies they promoted had the

adverse effect of aiding real-estate speculation and undermining the welfare of local

residents, spurring some urbanists to reject place-marking and search again for alternative

policy circuits that might develop a more egalitarian approach to social justice in urban

spaces. Likewise, Ip’s chapter on new urban developmentalism in Hong Kong examines

how new financial networks between China and Hong Kong have influenced exclusive

forms of state-led gentrification that undermine local residents right to the city. Ip does an

excellent job at foregrounding the use of quasi-state actors such as the Urban Renewal

Authority is unsettling claims to property and installing new spatial forms in the

landscape the pertain to ‘better’ the urban landscape but in fact act as vehicles for

displacement and property speculation. The above chapters’ analysis of the conjunction

of the state, capital, and strategic private actors in a speculative process of gentrification

and redevelopment here resonates with recent discussions about how to locate

gentrification outside of the North Atlantic, especially in contexts where questions of

land tenure are multi-layed, they urban commons complex, and where the state has

played a strong role in marshaling resources for development and picking strategic

partners (Shin and Lopez-Morales 2018; Ghertner 2015). Finally, what is also interesting

about all of these chapters is that they reveal how expansive networks of knowledge and

expertise forged from geopolitical conflict and economic integration continue to shape

15

East Asian urban development after the Cold War, albeit in novel, often unpredictable

directions.

Conclusion

In summary, the chapters in this volume draw our attention to the themes of geopolitical

economies, spaces of exception, and networks of expertise in a variety of ways and

disciplinary directions. The variegated forms of urbanization in the region, the

geopolitical economic forces that have shaped them, and the transnational flows,

aesthetics, and expertise from which they have been assembled are all foregrounded here.

While there is much more work to be done in order to provide a fuller overview of urban

developmentalism in East Asia, we hope that the efforts presented here stimulate further

methodological and conceptual innovation and inter-disciplinary dialogue. For instance,

the processes through which the urban strategies highlighted by each paper have

interacted with one another is a topic worthy of further attention, particularly in the

current moment. It seems clear to us that in recent times trajectories of urban

development have interacted, creating new networks, mutating urban forms, expanding

the scale of city-building activities and creating new regional and transregional

connections. Furthermore, the rise of neoliberal, market-friendly, and consumption-

oriented processes of urban development has gradually become more influential than they

were during periods of national developmentalism during the Cold War. How best to

understand the contemporary moment? There is room for much further discussion on

what the appropriate conceptual terminology to describe it might be. For instance, one

might call the contemporary period in some East Asian contexts that of a new urban

16

developmentalism, as Ip does for the context of Hong Kong, in as much as the process he

describes details a rescaling of state-planning and a roll out of new capabilities in urban

contexts. At the same time, the term post-developmental urbanism used by Gottfried to

describe Tokyo’s contemporary conundrums signifies a temporal shift away from

industrialization, and perhaps a move towards de-industrialization: a tendency being

witnessed in some of the other East Asian economies at the moment in formerly strategic

sectors such as shipbuilding and automobiles (Hassink et al 2017). We might also

describe some urban process in the regional as post-developmental in another sense: that

there are increased constraints on the capacity of both the local and national state to

manage the urbanization process, whether it be through industrial policy and other policy

measures (cf. Doucette 2016). Whichever term one prefers, it is clear that urbanization

processes in the present are animated by the continued mutation of the institutional and

material legacies of the Cold War period, but in a context where the regional, inter-Asian

political economy is more integrated into the world market than in the past.

Contemporary East Asia cites are spaces where global production networks and

transnational flows of expertise, migrants and capital shape and pass through the urban in

new ways, and where speculative development, urban displacement, divided cities, and

struggles over public space are beginning to seem more intense.

It is our hope that further scholarship on this topic might aid in the development

of a trans-Pacific and inter-Asian approach sensitive to how urban connections are being

made and remade in the contemporary regional and global economy. This is a project that

resonates both with Peck’s (2017) recent call for a conjunctural approach to urbanism

that is sensitive to the trans-Atlantic connections that shape urban austerity as well as

17

recent discussions on using East Asian interconnections as a guiding research

problematic (Chen, 2010; Paik, 2013). However, there is much more work to be done if

this goal is to be realized. Beyond the complexities of the current moment, there is more

that might still be extracted from historical and geographical inquiry into the role played

by the city or the urban in wider scholarship on Cold War developmentalism and

developmental states in general. As discussed above, the city is neglected in much of this

literature, which is often more focused on national-level industrial planning and ideology.

But as the chapters in this volume detail, developmentalism has also been an urban

project. The urban is an important site in which developmentalist politics renders itself

visible, in which the national state attempts to render populations legible and governable.

The urban is a site where desires for development, modernity and urban living often

become conflated and/or contested. It is a site where ruling powers try to legitimize their

power but also accommodate some of the criticisms against it. As the urban story of

developmentalism and the developmentalist story of urban development in East Asia

have often been absent from both urban research and development studies, we hope that

the present volume will help begin to address this lacuna alongside cognate attempts to

better scrutinize the current moment.

Finally, while the chapters in this volume each explore urban developmentalism

and point to areas for further engaging research, we might also further consider what

some of the future methodological contributions to such a project might be. For instance,

we feel that the ethnographic research on everyday practices of city making in chapters

such as those by Moon, Hae and Kim complements the more institutional focus on urban

development and/or archival research on Cold War planning networks by Choi and

18

Glassman, Cartier, Gottfried, and others. Each method is used to explore geopolitical

economies, spaces of exception and networks of expertise in unique ways. One open

question, however, is how might these methods speak across their disciplinary boundaries

in a more active fashion? What room is there for greater insights to be developed from an

inter-disciplinary, mixed-method approach? While there are a range of insights in this

volume that deepen the three main themes identified in this introductory chapter, we feel

there is much more room for further development of the methodological aspects of this

research. In particular, we are interested in exploring what insights might be gained

through greater dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities in understanding

the ways in which urban developmentalism takes place across institutions, networks, and

scales but also through aesthetics, everyday practices, and the built form (for example,

work by humanities scholars such as Watson, 2011 and Lee, 2010 provides an potential

contact zone in these regards). It seems to us that the chapters in this volume open up

several windows onto this topic and thus help set the basis for generating further critical

discussion and urban research.

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