Urban Affairs Review

XX(X) 1 –3

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445880 UARXXX10.1177/1078087412445880Book ReviewUrban Affairs Review© The Author(s) 2011

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Book Review

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 Asia’s “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 Euro-

American experiences of development. Jini Kim Watson’s The New Asian

City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form crafts an alter-

native vision, reexamining the urban form and experience of the turbulent

times and spaces of twentieth-century East Asia through an inspiring integra-

tion of scholarly and fictional genres, urban and postcolonial thought.

Kim Watson’s 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 inter-

sect 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

2 Urban Affairs Review XX(X)

urban studies and our understanding of the different possibilities for postco-

lonial 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 sec-

tions are written in a largely comparative fashion, where the different colo-

nial 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 Said’s notion of the “discrepant” to interrogate the

ambivalence of material urban developments—transportation, consumption,

built environment—under 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 particu-

lar 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 narra-

tives as Kim Watson focuses respectively on the Singaporean poetry of Edwin

Thumboo and Arthur Yap, Taiwanese New Cinema and Korean Minjung lit-

erature (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 prob-

lematically 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 Watson’s The New Asian City is a very important contribution to

the field of urban studies and our understanding of rapidly changing urban

Book Review 3

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.