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This chapter outlines the rubric of “messy urbanism” in terms of its significance, threats, and theoretical frameworks. Messiness is simultaneously a range of urban conditions and a notion that we attempt to unpack and challenge in this work. Here, messiness denotes urban conditions and processes that do not follow institutionalized or culturally prescribed notions of order. It suggests an alternative structure and hierarchy as well as agency and actions that are often subjugated by the dominant hierarchy, including notions of spatial and visual orders as well as social and political institutions and cultural norms. In this book, by examining a range of cases and contexts that span from Northeast Asia to South Asia, we are interested less in the distinct spatial and formal properties of specific locations and structures per se, but more on the social, spatial, and institutional politics of messiness, and the context in which messiness has been constructed. More precisely, we are interested in the questions that messiness raises with regard to the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship.

Jane Jacobs’ (1916-2006) observations of economic life in big cities challenged and modified the way the world sees cities. This chapter explores what we can learn from her work for Hong Kong and other East Asian cities. Her observations offer new insights into why a diverse combination of land uses might not necessarily lead to chaos or confusion. In this chapter, the author expresses his opinions and criticisms regarding the recent development of urban areas in Hong Kong and some East Asian cities.

This book explores “urban aspirations” in Asia. Focusing on cities such as Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Mumbai, Bangkok, and Shanghai, it examines notions of “urban society” to understand the different trajectories of urbanization and social formation in human society, along with their insertion in forms of governmentality. It discusses city planning and its implications for a politics of heritage, the political consequences of the imagined and real urban-rural divide between the city and the rest of the country, the porous and arbitrary limits of the city, and how settlements in the city create “urban villages” of immigrants that become intricate parts of the urban fabric. The book also proposes to use religion as a lens through which we can acquire a better view of what urban aspirations are, regardless of whether they are called secular or religious. Finally, it highlights the role of imperial modernity in the postcolonial politics of Asian cities, as well as the ways in which the sacred is mobile and creates social space in the city.

This chapter traces the literary assimilation of the high-rise building as a metonymical device for government and global capitalist alliances. It examines the urban esthetics used in expanding Seoul, Singapore, and Taiwan of the 1960s and 1970s, which center on the logic of an export-oriented production that fueled economies. In contrast to the metropolitan experience of horizontally expanding industrial cities, growth in the geographically and resource-limited New Asian City is typified by height, density, and constant reconstruction. Where European metropolitan residents have been overwhelmed by the city’s endless extension, subjects of the New Asian City are alienated by decisive qualities of newness, repetition, and ominous compression.

This chapter explains the role of the privatized interior in framing the disappearing female subject in works by Kang Sŏk-kyŏng, Su Weizhen, and Su-chen Christine Lim. It explores the textual and spatial production of the postcolonial New Asian City woman who appears at the threshold of public and private spaces. The chapter also emphasizes the asymmetry with Western urban and social forms of modernity, claiming that the shift to new spatial arrangements, such as nuclear families, individual bedrooms, and private spaces, does not produce the same kind of individualized feminist consciousness seen in the earlier industrializing Euro-American context.