Emergencities

Abstract

Western planning experts, beginning with the United Nations Mission of Experts on Tropical Housing in 1950–1951, undertook major interventions in what they described as a zone of urban crisis across Southeast Asia after the Second World War. In various ‘emergencities’, allegedly threatened by expanding squatter settlements, the experts proposed robust and immediate state action to organise a comprehensive regime of planning to replace the unauthorised areas with regulated housing. Yet, despite its scientific appearance, the planning expertise constituted a political project that sought to transfer Western ideas of the “Garden City” to unruly Southeast Asian cities. The project stressed the importance of nationhood, citizenship and democracy in urban reform and was fearful of the appeal of communism in post-colonial Southeast Asia. The expert interventions usually failed but still had significant and unpredictable outcomes. By reinforcing patronage politics, they politicised housing and extended state power into urban life. The interventions also created crisis situations of their own making and catalysed social resistance, both spontaneous and organised. Southeast Asian cities became sites of a struggle between competing forms of urban modernity. In contrast to the experts framing modernity and tradition in opposition, however, squatters demonstrated their adaptive “cultures of modernity”, utilising both old and new ways in their pursuit of a modern life.