Globalisation and the making of Asian world cities: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Ever since Friedmann's seminal paper on 'The World City Hypothesis' (1986), two interrelated sets of literature can be found - one set focusing on identifying world-city typologies and networks (Beaverstock and Smith 2000; Smith, 2003; Taylor, 2004),' while the other set examines world-city formation, mostly in 'Western' contexts (Brenner, 2001; Clark, 2003; Connell, 2000; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Newman and Thornley, 2005; Sassen, 2001). In recent years, research on Asian world-city formation has contributed to a growing volume of literature (Cai and Sit, 2003; Gugler, 2004; Hill and Kim, 2000; Lo and Yeung, 1996; Ng and Hills, 2000; 2003; Saito, 2003; C. H. Wang, 2003; J. H. Wang, 2004; Wu, 2002). However, few have examined the relationships between the mode of governance, the role of planning and the city's global status the three major variables investigated by papers in this special issue. For Stoker, governance involves working across boundaries within the public sector or between the public sector and private or voluntary sectors. It focuses attention on a set of actors that are drawn from but also beyond the formal institutions of government. A key concern is processes of networking and partnership. (Stoker, aooo. 3) Many have also pointed to a shift in policy making and implementation away from top-down government-led modes towards nested networks of cross-sectoral coalitions and partnerships, characterised by power sharing (DiGaetano and Strom, 2003; Jessop, 1997; Lambert and Oatley, 2002; Rhodes, 1997; and Stoker, 2000). These understandings of governance are grounded in realities remote from the Asian contexts where the state or the government is still the most important actor in governance, even in face of accelerated globalisation (Hill and Kim, 2000). However, this does not necessarily mean that their modes of governance are the same. The United Nations Development Programme (1997, 2-3) defines governance as 'the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country's affairs at all levels'. The three papers in this special issue present three styles of governance centred around strong state practices at different geographical scales. Since it is impossible to examine every aspect of each mode of governance, specific planning practices are chosen to illustrate how local states manage to employ or manipulate different planning tools to navigate the cities through evolving and sometimes conflicting social, economic and political contexts, according to implicit and explicit goals and objectives set within their dynamic power structures. An explicit goal common to all three cities under study is their aspiration to attain world-city status. Three Chinese cities under very different social, economic and political contexts are studied in this special issue - Beijing, the capital of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1949; Taipei, the capital of Taiwan; and Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China since 1997. Table 1 shows some basic statistics of the three cities, highlighting their differences in terms of population, area and economic capacity and structure. Beijing has the largest population size but the lowest per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Similar to Taipei, the secondary sector is still an important contributor to the city's GDP (31 per cent). Hong Kong has the highest per capita GDP among the three cities and its economy is primarily driven by the tertiary sector. Historical events have carved three distinct paths of developments in the three cities. Hong Kong had been a British colony for one hundred and fifty-six years before 1997. Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for fifty years before the end of the second World War. Hong Kong and Taipei are recognised capitalist cities but Beijing is still in transition, metamorphosing from a centrally planned capital city to one with a fast-evolving socialist market economy, rapidly gaining global prominence as the capital city of a rising economic giant. …