Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:34:56.617Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

City Networks as Alternative Geographies of Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Tim Bunnell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Over the last two decades, research on world cities and global cities has unsettled the nation-state as the default unit of analysis in many disciplines in Anglophone social science. Rather than seeing the world as comprised of a mosaic of national political and social units, alternative geographies of networks connecting cities and urban regions have risen to prominence. In this paper, I consider the implications of such alternative mappings for Southeast Asia, bringing urban studies and area studies into critical conversation with each other. Geographies of urban networks extending across national borders challenge the ingrained methodological nationalism of conventional area studies, not least in Southeast Asia. However, to what extent do framings of trans-national urban connections among Southeast Asian or Asian cities mean that methodological nationalism has simply been up-scaled to methodological regionalism? In the first of the two main sections of the paper, I look in detail at the network spatialities brought into view by global and world cities scholars and consider their implications for regional urban systems frameworks. Flows of people, money and ideas extending from cities in Southeast Asia to cities beyond that region, and even trans-continentally, arguably imply that areal framings melt into network geographies which are global in scope. In the second section of the paper, I consider three types of regional formations that have been identified in research on globalization: the global triad regions, region states, and inter-Asia flows of capital; models and people which I examine do not map onto conventional cartographies of Southeast Asia. Together, these two sections of the paper serve as a reminder that in future research regions need to be specified empirically rather than assumed to exist as a priori framings for research, and that the geographies of ‘actually existing’ regionalizing processes are often very different from area studies mappings of the world.

Keywords

city networksglobalizationmethodological regionalismterritorial trap
Type
Articles
Information
TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia , Volume 1 , Special Issue 1: Movement, Motion, and the (Im-)Permeability of Boundaries , January 2013 , pp. 27 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Institute of East Asian Studies, Sogang University 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Agnew, John. 1994. The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of international relations theory. Review of International Political Economy 1, 53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaverstock, Jonathan, Smith, Richard and Taylor, Peter. 1999. A roster of world cities. Cities 16, 445–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaverstock, Jonathan, Smith, Richard and Taylor, Peter. 2000. World-city network: a new meta-geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1), 123–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Jerry, Bridenthal, Renate and Yang, Anand A. (eds.). 2005. Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Braudel, Fernand. 1992. The Perspective of the World (Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, Neil. 1998. Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 459–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brenner, Neil. 1999. Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies. Theory and Society 28, 39–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim. 2002. Cities for nations? Examining the city – nation-state relation in information age Malaysia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(2), 284–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim. 2004. Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor: A Critical Geography of Intelligent Landscapes. London: RoutledgeCurzon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim. 2007. Post-maritime transnationalization: Malay seafarers in Liverpool. Global Networks 7(4), 412–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim. 2010. Routes of identity: Malay Liverpool and the limits of transnationalism. Pacific Affairs 83(3), 459–479.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim and Das, Diganta. 2010. A geography of serial seduction: urban policy transfer from Kuala Lumpur to Hyderabad. Urban Geography 31(3), 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim and Goh, Daniel. 2012. Urban aspirations and Asian cosmopolitanisms. Geoforum 42(1), 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim and Maringanti, Anant. 2010. Practising urban and regional research beyond metrocentricity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(2), 415–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, Tim, Muzaini, Hamzah and Sidaway, James. 2006. Global city frontiers: Singapore's hinterland and the contested socio-political geographies of Bintan, Indonesia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(1), 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burawoy, Michael. 2000. Introduction: Reaching for the global. In Burawoy, Michael, Blum, Joseph, George, Sheba, Gille, Zsuzsa, Gowan, Tessa, Haney, Lynne, Klawiter, Maren, Lopez, Steven, Riain, Seán Ó and Thayer, Millie (eds.), Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, pp. 1–40. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Chua, Benh Huat. 2011. Singapore as model. In Roy, Ananya and Ong, Aihwa (eds.), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, pp. 29–54. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Dick, Howard. 2005. Southeast Asia as an open system: geo-politics and economic geography. In Kratoska, Paul, Raben, Remco and Nordholt, Henk Schulte (eds.), Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, pp. 250–274. Singapore: Singapore University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dick, Howard and Rimmer, Peter. 2003. Cities, Transport and Communications: The Integration of Southeast Asia since 1850. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dicken, Peter. 1998. Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century (Third edition). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Duara, Prasenjit. 2010. Asia redux: conceptualizing a region for our times. Journal of Asian Studies 69(4), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, Michele and Lyons, Lenore. 2006. The borders within: mobility and enclosure in the Riau islands. Asia-Pacific Viewpoint 47(2), 257–271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frobel, Folker, Heinrichs, Jürgen and Kreye, Otto. 1980. The New International Division of Labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grundy-Warr, Carl, Peachey, Karen and Perry, Martin. 1999. Fragmented integration in the Singapore-Indonesian border zone: Southeast Asia's “Growth Triangle” against the global economy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23(2), 304–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampton, Mark. 2010. Enclaves and ethnic ties: the local impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism in Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31(2), 239–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Idawati, Dyah. 2009. Distorted Communication in the Struggle of Squatter Settlements along the Surabaya Riverbank. (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis). University of Melbourne.Google Scholar
Idawati, Dyah. 2010. Imagining Surabaya's new image: to be another Singapore? Paper presented at workshop on “Global Urban Frontiers: Asian Cities in Theory, Practice and Imagination” at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 8–9 September 2010.Google Scholar
King, Ross. 2008. Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space in Malaysia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.Google Scholar
Kratoska, Paul H., Raben, Remco and Nordholt, Henk Schulte. 2005. Locating Southeast Asia. In Kratoska, Paul, Raben, Remco and Nordholt, Henk Schulte (eds.), Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, pp. 1–19. Singapore: Singapore University Press.Google Scholar
Lim, Heng Kow. 1978. The Evolution of the Urban System in Malaya. Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Universiti Malaya.Google Scholar
McCann, Eugene. 2004. Urban political economy beyond the “global city.” Urban Studies 41(12), 2315–2333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCann, Eugene. 2011. Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: towards a research agenda. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1), 107–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, Donald. 2009. The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Michelle. 2009. Rebellion and Reform in Indonesia: Jakarta's Security and Autonomy Policies in Aceh. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moser, Sarah. 2012. Circulating visions of “High Islam”: The adoption of fantasy Middle Eastern architecture in constructing Malaysian national identity. Urban Studies 49(13), 2783–2805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ohmae, Kenichi. 1985. Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Ohmae, Kenichi. 1995. The End of the Nation-state: The Rise of Regional Economies. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Ong, Aihwa. 2011. Worlding cities, or the urban art of being global. In Roy, Ananya and Ong, Aihaw (eds.), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, pp. 1–26. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Percival, Tom and Waley, Paul. 2010. Picking a path towards East Asian regional urbanism. Paper presented at workshop on “Global Urban Frontiers: Asian Cities in Theory, Practice and Imagination” at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 8–9 September 2010.Google Scholar
Phelps, Nicholas, Bunnell, Tim and Miller, Michelle. 2011. Post-disaster economic development in Aceh: neoliberalization and other economic-geographical imaginaries. Geoforum 42, 418–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rimmer, Peter and Dick, Howard. 2009. The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes and Policy. Singapore: NUS Press.Google Scholar
Roy, Ananya and Ong, Aihwa (eds.). 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Allen, Agnew, John, Soja, Edward and Storper, Michael. 2001. Global city-regions. In Scott, Allen J. (ed.), Global City-regions: Trends, Theory, Policy, pp. 1–31. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sparke, Matthew, Sidaway, James, Bunnell, Tim and Grundy-Warr, Carl. 2004. Triangulating the borderless world: globalisation, regionalisation and the geographies of power in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore growth triangle. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 485–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Peter. 1995. Beyond containers: internationality, interstateness, interterritoriality. Progress in Human Geography 19(1), 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Peter. 2004. World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teo, Peggy. 2003. Limits of Imagineering: a case study of Penang. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(3), 545–563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Eric C. 2006. Singaporean exceptionalism and its implications for ASEAN regionalism. Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs 28(2), 183–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Eric C. 2008. Attitudes and Awareness Towards ASEAN: Findings of a Ten-Nation Survey. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wiemer, Calla. 2009. Three Cases of Cross-Border Economic Corridor Development with Lessons for the Greater Mekong Sub-Region. Asian Development Bank Consultancy Report. Available at: http://callawiemer.com/Documents/Wiemer%20Corridor%20Study.pdf (accessed on 18 June 2010).Google Scholar
Winter, Tim. 2007. Rethinking tourism in Asia. Annals of Tourism Research 34(1), 27–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yeung, Henry Wai-Chung. 1998. Capital, state and space: contesting the borderless world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, 291–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar