Periurban Asia: A commentary on "becoming urban"

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 84, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 525-534

  Leaf, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

Asian urban transitions; Comparative analysis; Periurban; Periurbanization

Indexed keywords

COMPARATIVE STUDY; PERIURBAN AREA; PERIURBANIZATION; SUBURBANIZATION; URBAN DEVELOPMENT;

ASIA;

EID: 80052701499     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2011843525     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. The exception is that of Wiktionary, a ''wiki-based open content dictionary,'' which defined it as ''immediately adjoining an urban area; between the suburbs and the countryside,'' available at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peri-urban, last accessed 28 February 2011.
2. Available at http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2001/publications/theme-reports/land/ glossary.html, last accessed 28 February 2011.
3. Available at http://www.scope-uk.ac.uk/projects/PUECHsumOct01.html, last accessed 28 February 2011.
4. Available at http://www.ecs.co.sz/periurban/pup_periurban_policy.htm, last accessed 28 February 2011.
5. Available at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/suburb, last accessed 28 February 2011.
6. Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London; New York: Routledge, 2006)
7. see also Jennifer Robinson, ''Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map,'' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (2002): 531-54.
8. Robin M. Leichenko and William D. Solecki, ''Exporting the American Dream: The Globalization of Suburban Consumption Landscapes,'' Regional Studies 39, no. 2 (2005): 241-253.
9. Peter M. Ward and Paul A. Peters, ''Self-help Housing and Informal Homesteading in Periurban America: Settlement Identification Using Digital Imagery and GIS,'' Habitat International 31 (2007): 205-218.
10. Ward and Peters, Self-help Housing, 206.
11. This understanding of suburbanization as sprawl is utilized in the Taiwanese context in Tsu-Lung Chou and Jung-Ying Chang, ''Urban Sprawl and the Politics of Land Use Planning in Urban Taiwan,'' International Development Planning Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 67-92.
12. They, however, divide their analysis in terms of ''sprawl at the urban level'' and ''sprawl at the regional level,'' a distinction somewhat akin to what I would argue is the difference between suburban and periurban.
13. In this respect, I should point out that the only other use of ''periurban'' in the North American academic context that I have come across is in specific reference to ''periurban agriculture,'' precisely the sort of conventionally ''rural'' function now carried over into an ostensibly new, and more ''urban,'' context.
14. A process-oriented understanding such as this, with its follow-on implications for the periurban's transitory nature and potential for categorical hybridity, is seen as typical of the field by one recent reviewer of the global literature on the topic.
15. See David Simon, Urban Environments: Issues on the Peri-Urban Fringe, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33 (2008): 167-185, with specific reference to 171.
16. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision Population Database, available at http://esa.un.org/unup/, last accessed 28 February 2011.
17. While it might be argued that a country-to-country comparison is valuable, especially with regard to nationally promulgated policies, I would advance an alternative argument, that local factors matter at least as much if not more than national contexts in determining periurban outcomes. Even from the small sample of cases here, one could make the argument that there is greater comparability between the situations in Nanjing and Hanoi than between either Nanjing and Chengdu or Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
18. For an early treatment of this point, see
19. T.G. McGee, ''The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis, in The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, eds. N. Ginsburg, B. Koppel and T.G. McGee (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 3-26
20. T.G. McGee, ''Metrofitting the Emerging Mega-urban Regions of ASEAN: An Overview, in The Mega-Urban Regions of Southeast Asia, eds. T.G. McGee and I.M. Robinson, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 3-26
21. Philip F. Kelly, ''Everyday Urbanization: The Social Dynamics of Development in Manila's Extended Metropolitan Region,'' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23, no. 2 (1999): 283-303.
22. For a review of debates and definitions of the urban, see John Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
23. See Michael Leaf, ''The Suburbanization of Jakarta: A Concurrence of Economics and Ideology,'' Third World Planning Review 16, no. 4 (1994): 341-356
24. for an analysis of the role of this territorial capture in the fiscal crisis of the late 1990s, see Haryo Winarso and Tommy Firman, Residential Land Development in Jabotabek, Indonesia: Triggering Economic Crisis? Habitat International 26 (2002): 487-506.
25. See Gavin Shatkin, ''The City and the Bottom Line: Urban Megaprojects and the Privatization of Planning in Southeast Asia,'' Environment and Planning A 40, no. 2 (2008): 383-401.
26. One classic example from the English-speaking world is Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973) which analyzes the evolution of these concepts through their expression in English literature over the centuries, including the observation that while ''country'' may be synonymous with ''rural,'' it is also in English a metonym for ''nation.
27. While Wirth understood urbanism to mean ''the complex of traits which makes up the characteristic mode of life in cities'' (7), he also emphasized that urbanism in this sense was by no means confined to cities. Similarly, we might define ruralism as the expression of rural relations and practices whether or not found within rural territories themselves.
28. See Louis Wirth, ''Urbanism as a Way of Life,'' The American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1-24.
29. See, as one example, Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974).