C.P. Pow: Our intersecting academic pathways and some of his lasting contributions

C.P. Pow became a significant part of my own academic journey from soon after I joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1999. Our academic inspirations, interests and identities overlapped, and we had opportunities to co-teach and co-write. I use these overlaps and collaborations as a way into reflecting on Pow's work, mainly during the period up to when he received tenure at NUS in 2011. I focus on two substantive themes. The first has to do with how and why Pow approached the landscape of Singapore beyond the visual or the ‘seen’. The second theme concerns the origins, development and consolidation of Pow's contributions to examining urban Asia in ways that unsettle Anglo-American-derived generalizations.     

Tropicality,the unruly Atlantic and social utopias: the French explorer Henri Coudreau (1859 − 1899)

This paper addresses the works of Henri Coudreau, a little‐known French explorer of Guiana and Amazonia who was later forgotten by the ‘heroic’ histories of exploration because of his unruliness and nonconformist attitudes. Drawing on the literature of postcolonialism and tropicality as well as on recent studies of anti‐colonialist geographies, I address for the first time Coudreau's geography from the perspective of anarchist and critical thinking. My main argument is that Coudreau's work is a further example of the complexity and heterogeneity of the European intellectual field during the imperial age. Despite having come of age intellectually among all the European racist and ethnocentric prejudices of his day, Coudreau developed a different outlook thanks to two factors, viz., his personal experience in living for years with the indigenous communities of Amazonia, and his exposure to anarchist anti‐colonialist ideas through his collaboration with Elisée Reclus. Coudreau's tropical utopia of an independent Amazonia, and his endorsement of the stateless nature of local communities, ran counter to French imperial politics, occasioning Coudreau's dismissal from the French administration and his professional exile in Brazil at the time of the Franco‐Brazilian border dispute (1897?1900).     

Administrative hierarchy and urban land expansion in transitional China

In a growing body of literature on urbanization in China, scholars have emphasized the proactive role of the Chinese local state in urban land expansion. Drawing upon official land use change data from 1998 to 2008, this study investigates the relationship between the hierarchical structure of the Chinese urban administrative system and urban land expansion. We find that urban land expansion coincides with administrative hierarchy, and cities with higher administrative levels (ranked by central government) tend to expand more rapidly while controlling for other economic and demographic drivers of urban expansion. Spatial regime models reveal that economic and demographic drivers of urban growth are also sensitive to a city's administrative rank. By quantifying the link between a city's rank and urban land expansion, we conclude that considering the hierarchical structure of the Chinese cities will result in a fuller understanding of the rapid urban growth in China.     

城市群研究进展与展望

城市群是指以中心城市为核心向周围辐射构成的多个城市的集合体.城市群的形成是经济发展和产业布局的客观反映,并已成为发达国家城市化的主体形态.进入21世纪,中国加入世界贸易组织,沿海城市群成为国家外向性经济、出口贸易和"世界工厂"的主要地区,以城市群为主体推进中国城市化进程成为中国特色城市化道路的重要选择.本文重点就城市群...     

THE VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL EXPANSIONS OF CHINA'S CITY SYSTEM

Most studies of the size, growth, and distribution of cities have been based on Western economies and have identified economic factors such as scale and agglomeration economies and level of economic development as major determinants of urban growth. It is unclear whether these generalizations are applicable in socialist economies. In this paper, I argue that institutional factors have played key roles in shaping China's city system, which is characterized by declining population concentration across cities and by tremendous vertical (population growth of cities) and horizontal (addition of new cities) expansions. The empirical analysis focuses on describing the size distribution of cities, estimating a multivariate model predicting the population growth of cities, and performing a logistic regression analysis of new and existing cities. The findings underscore the effects of urban and regional development policies, socialist institutions, changes in the urban administrative system, and state and local government interests, and suggest that they as a whole are more important than economic factors in explaining the attributes and changes of China's city system. [Key words: urban growth, city system, institutional factors, China.]     

GEOGRAPHY AS MELODY IN MUTTUSVAMI DIKSHITA'sINDIAN MUSICAL WORKS*

ABSTRACT. The life and works of Muttusvami Dikshita (1775–1834), a luminary of South Indian Karnatak classical music, abound in spatiocultural symbolisms of integration and harmony. Dikshita'speregrinations symbolize a cultural circuit of Hindu pilgrimage. His studies of North Indian Hindustani music at Varanasi (formerly Benares), and his transplantation of them throughout South India, make him an active agent of cultural diffusion, harmonizing cultural traditions through spatiosymbolic anchors. The religious expression of his musical genius, his songs, and his melodies contributed to linking linguistically and politically disparate regions of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century India. The works of Dikshita affirm India'scultural continuity and underscore its enduring cultural empathies and similarities.     

Decolonizing Benjamin in the Tropics: The long history of Guayaquil's arcades

This essay interrogates the long historical development of Guayaquil's arcades, or soportales, by analysing their historical development and relation to global commerce through littoral Ecuador's experience of cacao capitalism (1700–1925). I do so by employing and referencing Walter Benjamin's now paradigmatic texts concerning commodity culture and modernity in Paris' arcades. My work critically and synthetically examines archival and historical sources that catalogue Guayaquil's urban and architectural development in that tropical city-region. I explore how environmental factors, indigenous architectural techniques, globalizing commercial culture, cacao exports, and liberal ideologies form historical constellations expressing the multi-layered influences contributing to the growth and modification of Guayaquil's arcades. This transnational history of the particular attempts to recast understandings of urban space, architecture, and the tropical as dynamic edges of capitalist cultural modernity. This essay both deepens and decolonizes Benjamin's work by analysing the importance of the ‘coloniality of power’ on the formation of Guayaquil's arcades and their afterlives as aura. Whereas the arcades of Benjamin's Paris presented him with the primary form of capitalism's cultural modernity, I argue that Guayaquil's soportales serve as constellations for reading an alternative (tropical) modernity predicated on plantation agriculture, Eurocentrism, and cultural hybridization as an expression of political economy.     

中国城市空间结构研究评述

中国正处于城市化快速发展时期, 城市空间结构面临关键转型, 相关研究日益受到重视, 研究数量不断增多, 深度不断加强。因此, 有必要对中国城市空间结构相关研究进行系统总结, 从中找出存在的问题, 以及与国际相关研究的差距。基于对20 世纪80 年代以来中国城市空间结构相关研究成果的数量统计, 将其划分为3 个主要的研究时期:① 20 世纪80-90 年代中期, 为西方城市空间结构理论引入期及国内实证研究的起步期;② 20 世纪90年代中期-21 世纪初, 为中国城市空间结构的研究积累期;③ 21 世纪初至今, 为中国城市空间结构模式的总结及新城市空间现象研究的多元化时期。在对各个时期主要相关研究成果进行梳理和总结的基础上, 对比当前国际研究的最新成果, 提出未来中国城市空间结构的重点研究领域应当集中于:转型期城市空间结构理论模式的探讨, 新城市空间现象的深入探讨, 节约型城市空间增长的研究, 城市空间结构深层机制的分析, 中、微观尺度研究领域的开拓, 新研究方法的应用等6个方面。     

J. B. JACKSON AS A CRITIC OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

ABSTRACT. Understanding what the American landscape meant to J. B. Jackson requires an exploration of his background, education, and antagonism to the International Style. No full critique of modernism appears in Jackson's mature published work. However, knowledge that the first issues of Landscape magazine in 1951 and 1952 were the work of a single author leads to discovery of Jackson's pseudonyms, especially H. G. West, P. G. Anson, G. A. Feather, and A. W. Conway. This article examines Jackson's pseudonymous writings and links them to his well-known essays on the landscape: “The Westward-Moving House,” “Other-Directed Houses,” and “Southeast to Turkey.”     

Time,Action, Space

Postmetropolis deepens Edward Soja's engagement with the sociospatial dialectic, one of his major contributions to urban theory. It also represents an uncharacteristic foray into history. The objectives of my contribution are to probe his treatment of time and to extend his sociospatial dialectic into the realm of actor-network theory, thereby further situating the materiality of the city at the theoretical center of social thought.     

Regional Urbanization,Spatial Justice,and Place

Revisiting work such as Edward Soja's Postmetropolis reminds us of the importance of a geographical perspective, as well as a thoroughly process oriented and dynamic consideration of the urban. Soja's work emphasizes multi-scalar processes that work to produce urbanization, and the complex, fragmented, and unequal spaces that result. Attention to spatial process and justice is essential, but is incomplete without consideration and real attention to the material and geographically embedded experiences of place that manifest urbanization in everyday life.     

From Chicago to L.A. and Back Again: A Chicago‐Inspired Quantitative Analysis of Income Distribution in Montreal*

In a recent issue of Urban Geography (2001) , a number of key players in the 1960s and 1970s school of quantitative urban geography (called Chicago II in this article) set out some of the approach's key methodological premises and assessed its influence in the wider arena of urban studies. At about the same time, the 1920s and 1930s Chicago School of urban sociology (called the Chicago School in this article) was being reassessed in France ( Huet 2000 ), and deconstructed in Los Angeles ( Dear 2001 ). In this article, we outline a selection of basic models of urban space proposed by the Chicago School and further elaborated by Chicago II. We then consider certain aspects of three important critiques: humanist/aesthetic, Marxist, and postmodern. We argue that none of these invalidates the Chicago II approach to the study of urban areas, and we demonstrate its resilience and usefulness by way of the empirical example of Montreal. Though the results are of interest in their own right, the principal purpose of the analysis is to illustrate the type of insight that a structured quantitative approach provides and the way this approach rests on a theoretical understanding of processes at work in cities. We conclude by arguing that the humanist and Marxist critiques shed important light upon the possibilities and limits of the Chicago II approach, but that the postmodern claim that the spatial development of urban areas is not structured by at least some general processes is inaccurate.     

Regional Concentration and Region-Based Urban Transition: China's Mega-Urban Region Formation in the 1990S

Since 1978, China has experienced rapid continuous urban transformation, and many mega-urban regions have stood out. But how to measure mega-urban region formation and to what extent they have formed in China, are still questions that have not been fully answered. Using census data by county, this study illustrates China's intensifying population concentration and region-based urban transition in 1990s. By 2000, three geographically continuous regional concentrations had formed in China —Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan (Jing-Jin-Tang), the Yangzi River Delta (YRD), and the Pearl River Delta (PRD). All were characterized by region-based urban transition, with their "remote rural areas"³ involved in economic transformation; elsewhere, population agglomeration and urban transformation still focused mainly on major cities and their peripheral zones. It is the coexistence of great global attraction and severe local challenges in these mega-urban regions that makes them distinct from other metropolitan areas.     

Prelude to Brazil: Leo Waibel's American Career as a Displaced Scholar

Beyond Germany, Leo Waibel (1888–1951) built a distinguished reputation for his work in Africa and the Americas. Today he is remembered especially in Brazil, where he boosted the development of geography as a research discipline in the years 1946–1950. During his tenure of the chair in geography at Bonn (1929–1937), Waibel's main research preoccupation became the role of the tropics in the world economy. In early 1937, he sought research leave to make an extended field trip to Brazil. Stripped on political grounds in the same year of his chair, Waibel came to the United States, where he became the only geographer to receive help from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. He would eventually serve as one of the very limited core staff on President Franklin Roosevelt's “M” Project on migration and settlement. This paper reconstructs the context of his work in the United States, clarifying especially the nature of his collaborations with Isaiah Bowman, widely regarded at the time as the leading geographer within the United States. Waibel's correspondence from the United States, and later from Brazil, reveals an international career marked by contradictions.     

Simion Mehedinţi's Contribution to Modern Romanian Geography

Armed with a scholarship to find an answer to the question “What is geography?” Simion Mehedin?i's studies took him to continental Europe's three main centers of geographic thought: Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig. We explore how his innovative ideas flourished, especially in Leipzig under Ratzel. The first Romanian geographer, Mehedin?i, must be credited with having defined geography as a science of mutual relationships between geospheres. This thinking reached its pinnacle in two complex books, Terra and Ethnos, the contents of which we synthetically explore. We also trace the unfavorable historical and geopolitical conditions that led to this pioneering work being little recognized worldwide.     

“学生化”的城中村社区——基于广州下渡村的实证分析

学生化作为绅士化现象的一种类型,是高等教育规模扩张背景下学生群体对于城市空间进行重构的现象。起因于学生群体的居住偏好,以及投资者与房屋所有者的寻租行为,面向学生群体的居住空间开始产生并聚集,形成独特的学生化社区,并由此产生一系列的社会,经济与文化影响。基于对学生化现象相关研究的综述,本文对于广州市中山大学邻近的下渡村学...     

“THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN TIME”: RETROSPECT ON CARL SAUER AS PREHISTORIAN*

ABSTRACT. Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975) is widely regarded as one of the most influential geographers of the twentieth century, admired particularly for his studies in cultural and historical geography. His contribution to the study of prehistory is less widely acknowledged, but, between 1944 and 1962, he published a series of speculative yet scholarly papers that contain many prescient insights into humanity's remote past and the relationships of our ancestors to the environments they occupied—and modified. In this essay, based on the Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2001, I reflect on Sauer's contribution to the science of prehistory by examining, in the light of recent advances in knowledge, two major themes of Sauer's work: the early dispersal of Homo sapiens in the Old World, and the origins and prehistoric spread of agriculture.     

MAKING SUSTAINABLE CREATIVE/CULTURAL SPACE IN SHANGHAI AND SINGAPORE*

ABSTRACT. Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state‐vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade—Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social inclusion and community bonds they engender; environmental sustainability refers to the articulation with the language of existing urban forms and the preservation of or improvements to the landscape. Although both Shanghai and Singapore demonstrate simultaneous precariousness and sustainability, Singapore's city‐state status places greater pressure on it to ensure sustainability than does Shanghai, within a much larger China in which Beijing serves as the cultural hearth while Shanghai remains essentially a commercial center.     

Important progress and future direction of studies on China’s urban agglomerations

Urban agglomerations are an inevitable outcome of China’s new national industrialization and urbanization reaching relatively advanced stages of development over the past 30 years. In the early 2000s, urban agglomerations became new geographical units for participating in global competition and the international division of labor, and China has spent the past decade promoting them as the main spaces for pushing forward its new form of urbanization. The convening of the first Central Work Conference on Urbanization and the National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) further defined the status of urban agglomerations as the main players in promoting China’s new type of national urbanization. Nevertheless, urban agglomerations remain a weak link in Chinese academia and are in urgent need of study. Only 19 articles on the theme of urban agglomerations were published in the journal Acta Geographica Sinica between 1934 and 2013, accounting for only 0.55% of all articles written during that period. Not only are there very few, they have also all been published within a relatively short period of time, with the first having been published only 10 years ago. The studies are also concentrated among only a few authors and institutions, and research is aimed at national requirements but is rather divergent. Even so, some studies on urban agglomerations have played a leading role and made important contributions to dictating the overall formation of urban agglomerations nationwide. Specifically, a proposed spatial pattern for urban agglomerations formed the basic framework for the spatial structure of China’s urban agglomerations and guided the government to make urban agglomerations the main urban pattern when promoting the new type of urbanization; proposed standards and technologies for identifying the spatial dimensions of urban agglomerations played an important role in defining the scope of national urban agglomerations; a series of studies in the area of urban agglomerations spurred more in-depth and practical studies in the field; and studies on issues related to the formation and growth of urban agglomerations provided warnings on the future selection and development of urban agglomerations. Taking the progress and results of these studies as a foundation, the foci of selecting and developing urban agglomerations in China are as follows: to be problem-oriented and profoundly reflect on and review new problems exposed in the selection and development of urban agglomerations; to concentrate on urban agglomerations and lay importance on the formation of a new “5+9+6” spatial structure for China’s urban agglomerations; to rely on urban agglomerations and promote the formation of a new pattern of national urbanization along the main axes highlighted by urban agglomerations; to be guided by national strategic demand and continue to deepen understanding of major scientific issues in the course of the formation and development of urban agglomerations, including studying the resource and environmental effects of high-density urban agglomerations, scientifically examining resource and environmental carrying capacities of high-density urban agglomerations, creating new management systems and government coordination mechanisms for the formation and development of urban agglomerations, studying the establishment of public finance systems and public finance reserve mechanisms for urban agglomerations, and studying and formulating technical specifications for urban agglomeration planning and standards for delineating urban agglomeration boundaries.