by Joel Kotkin
Owing to the region’s prodigious energy resources, the Middle Eastern cities might have been expected to possess the wherewithal to deal with their rising populations. Islam’s early success as a city-based religion could have provided some glue for constructing a workable urban moral order. 39 Tragically, even at the height of the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s, few of these cities created either large-scale manufacturing or world-class service industries capable of employing the growing ranks of city dwellers. And to date, Islam has not been notably any more successful than other belief systems in coping with the ill effects of mass urbanization.
The economic prospects of Middle Eastern megacities, like those in much of the developing world, have been further eroded by the rise of what the historian Manuel Castells labels “informationalism.” The increased importance of technology, and the evolution of global economic networks, hurt cities whose populations were largely unable or unwilling to participate successfully in the evolving international economy.40
With the notable exceptions of secular-oriented Turkey and pariah Israel, few Near Eastern cities possessed high levels of computer and technical literacy. Barely 1 percent of the population in other Near Eastern countries, for example, used the Internet in 2000. The Middle East, noted the Syrian academic Sami Khiyami, now stood in danger of being “left behind again” in the information age, just as had occurred in the industrial era.41
Equally critical, these cities have lost large numbers of entrepreneurial and educated people, who now seek out opportunities in North America and Europe. This exodus has been particularly noticeable among highly urbanized ethnic and religious minorities.42 Since the 1960s, many groups, such as Arab Christians and Jews, have departed cities like Cairo, Baghdad, and Tehran even after having been resident there for centuries.43
These migrations have left behind a population that is generally too poor and unskilled to lay the basis for the kind of modern economy capable of financing an urban infrastructure. As urban populations passed over 50 percent in most Arab countries, sewer and water systems failed to keep pace. Housing also remained in short supply. In Cairo, Casablanca, and Alexandria, as many as three or four people crowd one room. Illegal settlements surround most of the major cities, constituting more than half of all new housing in urban parts of Egypt. A United Nations study estimated that by the 1990s, 84 percent of Cairenes could be characterized as slum dwellers.44
The Iranian capital of Tehran stands as another tragic failure. A relatively young city—becoming the country’s capital only in 1788—Tehran, as home to the ruling shahs, had enjoyed spectacular growth throughout the twentieth century. The country’s oil wealth, expanding middle class, and educated population all pointed to the potential for the building of a great modern city.
Unfortunately, the frequently corrupt and authoritarian regime had failed to distribute the benefits of the nation’s prosperity to its growing urban population. As the economy grew, rates of poverty in Tehran more than doubled between the 1940s and the 1970s.45 Social problems, including crime and prostitution, festered as newcomers crowded once tightly knit neighborhoods, turning Tehran, in the words of one Iranian planner, into “a city of strangers.”
Such alienated, impoverished urbanites, like the European working class of the nineteenth century, increasingly embraced radical ideologies, including Islamic fundamentalism. In 1979, these “marginalized Tehranis” and hard-pressed bazaris poured into the streets to overturn the shah’s rule and bring to power a fundamentalist government.
Cities in other countries not yet under Islamist control have suffered similar economic and social problems. From North Africa to Pakistan, these agglomerations incubated often violent movements with strongly antimodernist tendencies. Urban areas in the region, noted one top UN official, now represent “nothing less than social time bombs” that threaten to undermine the entire global order.46
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“QUEENS OF THE FURTHER EAST”
Asia experienced the world’s largest urban migration—in terms of absolute numbers—during the second half of the twentieth century. 1 In contrast with the growth of the Middle East, much of Latin America, and Africa, Asia’s metropolitan development generally occurred more along classic historical lines. Cities not only burgeoned in numbers, but also experienced considerable economic expansion, as well as often greater degrees of both political and social order.
Rather than suffer from the dilemma of postcolonial rule, many of Asia’s cities have lived up to the promise of what one nineteenth-century colonialist called “queens of the further east.”2 This optimistic picture was not universal, of course. At the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 40 percent of Karachi’s 10 million people lived in squatter settlements. Political instability, particularly the growth of anti-Western and antimodernist Islamic movements, has since slowed the successful integration of Pakistani cities into the global economy.3
Other major cities in Asia—Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila—have also suffered from political upheavals. Most experienced economic growth, but often barely enough to offset their own demographic expansion. The majority of residents remained very poor, although generally not in the proportions found in the cities of Africa and the Near East.
INDIA’S URBAN REVOLUTION
In the last decades of the twentieth century, India reemerged as a major center of global urban life. In contradiction to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideal vision of a village-centered nation, the nation’s economy shifted from a predominantly rural and agricultural system to one that was increasingly industrialized (even postindustrial) and urban. Spurred by state-led investment in manufacturing and modern infrastructure, cities in India more than doubled their share of the national gross domestic product between 1950 and 1995. 4 The reform of India’s once quasi-Socialist system, which had long suppressed entrepreneurial ventures, further accelerated urban growth.
Much of the new urban growth was concentrated less in the old colonial hub, Calcutta, than in the capital city of New Delhi and the other great outpost of imperialism, Bombay. In contrast with those of cities in much of the developing world, the prospects for Bombay, whose name was changed to Mumbai in 1995, are not entirely bleak. Projected to be the world’s second largest city, after Tokyo, by 2015, Mumbai already assumed a commanding position in a whole series of industries from financial services to manufacturing and entertainment. In the late 1990s, steps toward constructing new poles of development such as the “new city” of Navi Mumbai helped create new environments attractive to the city’s growing middle class.5
More than anything, the presence of a large group of educated, technically proficient workers—by 2000, India accounted for roughly 30 percent of the world’s software engineers—constituted the critical advantage for the nation’s metropolitan areas. This proved particularly true for several smaller Indian cities such as Bangalore.6
By the 1980s, Bangalore had emerged as India’s fastest-growing city, its population soaring from barely 1 million in 1960 to over 4.5 million by century’s end. With over nine hundred software firms, the city had become widely regarded as India’s “Silicon Valley,” and its development largely followed that of the original American version—sprawling, car oriented, and full of largely self-contained, research-oriented industrial parks.7
Following Bangalore’s lead, other Indian cities, such as Hyderabad, developed new office parks, academic institutions, highways, and airports conducive to the growth of advanced industries. In the late 1990s, Andhra Pradesh State, which includes Hyderabad, housed more than fifteen thousand software workers and saw its software exports increase twenty-six-fold.
As global demand for talent expanded, the technology and service industries began to spread even to lagging megacities such as Calcutta. 8 None of this brought an end to poverty in Calcutta, renamed Kolkata, or other Indian cities. In even the most economically dynamic centers, large pockets of unemployment and impoverished laborers, including millions of children working
for pitifully low wages, struggled alongside an expanding middle class.9
EAST ASIA BREAKS THE MOLD
Without question, the most spectacular urban evolution in Asia took place farther east, among cities influenced directly or indirectly by the rich urban culture of China. Long before India’s urban economy began to show signs of maturation, these Asian cities followed the path trod earlier by Osaka and Tokyo, financing their urban expansion from the fruits of rapid economic growth.
In the 1960s, most cities in Asia had been considered parts of the largely undifferentiated, impoverished “developing world,” alongside the likes of Cairo, Lagos, or Calcutta. By the end of the millennium, urban areas such as Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong had evolved into something much more. Like modern Asiatic versions of the vigorous trading city-states of Phoenicia, classical Greece, or Renaissance Italy, they now strode the world stage, looking for new industries and markets to conquer.10
SEOUL’S EMERGENCE
Until 1876, Seoul served as capital of the Korean “hermit kingdom,” cut off almost entirely from the rest of the world economy. Only under intense prodding from commercial interests from Japan did it slowly open itself to outside influence. Early in the twentieth century, the Japanese occupied the country outright. During Japan’s often brutal reign, Seoul subordinated itself to Osaka or Tokyo, much as Bombay and Calcutta serviced the needs of London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Like European colonialists in India and elsewhere, the Japanese also helped to transform Seoul, turning an old imperial capital into a modern city with manufacturing industries, streetcars, and a growing professional class.
Seoul regained its independence after the defeat of Japan in 1945, serving as the capital and principal city of the new Republic of Korea. Five years later, a surprise attack from the Communist-controlled north devastated the city. Over the ensuing three-year-long conflict, the city and its environs served as a critical battleground between Allied and Communist forces.
The South Korean capital emerged from the Korean War both battlescarred—47 percent of its standing buildings were destroyed—and desperately poor. Like many cities in the developing countries, it swelled with rural migrants; in the 1960s and 1970s, over three hundred thousand people migrated annually to the still largely devastated capital city.
As migrants poured in from the countryside, Seoul’s population increase paralleled that of Cairo, São Paulo, Mumbai, and a host of other cities in the developing world. In 1960, the city was home to 3 million people; by 2000, it had grown to more than 11 million, with a surrounding metropolitan area accounting for an additional 9 million.11
Initially, Seoul also displayed the familiar ill effects of this growth— ramshackle squatter settlements, perpetually overburdened transport, substandard sanitary and health facilities.12 What proved the critical difference was an economy that expanded faster than almost any in the world.
Seoul’s growing wealth provided the wherewithal to meet many challenges posed by its rapid demographic expansion. New roads, housing, office buildings, and research parks arose throughout the region. To make way for the development of the central parts of the city, sprawling squatter settlements were demolished throughout the 1960s and again in the 1980s, in part to prepare for the 1988 Olympic Games. Although many people were displaced, poverty was effectively reduced.13 By 1988, only 14 percent of Seoul’s population, according to one UN study, lived in slums, roughly one-sixth the level of Cairo’s. 14
By that time, the Korean capital had more in common with crowded, congested, and expensive Tokyo, or modern Western cities, than with the impoverished urban centers of Africa or the Middle East. Seoul dominated the Korean economy even more than the Japanese capital; it was home to forty-eight of the country’s fifty largest companies, the main government agencies, and most foreign corporate headquarters.15 The city also served as home to as many of these megacorporations as such older commercial centers as Frankfurt or Osaka.16 Seoul’s dominance was so overwhelming that by the early twenty-first century, some advocated moving the capital to rural areas to the south.17
BRITAIN’S SUCCESSFUL OFFSPRING
Seoul’s emergence represented part of a remarkable, wider-ranging late-twentieth-century pattern among East Asian cities. The progenitors of this event in modern urban history lay in the evolution of two commercial cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, spawned under the authority and economic power of the British Empire.
Hong Kong, granted outright to Britain in 1841, had emerged as a European microcosm, which helped it supplant Canton (Guangzhou) as the primary trading port in southern China. Increasingly, it also nurtured a formidable Chinese economic culture that would soon spread throughout East Asia. A new kind of urban society, a blending of Chinese and European influences, now evolved rapidly, as the population soared from a few thousand at the onset of the twentieth century to more than a million in 1937.
A decade later, the Communist revolution in China devastated that country’s commercial centers. Hong Kong now established itself, after Tokyo, as Asia’s second business capital. Crammed with refugees from the Maoist regime, it more than tripled in population by the 1980s. The city’s ascendancy rode on more than swelling numbers; it benefited from the presence of entrepreneurs and professionals from across China, most notably the former financial and industrial elites of Shanghai.18
SINGAPORE: ASIA’S MODEL CITY
Founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles as an imperial trading post, Singapore became a full-fledged British colony in 1867. Located far to the south of the Chinese mainland, the city attracted masses of migrants from that country. Sizable populations of Indians, Malays, Arabs, and Jews, as well as colonial representatives, transformed Singapore into a dynamic cosmopolitan society, connected not only to London, but to Baghdad, Jakarta, Canton, and Shanghai. Described by Joseph Conrad as “riotous with life,” the city teemed with merchants, sailors, and a primarily Chinese working class.19
The Japanese occupation during World War II severely disrupted this colonial society. Humiliated by an Asian power, Britain lost its claim to unchallenged supremacy. Pressure for independence grew, and in 1965, the British finally left the old colonial city.
Initially, the prospects for the tiny, 225-square-mile republic appeared dubious at best. The city suffered all the usual problems associated with developing countries—large, crowded slums, criminal gangs, and a relatively unskilled population. The country also faced hostility from neighboring, far more populous, and predominantly Muslim Malaysia from which it had broken away.
Singapore’s great achievement—so rare in the postcolonial world— was using its new sovereign power not to promote a small, and corrupt, elite, but to construct one of the stunning urban success stories of the late twentieth century. Under the authoritarian leadership of Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore broke dramatically with much of its colonial past and forged a new model for Asian urbanism. Tenements and low-slung shops were replaced by planned apartment complexes; congested streets were supplanted by a modern road system under which ran an advanced subway system; and crime, once rampant, was nearly eliminated.
As in Seoul and Hong Kong, the key lay in large-scale economic growth. Lee and his government worked assiduously to exploit Singapore’s natural advantage as a harbor and transit center for trans-Asian trade. Moving rapidly from low-wage industries like textiles to high-technology and service industries, Singapore by the end of the twentieth century boasted among the world’s best-educated and economically productive populations. Class divisions remained, but most now achieved a standard of living and wealth unimaginable for the masses in other cities of the postcolonial world. Income levels, barely $800 per person in 1964, had risen to over $23,000 in 1999.20
Singapore’s literate, English-speaking middle class, lack of corruption, and modern infrastructure also attracted a great deal of investment by global multinationals. Lee was not only interested in improving the short-run economic prospects for his tiny city-state
; he wanted to develop a new Asian urban culture capable of competing globally well into the twenty-first century. “Having given them a clean city, modern amenities and a strong economy,” one of his ministers declared, “we are now thinking of what culture we should give them.”21
THE REVITALIZATION OF CONFUCIAN DISCOURSE
By the mid-1980s, Lee had decided upon what “kind of culture” he wanted for his people—one built on the bedrock of the city’s Asian, and particularly Chinese, value system. The self-described Anglophile, who once suggested he was no more Chinese than President Kennedy was Irish, now promoted an essential Confucianist ethos, based on respect for the authority of a wise and powerful mandarin elite. Without this culture, he suggested, Singapore would soon degenerate into what he scathingly described as “another Third World society.”22
This revitalization of the Confucian discourse increasingly shaped perceptions not only in Singapore, but also in the Chinese-dominated economies of Taiwan, under nationalist direction, and in Hong Kong.23 Confucian attitudes of “collective egocentrism,” combining Western and traditional notions of personal and familial improvement, provided a sense of moral order and collective will not apparent in many other parts of the developing world.
By the 1980s, even China’s Communist leaders, long contemptuous of their capitalistic-minded overseas brethren, began to shift their attitudes toward this perspective. In 1992, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, openly expressed particular admiration for Singapore’s “social order,” embracing the city-state’s authoritarian approach to capitalism as the best blueprint for the rapid development of China’s own cities.24