Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City': Implications for Research and Theory

While voices in the comparative urbanism literature call for researchers to approach comparison with more experimental and critical methodologies, there remains no consensus on how to design and realize these studies. This essay examines the implications of comparative urbanism for researching the ‘Asian City'. Given the critique of existing modes of comparison embedded in recent calls for a new comparative urbanism, researchers are faced with a number of pressing questions: How do we approach this ‘regional' topic in a way that both resists categorizing the ‘Asian City' as an exotic ‘other', elevating it onto a mythical pedestal, yet appreciates its differences, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular' (Clifford, 1997; Werbner and Modood, 1997)? This essay thus highlights the multiple challenges of applying the comparative lens to the ‘Asian City', arguing that broader conceptualizations of the ‘Asian City' help to address the dangers in isolating Asian research into its own canon of parochial urban theory and offering a greater diversity of possibilities for justifying case selection in comparative approaches. In doing so, we hope that this essay responds to the comparative turn by illuminating to some extent its inherent complexity and methodological challenges.     

Building from Scratch: New Cities,Privatized Urbanism and the Spatial Restructuring of Johannesburg after Apartheid

By the start of the twenty‐first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City (formerly called Cradle City) are master‐planned, holistically designed ‘satellite cities’ built on vacant land. While incorporating features found in earlier city‐building efforts, these two new self‐contained, privately‐managed cities operate outside the administrative reach of public authority and thus exemplify the global trend toward privatized urbanism. Waterfall City, located on land that has been owned by the same extended family for nearly 100 years, is spearheaded by a single corporate entity. Lanseria Airport City/Cradle City is a planned ‘aerotropolis’ surrounding the existing Lanseria airport at the northwest corner of the Johannesburg metropole. These two new private cities differ from earlier large‐scale urban projects because everything from basic infrastructure (including utilities, sewerage, and the installation and maintenance of roadways), landscaping, security services, the regulation of common spaces, and selling and branding the city are firmly in the hands of private profit‐making corporate entities and outside the mandate of public authorities.     

The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

This article investigates the relationship between verticality and home. It develops the idea of ‘verticality as practice'. This appreciates verticality not as something that takes place in three‐dimensional landscapes, but as the outcome of everyday practical activity. Examining a modernist high‐rise estate, the Aylesbury Estate in London, the article identifies and examines a range of vertical practices, illustrating how they are intertwined with home. Vertical practices, such as those associated with the view, help to make a unique and special home, becoming intensely meaningful to residents. However, they also unmake dimensions of home when they interact with the estate's marginality.     

Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria

The proliferation of religious spaces is a relatively recent development in Nigeria. Nowadays there are more than a hundred religious camps belonging to different religious groups in the country. The most popular of these camps, the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is located 42 kilometres outside of Lagos and measures several thousand acres. Although initially not designed as such, developments in and around Lagos have compelled the managers of the Redemption Camp to present it as an urban alternative to the city of Lagos, which is generally deemed chaotic. The prestige of this camp and its activities have led to expansive urban development that involves the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to beyond the Redemption Camp. Based on a recent ethnographic study of the Redemption Camp, this article argues that the process of urban expansion in and around Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest. This article thus illustrates how church‐driven, religio‐urban developments follow a different logic of city making than often presumed by theorists of African cities, who generally neglect the religious forces that inform urban transformations in Africa.     

Building,Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul

This article analyses the development and marketing of Islamic gated communities in Basaksehir, Istanbul. It demonstrates how a blueprint of public–private urban development was appropriated by middle‐class Islamists. The gated communities in Basaksehir—which, at the outset, were not explicitly religious—gradually became attractive to religious actors searching for enclosed urban enclaves where Islamic communities would be protected against perceived moral‐urban threats. While urban‐religious enclaves appear to bear similarities to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated communities should be understood in light of the recent coming to power of the Islamist Turkish government. In cooperation with this government, housing development agencies approached Islamic investors to find capital for their public–private housing projects. One of the results of this form of urban development is that, contrary to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities are homogenous in terms of economic class, catering specifically to the Islamic middle classes. Moreover, people who invest in Basaksehir desire an urban‐religious lifestyle that differs from the ‘traditional' religious lifestyle experienced in ‘traditional' Islamic neighbourhoods. The specific urban‐religious configuration generates a new type of Islam that better fits middle‐class values and a middle‐class lifestyle.     

Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consumption dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the contributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective, the entwinement of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations. Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins.     

Multiple Temporalities of Policy Circulation: Gradual,Repetitive and Delayed Processes of BRT Adoption in South African Cities

In 2006, bus rapid transit (BRT) swept across South African cities. Within three years of learning of the Bogotá model of BRT, Johannesburg's Rea Vaya opened, followed shortly by Cape Town's MyCiTi, while several other cities are at various stages of planning and implementation. This article traces the circulation of BRT across the South African urban context to expose the multiple and varied temporalities through which BRT came to appear as the only available solution. These earlier encounters, which include the first published discussion of BRT in South Africa in a 1973 conference report, study visits to Curitiba in the 1990s and a failed attempt to implement a Bogotá‐style BRT system in Cape Town in 2003, were instrumental in creating a fertile ground for later adoption practices. While it may appear as if circulated policies shorten the gestation time from policy introduction to policy adoption, these repeated attempts to implement circulated innovations ensure that the turnover only seems accelerated. This article unravels the story of BRT adoption, departing from the theoretical discussions of the policy circulation process as a rapid phenomenon, instead demonstrating that it is gradual, repetitive and at times delayed.     

Representational Approaches Matter

This paper raises the question of how ethical issues arising out of social inequities involving international business in developing countries can be represented, and articulates a conceptual framework that identifies and maps four different approaches to representing or making sense of such issues. A fieldwork-based case study on the child labor issue in Pakistan’s soccer ball industry illustrates the argument that representational practices do matter, and that when representational approaches go awry, they end up savaging the well-being of the poor in the developing world. Farzad Rafi Khan holds a Ph.D. in Management from McGill University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.